A nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan that uses less than one per cent of the world's nuclear arsenal would have severe consequences and long-lasting impact on the global food security that will be unmatched in modern history, a research article said.
India and Pakistan are contributing to a de facto Asian arms race and the political instability in South Asia increasingly imposes a global threat.
Territorial disputes over the Kashmir region between India and Pakistan provide an increasingly high level of instability and escalatory retaliation could result in the use of nuclear weapons . This study highlights the indirect food system consequences of a possible, limited nuclear war based on a previously published India-Pakistan scenario, assuming 5 Tg of soot injection derived from a direct relationship between population density and target-specific fuel load.
According to recent study, a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan could ignite fires large enough to emit more than 5 Tg of soot into the stratosphere. The research focuses on how sudden cooling and perturbations of precipitation and solar radiation could disrupt food production for about a decade.
The study was published in the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Even a limited nuclear war could have dangerous effects far beyond the region that is fatally hit. It would result in global cooling that substantially reduces agricultural production in the world's main breadbasket regions, from the US, to Europe, Russia, and China.
The particular effect on food security worldwide including trade responses has now for the first time been revealed by an international team of scientists in a study based on advanced computer simulations. The sudden temperature reduction would lead to a food system shock unprecedented in documented history. It would not undo long-term climate change from fossil fuels use, though - after about a decade of cooling, global warming would surge again.
"Now we have the technological capabilities to do a sophisticated revision of earlier Cold War back-of-the-envelope calculations, but in a modern political context," Jagermeyr said. "My background is in climate change impact on global food systems. While we usually study global warming, the question of how sudden cooling would affect crop production and food systems is unresolved and therefore scientifically extremely interesting," said the main author at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and the University of Chicago; lead-author of the study
"We find severe losses in agricultural production, but importantly we also evaluate trade repercussions affecting local food availability. It turns out that major breadbasket regions would cut exports leaving countries worldwide short of supplies. A regional crisis would become global, because we all depend on the same climate system," Jonas added.
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