nuclear-news

The unaffordable nuclear weapons, and the risk of nuclear climate change

The time is now to quickly reduce our nuclear arsenals. Their costs are enormous to any nation building them. They cannot be used, and their continued existence makes the world a much more dangerous place.

Ban Nuclear Weapons; Saving Money and Saving the World Huffington Post, Alan Robock 
 Professor of Climatology, Rutgers University; director, Rutgers Undergraduate Meteorology Program Co-authored by Owen Brian Toon, Professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado, Boulder,btoon@lasp.colorado.edu

As the United States struggles to deal with budget problems, as the U.S. Air Force deals with boredom, poor morale, drug use, and cheating on certification exams by their personnel entrusted with control of nuclear missiles, we have a solution that will save money as well as make the world a much safer place – get rid of most of our nuclear weapons immediately. A recent New York Times editorial pointed out that it would cost $10,000,000,000 just to update one small portion of the U.S. arsenal, gravity bombs. The U.S. government has no data on the overall cost of maintaining its nuclear arsenal, but various sources estimate the cost over the next decade between $150 billion and $640 billion, depending largely on which nuclear related tasks are included in the budget.

Nuclear weapons are useless. They would never be used on purpose by the major powers, but could be used by accident. . Some countries might use them in a moment of panic, or in response to imagined threats and insults, or in a fit of religious hysteria. The arsenals of nuclear weapons states set a bad example for the world, encouraging proliferation. And they could kill us all.

The direct casualties from just three weapons of the size used on Hiroshima, exploding on U.S. cities, perhaps by North Korea or Iran in coming decades, would cause more casualties than the U.S. experienced in World War II. Even worse, our recent work shows that a nuclear war between any two countries each using only 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs, a modest fraction of what India and Pakistan now possess, could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. Unfortunately, we have examples of cities burning, like San Francisco here after the 1906 earthquake.

Nuclear winter was discovered 30 years ago by American and Russian scientists, including us, working together. We found that the stratospheric smoke originating from fires ignited by nuclear explosions in cities and industrial areas would be so dense that it would block out the Sun, making it cold, dark, and dry at Earth’s surface, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year. There would be winter conditions even in the summer. And our recent work using modern computers and simulation models not only has validated the early work, but shows that the smoke would last for more than a decade.

The scary thing is that this could still happen today……..

The time is now to quickly reduce our nuclear arsenals. Their costs are enormous to any nation building them. They cannot be used, and their continued existence makes the world a much more dangerous place. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alan-robock/ban-nuclear-weapons-savin_b_4819299.html

February 23, 2014 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized