Terrifying nuclear bomb prediction as world tensions rise

As the prospect of nuclear war rises, experts have made a terrifying prediction about what this means for Australia.

news.com.au Jamie Seidel @JamieSeidel, August 16, 2022

It’s been 77 years since the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It’s been 33 years since the Berlin Wall’s fall and the Cold War’s end.

But the bomb is back.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is making thinly veiled threats. China’s embarking on a massive nuclear weapon-building campaign. And the menace of atomic annihilation coming out of North Korea is so common as to become background noise.

Has the world forgotten how close these weapons can bring us to extinction?

A new study in the science journal Nature Foodhas built upon recent lessons from Australia’s and Canada’s catastrophic 2019-20 forest fires to anticipate the impact of nuclear detonation on global food production.

Estimates place the amount of smoke produced by the recent fires as up to 1 teragram (1 trillion grams). Heavier soot ejecta was up to 0.02Tg. Both quickly encompassed the globe – lingering in the sky for months afterwards.

This adds confidence to our simulations that predict the same process would occur after a nuclear war,” reads the research published today (Tuesday, August 16) in Nature Food, from lead author Lili Xia of Rutgers University, along with contributors including Dr Ryan Heneghan of the Queensland University of Technology.

The study’s not without immediate relevance.

The bomb is back……………..

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned that “humanity is just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation”. Ukraine. Asia. The Middle East. The Koreas. All are experiencing heightened levels of nuclear threats.

With 13,000 nuclear weapons sitting in stockpiles worldwide, the secretary-general warned delegates “the risks of proliferation are growing and guardrails to prevent escalation are weakening”.

“Future generations are counting on your commitment to step back from the abyss.

“This is our moment to meet this fundamental test and lift the cloud of nuclear annihilation once and for all.”

Such a war would reach far beyond the battlefield.

We’re seeing that right now.

The fighting between Russia and Ukraine has disrupted more than 20 per cent of global grain exports – threatening famine in Africa and the Middle East while causing prices to soar globally.

Even a “small” nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would have catastrophic implications. The handful of weapons both nations possess would kill some 52 million people instantly. They would also eject more than 16 teragrams (16 trillion grams) of soot into the stratosphere.

National borders will not constrain this. Instead, the soot will quickly be picked up by high-altitude jet streams and circle the world.

The result would be a global famine killing an additional 926,000,000 people within two years.

Australia, however, appears to get off relatively lightly. At least at first.

Food for thought

The study, Global food insecurity and famine from … nuclear war soot injection, examines the implications of wars scaling up from 100 warhead detonations through to 4400.

Only Australia and some other southern hemisphere nations would potentially avert starvation.

And that may include the worst-case “all-out exchange” scenario.

Some 360 million would die in the initial blasts. Two years later, an additional five billion would be dead of hunger…………………………… more https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/military/terrifying-nuclear-bomb-prediction-as-world-tensions-rise/news-story/938f4ed66c8f38b8b9cbbb2147500400