Nuclear war

Nuclear war and nuclear peace are fundamental concerns of humankind. The Foundation concentrates on the strategic, technological, scientific, and political analyses of this issue in an interdisciplinary atmosphere. 

It is much harder to gauge the scale of impacts for the unconfined risks. The most dramatic, and probably most immediate, of the dangers are those from nuclear weapons. Even a small nuclear weapon of the Hiroshima size could cause 100,000 deaths and a large-scale nuclear war could involve hundreds of millions of deaths. It is difficult to judge whether nuclear power would make the use of nuclear weapons more or less likely, or even... 

Chertok, R. J. and Lake. S. (1971a). Fate of fallout ingested by swine and beagles, page 125 in Survival of Food Crops and Livestock in the Event of Nuclear War, AEC Symposium Series No. 24, Report No. CONF-700909 (National Technical Information Service, Springfield, Virginia). 

The likelihood that British strategy would place less emphasis on the deterrent was increased by the appointment in 1959 of Mountbatten as CDS, given the doubts he had expressed the previous year about whether the West would ever use nuclear weapons. The 1961 Defence White Paper pointed out that many of Britain s most important responsibilities were not concerned with direct deterrence of nuclear war but rather with the checking of small conflicts that might develop into one. There was a need for rapid-reaction forces capable of dealing with a whole spectrum of possible aggression and military threats. The 1962 Defence White Paper stressed the need for NATO forces and strategy to be balanced and flexible, and noted the re-equipment of the army with... 

Let us now look at several results of this investigation. In the nuclear war scenario, for example, the SSMAE shows that Arctic environmental stability would be disturbed 3 months after the impact. From other scenarios, it follows that variations in the velocity of vertical advection from 0.004cm/s to 0.05 cm/s does not affect the Arctic environmental state. An error of 32% in ice area estimate leads to a variation in simulation results of 36%. When this error is more than 32%, simulation results become less stable and can vary by several times. The problem exists of finding the proper criterion to estimate SSMAE sensitivity to variations in model parameters. As Krapivin (1996) showed, a survivability function J(t) reflecting the dynamics of the total biomass of living elements would enable this sensitivity to be estimated. In this instance... 

According to Christian belief these verses from the Bible are a direct reference to nuclear war - the kind of war expected in the Cold War period. The sixteenth-century prophet, Nostradamus, made reference to another kind of attack in one of his extracts The sky will burn at 45 degrees. Fire approaches the city. In an instant huge scattered flame leaps up. 90 Was this then a reference to napalm and chemical warfare -the reality of the Cold War period ... 

Dickerson, M. H., Emergency Planning, Response, and Assessment A Concept for a Center of Excellence, Proceedings from an International Seminar on Nuclear War International Cooperation The Alternatives (CONF-8608I49-I), U.S. Department of Energy, Washington, DC, 1986. 

The fires from a major nuclear war could result in so much soot that the Earth s albedo could go up by 20%, relative. What atmospheric temperature change would this cause ... 

Nuclear weapons are the only true WMD, as indicated in the Cold War doctrine of mutually assured destruction (MAD). Just one weapon can kill hundreds of thousands, and a global nuclear war would imperil the human race and other species. And there is no defence against nuclear weapons. 

Pauling s speeches often started the same way. We live in a wonderful world, a beautiful world I like this world. I like everything in it the stars, the mountains, the seas, lakes and rivers, the forests, the minerals, the molecules—and especially the human beings, he would say. But all these wonderful things, he continued, were threatened with disaster from nuclear war and bomb-test fallout. 

As about 10 molecules of NO are produced per MT of explosive energy (1 Mt = 1 megaton TNT = 10 calories), a global war with detonations totalling 10 Mt would produce 50 X 10 g NO. This is many times more than the amount which naturally resides in the stratosphere. Large reductions in stratospheric ozone by several tens of percent, lasting for several years, were calculated as a consequence of a major nuclear war in which large weapons with yields of more than 1 Mt would be detonated. 

Such large weapons cause the hot fireballs to rise into the stratosphere (NAS, 1975). A several fold increase in the penetration of ultraviolet radiation to the earth s surface would result. This was considered to be the main, long-term, global, atmospheric effect of a total nuclear war. By cursory comparison with the reported effects of major volcanic explosions, the production of dust from nuclear ground bursts was estimated to lead to rather insignificant changes in the earth s climate. 

During a nuclear war, many fires would start near urban, industrial and military targets (Barnaby et al., 1982). We will try to make some rough estimates of the extent of fires in various categories of combustibles, the amount of particulate matter produced thereby, and its optical properties. We will use this information to estimate the effects of the particulates on... 

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