Credit: U.S. Department of Energy
In 1983, a team of scientists spearheaded by the late Carl Sagan became concerned about the long-term effects of a nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Soviet Union. They concluded that, devastating as they were, the bombs wouldn't be what destroyed civilisation as we knew it.
That dubious honour, they calculated, belonged to the years-long 'nuclear winter' that would result from soot and smoke darkening the sun and plunging temperatures to below freezing across much of the globe.
With the end of the Cold War, the risk of all-out nuclear war receded, and so, it seemed, did the risk of nuclear winter. But the relief may have been premature, scientists say.
In a series of papers presented in San Francisco, at a December 2006 meeting of the American Geophysical Union (and subsequently published in Science), a group that included two members of the original nuclear-winter team (Richard Turco and Owen Toon) re-examined the effects of nuclear bomb blasts.
They found that even a small nuclear exchange between rising nuclear powers such as India and Pakistan would radically affect the Earth's climate. The result wouldn't be a full-fledged nuclear winter, but their simulations nevertheless showed that such a war would wreck the Earth's ozone layer and initiate a global "nuclear autumn" that would cause years of crop failures, famine, and panic.
Booming cities
The threat stems from the fact that if you're a small nuclear power with a serious grudge against a neighbour, you're likely to use your arsenal primarily against cities. And it turns out that for this purpose, the monstrous megaton-scale bombs the U.S. and USSR once aimed at each other are "simply overkill," says Turco, an atmospheric scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The risk is compounded by the fact that everywhere, people are flocking to cities, many in politically unstable regions. "We're growing megacities all over the world," says Owen Toon, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. "Tehran has 10 million people."
These cities are so densely packed that the scientists estimate 20 million people could be killed outright in a war between India and Pakistan – even if each side used as few as 50 Hiroshima-sized bombs. That's nearly as many people as died in World War II, and comparable to the number of casualties once predicted from some scenarios for an all-out war between the U.S. and the USSR.
Invention Of The Atomic Bomb
The Orchestration of esembling the scientific devive that would split the atom for destruction, is no small feat. Even in the 1940's was early for western man, to grasp such a weapon- it is plausible to think how it really came into being- Why would the nature of Man, and his inborn hate wish such a disaster, on Humankind? Answer that someone, Then maybe it will be realized that there really is more to this Universe, than just- people who just can't seem to get along.It has been sometimenow that the response of the United States has leveled the conciousness of our Enemies- Who Will learn from the out-come of the next insanity.