close
Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2022 Aug;3(8):586-596.
doi: 10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0. Epub 2022 Aug 15.

Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection

Lili Xia  1 , Alan Robock  2 , Kim Scherrer  3   4 , Cheryl S Harrison  5 , Benjamin Leon Bodirsky  6   7 , Isabelle Weindl  6 , Jonas Jägermeyr  6   8   9 , Charles G Bardeen  10 , Owen B Toon  11 , Ryan Heneghan  12
Affiliations

Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection

Lili Xia et al. Nat Food. 2022 Aug.

Abstract

Atmospheric soot loadings from nuclear weapon detonation would cause disruptions to the Earth's climate, limiting terrestrial and aquatic food production. Here, we use climate, crop and fishery models to estimate the impacts arising from six scenarios of stratospheric soot injection, predicting the total food calories available in each nation post-war after stored food is consumed. In quantifying impacts away from target areas, we demonstrate that soot injections larger than 5 Tg would lead to mass food shortages, and livestock and aquatic food production would be unable to compensate for reduced crop output, in almost all countries. Adaptation measures such as food waste reduction would have limited impact on increasing available calories. We estimate more than 2 billion people could die from nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and more than 5 billion could die from a war between the United States and Russia-underlining the importance of global cooperation in preventing nuclear war.

PubMed Disclaimer

Comment in

References

    1. Oman, L., Robock, A., Stenchikov, G. L. & Thordarson, T. High-latitude eruptions cast shadow over the African monsoon and the flow of the Nile. Geophys. Res. Lett. 33, L18711 (2006). - DOI
    1. Wood, G. D. Tambora: The Eruption That Changed The World (Princeton Univ. Press, 2014). - DOI
    1. Stommel, H. & Stommel, E. Volcano Weather; The Story of 1816, The Year Without a Summer (Seven Seas Press, 1983).
    1. Turco, R. P., Toon, O. B., Ackerman, T. P., Pollack, J. B. & Sagan, C. Nuclear winter: global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions. Science 222, 1283–1292 (1983). - DOI
    1. Aleksandrov, V. V. & Stenchikov, G. L. On the modeling of the climatic consequences of the nuclear war. Proc. Applied Math (Computing Centre of the USSR Academy of Sciences, 1983).

Publication types

LinkOut - more resources