According to one study, a nuclear war between the United States and Russia would cause some five billion deaths worldwide. In addition to the populations that would simply disappear during this war, scientists have estimated that the fallout from such a conflict would have a terrible impact on global food production.
Researchers at Rutgers University estimate that the impact of a nuclear winter would be totally disastrous. Countries like the UK, USA, Germany, France and China would be devastated and everyone there would be dead by the second year.
Other better-off countries
Conversely, countries like Argentina and Australia would remain prosperous in comparison and not experience deaths from conflict, even if livestock in those areas died and it was not possible to trade with them. the other nations.
“Everyone understands that the direct effects of a nuclear war would be terrible, as we saw in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Our work shows that more than ten times as many people might die in the rest of the world due to the consequences on the climate and agriculture”, explains Professor Alan Robuck, director of the study.
Various Scenarios
In the study, published in the journal Nature Food, scientists considered six scenarios involving nuclear wars of varying sizes. Even the smallest conflict might deprive more than a billion people of food due to crop failure, dwarfing the number of people killed in the war itself, which is between 50 and 100 million.
But a full-scale nuclear war might cause such a drop in agricultural yields that 75% of the world’s population would starve to death in just two years. And while some countries would do well, they would have to deal with unmanageable refugee flows. “So it won’t necessarily be all rosy for a country like Australia,” concludes the scientist.