Why we all need a UN investigation into the consequences of nuclear war

At the United Nations, work is underway in the General Assembly to establish an international panel of scientists to assess, communicate and advance our current knowledge of the impacts of climate change. nuclear war. This effort would lead to a more informed and inclusive global debate about how much and how little everyone – including the nuclear weapons states themselves – actually knows about the catastrophic large-scale long-term human, ecological, environmental, economic and societal consequences. the use of nuclear weapons. Ideally, the findings could provide a basis for action toward the total elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide and secure a more secure future for people and our planet.

Everyone, not just scientists and their respective professional associations, in all countries, including the nuclear weapons states and their allies, should speak out in support of this effort to build a shared understanding of the risks posed by nuclear war plans and nuclear deterrent threats .

In September the member states of the UN overwhelming agreed on the Pact for the futurewhich one explains: “A nuclear war would destroy all of humanity.” But it has been more than thirty years since the last UN report on this threat, published in 1988, that report building on previous UN studies initiated in the United States 1960s And 1970sand called for a “cooperative, international scientific effort… to refine current findings and explore new possibilities” to understand the consequences of nuclear war. However, with the end of the Cold War and the waning of nuclear fears, such an effort was no longer undertaken.

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The world is very different today. While the global stock The number of nuclear weapons and some national arsenals today are a fraction of what they were in the late 1980s, there are more nuclear weapon states, and there are more environments and scales for potential nuclear war. Some arsenals are increasingthey are all being modernized and nuclear threats are being made more and more often. The world population is Today 50 percent bigger than in the 1980s, and the world is much more interdependent. Global trade and economic crises, climate change, mass migration and COVID all reveal what humanity and nature are more like now tightly bound in global circuits that collide with each other planetary boundaries.

As I wrote in the October issue of Reaching Critical Will’s First committee monitor, the Princeton Program on Science and Global Security, along with others, signed for years attention on the need for a new round of government and international mandated high-level scientific assessments of the consequences of nuclear war.

In 2020, the U.S. Congress approved a National Academies’ study about the climatic consequences of nuclear war, also known as nuclear winter– the first since the 1980s. The charge was to assess potential climate and environmental nuclear winter impacts, but not those caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear explosions, and their socio-economic consequences, in the weeks to decades after small-scale regional nuclear wars and before large-scale nuclear wars. involving the US and Russia. The impacts to be studied would include human health, agriculture and terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The report, expected this fall, has not yet been published.

In 2023, the Scientific Advisory Group of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) recommended a new study mandated by the UN General Assembly on the climatic, ecological, physical and social consequences of nuclear war. The study would also investigate “whether and how the interactions of these different physical, environmental and social impacts over different time scales could lead to cascading humanitarian impacts.” A resolution, Nuclear war effects and scientific researchThe call for such an inquiry was introduced at the UN in October by Ireland and New Zealand, and was initially co-sponsored by a diverse group of more than twenty states (from Latin America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia) , including one NATO member (Norway). More states are expected to increase this number.

A separate report 2023 by the US National Academies of Sciences has made clear the need for such assessments. Based on classified briefings and “classified level” reports, the study concluded that the US Department of Defense’s nuclear war impact models are so poor that they provide no real basis for policymakers to assess the effects of existing plans. to understand the use of nuclear weapons.

In that report, the Committee of the National Academies stated that the assessments of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons made by the Defense Threat Reduction Agency of the Department of Defense “focus on quick effects and military objectives” and that they only provide a partial account of the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons. implications. These models “have a major impact on the DoD’s strategic thinking about nuclear war.”

It concluded: “There is a need for a better understanding of the physical effects of nuclear weapons (e.g. fires, damage in modern urban environments, electromagnetic pulse effects and climate effects, such as nuclear winter), as well as the assessment and estimation of the psychological, social and political consequences of the use of nuclear weapons.” It is difficult to imagine a longer list of shortcomings in understanding the effects of the use of nuclear weapons.

More recently, in April, the national science academies of the G7 countries – Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and the US – held their first joint statement on nuclear weapons issues. Since 2005, they have issued joint statements on various science-related topics to advise the G7 Summit meetings. The Declaration on Nuclear Weapons drew particular attention to the risks and consequences of using nuclear weapons, noting: “A full-scale nuclear war between the countries with the largest arsenals would result in devastation for those countries and would cause damage worldwide. The scale of nuclear weapons use means there is the potential for the destruction of entire ecosystems and the extinction of species. In the worst case, this could be the magnitude of a mass extinction.”

The declaration emphasizes that the world needs a deeper and more widely shared understanding of the catastrophic consequences of nuclear war on people and the planet, and emphasizes that the scientific community has a special role and responsibility both in developing and communicating it .

Despite the consensus among the scientific academies of the G7 countries, their governments (which currently depend on the use of nuclear weapons and the threat thereof as part of their military plans) and some of their allies have not yet publicly expressed their support for the new UN resolution calling for a new, up-to-date investigation into the consequences of nuclear war. The scientific communities and the people living in these countries should ask themselves why. Are these states afraid that their populations will not accept nuclear weapons once they understand how their use can kill and harm countless millions, collapse societies, and devastate the planet?

A new UN-mandated expert study that assesses and addresses current knowledge about the consequences of nuclear war could stimulate a more informed, inclusive and much-needed global debate on what nuclear war means for people and the planet. It would be especially important for people and countries who have not themselves researched nuclear wars, but who would be innocent bystanders in any nuclear war. It would also help governments and people in nuclear-weapon states better understand the nature, extent, and severity of the many catastrophic consequences of nuclear war, not only for adversaries but for everyone, including themselves.

This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views of the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.