We are Walking on Very Thin Ice Right Now by Steven Starr

The US and Russia each have close to 6000 nuclear weapons/warheads in their nuclear inventories. On each side, a few thousand of these warheads are classified as retired and “scheduled for dismantlement” (but remain intact), a few thousand more are held “in reserve” (meaning they can be uploaded in a relatively short time), and each nation has about 1600 or 1700 warheads that are kept ready for immediate use. (See the "Nuclear Notebook" by Hans Kristensen and Matt Korda in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists for details on the US and Russian nuclear arsenals.)

Of these deployed and operational nuclear weapons, the US and Russia can each launch about 1000 strategic nuclear warheads (minimum explosive power of each warhead is 100,000 tons of TNT, or 100 kilotons) in a matter of a 15 minutes or less. The land-based ICBMs of the US and Russia can all be launched in a matter of a few minutes.

Both Biden and Putin are constantly followed by military officers carrying a “nuclear briefcase”, which is a communication device that allows either president to give the permission order to carry out a nuclear strike. The options can be for one warhead or an all-out attack with more than 1000 nuclear warheads. Unless the military refuses to obey the command, the attack will be carried out.

The US has roughly 350 cities of populations greater than 100,000; Russia has about 250 cities with populations of greater than 100,000. Each side can easily destroy every one of the cities of the opposing side (with an order that takes 5 minutes to carry out) and still have more than 1000 deployed and operational warheads for other targets.

Russia has about 700 strategic nuclear warheads that each have an explosive power of 800,000 tons of TNT. These are among the “launch-ready” weapons they can launch in a few minutes time. Each of these warheads, on an average weather day, will ignite fires over an area of 150 square miles. In a matter of 10‑15 minutes, these fires will coalesce into a single gigantic nuclear firestorm, with air temperatures of 500‑600 degrees Fahrenheit and hurricane force winds blowing towards the center of the fire zone. No one in the fire zone will survive the fire. For details, see an article that I co‑authored in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, “What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?” (https://thebulletin.org/2015/02/what-would-happen-if-an-800-kiloton-nuclear-warhead-detonated-above-midtown-manhattan/).

A war fought with hundreds or thousands of U.S. and Russian strategic nuclear weapons would ignite immense nuclear firestorms covering land surface areas of many thousands or tens of thousands of square miles. Peer-reviewed studies have calculated that up to 180 million tons of smoke and soot would be created by these nuclear firestorms. See https://nuclearfamine.org/ and http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/robock/robock_nwpapers.html for details.

Most of the smoke from these firestorms would rapidly rise above cloud level into the stratosphere, where it would rapidly spread around the earth. In a matter of a few weeks, a global stratospheric smoke layer would form, which would block up to 70% of warming sunlight from reaching earth’s surface in the Northern Hemisphere and 35% in the Southern Hemisphere.The smoke, being above cloud level, could not be rained out and it would remain in the stratosphere for a decade or longer.

The loss of warming sunlight would cause daily temperatures to fall below freezing every day for up to 3 years in central North American and central Eurasia. The intense cold weather would endure for many years, preventing crops from being grown. Most humans and animal populations would perish from starvation.

Unfortunately, those in charge of the US military have rejected the findings of the scientific studies on nuclear winter. I wrote about this for the Federation of American Scientists, see “Turning a Blind Eye Towards Armageddon – U.S. Leaders Reject Nuclear Winter Studies” at https://fas.org/2017/01/turning-a-blind-eye-towards-armageddon-u-s-leaders-reject-nuclear-winter-studies/.

In 2010, at the UN meetings of the First Committee, I asked Rose Gottemoeller and Anatoly Atonov (during their briefing on New START) if they were familiar with the new studies on nuclear winter, which predict that a US-Russian nuclear war would wipe out most of humanity. Both answered “no”.

Perhaps they have learned more about nuclear winter since 2010. But it is willful blindness to chose to ignore such information and criminal insanity to start a nuclear war that would amount to a mass extinction event.

We are walking on very thin ice right now, with incompetent ideologues in Washington who clearly have no real understanding of the existential dangers of nuclear war.

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This article was originally published as a comment to the article On Going Seriously Boom on The Saker's blog.

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Steven Starr is the director of the University of Missouri's Clinical Laboratory Science Program, as well as a senior scientist at the Physicians for Social Responsibility. He has worked with the Swiss, Chilean, and Swedish governments in support of their efforts at the United Nations to eliminate thousands of high-alert, launch-ready U.S. and Russian nuclear weapons; he maintains the website Nuclear Darkness.