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Absit Omen

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Jim Miles
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All power would be off. Modern technology would be gone, either from lack of power or from the electromagnetic pulses. Medical services would not exist, and certainly not for the trauma scale required to help survivors. Emergency services of other kinds would not exist. There would be no running water, no electricity, transportation routes into and out of bombed areas would not exist. Food resources would not be available. But just pretend that given all that, a person could survive for a week or two or a month in some kind of shelter, living inside while the radiation levels outside supposedly dropped to survivable levels. Two other major factors come into play.

Nuclear winter...

Scientists have long warned about the consequences of a nuclear war and its effects on the environment. Most commonly known of these is the concept of nuclear winter.

With the massive explosions and resultant fires huge amounts of ash, dust, and aerosols would be lifted high into the atmosphere and spread over the full range of the globe. With even a limited hypothesized nuclear war - usually argued as being between Pakistan and India - there would be enough ash and aerosols to create a nuclear winter. With the whole world involved it would be inevitable that there would be a few years of nuclear winter, the main result of which would be the loss of agricultural production.

Having survived the original blast, any survivors would face severe long-term obstacles in obtaining food. Corporate agriculture would be gone: fertilizer production would not exist, machines would not be repairable and largely without fuel, transportation of any surviving produce would not be possible, refrigeration and storage facilities would be inoperable. Local agriculture would depend on the variables of cold weather, lack of seed supplies, limited manpower, and the highly irradiated environment.

... and irradiated earth

The latter point is one that is generally ignored in arguments about nuclear war, but is sometimes included with those arguing about climate change in general. There are some 400+ nuclear reactors around the world - most of these are in Europe (including Russia) and the eastern U.S. with others located mainly in East Asia (China, Korea, Japan) and in India/Pakistan. These reactors require power and water in order to operate properly and while designed to be able to operate in certain adverse conditions they are highly susceptible to extreme damage without power to run the cooling systems and spent fuel-storage areas.

In a nuclear war, these facilities might be targeted directly, but even if not, they would be without power from the regular power grid and after a short period any emergency-backup facilities would run out of fuel, and depending on access, lose all their water requirements. Beyond that would be a lack of technical expertise to continue operating and repairing the facilities and no services would be able for long-term monitoring of the sites.

Several large-scale nuclear accidents give clear signals as to what to expect. In the Soviet Union, a major explosion in Chelyabinsk (1957) contaminated two dozen villages and large areas of land. Chernobyl in north-central Ukraine experienced a meltdown (1986) contaminating local land and lands as far away as Scotland. A major earthquake off Fukushima resulted in the meltdown of three nuclear cores (2011) at the Daiichi power station. Neither Chernobyl nor Fukushima have been cleaned up and still pose major long-term risks to the environment and people working on or nearby the plants. In the U.S. the Three Mile Island plant suffered a 'partial' meltdown (1979) resulting in large radiation release and structural damage to the power plant.

In all these cases, official reports have downplayed the number of people killed in the incidents. The immediate death toll may have been low, but the ongoing lingering radioactivity will take centuries/millennia to disperse. At Fukushima in particular, the nature and status of the melted cores is essentially unknown and the radioactivity is so high it destroys technical efforts used to find and observe the destruction.

In short, after a nuclear war and all its direct and concomitant damage and effects, there would be a highly probable several hundred Fukushimas around the world, spilling out endless amounts of radiation for centuries.

No nukes

If all that sounds scary, good, you should have that reaction. Surviving a nuclear war is a short-term action and in the long term virtually improbable.

Given that the world survives the current crisis, it needs to become mandatory to restrict and eliminate nuclear weapons from the world. Regardless of the widespread official acceptance of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, there have been no serious governmental attempts to eliminate nuclear weapons stockpiles and neither has there been any serious attempt to limit their spread - only the unwillingness of many countries to develop them has prevented a more widespread distribution.

Having become normalized, it becomes imperative to denormalize nuclear weapons and nuclear power plants. The militaries of the world will not do so alone, nor will they do so unilaterally.

While the world remains on the brink of nuclear destruction, a fate we have escaped so far mostly through luck combined with a small touch of intelligence, no one should be resting easy about the future of their children and grand-children. Hopefully they will have a history to read about that remains in the past and is not a series of ongoing current events' crises continually threatening their survival.

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Jim Miles is a Canadian educator and analyst who examines the world through a syncretic lens. His analysis of international and domestic geopolitical ideas and actions incorporates a lifetime of interest in current events, a desire to (more...)
 

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