A recent Channel 4 program ‘What if Putin goes Nuclear’ gave an unrealistically upbeat assessment of a nuclear war.
Colonel Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, former British Army officer, stated that a nuclear war ‘will not wipe us off the face of the earth’. Professor Gerry Thomas used evidence from the accident at the nuclear power plant in Chernobyl to suggest that the only fear we need have of radiation is thyroid cancer in children ‘which is very treatable’. Mike Granatt, a former senior civil servant with responsibilities for disaster survival planning, suggested that if we keep a battery operated radio and a good stock of tins we have an excellent chance of surviving a nuclear attack, unless, of course, we are unfortunate enough to be in the areas immediately incinerated. He also suggested that some form of government would still operate following a nuclear attack, including people able to direct survivors to places of safety where they would have new homes. This might be true if a nuclear strike on the UK was an isolated incident rather than part of a major nuclear war and involved one or two nuclear bombs. Otherwise, it is totally at odds with scientific evidence concerning the effects of a nuclear war.
Nuclear explosions are known to interfere with the climate; for obvious reasons, there has been a lot of scientific research into climate change in recent years. There are now numerous scientific papers agreeing that a nuclear war will cause immediate and catastrophic climate change, referred to by the shorthand ‘nuclear winter’. The extraordinary power of nuclear weapons means that sooty particles will be carried into the stratosphere above normal weather patterns and literally blot out the sun, massively disrupting the climate. It is predicted that a ‘regional war’ such as between India and Pakistan or a major war between Russia and the USA would disrupt weather patterns across the world for at least a decade. In the case of a nuclear war between Russia and the USA it is predicted that midsummer temperatures would be below freezing for the whole of the Northern hemisphere. Moreover, the reduced light and temperature will result in a 90% reduction in the growing season effectively creating total crop failure. Even a ‘regional war’ will threaten global food supplies. Nobody knows for sure how many nuclear weapons it would take to have this effect but some estimates suggest one UK submarine launching half its missiles would be enough. It is impossible to conduct nuclear war without causing global harm to all living things. Needless to say, nuclear winter is not a ‘solution’ to global warming; in the estimated ten years it would take the soot in the stratosphere to disperse, the harmful gases that have caused global warming are not going to have disappeared.
No sense of the possible scale of humanitarian catastrophe and environmental devastation was conveyed by the Channel 4 program; a nuclear war would inevitably involve multiple targets. One nuclear bomb has the capacity to immediately kill all living things across a bigger area but also with more lasting harm than any other type of weapon. The destructive power of a nuclear bomb is described by expressing how many tons you would need of the chemical explosive TNT for an equivalent release of energy in heat and blast. The nuclear bomb dropped from an aeroplane on Hiroshima in 1945 more or less immediately killed about 100 thousand people, sometimes estimated as 40% of the city’s population. The bomb dropped three days later on Nagasaki was only slightly less destructive. These bombs were ‘small’ in comparison to the nuclear weapons held by the nuclear-armed nations now. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima was equivalent to about 15 kilotons (15 thousand tons) of TNT. The UK’s bombs are 100kt (a 100 thousand tons) and some countries have bombs of several megatons (million tons). Nuclear weapon systems now include missiles capable of launching multiple bombs designed to simultaneously hit a set of targets thousands of miles away. For example, the UK’s nuclear weapon system involves four submarines, each with 8 Trident missiles, which, according to the government’s 2015 defence statement, are each armed with 5 bombs.
If you want to image the destructive power of just one 100kt nuclear bomb, think of a city you know. Scientists have calculated that the fire ball and heat created by a nuclear bomb of 100kt will consume everything within a radius of 2.7miles. So think of a spot in your city centre and make a circle that is 2.7 miles out from there in every direction. Think about where the hospitals are and ask yourself if any will be left. Then there is the radioactive fallout; anyone in its path in the next six hours will get a lethal dose. For a 100kt nuclear bomb, scientists estimate a plume two to three miles wide stretching downwind for twenty to thirty miles. Radioactive contamination of food and water will be much more widespread and very long lasting. Now think if there were multiple targets fanned out across the country.
The Channel 4 program simultaneously downplayed the horror of the aftermath of even one nuclear bomb – as if, all will be dead in the immediate area = end of problem. We know about the hell of the consequences, not from the accident at Chernobyl, but from the 1945 survivors of the 2nd World War bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, known in Japan as Hibakusha. It is impossible to describe the suffering that the arrival of a 100 kiloton nuclear bomb would cause, but the harrowing accounts of the Hibakusha give some idea. They bear witness to the excruciating agony of death for those who were not immediately vaporised or incinerated but died days later of burns, blast injuries and radiation sickness. As she spoke at the United Nations during the negotiation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in March 2017, Setsuko Thurlow describes the indelible memory of her four-year old nephew, his unrecognisable body, which she remembers as a blackened and swollen lump of flesh, as he begged for water until he died.
In Hiroshima and Nagasaki most hospitals had been destroyed, the majority of doctors and nurses killed. It is clear that in any nuclear attack, there will be days with no first responders, no help at hand and only unimaginable horror and suffering. As was briefly noted but not explained in the Channel 4 program, the detonation of a nuclear bomb triggers a powerful electro-magnetic pulse that destroys electronics for over a hundred miles and so all mobile phones and normal means of communication are gone. Imagine the electric grid and the transport network massively disrupted along with all health systems. As for the government surviving, even during the Cold War, the UK government began to doubt that survival of an all-out nuclear war was possible. Indeed, Scottish CND have access to a secret document from that period that was considerably less optimistic about stocks of tins keeping us alive.
Like ICAN and the wider peace movement, Scottish CND acknowledge that any use of nuclear weapons, either by intent, accident or miscalculation, will be catastrophic. A significant proportion of the human population and many other species will not survive an all-out nuclear war and life may not be very liveable for those who do. Eliminating nuclear weapons is the only way to remove these risks.
Learn more
ICAN: The Catastrophic Harm of Nuclear Weapons
ICAN: Emerging Technologies and Nuclear Risks
IPPNW: Nuclear Famine – The Climate Effects of Regional Nuclear War
IPPNW: The Ukraine Crisis Could Trigger a Nuclear Catastrophe
ICAN: Nuclear Weapons and the Collapse of Healthcare Systems
ICAN: Unspeakable Suffering – the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Counting the Dead at Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Jaegermeyer et al: A Regional Nuclear Conflict Would Compromise Global Food Security