Putin threatened using nuclear bombs. North Korea tests missile launches.
I decided to buy some Potassium Iodide tablets.
I needn't have bothered.
The premise of my purchase was that maybe people in places like Medford, Oregon wouldn't get blown to bits in a nuclear exchange. Thyroid glands will absorb radioactive Iodine unless they are given their fill of non-radioactive iodine. That's why I laid in a supply of Potassium Iodide for my family. Two tablets a day might keep people in a sheltering household safe during the worst of the fallout. Nuclear war didn't seem impossible. Accidents happen. Misinterpretations happen.
Maybe, I thought, nuclear warheads would be aimed at military facilities, not out-of-the-way places like Medford.
I wrote my college classmates. I said my first thought was that nuclear war meant near 100% of Americans would be killed, so any effort to "prep" for survival was pointless. But maybe there would be survivors. Maybe I need to lay in a store of supplies of medicines, food, and water. Did anyone have any data to share?
Dr. Ira Helfand did. He is Co-President of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and a Board Member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Two different organizations he has helped lead have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists had an article on him and his work.
He wrote me:
Guest Post by Ira Helfand.
Peter, unfortunately your initial instinct is correct. It is possible that Russia could use one or two nuclear weapons in Ukraine without triggering a larger nuclear war, but I certainly don't think any reasonable person would bet on it. In the past, whenever the U.S. has conducted a war game simulating a nuclear a conflict between the NATO and Russia, the use of even a single nuclear weapon has almost invariably led to full scale nuclear war. Ukraine is not part of NATO and does not have its own nuclear weapons, but once we cross the nuclear threshold I think we have to assume that all bets are off.
Certainly the kind of war that you suggest ( "There could be an exchange of attacks on military and strategic sites: Aircraft carriers, power plants, hydroelectric dams, D.C., ports, railroad centers") would almost immediately involve the full strategic arsenals of both countries. The immediate death toll in the U.S. would be well over 100 million and the entire economic infrastructure on which we all depend would be destroyed. There would be no internet, no electric grid, no health care system, no system for distributing food or heating oil, no running water. There would be widespread radioactive fallout. And in the months following the initial attack, the vast majority of people in both Russia and the U.S. who were not killed in the initial attacks would also die--from starvation, from exposure, from epidemic disease, from radiation poisoning.
But this utter destruction of both countries is only part of the story. A large war between the U.S. and Russia would loft some 150 million tons of soot into the upper atmosphere dropping temperatures around the world an average of 18 degrees F. In the interior of North America and Eurasia, temperatures would drop 45 to 50 degrees F. Earth has not been this cold in 18,000 years, since the coldest period of the last Ice Age. Under these conditions all the ecosystems that have developed since the end of that Ice Age would collapse, food production would stop, and according to a study published in Nature/Food this past August, more than 3/4 of humanity would starve. Nature.
The same study also showed that a much more limited war, as might take place between India and Pakistan, involving just 250 100-kiloton weapons, less than 4% of the world's arsenal, would kill more than 100 million directly and put enough soot into the atmosphere to trigger a global famine that would kill more than 2 billion people and destroy modern civilization.
So, you will not be living with 19th century technology in Medford. You will probably be dead and if you do beat the very steep odds and survive, you will be living in something considerably worse than the Stone Age.
This is why it is so terribly important to get rid of these weapons. According to Robert McNamara, we have survived this far in the nuclear age, not because we had wise leaders, or sound military doctrine, or infallible technology. "We lucked out. . . . It was luck that prevented nuclear war." And if we don't get rid of these weapons, sooner or later, and probably sooner, our luck is going to run out.
Fortunately this does not have to be our fate. Nuclear weapons are not a force of nature over which we have no control. They are little machines, the size of an arm-chair. We have built them ourselves and we know how to take them apart. We have already dismantled some 60,000 of them. We just lack the political power to make the nuclear-armed states dismantle the 13,000 that remain.Here in the U.S. we have formed the Back from the Brink campaign to build that political power and get our government to initiate negotiations with all eight of the other nuclear armed states for a verifiable, enforceable, time-bound agreement to dismantle their remaining nuclear weapons. It is possible that such an initiative would fail, but we don't know that, and we do know what is going to happen if we don't try.
In the late 1950s my brother and I wanted our father, DeVere Taylor, to build us a fallout shelter at our house in Medford. We thought it would be cool to gather supplies, build our bunkbeds, have a transistor radio, flashlights, etc. Our dad refused saying even if we survived we wouldn't want to be living after a nuclear holocaust. I hope we continue to be ''lucky''.