NUCLEAR FAMINE: TWO BILLION PEOPLE AT RISK?
Ira Helfand, MD, International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, PSR
Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War
on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition
Introduction to the Second Edition
In April of 2012 we released the report Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk which examined the climatic and agri- cultural consequences of a limited, regional nuclear war. The report looked specifically at the declines in US maize and Chinese rice production that would result from the pre- dicted climate disruption and concluded that even a limited nuclear conflict would cause extensive famine, mainly in the developing world, and put more than one billion people at risk of starvation.
Since then new research by Lili Xia and Alan Robock has shown that the climate change caused by a limited nuclear war would affect Chinese maize production as severely as rice production and it would affect wheat production much more severely than rice output. Their new findings suggest that the original report may have seriously underestimated the consequences of a limited nuclear war. In addition to the one billion people in the developing world who would face possible starvation, 1.3 billion people in China would confront severe food insecurity. The prospect of a decade of wide- spread hunger and intense social and economic instability in the world’s largest country has immense implications for the entire global community, as does the possibility that the huge declines in Chinese wheat production will be matched by sim- ilar declines in other wheat producing countries.
This updated version of Nuclear Famine attempts to address these new concerns and better define the full extent of the worldwide catastrophe that will result from even a limited, regional nuclear war.
Read full text at: http://www.psr.org/assets/pdfs/two-billion-at-risk.pdf
