The Effects of Nuclear War

INCALCULABLE EFFECTS

In 1975, the National Academy of Sciences published a report, Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Mu/tip/e Nuclear-Weapons Detonations, which addressed the question of whether a large-scale nuclear war would be likely to produce significant, irreversible effects on the world environment.

Leaves and new shoots started to appear 2 months after the explosion in Nagasaki, Japan on this chestnut tree

This document may be summarized as follows:

• It is possible that a large nuclear war would produce irreversible adverse effects on the environment and the ecological system.
• In particular, it would not require very large changes to greatly diminish the production of food. The report notes that it would be difficult to adapt to such changes in view of the likelihood that much of the world’s expertise in agricultural technology might perish in the war.
• The physical and biological processes involved are not understood well enough to say just how such irreversible damage, if it occurred, would take place.
• Therefore, it is not possible to estimate the probability or the probable magnitude of such damage.

With the exception of the discussion of possible damage to the ozone layer, where there has been some advance in knowledge since 1975, these conclusions still hold in 1979.

Moreover, there are at least two other respects in which there are hazards whose magnitude cannot be calculated. It is certain that the radiation derived from a nuclear war would cause mutations in surviving plants and animals; it is possible that some of these mutations might change the ecosystem in unpredictable ways, but this seems unlikely. Furthermore, the possibility cannot be excluded of major changes in human behavior as a result of the unprecedented trauma. Science fiction writers have speculated, for example, that in the aftermath of a nuclear war, the survivors would place the blame on "science" or on "scientists and through a combination of lynching and book-burning eliminate scientific knowledge altogether. There are cases in hisory (or rather archeology) of high civilizations that simply stopped functioning (though people survived biologically) after some shattering experience.

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