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Billion Would Starve Even in Limited Nuclear War
SHERWOOD ROSS ASSOCIATES
Public Relations
Interview Contact: Alan Robock: (848) 932-5751
ONE BILLION PEOPLE WOULD STARVE
FROM EVEN "LIMITED" NUCLEAR WAR
"The
world as we know it could end any day as a result of an accidental
nuclear war between the United States and Russia," a prominent
environmental scientist warns.
"With
temperatures plunging below freezing (as a result), crops would die and
massive starvation would kill most of humanity," asserts Alan Robock,
Distinguished Professor of the Department of Environmental Sciences at
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N.J., and a leading authority on
nuclear winter, with its catastrophic effects on the global food supply.
Robock
will present his new information in a speech to be delivered at a
conference on "The Dynamics of Possible Nuclear Extinction" Feb.
28-March 1st at the New York Academy of Medicine, 1216 Fifth Ave.,
sponsored by the Helen Caldicott Foundation For a Nuclear Free Future of
Asheville, N.C. (Press invited to cover.)
(Nuclear
Weapons) "would never be used on purpose by the major powers, but could
be used by accident. Some countries might use them in a moment of
panic, or in response to imagined threats and insult, or in a fit of
religious hysteria," Robock asserts. "The arsenals of nuclear weapons
states set a bad example for the world, encouraging proliferation, and
they could kill us all."
He goes on to say that
a nuclear war with each of two adversaries using 50 Hiroshima-sized
atom bobs as airbursts over urban areas "would inject so much smoke from
the resulting fires into the stratosphere that the climate change would
be unprecedented in recorded human history."
Robock
says climate model simulations find that the smoke would absorb
sunlight, making it dark, cold, and dry at Earth's surface and produce
global-scale ozone depletion with enhanced ultraviolet(UV) radiation.
"Crop models show that it would reduce agricultural production by 10-40%
for a decade. The impact of the nuclear war simulated here, using much
less than 1% of the global nuclear arsenal, could sentence a billion
people now living marginal existences to starvation," he asserts.
That
could come about, say, from the cooling after a nuclear war between
India and Pakistan, Robock explains. Calling on the United States and
Russia to "set an example for other current and potential nuclear
states," Robock says the only way to avoid a global climatic catastrophe
would be to reduce each of their arsenals well below new START levels.
(START
is an acronym for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty signed by America
and Russia on February 5, 2011, that reduces the number of nuclear
weapons and launchers that the U.S. and Russia deploy.) "The time is now
to quickly reduce our nuclear arsenals," Robock states. "Their costs
are enormous to any nation building them. They cannot be used, and their
continued existence makes the world a much more dangerous place."
He
cites President Obama's statement in Prague five years ago to the
effect that "The existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most
dangerous legacy of the Cold War…In a strange turn of history, the
threat of global nuclear war has gone down, but the risk of a nuclear
attack has gone up. More nations have acquired these weapons… As the
only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon, the United States has a
moral responsibility to act." #
Sherwood Ross
Public Relations
(305) 205-8281
102 SW 6th Avenue, Miami, FL
33130 sherwoodross10@gmail.com
Helen Caldicott Foundation
Mali Lightfoot
Executive Director
131 Forest Hill Drive
Asheville, NC 28803