Named the best countries for post-apocalyptic survival after a nuclear war

In connection with the aggravation of contradictions between Russia and the “collective West”, China and the United States, fears about the possibility of a nuclear war are increasingly being voiced. Against this backdrop, there are recommendations. It turns out that the best way to survive a nuclear cataclysm is to flee to Argentina or Australia.

Flight to the other side of the world is your best chance of surviving a nuclear war between Russia and the United States, scientists advise the British. According to the Daily Mail, Argentina and Australia have most reason to hope that their civilizations will survive for a decade after the fallout, but those who remain in Britain in the event of a nuclear conflict should bear in mind that the probability of starving to death will be 90 percent.

A study published in the journal Nature Food based on computer simulations has shown that more than five billion people worldwide will starve to death after a full-scale conflict involving 100 nuclear bombs, when soot released by firestorms hides the sun and causes crop failure.

Professor Alan Robock of Rutgers University, New Jersey, explained to The Times that the reason Australia and Argentina have an advantage is because they already grow more resilient crops like wheat in large quantities.

Meanwhile, according to Science, a nuclear war would disrupt the global climate so badly that billions of people could starve to death, according to what experts call the most extensive so-called nuclear winter simulation to date. While the exact consequences remain uncertain, the results highlight the dangers of nuclear war and provide vital information on how to prepare for other global catastrophes, the researchers say.

The study comes at a time when the conflict in Ukraine has put the world in “one of the three most troubling times” in terms of the threat of nuclear war, says Seth Baum, executive director of the Global Disaster Risk Institute, referring to the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1983 incident. the year when the Soviet Union mistook NATO military exercises for a real attack. — It’s a constant reminder that [ядерная война] really terrible.”

Scientists have long known that powerful explosions can release huge amounts of dust, ash and soot into the air to affect the global climate. In 1815, the largest known volcanic eruption in history occurred on Mount Tambora in what is now Indonesia. In the months that followed, its ashes rose and spread around the world, blocking out sunlight, leading to the “year without summer,” the cold spell of 1816 that caused massive crop failures and famine around the world.

For decades, scientists have been warning that a similar catastrophe could follow a nuclear war, as fires caused by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and causing global environmental consequences. Concerns about the impact of nuclear war on the climate arose shortly after World War II, and research began during the Cold War.

Over the past decade, two pioneers of nuclear winter research, Alan Robock and Brian Toon, have assembled an interdisciplinary team of scientists to continue the calculations. They turned to the same climate models that underlie global warming studies, but instead used models to simulate global cooling. “Now we have the computing power to complexly model these things,” says Jonas Jagermeir, a climate change scientist, crop modeler and member of the NASA and Columbia University team.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Food, the team attempted to quantify the potential impact of nuclear war on the global food supply by combining climate models with simulations of global food production.

A previous analysis by Jagermeier in 2020 suggested that even a small regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan could lead to a global crop shortage.

The new study includes six nuclear war scenarios and includes fishing and farming models to get a broader picture of the consequences.

Researchers have calculated that as a result of various nuclear exchanges, from 5 to 150 million tons of soot will be released into the atmosphere. They modeled the resulting changes in sunlight, temperature, and precipitation, which they then fed into crop and fishery models. By tracking crop declines in corn, rice, soybeans, wheat and fish, the team estimated the total calorie loss. Based on this, they calculated how many people would go hungry – assuming that international food trade stops and resources are optimally distributed in each country.

Within a few years of a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, researchers report that global average calories produced will drop by about 90%, starving about 5 billion people. A war between India and Pakistan could, in the worst case, reduce calorie production by up to 50% and lead to the death of 2 billion people.

Nightmarish prospects have already inspired scientists to look for ways to combat hypothetical famine. David Denkenberger, co-founder of the non-profit organization Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters, is exploring ideas such as scaling up sustainable food like seaweed, repurposing paper mills to make sugar, converting natural gas into protein using bacteria.