http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/CrisesArticle.aspx?storyId=N11428084&WTmodLoc=World-R5-Alertnet-4

Regional nuclear war could spark climate change
Tue 12 Dec 2006 0:21:00 GMT

By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO, Dec 11 (Reuters) - New scientific modeling shows that a 
regional nuclear conflict between countries such as India and Pakistan 
could spark devastating climate changes worldwide, a team of researchers 
said on Monday.

"We are at a perilous crossroads," said Owen Toon of the University of 
Colorado at Boulder's Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences. 
"The current combination of nuclear proliferation, political instability 
and urban demographics form perhaps the greatest danger to the stability 
of society since the dawn of humanity."

Toon was one of the scientists who warned in the 1980s of a "nuclear 
winter" should the United States and Soviet Union engage in a nuclear 
conflict.

The demise of the Soviet Union has reduced such a threat, but using 
supercomputing analysis not available two decades ago, the team 
calculated a devastating impact from the exchange of 100 nuclear weapons 
-- an amount they said represented the potential of India and Pakistan.

"Regional scale nuclear conflicts can inflict casualties comparable to 
those predicted for a strategic attack between the United States and the 
USSR," Toon told the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in 
San Francisco. "The smoke produced can endanger the entire population of 
Earth through climate changes and ozone loss."

The study's authors warned of the spread of nuclear technologies to many 
nations and the risks to ever more concentrated urban centers with large 
fuel stockpiles that would feed massive fires.

"Owing to the confluence today of nuclear proliferation, migration into 
megacities and the centralization of economies within these cities, 
human society is extremely vulnerable," said Richard Turco of the 
Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of 
California, Los Angeles.

The scientists said that smoke from a regional conflict would spread 
across the entire world within weeks and even produce a cooling effect 
as the sun's rays are partially blocked.

"This is not a solution to global warming because you have to look at 
the devastating climate changes," said Alan Robock of the Department of 
Environmental Sciences at Rutgers, who has studied the impact of 
climatic change from regional nuclear war.

"The main point here is that while most people think that we are on a 
path of reduced probability of war with the build down of the 
superpowers and we are on a trend toward a peaceful century, we actually 
have the opposite situation going on."

"We have a trend where the build up of nuclear weapons in many countries 
of the world creates the situation where there are 20, 30, 40 nuclear 
states, all dangerous as the Soviet Union used to be," Robock said.





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