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News in Science

South Asian nuclear war would destroy ozone

Tuesday, 8 April 2008 Maggie
Fox
Reuters

Soot thrown up by a nuclear explosion
would lead to chemical reactions that break down the earth's protective ozone
layer, researchers calculate (Source: iStockphoto)

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Nuclear war between India and Pakistan would knock a big hole in
the ozone layer, affecting crops, animals and people worldwide, researchers
say.

Fires from burning cities would send 5 million tonnes of soot or more into
the lowest part of earth's atmosphere, the troposphere, the US researchers
report today online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

And heat from the sun would carry these blackened particles into the
stratosphere, say the University of Colorado scientists.

"The sunlight really heats it up and sends it up to the top of the
stratosphere," says Dr Michael Mills of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, who chose
nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan as one of several possible
examples.

Up in the stratosphere, the soot would absorb radiation from the sun and heat
surrounding gases, causing chemical reactions that break down ozone.

"We find column ozone losses in excess of 20% globally, 25-45% at
mid-latitudes, and 50-70% at northern high latitudes persisting for five years,
with substantial losses continuing for five additional years," the researchers
write.

This would let in enough ultraviolet radiation to cause cancer, damage eyes
and skin, damage crops and other plants and injure animals.

Mills and colleagues based their computer model on other research on how much
fire would be produced by a regional nuclear conflict.

"Certainly there is a growing number of large nuclear-armed states that have
a growing number of weapons. This could be typical of what you might see," Mills
says.

Smoke is the key

Eight nations are known to have nuclear weapons, and Pakistan and India are
believed to have at least 50 weapons apiece, each with the power of the weapon
the US used to destroy Hiroshima in 1945.

Mills says the study adds a new factor to the worries about what might damage
the world's ozone layer, as well as to research about the effects of even a
limited nuclear exchange.

"The smoke is the key and it is coming from these firestorms that build up
actually several hours after the explosions," he says.

"We are talking about modern megacities that have a lot of material in them
that would burn. We saw these kinds of megafires in World War Two in Dresden and
Tokyo. The difference is we are talking about a large number of cities that
would be bombed within a few days."

Nothing natural could create this much black smoke in the same way, Mill
notes. Volcanic ash, dust and smoke are of a different nature, for example, and
forest fires are not big or hot enough.

The University of Colorado's Professor Brian Toon, who also worked on the
study, says the damage to the ozone layer would be worse than what has been
predicted by 'nuclear winter' and 'ultraviolet spring' scenarios.

"The big surprise is that this study demonstrates that a small-scale,
regional nuclear conflict is capable of triggering ozone losses even larger than
losses that were predicted following a full-scale nuclear war," Toon says.

Tags: defence-and-national-security,
nuclear-accident,
pollution,
environmental-health,
unrest-conflict-and-war,
phenomena,
ozone

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