Strikes by India against Pakistan overnight have been condemned as a ‘blatant act of war’.
Tensions between the nuclear-armed nations have spiralled since an attack by Islamist militants on Hindu tourists that killed 26 people in Indian Kashmir last month.
India said it struck infrastructure utilized by militants linked to the massacre, while Pakistan claimed it shot down several Indian fighter jets in retaliation.
United Nations spokesman Stephane Dujarric said in a press release late on Tuesday that Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called for max military restraint from each countries.
‘The world cannot afford a military confrontation between India and Pakistan,’ the statement read.
Worries of nuclear confrontation
India and Pakistan have built up their armies and nuclear arsenals over time. India was the primary to conduct a nuclear test in 1974, followed by one other in 1998.
Pakistan followed with its own nuclear tests just a number of weeks later.
The perimeters have since armed themselves with lots of of nuclear warheads, missile delivery systems, advanced fighter jets and modern weapons to tackle one another.
What might nuclear war between India and Pakistan appear to be?
In 2019, a team of scientists investigated how a nuclear war between the 2 countries could start – and what the implications might be for the remaining of the world.
The direct effects of a nuclear exchange in India and Pakistan themselves can be apocalyptic.
Depending on the precise variety of weapons used and their respective yields, anywhere between 50 million and 150 million people can be killed.
That just isn’t to say the cities obliterated, the tens of millions more injured with no hope of immediate help, and the destruction of major infrastructure.
But in addition they found that the implications wouldn’t be limited to India and Pakistan.
Even a ‘localised’ nuclear exchange could trigger a ‘mini ice age‘
The massive amounts of smoke sent billowing into the stratosphere from those burning cities would block out sunlight, sending global temperatures plummeting by as much as 10C.
Professor Brian Toon, a number one expert on climate and atmospheric science who co-authored the study, told Metro: ‘Even [nuclear war between] India and Pakistan can produce ice age temperatures with their arsenals.’
He explained the thought behind the study stemmed from a reporter calling amid heightened tensions within the early 2000s to ask what would occur if the 2 countries had a nuclear war.
‘I didn’t know the way many nuclear weapons India and Pakistan had,’ Toon, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences on the University of Colorado Boulder, told Metro.
‘So, I said I didn’t think anything would occur except in India and Pakistan – lots of Indians and Pakistanis would die, nevertheless it probably wouldn’t affect the remaining of the world.
‘I felt guilty about responding quickly and thought I had higher go and look into this.
Nuclear war ‘could kill 150 million in India and Pakistan – and billions around the globe‘
‘It took a number of years for me to get the time to take a look at it, but I discovered that at the moment, together they’d about 100 nuclear weapons.
‘One among them was a 50 kiloton weapon in India which they’d blown up in a test. So, they’d not less than Hiroshima-sized weapons.
‘I made a decision to work out what would occur in the event that they had a nuclear war between them and so they used 50 weapons in India and 50 weapons in Pakistan.
‘We most recently checked out this in 2019, and without delay I believe between them India and Pakistan have about 300 nuclear weapons.
‘I don’t know what their yields are, but they might be lots of of kilotons – North Korea has lots of of kiloton weapons, for instance.
‘At any rate, our greatest estimate is that in the event that they used about half of their arsenals they’d kill something like 50 to 150 million people in India and Pakistan, and between one and two billion people over the remaining of the planet.
‘The people over the remaining of the planet would die due to nuclear winter.’
What’s nuclear winter?
Nuclear winter theory first caught the world’s attention in 1983 when one in all its most famous scientists, Carl Sagan, published an article asking, ‘Would nuclear war be the top of the world?’.
In it, he wrote that ‘in a nuclear exchange greater than a billion people would immediately be killed, however the long-term consequences might be much worse’.
Setting them out in horrifying detail, Sagan and a few of his students, including Prof Toon, found that the thick black smoke billowing from burning cities would rise high up into the stratosphere blocking out the sun’s light.
The following cold, dry and dark would send temperatures plummeting below zero, crippling agriculture and condemning billions more people to starvation.
In Prof Toon’s study on a hypothetical nuclear war between India and Pakistan, he found that depending on the dimensions of the exchange anywhere between 20 and 40% of the sun’s rays can be blocked out.
Because of this, global surface temperatures would decline by as much as 10C, taking a decade to recuperate.
‘Ravenous doesn’t mean they’re hungry – it means they’re dead’
The team also estimated the proportion of individuals ravenous to death in each country because of this.
‘Ravenous doesn’t mean they’re hungry – it means they’re dead because there just isn’t enough food to feed the population,’ Prof Toon added.
The study estimates that 95 to 100% of the population can be left ravenous in Canada.
In Russia, the figure is 75 to 95%, while the proportion of individuals left ravenous in China was projected as 50% and 25% in the US.
The number varies across Europe.
‘At any rate, when you tally up everybody on the planet that dies from this it’s between one and three billion people, depending on which one in all these scenarios happens between India and Pakistan,’ Prof Toon said.
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