LONDON, Aug 18 (NNN-AGENCIES) — Argentina and Australia are the best places on earth in case of a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, according to a scientific report carried by London’s Daily Mail.
“Want to survive a nuclear war? Go to Argentina!,” read a headline earlier this week. It is the “best place to get through ten years of fallout, scientists say.”
After pointing out that Argentina and Australia were “the best hope” of surviving a nuclear outbreak, the publication stressed that the “likelihood of starving to death would be 90 per cent if you stay in Britain.”
The newspaper based its story on a study published in Nature Food which took into account computer simulations, according to which over 5 million people would starve to death worldwide if 100 nuclear bombs were to go off, “with soot thrown up by firestorms blocking out the sun and causing crop failure.”
Professor Alan Robock, from Rutgers University, New Jersey, told the Daily Mail that Australia and Argentina have the advantage of having resistant crops, such as wheat, in large quantities.
Nine nations, including the UK, currently control more than 13,000 nuclear weapons.
Even a clash between new nuclear states would “decimate food production and result in widespread starvation” the report warns.
The study shows the UK, US, Germany, France and China would be devastated and almost everyone dead by the second year
But places such as Argentina and Australia would have no deaths although livestock in other countries would perish and no trade would exist.
Professor Alan Robock, co-author added: “There still would be enough domestic production for them, but you can imagine there will be flotillas of hungry refugees from Asia on their way there.
“So it wouldn’t be necessarily peaches and cream just for Australia. The threat of using nuclear weapons to deter an attack is the threat of a suicide bomber.
“Because if you use them, everybody in your country will starve to death.”
The US team calculated how soot would travel from five smaller India-Pakistan wars and a large US-Russia one based on the size of each country’s arsenal.
A climate forecasting tool estimated the impact on maize, rice, spring wheat and soybean country-by-country.
The researchers also examined projected changes to livestock pasture and marine fisheries.
A localised war between India and Pakistan, global average caloric production decreased seven percent within five years.
In the worst case scenario – involving the US and Russia – this would rise to 90% three to four years after the fighting ended.
Crop declines would be the most severe in the mid-high latitude nations, including major exporters such as Russia and the US.
It could trigger restrictions and cause severe disruptions in import-dependent countries in Africa and the Middle East.
These would induce a catastrophic disruption of global food markets. Even a seven percent decline would exceed the largest since records began in 1961.
Under the largest war scenario, more than 75% of the planet would be starving within two years.
