File:Percent of the world's population dead from a nuclear war.svg
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English: Percent of the world's population dead from a nuclear war: summarizing climate simulations by an international team of 10 scientists who specialize in mathematical and statistical modelling of climate, food production, and economics (Xia et al. 2022; see esp. their Table 1) with models fit thereto. The vertical axis is the percent of the world's population expected to die within a few years after a one-week-long nuclear war that injects between 1.5 and 150 Tg (teragrams = million metric tons) of smoke (soot) into the stratosphere, shown on the top axis.[1] The bottom axis is the total megatonnage (number of nuclear weapons used times average yield in kilotons of TNT divided by 1,000 to convert from kilotons to megatons) simulated to produce the quantity of soot plotted on the top axis. The nuclear explosions would produce firestorms that loft soot into the stratosphere, where it covers the earth and lingers for years. That soot would block sunlight and reduce growth of living things. Substantial portions of the earth's population would likely starve to death if they did not die from something else sooner. The points plotted mark simulations performed by Xia et al. "IND-PAK" marks a range of hypothetical nuclear wars between India (IND) and Pakistan (PAK). "USA-RUS" marks a simulated nuclear war between the US (USA) and Russia (RUS). "PRK" = a simulated nuclear war in which North Korea (the People's Republic of Korea, PRK) used their existing nuclear arsenal estimated at 30 weapons with an average yield of 17 kt[2] without nuclear retaliation by an adversary, as recommended in this article. In the simulated scenarios, between 90 and 95 percent of the deaths were in countries not officially involved in the nuclear exchange. |
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| Source | Own work |
| Author | DavidMCEddy |
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- ↑ Xia et al. (2022, Table 1) reported "Number of direct fatalities" and "Number of people without food at the end of year 2" out of a total population of 6.7 billion for their simulated year 2010. Two issues with this: First, Xia et al. (2022, Fig. 1) show that the climate impact does not start recovering until year 5 after the nuclear war and has not yet fully recovered 9 years after the war. Thus, few people still alive without food at the end of year 2 will not likely live to year 9. Second, the percentages plotted here are the sums of those two numbers divided by 6.7 billion. The Wikipedia article on World population said the world population in 2010 was 6,985,603,105 -- 7 billion (accessed 2023.08-12). The difference between 6.7 and 7 billion seems so slight that we ignore it, assuming that the populations excluded from the simulations were probably not substantively different from those included to matter much, especially with the uncertainty inherent in these simulations. The models are cumulative distribution functions for Weibull distributions estimated using nonlinear least squares in R (programming language). Xia et al. (2022), “Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection”, in Nature Food[1] (in en), volume 3, issue 8, DOI:, ISSN 2662-1355, Wikidata Q113732668, pages 586-596.
- ↑ Estimates of North Korea's nuclear weapons stockpile vary widely, as summarized in the Wikipedia article on North Korea and weapons of mass destruction, accessed 2023-08-07. The estimate of 30 weapons averaging 17 kt was selected as close to the middle of the estimate cited in that article, totaling 510 kt (0.51 megatons), roughly a third of smallest nuclear war simulated by Xia et al. (2022).
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| Date/Time | Thumbnail | Dimensions | User | Comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| current | 17:09, 2 December 2023 |  | 504 × 504 (36 KB) | DavidMCEddy | new model(pweib(KT)); old pwieib(log(KT)) |
| 16:54, 6 August 2023 |  | 504 × 504 (75 KB) | DavidMCEddy | Uploaded own work with UploadWizard |
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