The 'nuclear winter' scenario

At least 95% of Canada's population would starve

- ALEX BALLINGALL

Above left, a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile is test-fired in 2022 as part of Russia's nuclear drills in Plesetsk, northwestern Russia.

In the unlikely, but unfortunately not impossible event of nuclear war, Canada would be one of the worst places on Earth to live.

Or rather, to die.

Alan Robock, a pioneering researcher in the science of nuclear devastation, provides the terrifying picture.

“Countries like Canada — you think you’re safer because you’re a member of NATO and (American) nuclear weapons will protect you. But you’re actually not,” he says over the phone from New Jersey, where he is a professor at Rutgers University.

“If they’re ever used, you’re all going to starve to death.”

Robock is talking about the “nuclear winter” scenario, a hypothesis he helped create in the 1980s through computer modelling that has only grown more sophisticated in the decades since. The basic premise is that, in a nuclear war, belligerent states would lob bombs at each other’s cities and strategic military installations. This would fuel massive infernos that not only incinerate people on the ground, but belch out gargantuan plumes of smoke that cascade into the air and envelop the globe in a cloak of soot that blocks out the sun.

As Robock explains, the scale of the ensuing apocalypse varies along a continuum. The more nukes get blasted, the more soot clogs the atmosphere, the more widespread the suffering and the death. At the grimmer end of the spectrum is what Robock calls “instant climate change” — a catastrophe that models included in a 2022 paper that Robock co-authored predict could “lead to the collapse of world agriculture and starvation of billions of people even in regions that were not involved directly in the war.”