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There's this preprint by Krauss and Dent getting a lot of discussion that suggests, in a remark at the very end that was of course destined to get a writeup in New Scientist, that our astronomical measurements of dark energy may destroy the universe for arcane quantum reasons. I think it's totally wrong.

The paper starts with an oddity that I learned about back in college, that a system that decays exponentially will (if left completely undisturbed) eventually pass to a realm in which it decays more slowly, via power law. This is generally practically unobservable, but they suggest it may have cosmological relevance if we live in an unstable false vacuum: it interacts in an interesting way with the cosmic inflation induced by dark energy, and this effect could be the only thing keeping us around. But watch out: since observing the system "resets the clock" (the famous quantum Zeno effect), we may have just returned to the exponential realm and thus sealed our doom by measuring the dark energy through supernova observations! Eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge and you shall die.

At the other end of the philosophical spectrum, I met with Don Page, a physicist and evangelical Christian at the University of Alberta in Canada, noted for his early collaboration with Stephen Hawking on the nature of black holes. To Page, the salient point is that God created the Universe ex nihilo – from absolutely nothing. The kind of cosmogenesis envisioned by Linde, in contrast, would require physicists to cook up their cosmos in a highly technical laboratory, using a far more powerful cousin of the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva. It would also require a seed particle called a ‘monopole’ (which is hypothesized to exist by some models of physics, but has yet to be found).

The idea goes that if we could impart enough energy to a monopole, it will start to inflate. Rather than growing in size within our Universe, the expanding monopole would bend spacetime within the accelerator to create a tiny wormhole tunnel leading to a separate region of space. From within our lab we would see only the mouth of the wormhole; it would appear to us as a mini black hole, so small as to be utterly harmless. But if we could travel into that wormhole, we would pass through a gateway into a rapidly expanding baby universe that we had created. (A video illustrating this process provides some further details.)

This is a very important question, I believe it is imperative to answer and clarify this concept to general public, since a lot of science fiction and pseudo-science has got attached to it, and some fraudulent individuals are trying to coax people into thinking that it can generate useful energy or work. Zero-point energy has become like an urban legend, which though true in its basic scientific roots, has no useful potential in our actual real-world life in terms of fulfilling our energy needs. It is similar to the wrong idea of using ordinary water at normal temperature and pressure to propel turbines or engines and drive our vehicles. The laws of thermodynamics do not permit these. As I have said many times before, when Laws of Thermodynamics do not permit something, then that thing cannot have a physical existence, as far as our knowledge of physics is concerned.

First of all, let’s look at what zero-point energy is. Zero-point energy is a non-vanishing energy which is there even when a particle or system has reached its ground state. Its magnitude is

We are doomed. Our best efforts to reproduce, to conserve, protect and survive will, in the end, come to nought. We could sort out climate change, dispose of our nuclear arsenals, ban research into killer AIs, and still the end would come, as surely as night follows day.

The problem is physics itself. Our home – our planet, our Solar System and indeed our entire Universe – has a finite lifespan. All that is will be destroyed, either in fire or, as observations suggest now seems more likely, in a lingering, depressing ‘heat death’. The stars will all go out, and the expanding cosmos will be no more than a colossal, black and freezing void in which nothing of interest ever happens again. The laws of nature insist upon it.

There is also the possibility that a Type II or Type III civilization might be able to reach the fabled Planck energy with their machines (10^19 billion electron volts). This is energy is a quadrillion times larger than our most powerful atom smasher. This energy, as fantastic as it may seem, is (by definition) within the range of a Type II or III civilization. The Planck energy only occurs at the center of black holes and the instant of the Big Bang. But with recent advances in quantum gravity and superstring theory, there is renewed interest among physicists about energies so vast that quantum effects rip apart the fabric of space and time. Although it is by no means certain that quantum physics allows for stable wormholes, this raises the remote possibility that a sufficiently advanced civilizations may be able to move via holes in space, like Alice's Looking Glass. And if these civilizations can successfully navigate through stable wormholes, then attaining a specific impulse of a million seconds is no longer a problem. They merely take a short-cut through the galaxy. This would greatly cut down the transition between a Type II and Type III civilization. Second, the ability to tear holes in space and time may come in handy one day. Astronomers, analyzing light from distant supernovas, have concluded recently that the universe may be accelerating, rather than slowing down. If this is true, there may be an anti-gravity force (perhaps Einstein's cosmological constant) which is counteracting the gravitational attraction of distant galaxies. But this also means that the universe might expand forever in a Big Chill, until temperatures approach near-absolute zero. Several papers have recently laid out what such a dismal universe may look like. It will be a pitiful sight: any civilization which survives will be desperately huddled next to the dying embers of fading neutron stars and black holes. All intelligent life must die when the universe dies.

We have reached a turning point in society. According to renowned , the next 100 years of science will determine whether we perish or thrive. Will we remain a Type 0 civilization, or will we advance and make our way into the stars? Experts assert that, as a civilization grows larger and becomes more advanced, its energy demands will increase rapidly due to its population growth and the energy requirements of its various machines. With this in mind, was developed as a way of measuring a civilization’s technological advancement based upon how much usable energy it has at its disposal. MEET THE KARDASHEV SCALE The scale was originally designed in 1964 by the Russian astrophysicist (who was looking for signs of extraterrestrial life within cosmic signals). It has 3 base classes, each with an energy disposal level: Type I (10¹⁶W), Type II (10²⁶W), and Type III (10³⁶W). Other astronomers have extended the scale to Type IV (10⁴⁶W) and Type V (the energy available to this kind of civilization would equal that of all energy available in not just our universe, but in all universes and in all time-lines). These additions consider both energy access as well as the amount of knowledge the civilizations have access to. First, it is important to note that the human race is not even on this scale yet. Since we still sustain our energy needs from dead plants and animals, here on Earth, we are a lowly Type 0 civilization (and we have a LONG way to go before being promoted to a type I civilization). Kaku tends to believe that, all things taken into consideration, time. But what does each of these categories actually stand for in literal terms? A is a given to species who have been able to harness all the energy that is available from a neighboring star, gathering and storing it to meet the energy demands of a growing population. This means that we would need to boost our current energy production over 100,000 times to reach this status. However, being able to harness all Earth’s energy would also mean that we could have control over all natural forces. Human beings could control volcanoes, the weather, and even earthquakes! (At least, that is the idea.) These kinds of feats are hard to believe, but compared to the advances that may still be to come, these are just basic and primitive levels of control (it’s absolutely nothing compared to the capabilities of societies with higher rankings). The next step up – a – can harness the power of their entire star (not merely transforming starlight into energy, but controlling the star). Several methods for this have been proposed. The most popular of which is the This device, if you want to call it that, would encompass every single inch of the star, gathering most (if not all) of its energy output and transferring it to a planet for later use. Alternatively, if fusion power (the mechanism that powers stars) had been mastered by the race, a reactor on a truly immense scale could be used to satisfy their needs. Nearby gas giants can be utilized for their hydrogen, slowly drained of life by an orbiting reactor. What would this much energy mean for a species? Well, nothing known to science could wipe out a Type II civilization. Take, for instance, if humans survived long enough to reach this status, and a moon sized object entered our solar system on a collision course with our little blue planet–we’d have the ability to vaporize it out of existence. Or if we had time, we could move our planet out of the way, completely dodging it. But let’s say we didn’t want to move Earth… are there any other options? Well yes, because we’d have the capability to move Jupiter, or another planet of our choice, into the way – pretty cool, right? So we’ve gone from having control over a planet, to a star, which has resulted in us to essentially make our civilization immune to extinction. But now, onto Type III, where a species then becomes galactic traversers with knowledge of everything having to do with energy, resulting in them becoming a master race. In terms of humans, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution – both biological and mechanical – may result in the inhabitants of this type III civilization being incredibly different from the human race as we know it. These may be cyborgs (or , beings both biological and robotic), with the descendants of regular humans being a sub-species among the now-highly advanced society. These wholly biological humans would likely be seen as being disabled, inferior, or unevolved by their cybernetic counterparts. At this stage, we would have developed colonies of robots that are capable of ‘self replication’; their population may increase into the millions as they spread out across the galaxy, colonizing star after star. And these being might build Dyson Spheres to encapsulate each one, creating a huge network that would carry energy back to the home planet. But stretching over the galaxy in such a manner would face several problems; namely, the species would be constrained by the laws of physics. Particularly, light-speed travel. That is, unless they develop , or use that immaculate energy cache to master wormhole teleportation (two things that remain theoretical for the time being), they can only get so far. Kardashev believed a was ‘too’ advanced and didn’t go beyond Type III on his scale. He thought that, surely, this would be the extent of any species’ ability. Many think so, but a few believe there is a further level that could be achieved. (I mean, surely there is a limit?) Type IV civilizations would almost be able to harness the energy content of the entire universe and with that, they could traverse the accelerating expansion of space (furthermore, advance races of these species ). To previous methods of generating energy, these kinds of feats are considered impossible. A Type IV civilization would need to tap into energy sources unknown to us using strange, or currently unknown, laws of physics. Type V. Yes, Type V might just be the next possible advancement to such a civilization. Here beings would be like gods, having the knowledge to manipulate the universe as they please. Now, as I said, humans are a very, very long way from ever reaching anything like this. But it’s not to say that it cannot be achieved as long as we take care of Earth and each other. To do so, the first step is to preserve our tiny home, extinguish war, and continue to support scientific advances and discoveries.

Stephen Hawking’s recent remarks regarding the possibility that our descendants might one day destroy the universe by disrupting the Higgs field with a larger-than-Earth supercollider has gotten people thinking: is there anything we could do now that would destroy the universe?

The answer to that question is, by all appearances, a pretty clear no. Here are two good reasons why:

But claiming that there should not be any more people does not imply that the population should be zero. As already stated: life-extension technologies could enable people to live indefinitely long lives – that is, to attain what I call “functional immortality”, whereby one lives until she either succumbs to injury, commits suicide, or perishes due to the heat death of the universe.8 This gestures the “dual policy” at the heart of no-extinction anti-natalism: first, we should stop procreating entirely (anti-natalism), and second, we should develop safe and effective life-extension technologies (pro-immortalism). This should appeal to Benatar himself given his anti-Epicurean view that death is (often) bad and, as such, one ought to (typically) avoid it. The reason is that, when evaluating an outcome, any harm at all “will be decisive”. Since “we (usually) have an interest in continuing to exist…death may be thought of as a harm, even though coming into existence is also a harm” (Benatar 2006, 213). This links to an important distinction between “lives worth starting” and “lives worth continuing”. Although life is much worse than most of us realise, many lives are not so bad as to warrant suicide. Thus, they are worth continuing even though they were not worth starting, much like a movie that is worth finishing but not having started. (If only you had known the movie was bad, you would have stayed home rather than venturing out to the theatre.)

But just as there are human lives worth continuing, there are arguments for why human existence is worth continuing, even if it would have been better for our evolutionary lineage never to have been. The strongest argument against human extinction, if sound, comes from total utilitarianism. The first to articulate this idea was Henry Sidgwick [1874] 1962, although more recent versions proceed by calculating how many people could come to populate Earth or our future light cone, with some claiming that up to 10^46 “human lifetimes” could exist per century within our galactic supercluster (Ćirković 2002). Since people are the substrate or “containers” of well-being (or value), the more people there are with net positive amounts of well-being, the better things will go from the “point of view of the universe”. But creating new lives is incompatible with anti-natalism, so this line of argumentation is a non-starter in the present context. There is, however, an alternative approach that focuses not on the total number of people but on the quality of their lives – rather than merely “lives not so bad as to warrant suicide”, there could exist future life conditions that are extremely good and hence very much worth continuing.

Until recent years the evaluation of nuclear warfare effects has been chiefly in terms of the direct impacts of the blast, heat and local radioactive fallout as they destroy humans, artifacts and social structure. Much of the public debate over the notions of a winnable, limited nuclear war and of survival thereafter has focused on the enormity of demands placed upon medical assistance for those people who live through the initial blast, the rationale or absurdity of plans to carry out massive evacuations as a means of deterring or mitigating the consequences of nuclear attacks, and the complexity of reconstruction.

Now, greater attention is turning toward the environmental consequences of nuclear detonations. This is basically because of increasing recognition that regardless of the immediate impact on lives, health, buildings, public facilities and the means of production, nuclear explosions might drastically alter if not, perhaps, fatally impair the life support systems of the globe. The vision of increasing through civil defense the number of survivors from direct impacts becomes morbidly whimsical if the survivors are in environments no longer capable of providing essential water and food.

And what sorts of quarters awaited those who staggered down the stairs? Only a handful were relatively posh; Chase Manhattan Bank, for one, dropped $49,000 on “compressed” wheat biscuits in banana and chocolate flavors to stock its five-story shelter. But most citizens would find only dank, low-ceilinged basements equipped with the barest necessities: bedding, drums of potable water, medical kits and government-issue wheat crackers. And while Uncle Sam thoughtfully provided toilet paper, the toilets themselves were harder to come by. A handy tip from a government booklet advised: “Make a commode by cutting the seat out of a chair and placing the pail under it.” It’s little wonder that the medical kits also included phenobarbital to chill everybody out.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the trouble with such crude accommodations became obvious almost immediately. Mere months into the program, reports emerged of leaking water drums and shelters that had never received any supplies. In a New York Times story in June of 1963, a Harlem woman asked, “Who’d want to go down there?” referring to the fetid tenement cellar meant to serve as her shelter space. The “rats are as big as dogs,” she said. “If fallout came, I’d just run.” In fact, the untenability of the shelters was public knowledge before they had even opened. A November 1961 story on the front page of The Washington Post bemoaned that most of the designated shelters would be little more than “cold, unpleasant cellar space, with bad ventilation and even worse sanitation.”

https://www.reddit.com/r/Foodforthought/comments/pidv2e/the_ability_to_stir_new_life_into_being_all/

It's an interesting idea, but it avoids discussing in any detail how this "protospermia" might work. Intuitively it seems like a nearly impossible task - certainly one we have nowhere near the required level of understanding to execute.

Island populations are very vulnerable to extinctions for a couple of reasons. They tend to have been isolated. One of the things we’re doing is removing the barriers that used to keep island species isolated. New Zealand had no terrestrial mammals. Species that had evolved in the absence of such predators were incredibly vulnerable. A staggering number of bird species have already been lost on New Zealand, and a lot of those that remain are in deep trouble. So, places that have been isolated for a long time. Those are very vulnerable. Species that have a very restricted range, that exist only in one spot in the world, those tend to be extremely vulnerable. They have nowhere to go and if their habitat is destroyed, say, then they’re gone.

Here is what we know: First, nuclear weapons are capable of causing human extinction, along with the extinction of many other species. Second, nine countries continue to rely upon these weapons for their so-called “national security.” Third, these nine countries are continuing to modernize their nuclear arsenals and failing to fulfill their legal and moral obligations to achieve a Nuclear Zero world – one in which human extinction by means of nuclear weapons is not a possibility because there are no nuclear weapons. Given these knowable facts, we might ask: What kind of “national security” is it to rely upon weapons capable of causing human extinction? Or, to put it another way: How can any nation be secure when nuclear weapons threaten all humanity? Certainly, it requires massive amounts of denial to remain apathetic to the extinction dangers posed by nuclear weapons. There appears to be a kind of mass insanity – a detachment from reality. Such detachment seems possible only in societies that have made themselves subservient to the nuclear “experts” and officials who have become the high priests of nuclear strategy. Whole societies have developed a gambler’s addiction to living at the edge of the precipice of nuclear annihilation. Remember Jonathan Schell’s insight: “We prepare for our extinction in order to assure our survival.” Of course, it is nonsensical to prepare for extinction to assure survival. Just as to achieve peace, we must prepare for peace, not war, we must be assuring our survival not by preparing for our extinction, but by ridding the world of the weapons that make this threat a possibility. We must, as Albert Einstein warned, change our “modes of thinking” or face “unparalleled catastrophe.”[iv] The Victims There have been many victims of the Nuclear Age, starting with those who died and those who survived the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This year marks the 70th anniversary of those bombings. The survivors of those bombings are growing older and more anxious to see their fervent wish, the abolition of nuclear weapons, realized. In addition to the victims in the atomic-bombed cities, there have been many other victims of nuclear weapons. These include the people at the nuclear test sites and those downwind from them. They have suffered cancers, leukemia and other illnesses. The effects of the radiation from the nuclear tests have also affected subsequent generations, causing stillbirths and many forms of birth defects. The Marshall Islanders were one group of nuclear victims. They lived on pristine Pacific islands, living simple lives close to the ocean waters that provided their bounty. But between 1946 and 1958 the US conducted 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands. The tests had the equivalent power of 1.6 Hiroshima bombs being exploded daily for 12 years. Some of the islands and atolls in the Marshall Islands became too radioactive to inhabit. The people of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), who became guinea pigs for the US to study, continue to suffer. They have never received fair or adequate compensation for their injuries resulting from the US nuclear testing program.

Genetic diversity generally underpins population resilience and persistence. Reductions in population size and absence of gene flow can lead to reductions in genetic diversity, reproductive fitness, and a limited ability to adapt to environmental change increasing the risk of extinction. Island populations are typically small and isolated, and as a result, inbreeding and reduced genetic diversity elevate their extinction risk. Two island populations of the platypus, Ornithorhynchus anatinus, exist; a naturally occurring population on King Island in Bass Strait and a recently introduced population on Kangaroo Island off the coast of South Australia. Here we assessed the genetic diversity within these two island populations and contrasted these patterns with genetic diversity estimates in areas from which the populations are likely to have been founded. On Kangaroo Island, we also modeled live capture data to determine estimates of population size. Levels of genetic diversity in King Island platypuses are perilously low, with eight of 13 microsatellite loci fixed, likely reflecting their small population size and prolonged isolation. Estimates of heterozygosity detected by microsatellites (HE= 0.032) are among the lowest level of genetic diversity recorded by this method in a naturally outbreeding vertebrate population. In contrast, estimates of genetic diversity on Kangaroo Island are somewhat higher. However, estimates of small population size and the limited founders combined with genetic isolation are likely to lead to further losses of genetic diversity through time for the Kangaroo Island platypus population. Implications for the future of these and similarly isolated or genetically depauperate populations are discussed. Genetic diversity has been identified as an important factor influencing a population's long-term potential for survival (Bouzat 2010). The contribution of genetic diversity has been recognized in numerous aspects of population persistence, and is critical for long-term fitness and adaptation [see Frankham (2005) for a review]. A loss of genetic diversity has been shown to affect individual fitness with decreased sperm quality (Hedrick and Fredrickson 2010), reduced litter size (Hedrick and Fredrickson 2010), increased juvenile mortality (Ralls et al. 1988), and increased susceptibility to disease and parasites (Coltman et al. 1999). Accordingly, populations lacking genetic diversity often exhibit an increased rate of extinction (Markert et al. 2010). Inbreeding, genetic drift, restricted gene flow, and small population size all contribute to a reduction in genetic diversity. Fragmented and threatened populations are typically exposed to these conditions, which is likely to increase their risk of extinction (Saccheri et al. 1998; Madsen et al. 1999; Frankham et al. 2010). Island populations are often isolated and small in size, and therefore experience increased levels of inbreeding and a greater impact of genetic drift. As a result, these populations generally have lower levels of genetic diversity and fitness than counterparts found in mainland populations. For example, the black-footed rock-wallabies of Barrow Island, Western Australia, have extremely low levels of genetic diversity (HE= 0.053), which has led to this population suffering inbreeding depression: females experience reduced fecundity and individuals exhibit increased levels of fluctuating asymmetry (Eldridge et al. 1999). These findings are not atypical with island populations frequently identified as having reduced genetic diversity, increased levels of inbreeding, and therefore a higher extinction risk (Frankham 1997).

Dr. Tom Chalko, MSC, PhD, head of Australia's physics, 2003 (March 3, Scientific Engineering Research, "Can a Neutron Bomb accelerate Global Volcanic Activity?", http://sci-e-research.com/neutron_bomb.html)

Consequences of using modern nuclear weapons can be far more serious than previously imagined. These consequences relate to the fact that most of the heat generated in the planetary interior is a result of nuclear decay. Over the last few decades, all superpowers have been developing so-called "". These bombs are designed to emit intensive neutron radiation while creating relatively little local mechanical damage. Military are very keen to use neutron bombs in combat, because lethal neutron radiation can peneterate even the largest and deepest bunkers. However, the military seem to ignore the fact that a neutron radiation is capable to reach significant depths in the planetary interior. In the process of passing through the planet and losing its intensity, a neutron beam stimulates nuclei of radioactive isotopes naturally present inside the planet to disintegrate. This disintegration in turn, generates more neutron and other radiation. The entire process causes increased nuclear heat generation in the planetary interior, far greater than the initial energy of the bomb. It typically takes many days or even weeks for this extra heat to conduct/convect to the surface of the planet and cause increased seismic/volcanic activity. Due to this variable delay, nuclear tests are not currently associated with seismic/volcanic activity, simply because it is believed that there is no theoretical basis for such an association. Perhaps you heard that after every major series of nuclear test there is always a period of increased seismic activity in some part of the world. This observable fact CANNOT be explained by direct energy of the explosion. The mechanism of neutron radiation accelerating decay of radioactive isotopes in the planetary interior, however, is a VERY PLAUSIBLE and realistic explanation. The process of accelerating volcanic activity is nuclear in essence. Accelerated decay of unstable radioactive isotopes already present in the planetary interior provides the necessary energy. The TRUE danger of modern nuclear weaponry is that their neutron radiation is capable to induce global overheating of the planetary interior, global volcanic activity and, in extreme circumstances, may even cause the entire planet to explode.

(Max, professor doing AI research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://time.com/6290977/nuclear-war-impact-essay/)

We know that an all-out U.S.-Russia nuclear war would be bad. But how bad, exactly? How do your chances of surviving the explosions, radiation, and nuclear winter depend on where you live? The past year’s unprecedented nuclear saber-rattling and last weekend’s chaos in Russia has made this question timely. To help answer it, I’ve worked with an amazing interdisciplinary group of scientists (see end credits) to produce the most scientifically realistic simulation of a nuclear war using only unclassified data, and visualize it as a video. It combines detailed modeling of nuclear targeting, missile trajectories, blasts and the electromagnetic pulse, and of how black carbon smoke is produced, lofted and spread across the globe, altering the climate and causing mass starvation. As the video illustrates, it doesn’t matter much who starts the war: when one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects them and fires back before impact. Ballistic missiles from U.S. submarines west of Norway start striking Russia after about 10 minutes, and Russian ones from north of Canada start hitting the U.S. a few minutes later. The very first strikes fry electronics and power grids by creating an electro-magnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter. The next strikes target command-and-control centers and nuclear launch facilities. Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to fly from launch to target. Major cities are targeted both because they contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy’s post-war recovery. Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud. These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and cause fires and blindness further away. The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages buildings, crushing nearby ones. The U.K. and France have nuclear capabilities and are obliged by NATO’s Article 5 to defend the U.S. so, Russia hits them too. Firestorms engulf many cities, where storm-level winds fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting glass and some metals and turning asphalt into flammable hot liquid. Unfortunately, peer-reviewed research suggests that explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and the radioactivity aren’t the worst part: a nuclear winter is caused by the black carbon smoke from the nuclear firestorms. The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today’s hydrogen bombs are much more powerful. A large city like Moscow, with almost 50 times more people than Hiroshima, can create much more smoke, and a firestorm that sends plumes of black smoke up into the stratosphere, far above any rain clouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up to a decade. High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere. This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes. It’s important to note that huge uncertainties remain, so the actual humanitarian impact could be either better or worse – a reason to proceed with caution. A recently launched $4M open research program will hopefully help clarify public understanding and inform the global policy conversation, but much more work is needed, since most of the research on this topic is classified and focused on military rather than humanitarian impacts. We obviously don’t know how many people will survive a nuclear war. But if it’s even remotely as bad as this study predicts, it has no winners, merely losers. It’s easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is something you can do to help: please help share this video! The fact that nuclear war is likely to start via gradual escalation, perhaps combined by accident or miscalculation, means that the more people know about nuclear war, the more likely we are to avoid having one.

IN the early 1980s, American and Russian scientists working together outlined a stark vision of the Cold War future. In a battle between the two superpowers, smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would be so dense that it would block out the sun, turning the earth cold, dark and dry, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year. This dystopia became known as nuclear winter. We haven’t heard much about this apocalyptic future in recent years. But the research into the destructive potential of a war involving nuclear weapons has continued. Even with the reduced nuclear arsenals that the United States and Russia agreed to in 2010, we have the ability not only to set off instantaneous destruction, but also to push global temperatures below freezing, even in summer. Crops would die and starvation could kill most of humanity. But it is not just the superpowers that threaten the planet. A nuclear war between any two countries using 100 Hiroshima-size atom bombs, less than half of the combined arsenals of India and Pakistan, could produce climate change unseen in recorded human history. This is why we should celebrate the recent agreement with Iran, which may stop it from producing a nuclear weapon. And it is also why we should look with deep alarm at North Korea’s recent launching of a rocket to put a satellite in orbit, in what is believed to be an effort to develop an intercontinental ballistic missile. Nine countries have nuclear arsenals, with an estimated total of 15,695 weapons, according to the Ploughshares Fund, a global securities group. About 94 percent are held by the United States and Russia. Except for North Korea, the other nuclear nations have each kept their arsenals at roughly 100 to 300 weapons. All have the destructive power to alter the global environment. These weapons have not been a deterrent to war or aggression. But even if you think they can be, how many would you have to use? The answer is, probably one. There are simply too many nuclear weapons in the world, by as much as a factor of 1,000, for anyone, anywhere, to be safe from the potential effects of even a small war. The chance that nuclear weapons would be used by mistake, in a panic after an international incident, by a computer hacker or by a rogue leader of a nuclear nation can be eliminated only by the removal of the weapons themselves. We were among the scientists involved in the initial research that discovered the potential for nuclear winter. More modern and advanced climate modeling has confirmed the initial findings and shown that the effects would last for more than a decade. The reason is that smoke from nuclear conflagrations would rise as high as 25 miles into the atmosphere, where it would be protected from rain and take at least 10 years to dissipate. In more recent research, we looked at the potential impact of a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, with each country detonating 50 Hiroshima-size bombs. These explosions would produce so much smoke that temperatures would plunge, shortening growing seasons and threatening the global food supply. Our calculations, based on how crops grow in different weather, showed that wheat, rice, corn and soybean production could be reduced by 10 percent to 40 percent overall for five years. The ozone layer would also be depleted, allowing more ultraviolet radiation to reach the earth’s surface. We hope this continuing research on the effects of even a so-called small nuclear war will highlight the threat to the planet in the same way that visions of a nuclear winter did more than three decades ago for Russian and American leaders, when the total number of nuclear weapons peaked at about 70,000. As Ronald Reagan put it in 1985, “A great many reputable scientists are telling us that such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the earth as we know it.” Mikhail S. Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, echoed Reagan’s comment in an interview in 2000: “Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us” to reduce the size of nuclear arsenals in both countries. The Obama administration’s goal is to work for the elimination of nuclear weapons, with no specific timetable. But President Obama does not need a treaty with the Russians to take this action. He can just follow the lead of President George H. W. Bush, who unilaterally reduced America’s nuclear arsenal as the Soviet Union was disintegrating. With less than a year left in office, President Obama could add to his legacy by sending a similar signal to the Russians today. We could reduce our arsenal from roughly 7,000 weapons to 1,000, eliminating land-based missiles and outlining plans to further reduce air- and submarine-based missiles. Mr. Obama said himself in 2009 that “the existence of thousands of nuclear weapons is the most dangerous legacy of the Cold War” and that the United States, as the only nation to have used these weapons, had “a moral responsibility” to seek a world without them. “We have to insist,” he said, “‘Yes, we can.’”

If we look at the four categories in which SIOP targets were grouped by the Cold War’s end (US GAO 1991: 2), we can easily see that moving from the first to any of the next three— and especially the fourth— amounted to countervalue targeting: (1) Nuclear Forces (ballistic missiles and their launch facilities and con- trol centers; nuclear weapons storage sites; airfields supporting nuclear- capable aircraft; ballistic missile submarine bases); (2) Leadership (command posts; key communication facilities); (3) Other Military Forces (barracks, supply depots, marshaling points; airfields not supporting nuclear forces; ammunition storage facilities; tank and vehicle storage yards); and (4) War- Supporting Industrial and Economic Factories (industrial: ammunition factories, tanks and armored per- sonnel carrier factories, petroleum refineries, railway yards and repair facilities; eco- nomic: coal, basic steel, basic aluminum, and electric power).

We could argue that “Nuclear Forces” are counterforce targets, but even that distinction takes no account of their vast number, or locations proximate to urban areas. Indeed, a counterforce strategy aimed “strictly” at nuclear- force targets would require many more times the weapons needed to destroy Soviet cities (Lortie 2001: 23). Thus, the United States could not destroy military targets without imposing significant “value” damage through errant blasts, fallout, and the destruction of collocated targets (McKinzie et al. 2001). Although warfighters touted the idea of counterforce exchanges that would “spare” urban targets, the indirect and collateral effects on cities— ensuing, for instance, from the spread of fallout from “surgical strikes” on nuclear missiles— would include the deaths of millions of Soviet and US citizens. The destruction of roads, governmental facilities, communi- cation links, vital industries, and so forth would destroy critical economic, societal, and governmental nodes, with (cumulative) contagion effects that would, in turn, destroy society as it previously existed.

With the new NATO plan for installation of nuclear tactical weapons in Europe, nuclear missiles may reach Moscow in only 6 minutes, and the opposite case is also possible in the same time. The question is: how can we be sure that this will not be triggered by a human error or computer malfunction. An adequate reaction dictated by the dilemma “to be or not to be” and the concept of preventive nuclear strike may lead to a nuclear consequence that is difficult to stop. At the present level of distributed controlled systems and military global navigations, this will lead to unstoppable global nuclear war. However, there is something not predicted, of which the military strategists, politicians and powerful forces are not aware. Probably, it will not be a nuclear winter that they hope to survive in their underground facilities. The most probable consequence will be a partial loss of the Earth’s atmosphere as a result of one or many powerful simultaneous tornadoes caused by the nuclear explosions.

In a tornado, a powerful antigravitational effect takes place. The official science does not have an adequate explanation for this feature due to an incorrect concept about space. The antigravitational effect is not a result of the circling air. It is a specific physical effect in the aether space that is dismissed in physics as it is currently taught. Therefore, the effective height of this effect is not limited to the height of the atmosphere. Then in the case of many simultaneous powerful tornadoes, an effect of suction of the earth atmosphere into space might take place. Such events are observed on the Sun and the present physical science does not have an explanation for them. The antigravitational effect is accompanied by specific electric and magnetic fields with a twisted shape. This is observed in tornado events on the Sun. Some effects in the upper Earth atmosphere known as sprites have a similar combination of electrical and magnetic fields but in a weaker form. They are also a mystery for contemporary physical science.

In the nuclear conversation, what are we not talking about that we should be?

We are not talking enough about the climatic effects of nuclear war.