Volodymyr Tarasov via Creative Commons
Ukrainian soldiers in the abandoned city of Pripyat near Chernobyl shortly after Russians took control of the nuclear reactor.
On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin began a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The nation’s forty-four million citizens were confronted with tanks, airstrikes, and the fear of Russian forces closing in on their communities. As world leaders condemned Putin, he placed Russia’s nuclear deterrence forces on high alert, causing major trepidation throughout the world.
Russia is home to thirty-eight nuclear reactors for power generation and approximately 1,600 to 2,000 currently deployed tactical nuclear weapons, which are made for battlefield use and have a shorter range and a smaller impact. If the Kremlin decides to use its nuclear weapons, the devastation would be horrific.
“Even on a small scale, regional nuclear war will disrupt the global climate cycle.”
In 1945, the United States detonated two small nuclear bombs over the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The explosion in Nagasaki alone generated energy equivalent to 16,000 tonnes of TNT. In the five years following the blast, cases of leukemia increased dramatically, and many survivors developed thyroid and other types of cancer. In addition, the bombing of Hiroshima killed an estimated 80,000 people on impact, and several thousands died later due to radiation exposure.
The contamination of the air in Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused radiation to be carried to regions past the two urban areas. A nuclear war over Ukraine could lead to consequences that are substantially more dire.
“Most nuclear bombs [today] are tens or even hundreds of times as powerful as the bombs dropped in World War II in Japan,” Adrian David Cheok, an Australian scientist who built the Nikola Tesla Death Ray, which may soon be deployed as a defensive weapon in Ukraine, tells The Progressive. “Therefore, in the event of a nuclear war [now], all major cities would be totally destroyed.”
“The heat generated would vaporize almost everything in a city, including, of course, the people,” Cheok continues. “The next stage would be radiation, which would spread beyond the cities and destroy most life forms.”
According to Cheok, a nuclear war would also cause massive climate effects. “We effectively would have black clouds covering the Earth,” he says. “The temperature of our planet would drop, and almost anything else surviving would freeze to death. . . . I’m not sure what creatures would survive, but almost certainly not humans.”
In 2019, Princeton University conducted a simulation-based study on the outcome of a nuclear war between Russia and the United States. The simulation estimated more than ninety million deaths within the first few hours. It further concluded that “slow violence fatalities from the ongoing effects of nuclear fallout would result in many more deaths.”
Yuri Vanetik, who recently wrote an op-ed about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the Wall Street Journal, tells The Progressive that, if the situation in Europe ends up escalating, “Putin could deploy low-yield tactical nuclear weapons.”
“[The worst case scenario] would likely render our eco-system virtually unlivable,” Vanetik says. “Even on a small scale, regional nuclear war will disrupt the global climate cycle. The chemistry of our oceans would be materially altered in such a way that coral reefs and marine life ecosystems would be damaged. Millions of tons of soot would be catapulted into the atmosphere, and it’s the soot that is a major factor in the severity of a nuclear winter.”
Even in the case of a regional nuclear conflict, global cooling would affect the oceans’ ability to absorb carbon, Vanetik explains. “This would cause the pH to go up and minerals in sea water would be diminished.” He adds, “Trade winds would reverse direction and droughts and heavy rains could plague the planet.” And a post-nuclear phenomenon referred to as nuclear winter could devastate the entire world’s climate cycle. Crops, atmosphere, and oceans would be disrupted for years.
When the Chernobyl disaster took place in 1986, the resulting steam explosion and flames released at least 5 percent of the plant’s radioactive reactor core into the environment. The delayed consequences of that tragedy are still ongoing. In fact, the Chernobyl exclusion zone is among the most radioactive areas on Earth. Thousands of acres surrounding the reactor site still contain “ambient radiation dose rates exceeding typical background levels by thousands of times.”
Even a “limited” nuclear war or the destruction of a nuclear reactor and the release of its radiation could bring destruction on a level greater than the world has ever seen.