YTread Logo
YTread Logo

I've studied nuclear war for 35 years -- you should be worried. | Brian Toon | TEDxMileHigh

May 29, 2021
Translator: Nastya Lichman Reviewer: Queenie Lee 66 million

years

ago, a mountain-sized asteroid traveling 10 times faster than an assault rifle bullet crashed into the shallow seas covering what is now the Peninsula of Yucatan in Mexico. The immense energy of that impact flung rocks as far north as Canada and vaporized the asteroid, part of Mexico, and part of the shallow sea. Well, this fireball of vaporized rock and water rose high above the Earth's atmosphere and spread across the planet. As it cooled, droplets of molten rock the size of a grain of sand solidified into an immense swarm of shooting stars.
i ve studied nuclear war for 35 years    you should be worried brian toon tedxmilehigh
The shooting stars re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and heated the atmosphere above a thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Standing on the ground, the dinosaurs watched as the blue sky turned into a layer of red-hot lava. The scientific artist David Hardy imagines the fate of the dinosaurs in this painting. They were roasted to death under the blazing skies. The energy in the sky is like that of the light bar of an electric oven. If you're dying to experience what dinosaurs did when they died, turn on the oven and get in. (Laughter) The bright skies caused everything to go up in flames.
i ve studied nuclear war for 35 years    you should be worried brian toon tedxmilehigh

More Interesting Facts About,

i ve studied nuclear war for 35 years you should be worried brian toon tedxmilehigh...

Large clouds of smoke rose into the upper atmosphere and blocked the sun from reaching the ground. It became cold and dark. Photosynthesis stopped and plants and animals, in the ocean or on land, starved or froze to death. The dinosaurs did nothing wrong that caused them to die. It was pure luck that an asteroid hit Earth and killed 70% of the species we know on the planet. Unfortunately, during our lifetimes, we may experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. But I'm not talking about another asteroid collision, but rather a

nuclear

war. A

nuclear

war would have many of the same phenomena that the dinosaurs experienced.
i ve studied nuclear war for 35 years    you should be worried brian toon tedxmilehigh
But this time it would be absolutely our fault. Fortunately, there are things we can do to prevent this from happening. If you live in a city that has a military base, there is a missile aimed at you right now. If you live in a city that has a major industry, a major university, a large airport, an oil refinery, or oil storage facility, there is a hydrogen bomb aimed at you right now. We live in a dangerous era. There are 15,000 nuclear weapons on the planet. And the nine nuclear weapons states are in conflict with each other. United States and North Korea, NATO and Russia, India and Pakistan.
i ve studied nuclear war for 35 years    you should be worried brian toon tedxmilehigh
We are just one misunderstanding, one mistake or one fanatical politician away from a nuclear conflict. In World War II, fleets of hundreds or even a thousand aircraft were used to bomb a single city. But with the invention of the atomic bomb, only one plane and one bomb were needed. The Enola Gay carried an atomic bomb with the power of 15,000 tons of TNT. And when he dropped that bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, a hundred thousand people died. Over time, even more powerful bombs were built. Hydrogen bombs. This plane from the 1960s carried five hydrogen bombs, the red and white things there, and had the power of 500 Hiroshima bombs.
And, of course, the United States and Russia don't just use airplanes. They have intercontinental ballistic missiles with hydrogen bombs and nuclear submarines with missiles. A single submarine with Trident missiles can carry one hundred hydrogen bombs with the explosive power of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Knowing the power of bombs and their targets, we can understand the destructiveness and loss of life that could occur if they were ever used. Imagine, for example, that the United States attacks Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, with the smallest bomb carried on a Trident missile submarine. 500,000 people would die, approximately the population of Sacramento or Baltimore.
Nuclear weapons kill people in four different ways. In this orange circle, there is a shockwave so powerful that it knocks down concrete buildings and kills everyone within that area. In the red circle, there is radiation that is released from the atomic bomb when it fissions. The radiation would kill between 50 and 90% of North Koreans in the coming weeks. In this green circle the shock wave continues with enough force to demolish residential buildings. And in this yellow circle, six miles in diameter, there is an explosion of light so bright that if your skin were exposed, you would suffer third-degree burns, which can be fatal, and flammable things like leaves, newspapers, and your clothes would burn. burst into flames.
And of course, if we attack North Korea, they will likely attack us back. If they use a gun the same size we use, and they've already tested one like this, they could kill 150,000 people in this 6-mile diameter circle in Denver. And these terrifying scenarios I talk about are only if each side uses a nuclear weapon. But Russia and the United States each have 4,000 strategic nuclear weapons. That is enough to attack every city with more than 100,000 inhabitants, in every country, with 10 atomic bombs. In a war like that, 400 million people would probably die on the planet, in China, in Russia, in Europe and in the United States.
But wait, that's not all. (Laughter) I just talked about the damage near ground zero. That's all the military considers in its war plans. But there will be side effects. Remember the dinosaurs: it was the burning forests that killed three-quarters of the species we know on the planet. And the same would happen after a nuclear war; Cities would catch fire and burn. It is this damage, damage that the military does not even consider, damage that is simply considered an accident, that could destroy human civilization. Even a war between India and Pakistan, two of the smallest nuclear powers, with only a few hundred weapons about the size of the Hiroshima bomb.
We could die as unintended consequences that the Indian and Pakistani generals did not even think about. My colleagues Luke Oman and Alan Robock calculated the spread of smoke after a war between India and Pakistan. It only takes about two weeks for the smoke to cover the entire Earth. And it would rise to altitudes between 20 and 50 miles above the surface. At those altitudes it never rains. The smoke would remain there for

years

. This farmer, perhaps in Europe or the United States, but many thousands of miles from Pakistan and India, looks at the smoky sky above him and at the crops that have died in his field from lack of light and cold temperatures.
It is estimated that in a war between India and Pakistan, we would lose between 10 and 40% of corn, wheat and rice production for years due to bad weather. The entire world only has enough food to feed the population for 60 days, unless agriculture produces more food. Ira Helfand, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning member of the International Association of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, has estimated that between one billion and two billion people would starve to death after a war between India and Pakistan. And after a full-scale nuclear war, temperatures would drop below ice age conditions. We would be in a nuclear winter.
No crops would grow. It is estimated that 90% of the planet's population would die of hunger and civilization would be destroyed. And no one would be safe. Neither those from countries without nuclear weapons, nor those from countries that did not participate in the war, nor those on the other side of the planet where the explosions occurred. No one would be safe. I bet you're not getting a warm fuzzy feeling from this talk. (Laughter) But we don't have to continue moving forward as we have been doing until now, walking towards disaster. We can do things to stop nuclear war and prevent global hunger and the end of human civilization.
In the 1980s, politicians recognized the dangers of nuclear conflict and did things about it. Today, politicians do not seem to understand the dangers of these wars. And the younger generations hardly think about the nuclear conflict. This was instilled in us baby boomers. In elementary school, we were taught "duck and cover" exercises and how to crawl under our desk in a desperate attempt to avoid a nuclear explosion. (Laughter) In high school, our mothers told us, "You can't drink milk anymore, because the 500 atmospheric nuclear weapons test had poisoned the earth with radiation. And popular culture was dominated by radioactive mutants, like Godzilla, who is a Japanese nightmare of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
In the 1980s, I worked with Richard Turco, Carl Sagan, Russian scientists and others to inform Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan about the dangers of nuclear war. We told him that a nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter that could end civilization as we know it. And they listened. (Applause) Ronald Reagan said: "Many reputable scientists are telling us that such a war could end without victory for anyone because we would eliminate the earth as we know it. And Mikhail Gorbachev said: "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 this was a great encouragement to us, to the people of honor. and morality, to act in that situation.
In September 2017, the United Nations passed a resolution banning nuclear weapons such as landmines, chemical and biological weapons have been banned. Unfortunately, nuclear weapons states want ignore that ban and just move on as if nothing had happened. They have been. It's up to us to wake them up before they sleepwalk into a nuclear disaster. What can they do about it? Talk to your political representatives. Tell them you'd like the Department of Defense tell us what would happen. This happens after a nuclear war. They did this in the 1980s. How many people would die in Korea if we nuked them?
How many people would die in Russia, China, South Korea and Japan, the countries surrounding North Korea? What will happen if, like every other war we've fought, it doesn't go as planned and expands beyond North Korea? And they

should

ask their politicians to stop "jumping on a warning." In launch after a warning, the American president can launch nuclear-armed missiles in a matter of minutes without consulting anyone, using the nuclear soccer ball, which a military officer carries everywhere to the president. In 1968, the United States and 190 other countries signed the treaty to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In that treaty, we promised to reduce our nuclear arsenals to zero as soon as we could.
We need to keep that promise. All our lives may depend on it. (Applause) Thank you.

If you have any copyright issue, please Contact