Statistics

Number of weapons on urban targets, yields, direct fatalities from the bomb blasts, and resulting number of people in danger of death due to famine for the different scenarios we studied. The 5 Tg case scenario is from reference 16 for an India-Pakistan war taking place in 2008; the 16-47 Tg cases are from reference 18 for an India-Pakistan war taking place in 2025; and the 150 Tg case is from reference 52, which assumes attacks on France, Germany, Japan, U.K., U.S., Russia, and China. The last column is the number of people who would starve by the end of Year 2 when the rest of the population is provided with the minimum amount of food needed to survive, assumed to be a calorie intake of 1911 kcal/capita/day, and for no international trade, from Supplemental Information, Table S5, the Partial Livestock case, in which 50% of livestock grain feed used for human consumption, and 50% of livestock grain feed used to raise livestock, using the latest complete data available, for the year 2010. For 2010, the world population was 6,703,000,000. There are many other scenarios in which these amounts of soot could be produced by a nuclear war, and the scenarios we use are only meant to be illustrative examples. The last column is the case with the fewest number of deaths, and other cases are available in the Supplementary Information.