So in the last episode I asked you not to have nightmares, and then I promptly went and had some of my own. In my dream there was no more food being produced, and it was impossible to grow any more. Humans had to survive by fighting over an increasingly dwindling supply of canned and dried foods, until most starved.
(Possibly a symptom of Covid lockdown - lots of people are reporting vivid dreams lately. my own sons had a corker - cows invaded our garden and then turned into humans who tried to rob our house!)
But this episode is not perhaps what you think it will be about.
Because mostly when people talk about surviving a nuclear war, they mean surviving the blasts, the fires, the fallout, the radiation. Which are all quite bad enough, each of them on their own, let alone all together.
What not many people think about when we talk about surviving a nuclear war, is what we'll be doing on the other side. After the war is over. Andin particular, what we'd be eating.
Einstein said we'll use rocks on the other side. Actually, he didn't quite say that, Dave Mustaine did, paraphrasing Einstein in the lyrics of Megadeth's song 'Set the World Afire' from the rather good and fast album 'So Far, So Good... So What!'. But this was where I first came across the Einstein 'quotation' as a young teenage metal head back in the late '80s.
What Einstein actually said was: 'I do not know how the Third World War will be fought, but I can tell you what they will use in the Fourth - rocks!'. Of course, Einstein wasn't the only prominent physicist voicing misgivings about the Manhattan Project and the dawning of the atomic age (Oppenheimer's famous misquotation of the Bhagavad Gita 'Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds'; Feynman's crisis moment going by a newly-built bridge and realising the all human effort is futile when it could now be so easily destroyed; etc.)
It's generally accepted that post-apocalypse, with civilisation significantly destroyed and any remaining clusters of humanity pitched into a struggle over scarce and diminishing resources, the general technology level and integration of supply chains that we currently take for granted would be reduced to much lower levels that would look more like the stone age than the space age.
So what would people around the world do after a devastating catastrophe like a nuclear war? And more specifically, what would people eat? (Not rocks. Einstein didn't suggest what we might eat on the other side).
Making the Case for a Planetwide Food Prep
This is where David Denkenberger comes in. A mechanical engineer by day, in his spare time he runs the nonprofit Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). (https://allfed.info/) It turns out that the world does not have much food stored up as a precaution against the eventuality of a large or global disaster that might affect the global food supply production and supply chain. So ALLFED's goal is to prepare for and mitigate the obvious issue of how we can continue to feed people around the world and maintain peace, if some parts or significant parts of the planet run out of food?
Interestingly, while existential threats from asteroids, comets, volcanoes and nuclear war may seem quite remote and so the urgent need for an organisation like ALLFED has not been so apparent; the recent COVID-19 threat has highlighted the fragility of global suplly chains just in case we needed reminding.
Like a warning shot across our bow, the knock-on effect of even isolated but especially extensive (or global) lockdowns and restrictions on the free movement of goods (not just due to COVID-19 but also the broader trade wars (for example, US-China) and increased isolationism from some nations (India, USA, China etc. all recently opting to restrict or ban exports of key materials in order to safeguard internal supply)) has seen the general global population become even more vulnerable to food insecurity, food price inflation, and possible starvation.
(ALLFED has published a report about this: https://allfed.info/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ALLFED-COVID-19-Cascading-Food-System-Risk-Report.pdf)
ALLFED highlight three main impacts of any type of global catastrophe (e.g. nuclear war, asteroid or comet strike, super volcano eruption):
- significant reduction in food production capacity
- significant reduction in or loss of industrial production capacity
- total food production loss
ALLFED use current research to predict a very high (80%) probability of significant food production loss during this coming century (https://www.foodsecurity.ac.uk/publications/extreme-weather-resilience-global-food-system.pdf). This is a huge risk that needs addressing and will require a combined international if not global effort to mitigate against it.
A lesser (but still significant) risk is a significant (10%) probability of significant or total loss of industrial capacity during this coming century. While that might be bad enough in itself, the fact that we rely on industrialised agricultural production methods to plant and harvest, fertilise and pest control our crops puts the global food supply at risk of industrial factors that could lead to mass starvation. (https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms9611). As a species we currently have no Plan B in case of even just temporary failure of just part of our industrialised agricultural capacity.
Again, a lesser but chilling risk is a significant (10%) probability of total food production loss during this coming century. (https://drive.google.com/viewerng/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGVmYXVsdGRvbWFpbnxkYXZpZGRlbmtlbmJlcmdlcnxneDo1MTg1ZDQ4NGI1MDMxN2Q0)
This last one is our most dangerous existential risk.
ALLFED identify three likely catastrophes that could lead to a total loss of global food production capacity:
- Asteroid/comet impact
- Super volcano eruption
- Nuclear war
Asteroid / Comet Impact
Of the first type of catastrophe, asteroid or comet strike, we don't yet have enough resources to monitor hazardous extraterrestrial objects that might strike the Earth. NASA runs the Near Earth Object (NEO) programme, and this has detected an estimated 98% of all NEOs greater than 1 mile (1.5 km) in diameter. NASA say that they do not predict any major impacts in the next few hundred years. And there are other, small scale / amateur NEO-type monitoring posts around the world, monitoring the dark skies for threats.
The big problems with this should be clear.
98% is not 100%. There is still a margin for NASA to have missed a big planet-busting space rock.
98% of what? In the business of detecting unknown objects, how confident can NASA be that the number of objects detected so far is actually 98% of what's out there?
Size matters. It's fine for NASA to sound reassuring - they've found most of the NEOs that are a mile or more across. But the smaller NEOs can also be incredibly destructive. As a measure of scale, each year the Earth is hit by meteoroids that measure a mere 16 feet in diameter but which deliver equivalent to one kiloton TNT explosions. Somewhere in between 16 feet and one mile across, there are a bunch of NEOs that can do a lot of damage to our planet. Additionally, there a few hundred comets that pass near large gas giant planets like Saturn and Jupiter which could potentially change trajectory and either strike the Earth or disentegrate near it and cause a dust veil with the potential for a 'nuclear winter' style global cooling lasting for thousands of years.
In each of these cases, if NASA has not made a perfect prediction, the risk to human life is obvious. So the need for some type of food storage and continuity programme is very strong.
Super Volcano Eruption
There are about six (that we currently know of) supervolcanoes on Earth that collectively produce eruptions every 50,000 years or so, ejecting upwards of 1 trillion tons of material into the atmosphere. For reference, Mount St Helens ejected about 540 million tons of material, which is about one thousand times smaller than any of the supervolcanoes).
One supervolcano in particular that we should be aware of is the Yellowstone Caldera located under the continental USA. It erupts every 600,000 years on average, and yes, you guessed it - it last erupted approximately 600,000 years ago. If it erupted, or perhaps we should instead say when it erupts, it will almost certainly cause a volcanic winter. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter)
Smaller euptions in the recent past should give us some indication of what might happen. For example, in 1815 the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia caused crop failures and catastrophic climate changes in Europe and the Americas. There were food riots, looting, and mass starvation. The sobering point to pay attention to is that Mount Tambora, although a much larger eruption than Mount St Helens in terms of ejected material, is still miniscule in comparison to say, Yellowstone Caldera or the Toba Supervolcano.
(Image: Robert Krulwich/NPR)
In fact, the last time Toba erupted around 71,000-73,000 years ago, some scientists propose that the evidence points to an immediate global cooling leading to significant deforestation, and large scale depopulation among humans and animals in an ongoing event called a bottleneck. In this Toba Catastrophe theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toba_catastrophe_theory) the global population is believed to have dropped to around or below 40,000 people.
The cynics among you may at this point argue that we wouldn't need that much food to feed such a small population of humans (and concurrently, animals). But the starvation of nigh on 7 billion humans would first have to occur in order to reach this point, and that is the catastrophic disaster that ALLFED are pressuring us to prepare for and mitigate against. Although we might not be able to save everybody, we could, with some preparation and planning, save a very large proportion of the human population from a miserable extinction by starvation and cold.
Nuclear War
A nuclear exchange of even small proportions would cause significant global atmospheric effects, but the nightmare scenario remains a nuclear war between one of the larger superpowers such as the USA, Russia, or China. The firestorms, smoke and dust would create millions of tons of material in the atmosphere with the potential to block out the sun from the Earth's surface for as long as a decade.
The evidence for such a climate catastrophe is based on the observations made in the aftermath of events such as the bombing of Hamburg using conventional munitions, and the bombing of Hiroshima using an atomic weapon, combined with recent observations of natural, large-scale wildfires.
In each modelled nuclear war case involving upwards of 100 firestorms, the resulting debris would create first a 'Nuclear Twilight' where the debris would prevent 99% of the natural solar radiation from reaching the surface of the Earth, thus preventing almost all food production on Earth. While a smaller, similar effect could be created with 100+ conventional firestorms, the increasing sizes of modern nuclear weapons would create much greater firestorms over larger areas capable of lifting smoke and debris much higher into the stratosphere where it will remain for longer and cause more damage to climate stability and therefore food production.
The most recent research (e.g. Mills (2014) 'Multi-decadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict' in Earth's Future) suggests that even a limited exchange of around 100 'small' (15 Kt) nuclear weapons would be sufficient to trigger a global nuclear famine.
So there we have it, and hopefully some of this information might have persuaded you of the pressing need for governments and peoples around the world to engage in an international effort to prepare resilient safeguards against the day when the food supply runs short our completely out around the planet.
Sources and links for this episode:
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/7/25/20707644/nuclear-winter-famine-apocalypse-allfed
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-survive-after-nuclear-war-what-to-eat-2020-1?r=US&IR=T
https://www.foxnews.com/science/nuclear-winter-global-famine-doomsday-diet-save-humanity
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK219173/
https://eos.org/articles/nuclear-winter-may-bring-a-decade-of-destruction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_winter
https://www.cpr.org/2020/01/09/a-colorado-professor-is-warning-the-world-of-nuclear-winter-again/