It’s a similar story when it comes to surface temperature. The most harmful isotopes would decay before reaching our shores, and even fallout drifting over from a potential attack on Australia would likely be blown eastward, where it would be rained out. Experts like Toon and Brian Martin, a social scientist at the University of Wollongong who has a PhD in theoretical physics, say that we’d have little to fear from radiation drifting our way. The good news is, we would likely be spared the worst consequences of all this. Where does New Zealand fit into all this? Based on what several experts have told me, there’s good news and bad news. It’s estimated 90% of the population of the planet would starve to death.” “After a full scale nuclear war, temperatures would plunge below Ice Age conditions,” Toon explained to a TED audience earlier this year. That means shorter growing seasons and the destruction of crops by killing frosts, which Brian Toon, one of the authors of the report, has said would reduce yields of corn, wheat and rice by 10-40% for years afterwards. More alarming is the fact that the colossal amount of black carbon sitting up in the stratosphere would cause a global nuclear winter, the coldest average surface temperatures in 1,000 years. This means the average burn time in the sun would halve for humans, while the resulting surge of UV radiation would wreak havoc on the world’s vegetation and sealife, including, in the latter case, disrupting the entire food chain of the ocean and damaging marine life in its early, developmental stages. Even a “limited” war like this would send five megatonnes of smoke into the stratosphere, heating it by up to 100☌ and wiping out most of the earth’s ozone layer for as long as a decade. In a 2014 paper for Earth’s Future, a team of scientists attempted to model the effects of a limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan that would see each country use 50 warheads, each with a yield of 15 kilotons, about the same as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Still, some have tried to map out a potential aftermath. With so many variables at play – the countries involved, where they’re located, the number of weapons deployed, what time of the year it is – there’s no definitive post-war scenario. Nailing down the exact consequences of a nuclear war isn’t easy, and not just because it’s never happened. But “best” is a relative term, and this belies just how hellish life could become on one of the world’s last inhabitable countries. According to various experts, New Zealand would indeed likely be the best place to be in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Of course, the question on everybody’s lips is: should global nuclear war break out, what will happen to New Zealand? We after all currently enjoy the status of being the “bolt hole” for the world’s terrified billionaires, and our geographic distance and general disentanglement from the rest of the world’s geopolitical jostling suggests that should the worst happen, we at the very least won’t be in the firing line. But even if North Korea successfully de-nuclearises and the US stops its sabre-rattling, the world won’t be safe from the threat of future catastrophe: there remain around 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world today, nearly 14,000 of which are held by Russia and the United States, two countries currently experiencing a renaissance of mutual loathing. Next month, Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un will, all going well, attempt to alleviate these fears somewhat, in what is arguably the best opportunity in decades to end conflict in the Korean peninsula and drive nuclear tensions down. And fair enough: we’ve blundered our way to the precipice of nuclear warfare so many times by this point that it’s a wonder how we never made it over the edge. Mushroom clouds balloon and change shape across the globe to the tune of Vera Lynn’s “We’ll Meet Again.” A shirtless man pounds his fist into the sand at the sight of a half-buried Statue of Liberty.Īnxiety over nuclear annihilation is lodged in our collective psyche, as these massive film spoilers attest to. We’re at the bottom of the world, but what would happen to bolt-hole of choice New Zealand after even a ‘limited’ nuclear war? Branko Marcetic talked to scientists about what will happen to the ecology, economy and overall quality of life after a hypothetical nuclear war.Ī woman’s flesh burns away as she clings to a chain-link fence in a city turned to hot dust.
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