Nuclear warfare is military conflict involving the deployment of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear war is potentially the primary near-term anthropogenic existential risk. Nuclear war would probably not cause human extinction through the direct damage of an exchange. Rather, researchers are concerned about the potential for a nuclear winter: firestorms caused by the explosions could release particulate matter into the stratosphere, causing significant global cooling which would last for several years. This cooling would disrupt global agriculture, which would likely kill many more people than the initial exchange.[1]
However, there is some disagreement about how climate systems would react to the particulate matter and how much soot would actually be created (modern cities are potentially less vulnerable to firestorms than those during the cold war). As a result, it is unclear whether nuclear war poses an existential risk or a non-existential global catastrophic risk.
Further reading
Baum, Seth D., Robert De Neufville & Anthony M. Barrett (2018) A model for the probability of nuclear war, working paper 18-1, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.
Baum, Seth D. & Anthony M. Barrett (2018) A model for the impacts of nuclear war, working paper 18-2, Global Catastrophic Risk Institute.
Cirincione, Joseph (2008) The continuing threat of nuclear war, in Nick Bostrom & Milan M. Ćirković (eds.) Global Catastrophic Risks, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Open Philanthropy (2015) Nuclear weapons policy, Open Philanthropy, September.
A report exploring possible interventions to address risks from nuclear war.
Roser, Max (2022) Nuclear weapons: Why reducing the risk of nuclear war should be a key concern of our generation, Our World in Data, March 3.
Scouras, James (2021) On Assessing the Risk of Nuclear War, Laurel: Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.
Related entries
armed conflict | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | civilizational collapse | Cuban Missile Crisis | existential risk | existential risk factor | Manhattan Project | nuclear disarmament movement | nuclear security | Nuclear Threat Initiative | nuclear winter | Russell-Einstein Manifesto | Trinity | weapons of mass destruction
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Robock, Alan (2010) Nuclear winter, WIREs Climate Change, vol. 1, pp. 418–427.
Nuclear warfareandNuclear weaponshave now been merged. One undesirable side-effect of this is that the article’s “slug” is nownuclear-warfare-1. I have asked the tech team how to remove the appended-1from these and other articles.