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Wake-up call
For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis, nuclear war is not a distant threat but a real possibility and the lives of 12 million people are at risk. But you may not have realised - perhaps because the rest of the world doesn't seem too bothered, or because India and Pakistan are a long way away. Or maybe you just don't want it to spoil your World Cup. Henry Porter says it's time to take notice

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The world holds its breath
Old foes India and Pakistan inch ever closer to nuclear war

The world is now facing the most dangerous nuclear confrontation since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. Yet in the West there is little media attention to this enormous threat, and almost no public interest or concern. The crisis over Kashmir might as well be on Jupiter. The discovery of the body of a long-missing female intern in Washington has totally eclipsed news of a possible nuclear war in South Asia that could kill tens of millions and contaminate the entire globe with clouds of radioactive dust.
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thanks to Cursor

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'12m deaths' in nuclear war

An American intelligence report says a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could kill up to 12 million people and injure seven million.
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thanks to Cursor

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Nuclear Nightmares

As I neared the end of this assignment, I asked Matthew McKinzie, a staff scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, to run a computer model of a one-kiloton nuclear explosion in Times Square, half a block from my office, on a nice spring workday. By the standards of serious nuclear weaponry, one kiloton is a junk bomb, hardly worthy of respect, a fifteenth the power of the bomb over Hiroshima.

A couple of days later he e-mailed me the results, which I combined with estimates of office workers and tourist traffic in the area. The blast and searing heat would gut buildings for a block in every direction, incinerating pedestrians and crushing people at their desks. Let's say 20,000 dead in a matter of seconds. Beyond this, to a distance of more than a quarter mile, anyone directly exposed to the fireball would die a gruesome death from radiation sickness within a day -- anyone, that is, who survived the third-degree burns. This larger circle would be populated by about a quarter million people on a workday. Half a mile from the explosion, up at Rockefeller Center and down at Macy's, unshielded onlookers would expect a slower death from radiation. A mushroom cloud of irradiated debris would blossom more than two miles into the air, and then, 40 minutes later, highly lethal fallout would begin drifting back to earth, showering injured survivors and dooming rescue workers. The poison would ride for 5 or 10 miles on the prevailing winds, deep into the Bronx or Queens or New Jersey.
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