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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Even a relatively small nuclear war would create a worldwide food crisis lasting at least a decade in which hundreds of millions would starve, according to our new modeling published in Nature Food.

In a nuclear war, bombs dropped on cities and industrial areas would start firestorms, injecting large amounts of soot into the upper atmosphere. This soot would spread globally and rapidly cool the planet.

Although the war might only last days or weeks, the impacts on Earth's climate could persist for more than ten years. We used advanced climate and food production models to explore what this would mean for the world's food supply.

[...] We simulated six different war scenarios, because the amount of soot injected into the upper atmosphere would depend on the number of weapons used.

The smallest war in our scenarios was a "limited" conflict between India and Pakistan, involving 100 Hiroshima-sized weapons (less than 3% of the global nuclear arsenal). The largest was a global nuclear holocaust, in which Russia and the United States detonate 90% of the world's nuclear weapons.

[...] Even under the smallest war scenario we considered, sunlight over global crop regions would initially fall by about 10%, and global average temperatures would drop by up to 1–2℃. For a decade or so, this would cancel out all human-induced warming since the Industrial Revolution.

In response, global food production would decrease by 7% in the first five years after a small-scale regional nuclear war. Although this sounds minor, a 7% fall is almost double the largest recorded drop in food production since records began in 1961. As a result, more than 250 million people would be without food two years after the war.

Unsurprisingly, a global nuclear war would be a civilization-level threat, leaving over five billion people starving.

[...] In a post-nuclear-war world, we expect global food distribution would cease entirely for several years, as exporting countries suspend trade and focus on feeding their own populations. This would make war-induced shortages even worse in food-importing countries, especially in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.

Our results point to a stark and clear conclusion: there is no such thing as a limited nuclear war, where impacts are confined to warring countries.

Our findings provide further support for the 1985 statement by U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, reaffirmed by the current leaders of China, France, the U.K., Russia and the U.S. this year: "A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought."

Neil deGrasse Tyson's Star Talk podcast just did an episode on this scenario and provides some background to the aforementioned Reagan/Gorbachev statement.

Journal Reference:
Xia, L., Robock, A., Scherrer, K. et al. Global food insecurity and famine from reduced crop, marine fishery and livestock production due to climate disruption from nuclear war soot injection [open]. Nat Food 3, 586–596 (2022). DOI: 10.1038/s43016-022-00573-0

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