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tonyPick [blogspot.co.uk] writes:

There's an interesting pair of articles over at The Conversation which discuss the potential impacts of smaller scale nuclear conflicts, the perceptions of them, and the risks involved in even localised conflicts .

Initially Mattia Eken [theconversation.com] argued in March that the threat is often exaggerated and overhyped [theconversation.com], concluding that:

nuclear weapons are here to stay; they can’t be “un-invented”. If we want to live with them and mitigate the very real risks they pose, we must be honest about what those risks really are. Overegging them to frighten ourselves more than we need to keeps nobody safe.

More recently a response was published by Professor David McCoy [theconversation.com], discussing research modelling the impact on environment and climate [theconversation.com] which indicates more significant long term impacts globally. Highlighting the impact of a limited conflict between India and Pakistan he discusses the worldwide impacts on global food production:

With total world grain reserves amounting to less than 100 days of global consumption, such effects would place an estimated 2 billion people at risk of famine.

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