66 million years ago, a mountain-sized asteroid travelling ten times faster than a bullet train slammed into the seas covering what we know today as the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico.The immense energy of that impact thrown rocks as far as Canada. The fireball vaporised the dinosaurs. The readers may ask why such a description in the very beginning of the article is given but to face the facts an impending nuclear war in South Asia between India and Pakistan will have a likely situation.
On February 14, a suicide bomber killed more than 40 CRPF troops in a convoy in Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir by a militant group called Jaish-e- Mohammad based in Pakistan. The tensions between the two nuclear powers in the region are running high after a series of offensive and counter-offensive on both sides. The two countries have around 140-150 nuclear weapons with power more than what has been used in Hiroshima, Japan which is enough to eradicate cities and annihilate millions of people.
Climate scientists have shown how a nuclear war would affect the whole world it will bring significant changes in climate whether it is in India or abroad. The ozone layer will be crippled and as Alan Robock, a climate scientist pointed out the smoke particle will be in the stratosphere for five years. A situation that will bring a decline in global temperatures around the world what the researchers call ‘ a global nuclear famine’ with the crisis in food production, the population cannot be sustained even for sixty days, as a result, millions will die of starvation. Such a situation may take decades to return to normal. As Noam Chomsky says that today the threat of a nuclear war is greater than during the cold war years and it is concentrated in the hands of nuclear powers around the world. The herald for a nuclear war echoes J.Robert Oppenheimer’s interview in the book ‘The Decision to Drop the Bomb’, “now, I become Death, the destroyer of worlds”.
The intention is not to create a mass hysteria but an appeal to the two sides for peace. In the end, nuclear war in the words of late U.S President Ronald Reagan,” such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the earth as we know it.”
In the end, we do not want a world where the political leadership or regimes boast about their country’s nuclear arsenals or threaten to strike a death blow to any country using nuclear weapons or Trevor Noah’s joke on the India-Pakistan conflict that it will be the most exciting war of all time.