Over 13,000 ! This is the number of nuclear weapons found on Earth in 2021. As early as the 1980s, scientists sought to predict the climatic effects of a nuclear conflict in the long term. Beyond radiation, they highlight the impact of the smoke spread in the atmosphere. By blocking the sun’s rays, it would cause an artificial winter, quickly referred to as “Nuclear winter”. Such an event could lead to temperature drops of the order of 10 to 20 ° C for continental areas, for several weeks. Not to mention the disastrous consequences on farms, especially the large cereal and rice-growing regions. As if that were not enough, a new international search including the Rutgers University and the National Center for Atmospheric Research studied the chemistry of aerosols in the atmosphere. This study reminds us that despite the universal feeling of serenity, nuclear war is still possible. But is it even possible to imagine large-scale devastation? Discussion with Benoît Pelopidas, associate researcher at Stanford University and founder of the nuclear knowledge studies program (Nuclear Knowledges) at Sciences Po (CERI) which is distinguished by its interdisciplinary nature and strict refusal of conflict of interest, being exclusively funded on the basis of the academic evaluation of the work accomplished.
Immediate and long-term calamities
Nuclear war. The term frightens first by its promise of immediate calamities such as the explosion, the heat from the fireball or the radiation emitted. But all this is only the beginning … Indeed, the consequences on the ozone layer and the quantity of UV received on the ground are spread over the long term, whether on a regional scale as to that of the entire planet! To estimate them accurately, researchers used four modern climate models that incorporate interactions between chemical elements into their calculations. Two of them simulate the global and regional climate, as well as the upper atmosphere. The third focuses on calculating the dose of UV reaching the earth’s surface. Finally, the last deals specifically with smoke particles. Their association paints a new portrait of the potential cataclysm …
Taking into account nitrogen oxides from the thermonuclear fireball would further damage the ozone layer, reducing it by an additional 5%. To simulate a regional conflict, the researchers injected bombs of 5 megatons into their models – against 13 kilotons for the explosive having razed Hiroshima, that is to say more than 100 times more powerful! The total result would reach 25% ozone loss over a dozen years. On the other hand, a “positive” point would be the protection of this soot vis-à-vis UV-B. But its lifespan being limited, the indexed values will soon rise to the extremes – 35 for the tropics over 4 years, more than 45 at the South Pole for 3 years. With subsequent numerous cases of skin cancer, cataracts and severe immune disorders. On a planetary scale, it is not 5 but 150 megatonnes that have been anticipated by scientists! This time, the ozone column would drop by nearly 75% over 15 years. In both cases, the new predictions are superior to the previous ones, and therefore even more alarming than the first works of the 1980s. How then is it possible to succeed in relegating this threat to the background?
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The very concept of an atomic explosion has been trivialized.
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Nuclear conflict: what we know and what we think we know
In the early 1960s, the coupling between very fast ballistic missiles traveling in outer space and thermonuclear explosives on board very difficult to detect submarines made the preventive destruction and interception of these systems almost impossible. nuclear weapons. The resulting material vulnerability pushes some nations to attempt to re-establish protection. Fallout shelters or missile defense, nothing helps: the solutions implemented are not enough. “We have great difficulty believing the extent of this vulnerability,” says Benoît Pelopidas. “Several factors converge to produce a temptation to deny nuclear vulnerability: since 1980, nuclear explosions have been underground and no one has any direct experience of their violence; the discourse of deterrence aimed at convincing people of the effectiveness of the said strategy, the voices which hold it cannot say all the limits; deterrence is moreover only rarely presented as the bet it is on a vulnerability; on the contrary, it often presents itself as a protection. Finally, the extent of this vulnerability is difficult to imagine, as the German philosopher Günther Anders already observed sixty years ago ”.
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In 1983, the words of Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel denote the psychological factors of our insensitivity to very large numbers: “When we hear of 1000 bombs, of megatons, we don’t know what it all means. I don’t have that kind of imagination. For me, it’s an abstraction ”. Here is the important word: abstraction. In fact, Benoît Pelopidas shows that fiction plays an essential role in overcoming our disbelief in the face of the possibility of catastrophe. However, “after the end of the Cold War, fictional representations of nuclear disasters have been reduced to scenarios of nuclear terrorism without possible reprisals, past events or others in which machines start nuclear war. The latter is even derided, in a game with the spectator where the convention consists in having fun to be afraid while sharing the false assumption that all this is not possible, in the direct manner of the comic series The Brink in 2014 ”, underlines Benoît Pelopidas. The reboot of The Planet of the Apes (2011-2017) thus replaces the nuclear apocalypse with a pandemic. The disaster becomes environmental rather than military, like the phenomenon of glaciation in The day after (2004). Sometimes even, in a dramatic reversal, the poison becomes the cure. Godzilla, a figurehead of nuclear fear in post-war Japan, has recently become a friend of humanity fed on radiation (Godzilla, 2014).
Nuclear war: catharsis or fear?
However, during the Cold War of the 1950s to the beginning of the 1990s, fiction made it possible to place the viewer in a situation where nuclear war became possible, through four major gestures. The first was to show the spectator the start of nuclear war by plunging them closer to the action (Dr Folamour, 1964). The second avoided this passage but made it clear that the event had taken place by comparing the before and after (Malevil, nineteen eighty one). The third made this possibility inevitable, by announcing the beginning of the nuclear conflict and by associating the spectator with the characters on borrowed time, like the fall of the comet in Melancholia (2011). The fourth problematized complacency with regard to this eventuality: should we forget the sword of Damocles above our heads, or rather fear it even if it means becoming paranoid? ” The film I live in fear, from 1954, transcribes this on the screen through the character of the father of a family, survivor of Hiroshima who apprehends the repetition of the catastrophe to the point of wanting to exile his family in Brazil, in the face of the latter, carefree, who will choose to have him interned, ”explains Benoît Pelopidas. Here, no catharsis in a clean, smudge-free explosion, or relief from avoiding nuclear war (WarGames, 1983). On the contrary, the decrepitude of human beings left to fend for themselves (Threads, 1984). A long agony which remains fixed in the spectator’s head, so that he realizes what could happen. And that he thus make it his duty to prevent it.
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