A More Peaceful World

The Effects of a Global Nuclear War

Even a single nuclear bomb on a city would overwhelm the capacity of a country’s health services to respond in any meaningful way. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan involving 100 detonations would affect the whole world for many months as a result of dark skies from the soot particles lifted into the stratosphere. A global nuclear war, when about 13,000 weapons could be exploded, would end human civilisation on Earth.

In a global nuclear war, health services would be inundated by a tsunami of crush injuries, trauma, radiation sickness, and infections at a time when the supply of health workers, dressings, fluids, hospitals, transport, communications, and pharmaceuticals would have been reduced to nothing.

Worst of all, even the uninjured would be existing in a world darkened by Nuclear Winter caused by tonnes of soot and smoke sent into the atmosphere by the nuclear detonations. The darkness and cold caused by this layer would cause crop failures for many years. Along with dwindling supplies of food and clean water, and with armed, desperate gangs ready to take any food they could find, the idea of surviving a nuclear war is nothing but a delusion.

Link to World Health Organisation 1987 paper on effects on health and health services.
In 2026 there is a plan in the UN for a new report on this topic. Shamefully, the UK voted against this project, which suggests that the British Government would be uncomfortable with its findings.

Next: Therefore we must eliminate all nuclear weapons from the world