De un lector amigo.
La gente conoce o barrunta que una guerra nuclear los efectos aniquiladores de una guerra nuclear a gran escala, entre otras cosas, por las distopías cinematográficas hollywoodienses. Aún así impresiona verlo plasmado mediante lenguaje científico.
Me ha oportuno transcribirte algunos párrafos iniciales y los párrafos finales del informe del Dr. Paul R. Ehrlich sobre las “consecuencias biológicas de la guerra nuclear”, incluido en el libro de Kennedy/ Sagan/ Ehrlich,The Cold and the Dark, publicado en 1984, en el cual se contienen parte de los informes y debates elaborados por un grupo de destacados físicos y biólogos anglosajones, alemanes y soviéticos acerca de las consecuencias físicas y biológicas de una guerra nuclear general. Tal vez interese a alguno de los lectores de tu blog. El supuesto de que se parte es el de una guerra nuclear en que llegan a explotar bombas nucleares con una potencia comprendida entre los 5.000 y 10.000 megatones. El autor sostiene, de acuerdo con las conclusiones expuestas por un grupo de trabajo encargado de analizar el asunto, que es muy improbable, por no decir casi imposible, que una guerra nuclear “limitada” no degenere rápidamente en una guerra nuclear general.
“Most of my focus will be on widely ignored indirect consequences for human beings of such a war that would be transmitted through effects on ecological systems. But I do not want to downplay the potential direct effects, well known as they may be, for they will be truly horrifying. Consider what recent studies indicate would happen in a large thermonuclear war, in which somewhere between 5.000 and 10.000 megatons of weapons were detonated -mostly in the Northern Hemisphere. (To put such a war in perspective, consider it roughly equal to the explosion of one-half to three quarters of a million Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, which amounts to only a portion of the current nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR).
(…).
Blast alone, according to one estimate, would be expected to cause 750 million deaths. As many people as existed on this planet when our nation [EEUU] was founded would be vaporized, disintegrated, mashed, pulped, and smeared over the landscape by the explosive force of the bombs. Another study predicts that 1.1 billion [1.100 millones] would be killed and a like number injured immediately by blast, heat, and radiation. In other words, almost half of the current population [de la época; hoy sería la mitad de unos 8.000 millones de personas]-including most of the residents of the rich nations of the Northern Hemisphere- could become casualties within a few hours.
It is also crystal clear that the very fabric of industrial society would be destroyed by such a war. Virtually all cities -which are the political, industrial, transport, financial, communications, and cultural centers of societies- would simply cease to exist. Much of humanity´s know-how would disappear along with them. Medical care and other disaster relief services would be essentially nonexistent -there would be no place for help to come from. Survivors in the once reach nations would not only face the crushing psychological burdens of having witnessed the greatest catastrophe in human history, they would also know there was no hope of succor.
Such a situation is so mind-boggling that many take it to be a worst-case estimate of the potential damage to Homo sapiens in World War III. Instead, as we shall now see, I have only described the obvious tip of the iceberg. The fates of the 2-3 billion [¿3.000-4.000 millones hoy?] people who were not killed immediately -including those in nations far removed from targets- might in many ways be worse. They, of course, would suffer directly from the freezing temperatures, darkness, and midterm fallout discussed by Professor Sagan. But the most significant long-term effects would be produced indirectly by the impact of these and other factors on the environmental systems of the planet.
(…).
Plausible nuclear war scenarios can be constructed that would result in the dominant atmospheric effects of darkness and cold spreading over virtually the entire planet. Under those circumstances, human survival would be largely restricted to islands and coastal areas of the Southern Hemisphere, and the human population might be reduced to prehistoric levels.
When many of us read Jonathan Schell´s book, The Fate of the Earth, we were very much impressed by the moving way in which he presented the case, but I suspect that most biologists, like myself, thought it was a little extreme to imagine that our species might actually disappear from the face of the planet. It did not seem plausible from what we knew then.
Now, the biologists have had to consider the possibility of the spread of darkness and cold over the entire planet and throughout the Southern Hemisphere. It still seemed unlikely to them that that would immediately result in the deaths of all the people in the Southern Hemisphere. We would assume that on islands, for instance, far from sources of radioactivity and where the temperatures would be moderated by the oceans, some people would survive. Indeed, there probably would be survivors scattered throughout the Southern Hemisphere and, perhaps, even in a few places in the Northern Hemisphere.
But one has to ask about the long-term persistence of these small groups of people, or of isolated individuals. Human beings are very social animals. They are dependent upon the social structures that they have built. They are going to face a very highly modified environment, one not only strange to them but also in some ways much more malign than people have ever faced before. The survivors will be back in a kind of hunter and gatherer stage. But hunters and gatherers in the past have always had an enormous cultural knowledge of their environments; they knew how to live off the land. But after a nuclear holocaust, people without that kind of cultural background will suddenly be trying to live in an environment that has never been experienced by people anywhere. In all likelihood, they will face a completely novel environment, unprecedented weather, and high levels of radiation. If the groups are very small, there is a possibility of inbreeding. And, of course, social and economic systems and value systems will be utterly shattered. The psychological state of the survivors is difficult to imagine.
It was the consensus of our group that, under those conditions, we could not exclude the possibility [una forma muy morigerada de expresarse: lo que sugiere en realidad su estudio es la muy elevada probabilidad] that the scattered survivors simply would not be able to rebuild their populations, that they would, over a period of decades or even centuries, fade away. In other words, we could not exclude the possibility [lo ya comentado] of a full-scale nuclear war entraining the extinction of Homo sapiens.
