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MONDAY last week I was sitting in the Hofburg Palace in Vienna, surrounded by gilt, with chandeliers lighting a room designed for Strauss waltzes, listening to Naledi Pandor speak and feeling my chest swell with pride. Damn, she was good - stimulating, intelligent and feminist to boot.
READ: Pandor shines light on gender at global science summit
All day - indeed, all week - I had people come up to me, people who hailed from the four corners of the globe, and tell me how impressed and inspired they were by our minister of science and technology’s keynote speech.
It was a pretty good feeling, all the more so since I’ve kinda got out of the habit of feeling proud when our government people speak. I felt like I’d dived through a time warp back into the early 1990s when patriotic pride was the feeling du jour.
I was in Vienna representing the South African Science Journalists Association and the African Federation of Science Journalists, invited by the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organisation (CTBTO) to attend its annual Science and Technology Conference, which showcases science done in fields that relate to the verification of nuclear tests.
The treaty and the organisation aim to end all nuclear explosions – more than 2 000 tests around the world since Nagasaki have left a terrible legacy – and one crucial role is constant monitoring to detect any nuclear tests that may be suspected to have taken place.
This involves incredibly detailed and precise use of all sorts of techniques for looking, listening and sniffing, as the CTBTO puts it – using infra-sound to ‘hear’ rumbling seismic events, for example, and noble gas detection to smell out radioactivity.
So what, you might ask? Why should any African care, coming as we do from a continent free of nuclear weapons - and in our case, from the only country ever to decide to dismantle its nuclear weapons?
Geopolitical tensions create cold war risk
Because of what’s happening geopolitically right now. Tensions are rising between Russia and the USA, tilting the world back into previously unimaginable ways towards a cold war, with a tit-for-tat rhetoric (as part of which, President Vladimir Putin recently said Russia would be adding 40 intercontinental missiles to its arsenal this year – count ‘em, 40!).
“Russia’s recent use of nuclear rhetoric, exercises and operations are deeply troubling,” Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg told an audience at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies think-tank in May this year.
And of course, there’s always the nuthouse wedged between China and South Korea to consider. North Korea has nuclear weapons and is the only country to have conducted tests in 17 years – at least three and possibly four since 2006, the last of these in 2013.
There are some 17 000 of these things around the world – all terrifyingly powerful. CTBTO executive secretary Dr Lassina Zerbo said, in a session at the conference, that he never really understood the impact of a nuclear explosion till he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki and spoke to survivors.
But any modern nuclear conflict is likely to cause damage that is orders of magnitude bigger than anything experienced in 1945. The Hiroshima bomb, Little Boy, was 15 kilotons and Fat Man 21. Among the 17 000-odd weapons around the world are individual ones over 900 kt – way over 50 times 15 kt, and capable of delivering damage that human minds are incapable of envisaging.
A study published last year did a sort of possible accounting: Multidecadal global cooling and unprecedented ozone loss following a regional nuclear conflict, Michael Mills et al, Earth’s Future, doi:10.1002/2013EF000205, posited a relatively modest little nuclear war between India and Pakistan (neither of whom are signatories to the CTBT).
Global cooling, you say, ha, there’s our solution to climate change! No, wait a minute, not so fast. Using atmospheric chemistry, ocean dynamics, and other ways of thinking about earth’s systems, the authors figured that “A limited, regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan in which each side detonates 50 15 kt weapons could produce about 5 Tg of black carbon [which would] spread globally, producing a sudden drop in surface temperatures and intense heating of the stratosphere […], global ozone losses of 20%–50% over populated areas, levels unprecedented in human history, would accompany the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1000 years.
War may trigger a global nuclear famine
"We calculate summer enhancements in UV indices of 30%–80% over midlatitudes, suggesting widespread damage to human health, agriculture, and terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. Killing frosts would reduce growing seasons by 10–40 days per year for 5 years. Surface temperatures would be reduced for more than 25 years due to thermal inertia and albedo effects in the ocean and expanded sea ice. The combined cooling and enhanced UV would put significant pressures on global food supplies and could trigger a global nuclear famine.”
In other words, the kind of damage that should be on everyone’s agenda. Africa can ill afford the direct effects outlined above – more famine, anyone? – and we can ill afford the global economic consequences that would head our way like a runaway train if this scenario ever plays out.
So yes, we should feel immediate concern and urgency about this. For ourselves, our growth and development and for our children. Bring out the Ban the Bomb posters again!
*Mandi Smallhorne is a versatile journalist and editor. Views expressed are her own. Follow her on twitter.
