Nuclear war and public health: preparedness, protection and the case for prevention

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. e316-e322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Boulton ◽  
Thomas Dunn
Keyword(s):  
Human Life ◽  
Nuclear Disarmament ◽  
International Peace ◽  
Global Instability ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Preventative Measures ◽  
Peace Research ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Nuclear Winter ◽  
Nuclear Warhead

Abstract Background According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, the year 2018 saw a continuing ‘drift into global instability’ in which ‘both the USA and Russia are on a path of strategic nuclear (weapons) renewal’ with 3750 nuclear bombs globally deployed ‘ready to fire’. Treaties are being abrogated with increasingly aggressive language exchanged, and discredited tactics such as ‘limited use’ revived. These developments risk an amplifying cascade of nuclear weapon fire, whether started by intent, miscalculation or unintentionally. Results A nuclear war would cause immediate and massive loss of human life, unprecedented damage to societal infrastructures and climatic disruption resulting in a ‘nuclear winter’ or ‘nuclear famine’. Conclusions The systems defending national territory against nuclear warhead missiles do not guarantee protection, and neither would hastily erected domestic shelters. Any post-survival world would be utterly different and severely challenging. The only effective preventative measures require nuclear disarmament through treaty.

scholarly journals Rise and Decay of the COVID-19 Epidemics in the USA and the State of New York in the First Half of 2020: A Nonlinear Physics Perspective Yielding Novel Insights

2021 ◽  
Vol 2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Till D. Frank
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Compartment Model ◽  
The State ◽  
Stability Parameters ◽  
Intervention Measures ◽  
Infection Dynamics ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
The Stability

As of December 2020, since the beginning of the year 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has claimed worldwide more than 1 million lives and has changed human life in unprecedented ways. Despite the fact that the pandemic is far from over, several countries managed at least temporarily to make their first-wave COVID-19 epidemics to subside to relatively low levels. Combining an epidemiological compartment model and a stability analysis as used in nonlinear physics and synergetics, it is shown how the first-wave epidemics in the state of New York and nationwide in the USA developed through three stages during the first half of the year 2020. These three stages are the outbreak stage, the linear stage, and the subsiding stage. Evidence is given that the COVID-19 outbreaks in these two regions were due to instabilities of the COVID-19 free states of the corresponding infection dynamical systems. It is shown that from stage 1 to stage 3, these instabilities were removed, presumably due to intervention measures, in the sense that the COVID-19 free states were stabilized in the months of May and June in both regions. In this context, stability parameters and key directions are identified that characterize the infection dynamics in the outbreak and subsiding stages. Importantly, it is shown that the directions in combination with the sign-switching of the stability parameters can explain the observed rise and decay of the epidemics in the state of New York and the USA. The nonlinear physics perspective provides a framework to obtain insights into the nature of the COVID-19 dynamics during outbreak and subsiding stages and allows to discuss possible impacts of intervention measures. For example, the directions can be used to determine how different populations (e.g., exposed versus symptomatic individuals) vary in size relative to each other during the course of an epidemic. Moreover, the timeline of the computationally obtained stages can be compared with the history of the implementation of intervention measures to discuss the effectivity of such measures.

scholarly journals Une Lecture Écocritique de Marguerite Yourcenar

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Teo Sanz
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Pollution ◽  
Key Words ◽  
French Literature ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Marguerite Yourcenar ◽  
Palabras Clave ◽  
Agrippa D'aubigne ◽  
Literary Figure ◽  
The Usa

Key words: Marguerite Yourcenar, engagement écologique littéraire, Agrippa d'Aubigné, sensibilité vis-à-vis de la nature, dissolution dans la nature, fragilité des forêts, éthique se l'environnement non anthropocentrée  The Belgian-French novelist Marguerite Yourcenar is a rare example of an established literary figure whose writing in French cries out for ecocritical attention. Discovering environmental pollution and destruction as an issue in the late 1950s, when she went to live in the USA, Yourcenar became an active supporter of conservationist and animal rights initiatives, and began to express her commitment to reconciliation between humans, non-human life and the inanimate environment in her fiction and critical essays on French literature. A fascination with pristine wilderness speaks from her last novel, published in 1982, whose protagonist relinquishes human individuality to become one with sublime nature.   Palabras clave: Marguerite Yourcenar, compromiso ecológico literario, Agrippa d'Aubigné, sensibilidad con la naturaleza, disolución en la naturaleza, fragilidad de los bosques, ética del medioambiente no antropocéntrico.  La novelista franco belga Marguerite Yourcenar es un raro ejemplo de figura literaria de reconocido prestigio cuyos escritos en francés claman atención ecocrítica. Cuando emigró a Estados Unidos a finales de los años 1950 descubrió el problema de la contaminación y destrucción medioambiental y se convirtió en colaboradora activa en iniciativas conservacionistas y pro derechos de los animales. Comenzó a expresar su compromiso con la reconciliación entre los seres humanos, los seres vivos no humanos y el medioambiente inanimado en su literatura y en ensayos críticos sobre literatura francesa. De su última novela, publicada en 1982, en la que la protagonista abandona la individualidad humana para fundirse con la naturaleza sublime emana una fascinación con la prístina naturaleza salvaje.

No paradox here? Improving theory and testing of the nuclear stability–instability paradox with synthetic counterfactuals

2021 ◽  
pp. 002234332110185
Author(s):  
Francesco Bailo ◽  
Benjamin E Goldsmith
Keyword(s):  
Synthetic Control ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Quantitative Studies ◽  
Limited Support ◽  
Before And After ◽  
Nuclear Stability ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Valid Comparison ◽  
Empirical Tests ◽  
The Stability

This article contributes to both the theoretical elaboration and empirical testing of the ‘stability–instability paradox’, the proposition that while nuclear weapons deter nuclear war, they also increase conventional conflict among nuclear-armed states. Some recent research has found support for the paradox, but quantitative studies tend to pool all international dyads while qualitative and theoretical studies focus almost exclusively on the USA–USSR and India–Pakistan dyads. This article argues that existing empirical tests lack clearly relevant counterfactual cases, and are vulnerable to a number of inferential problems, including selection on the dependent variable, unintentionally biased inference, and extrapolation from irrelevant cases. The limited evidentiary base coincides with a lack of consideration of the theoretical conditions under which the paradox might apply. To address these issues this article theorizes some scope conditions for the paradox. It then applies synthetic control, a quantitative method for valid comparison when appropriate counterfactual cases are lacking, to model international conflict between India–Pakistan, China–India, and North Korea–USA, before and after nuclearization. The article finds only limited support for the paradox when considered as a general theory, or within the theorized scope conditions based on the balance of resolve and power within each dyad.

The continuing threat of nuclear war

2008 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph Cirincione
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Nuclear Weapons ◽  
The United States ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The North ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Soviet Union ◽  
The World ◽  
Nuclear Winter

The American poet Robert Frost famously mused on whether the world will end in fire or in ice. Nuclear weapons can deliver both. The fire is obvious: modern hydrogen bombs duplicate on the surface of the earth the enormous thermonuclear energies of the Sun, with catastrophic consequences. But it might be a nuclear cold that kills the planet. A nuclear war with as few as 100 hundred weapons exploded in urban cores could blanket the Earth in smoke, ushering in a years-long nuclear winter, with global droughts and massive crop failures. The nuclear age is now entering its seventh decade. For most of these years, citizens and officials lived with the constant fear that long-range bombers and ballistic missiles would bring instant, total destruction to the United States, the Soviet Union, many other nations, and, perhaps, the entire planet. Fifty years ago, Nevil Shute’s best-selling novel, On the Beach, portrayed the terror of survivors as they awaited the radioactive clouds drifting to Australia from a northern hemisphere nuclear war. There were then some 7000 nuclear weapons in the world, with the United States outnumbering the Soviet Union 10 to 1. By the 1980s, the nuclear danger had grown to grotesque proportions. When Jonathan Schell’s chilling book, The Fate of the Earth, was published in 1982, there were then almost 60,000 nuclear weapons stockpiled with a destructive force equal to roughly 20,000 megatons (20 billion tons) of TNT, or over 1 million times the power of the Hiroshima bomb. President Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ anti-missile system was supposed to defeat a first-wave attack of some 5000 Soviet SS-18 and SS-19 missile warheads streaking over the North Pole. ‘These bombs’, Schell wrote, ‘were built as “weapons” for “war”, but their significance greatly transcends war and all its causes and outcomes. They grew out of history, yet they threaten to end history. They were made by men, yet they threaten to annihilate man’.

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