Musa Sattar – UKNuclear Weapons•Wars
11th February 2026
A chilling look at the coldest threat to humanity, the disaster we hope never arrives
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By Musa Sattar, London, UK
On a clear morning, satellites orbiting Earth watch the planet breathe. Clouds rise and thin, ice glints and retreats, forests exhale moisture into the air. Climate science has taught us to see this living planet as a tightly coupled system, where disturbances in one region can ripple across the globe. Yet one of the most abrupt and least appreciated threats to this system does not come from slow warming or melting ice, but from fire. Not wildfire driven by drought, but city-scale firestorms ignited in minutes by nuclear weapons.
Last month, the Doomsday Clock moved to just 85 seconds before midnight, the closest it has ever been. The Clock, maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, is a symbolic measure of how close humanity is to global catastrophe, with midnight representing irreversible disaster driven by nuclear war, climate change, and emerging technologies. The scientists who set it warned that the world is facing serious dangers, urging global leaders to reduce nuclear weapons, set clear rules for the use of AI, and strengthen cooperation against biological threats. Their message was simple: with no real arms control talks and little leadership on nuclear issues, the global nuclear situation has grown more worrying.
That warning feels especially timely now. As the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START Treaty) [1] between the United States and the Russian Federation has ended, the number of deployed strategic nuclear weapons and the doctrines governing them again command attention. Earlier, President Donald Trump had signalled little concern about the treaty’s expiration, remarking that if it lapsed, a better deal could be pursued. And now he declined a proposal from Russian President Vladimir Putin to voluntarily maintain existing limits, arguing instead that extending New START would be a mistake and that nuclear specialists should focus on negotiating a new, modernised agreement designed to endure far into the future. [2]
But beyond questions of deterrence and diplomacy lies a deeper scientific concern. What would nuclear war do to the Earth system itself? Could even a limited regional conflict trigger a global climatic shock known as nuclear winter?
For more than four decades, scientists have explored this unsettling possibility. Their conclusions have evolved with better data and more powerful models, but the core message has remained consistent. Nuclear war is not only a humanitarian catastrophe or a geopolitical failure. It is a planetary-scale experiment in climate disruption, one whose outcome could threaten the foundations of civilisation.
Firestorms and the Physics of Darkness
The basic mechanism behind nuclear winter is deceptively simple. Nuclear explosions over cities would ignite vast fires, consuming buildings, fuel, plastics and vegetation. These fires would generate enormous quantities of black carbon soot, composed of tiny light- absorbing particles. Unlike ordinary smoke, black carbon is exceptionally effective at heating the air around it by absorbing sunlight.
In conventional fires, smoke tends to be washed out of the atmosphere within days or weeks by rain. Nuclear firestorms are different. The intense heat they generate can loft smoke high into the upper troposphere and even into the stratosphere, a dry atmospheric layer where rainfall is absent. Once there, soot can persist for months or years, spreading around the globe.
This is not speculation grounded only in theory. During the Second World War, the firebombing of cities such as Hamburg and Dresden produced self sustaining firestorms that generated towering columns of smoke. Modern megacities contain far more combustible material, particularly petroleum based products. Studies of urban fuel loads suggest that contemporary cities could burn hotter and longer than any in human history.
The crucial scientific question is scale. How much soot would be produced, how high would it rise, and how would it interact with the climate system?
Robock, Toon and the Modern Revival of Nuclear Winter Science
In the early 1980s, the first nuclear winter studies used relatively simple climate models and coarse assumptions. Critics questioned their realism, particularly the idea that smoke could reach and remain in the stratosphere. For a time, interest waned. It returned forcefully in the 2000s, led by climate scientists Alan Robock and Brian Toon, who applied modern global climate models to the problem.
Their landmark simulations examined scenarios ranging from a limited regional nuclear war, such as one involving India and Pakistan, to full-scale conflict between major nuclear powers. In a widely cited study, Robock and colleagues estimated that a regional war involving around one hundred Hiroshima-sized weapons could inject roughly five teragrams of black carbon into the upper atmosphere.
The modelled consequences were stark. Global average surface temperatures dropped by up to 1.5 degrees Celsius within months, with far greater cooling over land and at higher latitudes. Precipitation declined worldwide, weakening monsoons and shortening growing seasons. The stratosphere heated dramatically, altering atmospheric circulation and depleting ozone, which increased ultraviolet radiation at the surface.
More extreme scenarios involving larger arsenals produced cooling rivaling that of the last ice age, but occurring almost instantaneously on geological timescales. Even critics of the early nuclear winter work have largely accepted that these newer simulations are grounded in well tested climate physics.
Importantly, the models used by Robock and Toon are close relatives of those employed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The same equations that simulate greenhouse warming, El Niño events and volcanic eruptions are used to explore nuclear soot injections. This continuity lends credibility to the results, even as uncertainties remain.
Lessons From Deep Time and Historical Disasters
One way to assess the plausibility of nuclear winter is to compare it with natural experiments from Earth’s past. Volcanic eruptions provide the most direct analogues. In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia erupted with extraordinary violence, injecting vast quantities of sulphate aerosols into the stratosphere. The following year became known as the Year Without a Summer. Crops failed across Europe and North America, famine spread, and global temperatures fell by about 0.5 degrees Celsius.
Tambora’s aerosols were chemically different from black carbon, but the climatic mechanism was similar. Sunlight was blocked, the surface cooled, and weather patterns shifted. The eruption demonstrated how a single event in one location could destabilise climate worldwide.
Looking further back, the Toba supervolcano eruption around seventy four thousand years ago may have produced even more severe cooling. Some hypotheses suggest it contributed to a population bottleneck in early humans, although this remains debated. What is not disputed is that Earth’s climate is sensitive to sudden injections of particles into the upper atmosphere.
Nuclear winter differs in a crucial respect. Black carbon absorbs sunlight rather than reflecting it. This heats the stratosphere while cooling the surface, creating a strong temperature inversion that can trap soot aloft for longer than volcanic aerosols. In some models, black carbon persists for a decade or more, extending the duration of climatic disruption well beyond historical volcanic events.
Urban Combustion in the Modern World
Recent studies have focused on refining estimates of how much soot nuclear firestorms would actually produce. This requires understanding the combustible content of modern cities, how fires spread, and how efficiently smoke is lofted upward.
Urban areas today contain dense concentrations of flammable materials, from plastics and synthetic fabrics to fuel storage and vehicles. Research using data from large urban fires, combined with laboratory experiments on combustion, suggests that black carbon production per unit area could be higher than assumed in earlier models.
Equally important is the behaviour of smoke plumes. Observations of intense wildfires in Australia and North America have shown that so-called pyrocumulonimbus clouds can inject smoke directly into the stratosphere. Satellite measurements have tracked these smoke layers circling the globe for months, affecting temperatures and ozone chemistry.
These wildfire driven events, while far smaller than nuclear firestorms, provide real world validation of the processes envisioned in nuclear winter scenarios. They demonstrate that under the right conditions, smoke can reach altitudes once thought inaccessible to fires and remain there long enough to influence climate.
Food Systems Under a Darkened Sky
The most immediate human consequence of nuclear winter would not be the cold itself, but hunger. Global food production is finely tuned to climate, daylight and seasonal rhythms. Even modest cooling and reduced sunlight can have outsized effects on crop yields.
Modelled nuclear winter scenarios show sharp declines in maize, wheat and rice production, particularly in the mid latitudes that serve as major breadbaskets. Shorter growing seasons, increased frost risk and weakened monsoons would strain both rain-fed and irrigated agriculture.
Marine ecosystems would also suffer. Reduced sunlight would suppress phytoplankton growth, disrupting ocean food webs from the bottom up. Fisheries that feed hundreds of millions of people could collapse.
Ecologists interviewed for recent studies emphasise that modern food systems lack resilience to such abrupt shocks. Global trade might buffer shortages in some regions, but widespread simultaneous failures would overwhelm markets and humanitarian response mechanisms. In a world already grappling with climate anxiety and food insecurity, nuclear winter represents an extreme stress test.
A Planetary Risk in a Nuclear Age
As arms‑control agreements weaken and global tensions rise, it’s easy to think about nuclear weapons only in terms of military strategy and political power. But climate science and historical events force us to see them differently. It treats a nuclear war as a shock to the entire Earth system, something closer to an asteroid strike or a massive volcanic eruption than a traditional conflict.
From this viewpoint, even a ‘small’ regional nuclear war would not stay regional. The atmosphere doesn’t recognise borders. Smoke that blocks sunlight over one continent cools oceans, farmland, and weather patterns across the globe. The whole planet reacts.
This isn’t political speculation; it’s physics, chemistry, and ecology. The same peer‑reviewed science that helps us understand climate change also shows how a nuclear war could trigger sudden global cooling if enough cities burn at once.
At the Edge of Treaty Expiry, the World Faces a Choice
As the New START Treaty has ended, the relevance of this understanding sharpens. Limits on nuclear arsenals are not only about national security. They are about limiting the maximum plausible disturbance humans can inflict on the climate system in a single act.
The science does not predict the future. It illuminates pathways. One pathway leads through firestorms, darkened skies and collapsing ecosystems. Another leads through restraint, verification and a recognition that in a tightly coupled Earth system, survival depends on avoiding irreversible shocks.
The world today is in a fragile and unpredictable state. Recognising the devastation that a nuclear conflict could bring to humanity and all living beings makes it clear that eliminating this threat is an urgent global responsibility.
For more than two decades, His Holiness, Hazrat Mirza Masroor Ahmad (aba) has repeatedly reminded us that true stability requires a moral and spiritual return: ‘There is only one solution for the world to return to normal, and that is for mankind to turn to Allah the Exalted and to fulfil His rights and the rights of His creation.’ On another occasion, he emphasised, ‘For the world to return to its normal conditions, we must bow before God and fulfil His rights and the rights of His creation.’
Nuclear winter is a warning written in the language of climate models and atmospheric chemistry. It tells us that the greatest danger of nuclear weapons may not be the blast we fear, but the silence that follows, when sunlight fades, harvests fail, and the planet itself bears the scars of human conflict.
It now falls to us, and to world leaders, to decide whether we will heed this guidance and choose a path of peace, or ignore it and push the world closer to destruction.
About the Author: Musa Sattar has an MSc in Pharmaceutical Analysis from Kingston University and is serving as the Assistant Manager of The Review of Religions and the Deputy Editor of the Science & Religion section.
ENDNOTES
[1] https://www.state.gov/new-start-treaty
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/08/us/politics/trump-interview-power-morality.html
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- QUESTION & ANSWER: Distortion of Religion
- The Keys to Peace in a Time of Global Disorder
- Nuclear War vs Climate Change
- Impending Nuclear War: Survivors will not be Winners
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Categories: Climate, War, world war III