Public opinion is characterized by a mix of concern and skepticism regarding a potential nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan. While fears about Pakistan's internal instability and its impact on nuclear safety are notable, many believe escalation to war is unlikely. Discussions underline the catastrophic global consequences of any nuclear exchange, including environmental, geopolitical, and economic ramifications. Nonetheless, there remains a sense of hope for peace, driven by diplomatic efforts, overshadowing the fear of war.

Pakistan

India

Saudi Arabia

I wonder if the predicted decreased average global temperature of 1.8° C would be offset at least to some degree by the predicted increased global average temperature due to climate change.  Probably too complicated to model I imagine.

j_bgl

Submission Statement:  A new multinational study incorporating the latest models of global climate, crop production and trade examines the potential effects of an exchange between two nuclear-armed enemies: India and Pakistan. It suggests that even a limited war between them might cause unprecedented global food shortages and starvation lasting more than a decade.

[deleted]

I doubt they're going to war. They are trying to open up trade and normalize relationships with the help of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. There will always be bad-blood between them but the path forward is peace and friendly relationships.

Airbusa3

... 5 million tons of soot would drop global temperatures by 1.8C? 

During the Gulf War, Saddam's forces set fire to Kuwaiti oil wells as they retreated, releasing **8 million tons of soot**. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-011-1685-5_3

That was supposed to be enough to cause global nuclear winter and drop global temperatures by over 5C according to Carl Sagan. https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1991-01-23-1991023131-story.html

It didn't even drop the immediate temperatures directly under the plumes by 5C. 

5 million tons of it isn't dropping temperatures, and we have hard proof from our own lifetime to prove it fundamentally wrong...

lordderplythethird

This is old and relatively outdated considering the recent the detente between Rawalpindi and Lutyens Delhi. Indian defense planners and policy makers are pretty disciplined when it comes to use of force (Pakistani Army is no slouch with it's discipline either, despite being painted as a bunch of crazy Islamists) and India has a no first use which pretty much means no use. The issue isn't going to come their regular forces going rogue but rather security of nuclear assets especially on the Pakistani side. Pakistan has issues with law and order and an insurgency and it is slowly spiralling into an Afghanistan. This is to me is more serious than regular forces exchanging nukes.

I don't think there can be a 'limited' nuclear war between two nuclear armed countries.

kdy420

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depressed_pen

Apart from food products, AFAIK India produces a lot of pharmaceutical products. Also, they manufacture clothes but also a lot of cotton fabric.

LoufLif

I don’t think it’s likely that they’ll use nukes on each others we don’t even know yet what really happened yesterday - there is so much misinformation going around it’s unbelievable. They didn’t start nuking each other last time they went at it so why should they do it now.  

How a nuclear exchange would affect us in Europe is probably mostly hinging on how many nukes, what type (ground or air burst etc) and what the weather was like.  
It’s not as close as Chernobyl but also not on the other side of the globe.  
You’ll most likely not get any Agricultural products from the regions anytime soon if they get nuked.  


War and conflict between them isn’t the best for us either. Due to the “decoupling” a lot of companies moved/are moving to India from China. They are an emerging economic powerhouse. Conflict is bad for business and we’ll probably have to deal with China longer.   


I’d need to look but I’m pretty sure I got some stuff made in India. The issue is not the whole product but raw resources, intermediate products etc. if you look at a supply chain for a specific product you’ll see way more countries involved than the “made in XYZ” suggests.

BonyDarkness

The only real danger imho is violence on the streets of our own cities with large immigrant populations, you could end up with areas locked down, very often the police in Europe won't intervene in such outbreaks so anybody trapped in a certain areas might struggle.

Specialist_Alarm_831

No one thinks of the climate, the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food we eat and the effects of war, never-ending nuclear war. People think we live in segregated bubbles.

Look at the effect the devestation of Gaza has caused to the environment (and of course humanity)..

[Gaza Climate Change ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_the_Gaza_war#:~:text=Greenhouse%20gases,-Wars%20have%20a&amp;text=The%20climate%20cost%20of%20the,over%2020%20climate%2Dvulnerable%20nations.)

NewVentures66

I read some petrol product (gasoline?) consumed / imported to Europe are refined in india out of Russian crude oil.

So maybe car fuel prices increase in Europe?

GrenobleLyon

Nuclear war, even limited to the appeox 300 nukes between India and Pakistan would be a disaster for the global food production. A worst case scenario could involve a small scale nuclear winter due to all the ash in the atmosphere (physicist are unsure about the actual impact). This means that not only would it be much harder and more expensive to import food to Europe, but our own production could be reduced due to a couple of much colder summers.

New-Salamander-9397

India did not give at ratt’s ass when Russis invaded Ukraine. Why would I then care what happens in that conflict?

It is just internal positioning for bith leaders - and they seem perfectly happy to sacrifice lives in that game. Just like Trump and Putin

AdventurousCrow6580

Are there any strike agreements with other countries?  Like if India hit pakistan would China or Russia come to the defence of either of them which in turn could cause a domino effect?

ttylmm

Not another refugee crisis please. We took in too many last time.

averyycuriousman

If one nuke is launched, no more conflict in the future and most likely 10-20% agro drop because of 10% less sunlight. So future commodity buying is possible.
Also their entire history it is peacocking a small hit so both sides can say "look at we did" and then back to 10 years of just peacocking with border dancing.
Although India will go for the water supply, if that happens pakistan is 100% dead

Douude

Probably very little. They already did that four times and the last time both had nuclear weapons. 

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani\_wars\_and\_conflicts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_wars_and_conflicts)

It's sad that people will die in this pointless dick-measuring contest, but it will most likely remain a regional tragedy.

kiluegt

Not much direct impact, but UK may see some riots, that is possible. If Rafale indeed has been shot down by Chinese planes, and it is not pilot error, then French arms industry could suffer hugely, the world would lose confidence in Dassault products, maybe even Safran's.

greatbear8

Euphoric-List7619

MaisJeNePeuxPas

IMHO, none at all. We'll probably have to set up additional border controls to prevent some kind of "migrant flood" orchestrated by one or the other, but that should be it.

Even if they nuke each other out, it shouldn't affect us much.

Tquilha

I know one thing for sure. The world population would drop drastically as India has 1bn people alone. 

The only good news is that India is not a NATO nation. So, the rest of NATO won’t be contractually obligated to strike Pakistan as a result. This could limit the damage globally, but there’s still the idea that a non-NATO nation could come to the aid of Pakistan and create a different global crisis that still could trigger a third world war. Who knows how that might look?

They_Beat_Me

Right now, both sides have just over 150 nukes total. That is a lot, but not for a role as broad as you're describing. India has 48 cities over 1 million and Pakistan has 10. But trying to hit them all in a first strike would be a terrible strategy. Pakistan would use nearly all their nukes in the opening minutes, considering many would never reach their target so each target would need multiple dedicated. India could hit those ten cities in the opening minutes, but they don't need to, they have nuclear submarines to ensure those cities can be eliminated so their priority would be on stopping Pakistan's nukes by hitting military bases where they are launching from. So for this to make sense, both sides (but especially Pakistan) will need to dramatically increase the rate at which they are building new nukes, which is a multi-year process to turn up so they would need to have started years ago without India knowing.

But if all those cities were hit, they would not be the only parts hit. Military installations, command and control facilities, centers of government would also all be hit as they are even more valuable targets. So we would have had anywhere from 200-400 nukes exploding in the Indian subcontinent. The amount of fallout will drastically depend on how they explode. If they are "air burst" it's not as terrible but if it's ground burst it can kick massive amounts of radioactive material into the atmosphere. So in the worst case, that is not only enough to irradiate nearly the whole subcontinent but likely also large parts of Southeast Asia where there are hundreds of millions more. So how it affects the environment, in the Indian subcontinent and beyond, depends on where the nukes explode. 

If it is the worst case and it reaches high enough in the upper levels of the atmosphere, radioactive particles could spend the next several years raining down across most of the Northern Hemisphere and likely some parts of the Southern. It would dramatically alter the weather as the dust blocks sunlight for years. That would irradiate and disrupt growing in the primary farmlands of the world and the home of 90% of humanity. If it is the worst kind of exchange at least, it would likely disassemble the world order as we know it as the vast majority of all humanity are suddenly at risk and food production falls to where billions could starve.

But even in the best case, a war like that would not stay isolated. Pakistan is one of China's closest allies, and Chinese military has been fighting the Indian military in small border clashes for years as China claims a province of India as their own. The thing that has kept China and India at such a low grade war is they currently have essentially a gentlemen's agreement to not use guns. But war creates the condition for more war, and if India is about to fight Pakistan it is very likely that China would do some strong-arming at the least to try to prevent it from going nuclear, but if it did go nuclear it's hard to predict what China's reaction would be, and they have more nukes than the other two put together with some of the world's best rockets to deliver them. And if China is already going to war, what else that might mean is hard to say.

Similarly, India may not be NATO but it is a US ally, one that has been growing closer for some time as a way for each side to better counter China. Just like I can't predict how involved China would ultimately get, I can't predict the US response either. It also matters quite a lot who the President is as it seems far less likely Biden would be very aggressive as his measured pace in Ukraine has shown.

The refugee crisis would be unlike anything humankind has ever experienced. India's cities are spread throughout as is Pakistan's. There will not be any real safe-harbors, which would put Bangladish in a particularly strange spot. While it would be spared any blasts, the radiation will not stop at the borders, and so while it may have more intact infrastructure it would not be any safer long term. Even with massive casualties, that's 1.1-1.4 billion people who need to take shelter from the radiation in a country that has not prepared places and food to attempt anything at 1% that scale. So there is nothing but escaping on foot as there are too many people for any other form of transportation to handle. The neighbors are not going to want hundreds of millions coming with no food, dwarfing their own populations, and many may try to simply prevent any from coming, as all their neighbors are now also likely affected by the radiation created in the fighting. 

The ability to receive aid will be dramatically reduced as most major port facilities and rail hubs, except in Bangladesh, will likely be destroyed. So even if the combined might of the rest of the world made sure to send enough food for more than a billion people, which the Indian diaspora across the first would would likely be leading a charge for, actually getting it too the people would be nearly impossible especially as any pre-war governing structure will have been depleted in both leadership and authority. 

So it may be that the priority of evacuation is the areas affected but not obliterated. Even then, you are talking about more than a billion, especially if states East of India will be dealing with major radiation. It may require a kind of grand societal triage where the world simply ignores the worst hit areas, leaving them to die, so the limited resources can save the most people. 

As for social media? What is there to say? We'll have just witness the greatest mass killion in human history. There may be a renewed push to denuclearize, though I doubt it would be enough to get non-democracies like China and Russia to agree to do so. The kind of exchange you're describing opens a new era of humanity, and it's very hard to see what the rest of the world does in that new reality. 

I've never seen an estimate for the death total of such a large and total strike, largely because Pakistan can't currently pull off such a strike, but an estimate for a war going to limited nuclear strikes killed 50 million in the first month. And in that scenario, nothing beyond 300 miles of the border was hit, so most of India continued to function to send supplies and evacuate. Strike the whole subcontinent and where is the help going to come from?

If you want to see what something like this could look like, you should watch the British movie Threads (1948). It's free [on Youtube](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvFu7Z5cc88) and explores the life in Britain after the cold war resulted in a limited strike on Britain. It's possibly the best movie ever made on the topic of nuclear exchange and the way that society as we know it only exists because of an interconnected web of supports and nuclear weapons blow that up leaving us with nothing.

auandi

Fortunately, this isn't really possible.

For this scenario to unfold, both nations would somehow have to add 15 megaton nuclear weapons they don't have to their arsenals, dirty weapons that could very easily blow directly back onto their own soil given weather patterns (India and Pakistan are NEIGHBORS).

In addition, while the most optimal use of a nuclear weapon is an airburst, every one of these weapons are being used as a ground detonation.  In other words, both nations are deliberately using their arsenals to risk this consequence directly.

It's also not possible to, having built this new nuclear weapon with 75 times the yield of current designs, build a whole set of launch vehicles and means to get those weapons to every city as a ground burst.  India and Pakistan are doing really stupid stuff, but now they need to do it well.

===

Scratch all of it and ask the real question:  **What if there is a nuclear war between India and Pakistan?**   It's not going to have 15 megaton weapons, as technology makes that sort of heavy yield weapon less important, and much more important to get the weapons where they need to go quickly.

Fighting between India and Pakistan is almost certainly going to involve Kashmir, a decision to push the country to truly settle the issue by force of arms; rejection of international negotiations, and the fateful choice that nuclear weapons can be used in a way that does not end the nation that uses them.  The slide into a nuclear war in 2025 might well start with tensions today, and there will be time for thousands, perhaps a million, to leave as the situation darkens.  Perhaps there are elections that end in hawks taking control, perhaps the UN is particularly inept in trying to negotiate.

While the descent into the scenario is slow, a world of nuclear weapons being used is death by flashes of light.  The world will not tolerate nuclear weapons being used, but the situation probably does go completely out of control.  Nuclear war is supposed to be using nukes to achieve goals of the nation.  The thinking will very quickly change:

A)  We can use nuclear weapons in a way that doesn't provoke a general exchange and favors us.

B)  We need to use our arsenal more aggressively, perhaps retaliate for a strike on a civilian target or consider a Counter-Force strategy to stop the other nation from using their nuclear weapons.

C)  Our nation is under massive attack and we may be about to lose our nuclear arsenal and the war; full send.

Full Send is not going to be a clean, organized affair that leads to each city getting exactly one nuclear weapon.  It may be a military focused plan that tries to avoid civilian targets; it may be a desperate plan that just tries to avoid having weapons destroyed on the ground if they can do any good in the war.  No one would actively seek to commit genocide as a goal of nuclear war.

\---

In this case, Kashmir will be trashed, the border between India and Pakistan is also heavily nuked; there would be a lot of tactical nuclear strikes in these areas.  Further away from the front, both nations would target political (New Delhi, Islamabad), military and logistical (airports, seaports) targets first.   Switching to cities happens when one side goes from B to C above.  

We wouldn't see large cities hit by one nuclear weapon; if the situation has deteriorated to using nuclear weapons against cities, there is one final card that will be played:  India and Pakistan are forced to stand down.  Thus, this whole nuclear nightmare happens in a day; and after that day, both ruined nations will agree to UN intervention, including relinquishing their nuclear arsenals, as anything less means tens of millions dying in the pyres that were once cities.

Neither India nor Pakistan have any real plan to protect their population from a nuclear war.  Between Fire, Radioactive Fallout, and the more familiar problems of lack of medical care, drinkable water, and food, both nations would collapse.  Casualties might be 500M+, although most cities could be rebuilt; even the worst nuclear fallout in the world, the Chornobyl Disaster, has over 40 years demonstrably reduced its radioactive footprint and the idea of reducing the containment area was under discussion until Russia decided she was going to violently rape Ukraine.

I'm not going to say that Radiation isn't a medium term concern, but India and Pakistan do not have the wealth or options to build new cities elsewhere.  I would also suggest both nations may well splinter into smaller ones.  Unified by the British, I'm not sure the organic epilogue is for India and Pakistan to return to the world stage.  Both are somewhat complicated post-colonial legacies; if large unions ended disastrously, perhaps we'd see a Tamil state emerge; the whose who in such a new order depends on something I can't calculate--who loses the least in the nightmare.

SocalSteveOnReddit

Ok this is getting irritating now.

1. Nur Khan is not a nuclear command and control base. Its a legit target, being HQ of PAF Transportation Command. Lets not try and add stuff. 

2. Notably there *are* actual nuclear fascilities nearby, which Indians didn't touch. Chiefly since IAF leadership is not insane.

3. Kirana Hills was a cold testing site back in the 1980's. It was decommissioned in the 1990's and handed back. Its not a "nuclear weapon storage site".

4.  Pakistan doesn't operate on a hair trigger nuclear alert like the US and Russia. It has various levels of alert. During peacetime, a certain amount of asset on quick alert, the rest will be on alert levels which will require several hours to several days notice depending on the state of the asset to make ready.

This crises began on 22nd April. LOC became hot soon. Conflict using airpower began on 7 May. The attack on Kirana hills was on 10th May.

By that time it is certain that every strategic asset, every launcher and warhead is long since dispersed  to their wartime launch sites.

In other words even if right now you attack an actual Pakistani nuclear base, it will do nothing, eveeyone is long gone.

aaronupright

The Kirana Hills facility was decommissioned in '90s and was even open to the general public IIRC.

ValidStatus

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirana_Hills_Site

Wikipedia is a pretty basic source of info. If you go to veneue and read it you will find out that Kirana hills are now open to public

Ok_Trick7732

Apparently they struck near the site, which is still pretty irresponsible, both countries publicly give the location of their nuclear facilities just so their is no misunderstanding.

Pure-Toxicity

[https://xcancel.com/search?f=tweets&amp;q=Geolocation+of+explosion%3A+%7E31.96952%2C+72.72064+%2B%2F-100m++It+is+NOT+at+any+observable+tunnel+entrance+at+Kirana+Hills%2C+nor+is+it+very+close+to+any+of+the+munitions+stored+there.+It%27s+against+an+unused+hillside.&amp;since=&amp;until=&amp;near=](https://xcancel.com/search?f=tweets&amp;q=Geolocation+of+explosion%3A+%7E31.96952%2C+72.72064+%2B%2F-100m++It+is+NOT+at+any+observable+tunnel+entrance+at+Kirana+Hills%2C+nor+is+it+very+close+to+any+of+the+munitions+stored+there.+It%27s+against+an+unused+hillside.&amp;since=&amp;until=&amp;near=)

If it is, they didn't hit it directly (which is a good thing because this is the type of thing to cause further escalation)

cft4201

Do not dig anymore please. Just let both sides declare victories and end this horrible conflict. This military operation is stupid to begin with.

Expert_Part_9115

There is a NY article and an American nuclear cleapup plane in pakistan. But nothing concrete yet. Probably will shake out when trump inevitably brags about it.

RajarajaTheGreat

Pakistan's economic hardship and political fragmentation influence its capability to maintain its nuclear arsenal, raising global security concerns.

Pakistan's Nuclear Arsenal Crisis and Global Implications

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