In the shadow of the Cold War, many around the world feared the possibility of an approaching nuclear winter. Our attention has since wandered off its horrors, leaving us with a general lack of awareness of what could be dangerous for humanity’s future, according to a new report. It goes without saying that the threat of a nuclear explosion is not a trivial event. Decades of popular culture have left a relatively strong link between global disaster and nuclear weapons in society.

But the precise details of what we can expect from this escalation of the conflict have become vague over the past few decades.

The facts themselves are pretty clear. In addition to the millions of people who will die from direct explosions, climate models predict that the debris of a nuclear war will block most of our sunlight for decades. For the survivors, the consequences will be devastating: massive crop famine followed by a drop in global temperatures with mass starvation.

Despite this obscure threat, only a small percentage of the modern population claims to have good knowledge of the precise consequences of nuclear war, and many of these people rely on outdated information that was spread amid political tensions between the superpowers of the 1980s.

“In 2023, we face a greater risk of nuclear conflict than we have seen since the early 1980s,” says Paul Ingram, a global risk researcher and diplomatic expert at the University-run Center for Existential Risk Studies (CSER). Cambridge in England. Ingram is the sole author of the non-peer-reviewed report.

“However, what is not publicly discussed is the incredibly dire long-term consequences of nuclear war for the planet and its population.”

The new report used an online survey of 1,500 people in the UK and 1,500 in the US. Participants were asked how much they knew about a possible nuclear winter and where they got this information. The survey allowed several sources to be selected, so they are not mutually exclusive.

The results showed that 3.2 per cent of UK respondents and 7.5 per cent of respondents in the US had heard of the consequences of nuclear war from contemporary media or culture. Most people said that their memories of information released in the 1980s, at a time of heightened Cold War hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union, shaped their views on the risk of nuclear winter. Not surprisingly, few relied on recent scientific papers.

Using hypothetical news as a clue, Ingram also evaluated how people would want their government to react in the event of a nuclear attack. Half of the respondents were shown an infographic about the consequences of nuclear winter before they responded, the other half were not.

In the event that Russia launches a nuclear attack on Ukraine, nearly one in five respondents supported nuclear retaliation. For those who have seen the infographic, that number has dropped to 13 percent in the UK and 16 percent in the US, showing how education affects public opinion.

“There is an urgent need for public education based on the latest research in all states with nuclear weapons,” says Ingraham. “We need to collectively reduce the temptation for leaders of nuclear armed states to threaten and even use such weapons to support military operations.”

The nuclear winter infographic the researchers used was published in a peer-reviewed study in 2022. Theoretically the smallest nuclear war would involve 100 nuclear warheads of 15 kilotons each (roughly the same size as those used in Hiroshima), representing only 0.1 percent of the combined nuclear arsenal of Russia and the United States.

Scientists estimate that this “small” war will cause 27 million direct deaths and 225 million additional starvation deaths. At the top of the scale, we’re looking at total nuclear war, 400 million direct deaths, and more than 5 billion starving as a result of nuclear war.

While there are many factors to consider, estimates vary when it comes to the impact of nuclear war, but even the best-case scenario would clearly be incredibly dire. This report shows that a large part of preventing the self-destruction of our species lies in raising our awareness of what we can do to ourselves.

“The idea of ​​a nuclear winter is often a permanent cultural memory, as if it were historical material rather than a terrible modern risk,” Ingraham says.

The full report can be read online at the Center for the Study of Existential Risk.