James' World 2

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Hmmmm….Man’s inhumanity to man, where are the silos? Thank goodness for our 3 tier power structure!

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We are living in a scary time. After a terrorist attack that killed at least 26  people, mostly Indian tourists, in Kashmir in April, India blamed the attack on Pakistan, threatened to cut off that nation’s water supplies, and followed up in May with airstrikes. Pakistan has promised a “measured but forceful response,” threatening a wider war endangering everyone.

India and Pakistan each have about 170 nuclear weapons. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan would produce smoke from fires in cities and industrial areas. That smoke would rise into the stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above the troposphere where we live, which has no rain to wash out the smoke. Our research has found that the smoke would block out the sun, making it cold, dark, and dry at Earth’s surface, choking agriculture for five years or more around the world. The result would be global famine.

Like it or not, humanity still has a nuclear dagger pointed at its throat. But there is another choice that starts with the U.S. If we take our land-based missiles off their hair-trigger alerts and negotiate with Russia to reduce our nuclear arsenal, we could set an example for the rest of the world. If we eventually sign the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, the U.S. could provide an example to Iran and other nations with an interest in building their own nuclear arsenal.

The alternatives are terrifying. One of us (Robock) published an article in Scientific American 15 years ago describing how a war in South Asia, like the one now possible between India and Pakistan, could produce global climate change and threaten the world’s food supply, but we did not know how large that threat would be. In the years since then, we have calculated, for a range of smoke amounts released from nuclear war, the specific effects on agriculture in each nation. From there, we estimated how the people would fare under the assumption that their stored food was gone, trade was halted, and they kept the same agricultural activity. A nuclear war between India and Pakistan could kill one to two billion people through starvation in the two years after the war.

The U.S. and Russia have more than 8,000 nuclear weapons. A nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could kill more than six billion people around the world in the following two years. The direct impacts of blast, radiation, and fire on those attacked by nuclear weapons would be horrific, as we know from what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, but 10 to 20 times more people would die from famine.

Many people assume that there will never be another nuclear war, since it has now been 80 years and several generations since the last one. They also have been told that nuclear deterrence must be maintained to keep us safe. Yet threats to use nuclear weapons from Russia and North Korea, and even from the U.S. president, have worried many. The New START treaty, the only remaining arms control agreement between the U.S. and Russia, expires next year. China is rapidly increasing its nuclear arsenal.

President Trump just proposed a budget for the next fiscal year with a 13 percent increase for the Defense Department. This is exactly the wrong  direction for the U.S. A substantial part of the defense budget is for a “modernization” of our nuclear arsenal. Our nuclear “triad” is composed of land-based missiles, submarine missiles and nuclear bombs that could be dropped from airplanes. We already have all of these, and they cannot be used without the risk of killing almost all the people on the planet. They need to be removed, not modernized.

Deterrence is a myth. The theory is that we will not be attacked because we will attack an enemy if they attack us, thus deterring them. But in order for it to work, they have to believe that we will act as a suicide bomber. That is, that we will attack an enemy, producing so much smoke that we will be unable to grow any crops for more than five years, and thus all starve to death. This is not mutual assured destruction (the so-called “MAD” theory). It is self-assured destruction (SAD).

The upcoming Independent Study on Potential Environmental Effects of Nuclear War, a report from the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine due out this summer, the first such report since 1985, will make this danger more plain.

The rest of the world well understands the risk we all face. In 2017, after three international conferences on the humanitarian consequences of the use of nuclear weapons, including the indirect effects on food supply based on our work, the United Nations passed the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which prohibits possession, manufacture, development and testing of nuclear weapons, stationing and installment of nuclear weapons or assistance in such activities, by its parties. The treaty came into force on January 22, 2021. There are currently 94 signatories and 73 states parties, but the nine countries, notably including the U.S., with nuclear weapons have not signed it and are trying to ignore the will of the rest of world.

The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which led the effort to get this treaty, was awarded the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize “for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons.”

For deterrence to succeed, there must be no use of nuclear weapons by accident, terrorists, computer malfunctions, hackers or unstable leaders. We have come close many times. As Beatrice Fihn, executive director of ICAN, said in her Nobel Peace Prize Lecture on December 10, 2017, “If only a small fraction of today’s nuclear weapons were used, soot and smoke from the firestorms would loft high into the atmosphere—cooling, darkening and drying the Earth’s surface for more than a decade. It would obliterate food crops, putting billions at risk of starvation. Yet we continue to live in denial of this existential threat.… The story of nuclear weapons will have an ending, and it is up to us what that ending will be. Will it be the end of nuclear weapons, or will it be the end of us? One of these things will happen. The only rational course of action is to cease living under the conditions where our mutual destruction is only one impulsive tantrum away.”

When Carl Sagan, a leader in early nuclear-winter research, was asked if he didn’t want to keep our nuclear weapons as a deterrent, he said: “For myself, I would far rather have a world in which the climatic catastrophe cannot happen, independent of the vicissitudes of leaders, institutions, and machines. This seems to me elementary planetary hygiene, as well as elementary patriotism.” We agree.

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On November 23, 1903, the Iroquois Theatre opened in Chicago to rave reviews. “Few theaters in America can rival its architectural perfections,” applauded one commentator. The venue was “absolutely fireproof,” its playbills boasted.

Five weeks later, during a December 30 holiday matinee performance with 1,800 people in the audience, the Iroquois was engulfed in flames. Until the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center in 2001, it was the worst building disaster in the U.S.

Underwriters Laboratories, founded in 1894 to promote safety, joined the investigation into what went wrong at the Iroquois. The building didn’t have a single fire alarm. Crucial escape routes were barred with locked doors. And the one safety tool that could have stopped the fire at its initial spark, when an ​​electric light ignited a curtain backstage, didn’t work: the fire extinguisher.

“A man put 10 cents’ worth of baking soda in a 5-cent tin tube. He sold it for $3 as a fire extinguisher,” fumed UL founder William Henry Merrill, Jr., likening the contraption to a phony magic wand. “Unfortunately, there was nothing ‘make-believe’ about the fire, and the result was very real to the families and the friends of over 600 women and children, whose lives were sacrificed that a man might make a profit of $2.”

Determined to prevent such pointless tragedies in the future, Merrill created a certification operation to assure the public that products with its distinctive mark had been scientifically tested and could be used safely. More than a century later, UL is still at the forefront of fire prevention.

“What made us relevant in the late 1800s is the same thing that has us relevant today, if not more,” says Steve Kerber, vice president and executive director of the Fire Safety Research Institute (FSRI), a part of UL Research Institutes (ULRI). “We’re trying to understand these new products or behaviors or technologies when they’re a concept … to understand the impact they have before people die.”

Danger at the Edge of Town

FSRI and its partners among ULRI’s other research institutes are focused on two main issues, both born of new technological and societal developments: fires caused by lithium-ion batteries and fires that ignite where wildland and urban development meet.

Wildland-urban interface fires, as they’re called, are especially hazardous. Not only do they threaten homes and businesses but “the fuel that can burn includes many things of human origin: plastics, fuels, energy-storage systems, solar panels and more,” says Christopher J. Cramer, ULRI’s interim president and chief research officer. “The gases and particulates that are produced under these circumstances are likely to be much more dangerous.”

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With graduation season just a few days away, it’s almost the time to throw up those caps and gowns, but unfortunately, that’s not the only thing being thrown around. So are the anxieties of a younger generation that is graduating into what might be the harshest economy in more than ten years. 

Not only did these kids start college during a pandemic, but now they’re finishing with inflation through the roof, a housing market that seems unattainable, and a job market that’s arguably even worse than 2008 (and for the millennials, if you know, you know). Throw in student loans, and you’ve got a perfect storm of financial stress.

Intuit released their Prosperity Index for 2025 graduates, and the findings are… well, they’re pretty much what you’d expect given everything we’ve been seeing discussed surrounding the economy as of late. But the numbers put some real perspective on what we’re seeing.

About 42% of new grads say they’re “cautiously optimistic” about their financial future as they tiptoe into adulthood. And the way these young adults define success looks nothing like what their parents were chasing at the same age. Almost 60% say having a decent savings account equals success in 2025. And 43% just want to make rent without having a panic attack every month. That’s not exactly “corner office and vacation home” territory, is it?

What’s really telling is that most of these young people are avoiding long-term goals altogether. The economy’s so unpredictable that three-quarters of gen-z graduates argue what’s the point of planning? Nearly half say they’re even more hesitant to plan long-term than they were last year.

What’s keeping them up at night? Cost of living tops the list for practically everyone (97%). Job security isn’t far behind at 87%. Then there’s saving money (47%), paying bills (31%), debt (31%), budgeting (29%), building credit (28%), and housing costs (25%). Basically, everything about money is stressing them out.

But there’s something weird happening with all this stress. Instead of doubling down on the traditional get-a-good-job path, the Class of 2025 is going in a completely different direction. They’re becoming entrepreneurs by necessity.

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Young adults in graduation gowns joyfully tossing caps into the sky, celebrating achievement and new beginnings against a clear backdrop

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