A Formal Framework for Measuring Institutional Collapse under a Nuclear Winter Scenario

Noah Peters

A medium-scale regional nuclear exchange could plausibly loft ~16 Teragrams (16 * 10¹² grams, Tg) of soot into the stratosphere, sufficient to reduce conventional agricultural output past the ~30% threshold at which large-scale starvation emerges. Alternative food-production methods could restore sufficient caloric supply in the United States, but scaling them to ~70% of pre-shock capacity requires at least 12 months. This creates a critical 6-12 month bridge during which survival depends on existing food stocks, rapid diversion of calories, and the continued functioning of the institutions that enable their distribution.

We argue that this bridge is a problem not only of aggregate food availability but also of economic and political coordination. A severe food shock could either result from or exacerbate institutional collapse, or conversely, institutional deterioration could severely compromise food distribution, among other things. Although nuclear winter's consequences for agriculture have received substantial attention, comparatively little work has examined such a scenario's impact on the potential breakdown of certain critical economic and political institutions. This research gap is particularly important in light of the survival of populations during the first year after a nuclear exchange likely depending less on latent food-production capacity than on whether the institutional mechanisms necessary for allocating existing calories remain functional.

Hence, we suppose that currency stability, as well as viable contract and property-rights enforcement, are necessary for the functioning of a nationwide price mechanism, which is in turn the most efficient means for distributing remaining foodstuffs and scaling up the alternative production methods. We seek to model these institutions as tippable coordination equilibria. Doing so produces a quantitative measurement of these institutions' risk of collapse in the wake of a nuclear winter scenario and permits us to define a country-level fragility index based on the distance from the weakest institution to its tipping point. We restrict the analysis to the United States and estimate institutional fragility under two primary scenarios: a regional India--Pakistan exchange, in which the primary shock is soot concentration in the stratosphere, and a U.S.--great-power exchange, in which soot is compounded by direct blast damage to the nation's infrastructure. Our objective is to identify which institution is most likely to collapse first and thereby determine which peacetime investments and policy measures could most cost-effectively preserve economic coordination.