Global industrial disruption following nuclear war

Simon Blouin, Florian Ulrich Jehn, David Denkenberger

Nuclear war poses catastrophic risks not only through its immediate effects and potential nuclear winter, but also through the disruption of industrial production on which modern civilization depends. We first derive a nuclear weapon destruction radius scaling relationship from historical data and fire modelling and combine it with OpenStreetMap industrial facility locations to calculate direct infrastructure losses. We then quantify supply-chain amplification by fitting a power-law relationship between infrastructure loss and output decline across seven historical disruptions. In an India-Pakistan exchange where each side strikes the other's urban centres with 85 warheads of 15 kilotons, we estimate reductions of approximately 5% and 22% of India's and Pakistan's national industrial outputs. We also modelled a US-Russia scenario where Russia strikes the United States with 2,030 warheads of 100-800 kilotons following an open-source target list. We assume proportionally similar damage for Russia. National industrial output reductions reach approximately 58% in each country, which, combined with trade-mediated spillovers, implies a global industrial output decline of at least 20%. Financial contagion, high-altitude electromagnetic pulse attacks and escalation to other NATO states would push the disruption substantially higher. Such industrial collapse would severely impair humanity's ability to meet basic needs and adapt to nuclear winter.