ISLAMABAD, Dec 10: More than two billion people — a quarter of the world’s population — would be at risk of starvation in the event of a limited nuclear exchange, such as the one that could occur between India and Pakistan, or by the use of even a small number of nuclear weapons held by the US and Russia, says a report by an organisation founded by experts from the US and the former Soviet Union.

The second edition of the report, titled ‘Nuclear Famine: Two Billion People at Risk — Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition’ released on Tuesday by the Nobel Peace Prize-winning ‘International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War’ (IPPNW), explains how the use of even relatively small nuclear arsenals of countries such as India and Pakistan could cause long lasting, global damage to ecosystems.

A nuclear war using as few as 100 weapons anywhere in the world would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than two billion people would be in jeopardy, the report said.

The findings paint an even grimmer picture in the case of nuclear famine, saying that China’s winter wheat production would fall 50 per cent in the first year and, averaged over the entire decade after the war, would be 31pc below baseline.

More than a billion additional people in China would face severe food insecurity. The total number of people threatened by a nuclear-war induced famine would be well over two billion. Corn production in the US would decline by an average of 10pc for an entire decade, with the most severe decline (20pc) in five years, soybean production would decline by about 7pc, with the most severe loss, more than 20pc, in five years.

There would be a significant decline in middle season rice production in China, and during the first four years rice production would decline by an average of 21pc; over the next 6 years the decline would average 10pc.

Increases in food prices would make food inaccessible to hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest. Even if agricultural markets continued to function normally, 215 million people would be added to the rolls of the malnourished over the course of a decade.

‘Nuclear Famine’ is the second IPPNW report to address the global health and environmental consequences of a nuclear war using only a fraction of the more than 20,000 nuclear weapons in the world today.