What are the odds? When I heard that a study that was released in 2019 had analyzed the damage that would be done by a nuclear war between India and Pakistan in 2025, I knew that I had to investigate. It turns out that this study really does exist. According to the authors of the study, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan in 2025 would cause up to 125 million direct fatalities and would produce a nuclear winter which would cripple global food production…
A nuclear war between India and Pakistan — which share a long history of conflicts — would not only result in 50 to 125 million direct fatalities but could jeopardize the entire planet, causing sharp drops in global temperatures and precipitation that could devastate the world’s food supply, according to a new study published October 2 in Science Advances.
The authors evaluated a simulated nuclear war scenario for the year 2025 between the two countries based on advice from policy and military experts. They find that if Pakistan attacks urban targets in 2025 with 150 nuclear weapons and if India responds with 100 nuclear weapons, depending on the size of the weapons, ranging from 15-kiloton to 100-kiloton, smoke from burning cities would release 16 to 36 teragrams of black carbon into the atmosphere, blocking out sunlight and cooling the global surface by 2 to 5°C (3.6 to 9°F).
Is it just a coincidence that they picked the year 2025?
If so, that is pretty wild, because a war between India and Pakistan has just broken out.
If you read the actual study, you will discover that it says that a nuclear war between these two nations would cause “mass starvation” around the world and it would take “more than 10 years” for the global climate to fully recover…
Pakistan and India may have 400 to 500 nuclear weapons by 2025 with yields from tested 12- to 45-kt values to a few hundred kilotons. If India uses 100 strategic weapons to attack urban centers and Pakistan uses 150, fatalities could reach 50 to 125 million people, and nuclear-ignited fires could release 16 to 36 Tg of black carbon in smoke, depending on yield. The smoke will rise into the upper troposphere, be self-lofted into the stratosphere, and spread globally within weeks. Surface sunlight will decline by 20 to 35%, cooling the global surface by 2° to 5°C and reducing precipitation by 15 to 30%, with larger regional impacts. Recovery takes more than 10 years. Net primary productivity declines 15 to 30% on land and 5 to 15% in oceans threatening mass starvation and additional worldwide collateral fatalities.
This is why we should all be very deeply concerned about what is happening on the other side of the planet right now.
If nuclear weapons are used, we could soon find ourselves in the middle of a horrifying global famine.
According to a British news source, we are witnessing “the worst fighting between the nuclear-armed neighbours in nearly three decades”…
New Delhi has been placed on high alert, with all government employee leave canceled, as India and Pakistan accuse each other of launching military attacks in the worst fighting between the nuclear-armed neighbours in nearly three decades. India’s Defence Minister Rajnath Singh stated that Pakistan’s armed forces launched multiple drone and missile attacks across 15 cities along the western border on Thursday night and Friday morning, which were “effectively repulsed.”
Islamabad was also accused of “numerous ceasefire violations” along the Line of Control in Jammu & Kashmir, receiving a “befitting reply,” according to Indian officials. Targets included military stations in Jammu, Pathankot, and Udhampur.
News outlets in the United States are not giving this conflict nearly the coverage that it deserves.
Last night, there was very heavy artillery fire along the line of control…
Indian and Pakistani soldiers exchanged heavy volleys of shells and gunfire across their frontier in Kashmir overnight, killing at least five civilians in a growing military standoff that erupted following an attack on tourists in the India-controlled portion of the disputed region.
In Pakistan, an unusually intense night of artillery exchanges left at least four civilians dead and wounded 12 others in areas near the Line of Control that divides Kashmir, local police official Adeel Ahmad said. People in border towns said the firing continued well into Friday morning.
And earlier this week we witnessed a dogfight that is being called “one of the largest air battles since World War Two”…
Some 125 Indian and Pakistani fighter jets battled for over an hour in one of the biggest dogfights in recent history, according to a Pakistani security source quoted by CNN.
If the numbers of aircraft were confirmed, it would make it one of the largest air battles since World War Two.
Pakistan has also been sending hundreds of drones into India, but it appears that most of those drones are being intercepted.
This is a very, very serious situation.
When asked about the fighting on Friday, Pakistan Defense Minister Khawaja Asif responded by admitting that a full-blown war is here…
Pakistan Defence Minister Khawaja Asif on Friday said that Islamabad has “no option left other than full a blown war” in response to what he described as India’s increasingly aggressive posture over the past four days.
“We dont have any other options other than this …. We have to pay them back in the same coin,” said Asif in an interview to a Pakistani news channel.
When the anchor asked if the “war is at our door?”, he replied, “Absolutely, there shouldn’t be any doubt on this…”
For the good of humanity, the U.S. government needs to step in and try to mediate this crisis.
But Vice-President JD Vance insists that what is happening on the other side of the planet is “none of our business”…
“Look, we’re concerned about any time nuclear powers collide and have a major conflict,” Vance told Fox News’s Martha MacCallum in a segment. “What we can do is try to encourage these folks to de-escalate a little bit.”
That’s when he emphasized that the South Asian conflict is “none of our business” and that Washington acknowledges its inability to control outcomes in the restive region.
“But we’re not going to get involved in the middle of war that’s fundamentally none of our business and has nothing to do with America’s ability to control it,” he asserted.
I fundamentally disagree.
If either India or Pakistan decides to use nuclear weapons, the other side will do the same.
The resulting nuclear winter would kill hundreds of millions of people all over the world.
In fact, we would actually see Americans starve to death in such a scenario.
So it is very much in our national interest to bring the fighting to an end.
Hopefully we will see someone step in to defuse this crisis before it is too late.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.