We’re at a scary moment internationally as tensions escalate between the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan, and we should all be praying for things to calm down. In addition to the horrible death toll and humanitarian crisis that would follow, according to scientists, a small-scale nuclear war could actually reverse global warming and actually cause devastating global cooling.

To be abundantly clear, what follows isn’t meant as a how-to guide advocating nuclear war as some sort of out-of-the box alternative solution to climate change. It’s meant as a description of the science surrounding how a theoretical regional nuclear war could affect the Earth’s atmosphere, and thus the climate, even for people not directly in the blast radius.