The United States and Russia are dangerously close to stumbling into a war over Ukraine that could go nuclear and kill hundreds of millions of people in a single day, a Nobel laureate who is one of the world\u2019s leading experts on the dangers of nuclear weapons warned in Washington this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly dangerous situation. \u2026 If there\u2019s a nuclear war tonight, that\u2019s the Northern Hemisphere (of the entire world) gone, Dr. Helen Caldicott told a National\u00a0Press Club Newsmakers news conference\u00a0on Wednesday<\/span>. She was speaking on the topic: \u201cUkraine: Is Nuclear Conflict Likely?\u201d<\/p>\n Caldicott is an Australian physician who founded the International Physicians against Nuclear War, a group that under her leadership won the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize. She is the former\u00a0president of the Nuclear Policy Research Institute based in Washington<\/p>\n The expansion of NATO to Russia\u2019s borders is \u201cvery, very dangerous,\u201d Caldicott said. \u201cThere is no way a war between the United States and Russia could start and not go nuclear. \u2026 The United States and Russia have enormous stockpiles of these weapons. Together they have 94 percent of all the 16,300 nuclear weapons in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are in a very fallible, very dangerous situation operated by mere mortals,\u201d she warned. \u201cThe nuclear weapons, are sitting there, thousands of them. They are ready to be used.\u201d<\/p>\n Caldicott strongly criticized Obama administration policymakers for their actions in forward positioning U.S. and NATO military units in countries of Eastern Europe in response to Russian support of breakaway separatists in the provinces of eastern Ukraine. On \u2014, the U.S. government announced the deployment of the Ironhorse Brigade, an elite armored cavalry unit of the U.S. Army to the former Soviet republics of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, along the historic invasion route from the West to St. Petersburg.<\/p>\n