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Nuclear Winter or Nuclear Summer?
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10245 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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8 / 1986 |
2,440 Words |
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S. Fred Singer
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THE CONTROVERSIES
The hypothesis that a major nuclear war would lead to severe climate consequences affecting the whole earth has become quite controversial. On the one hand, supporters of the theory argue that weeks and months of darkness and freezing (the "nuclear winter") would destroy agricultural crops and much of the world's biota, causing misery to the surviving human population; some have gone further and speculated that such a climate event would spell the end of the human species on this planet.
On the other hand, the theory has been attacked as a scientific hoax, with political motives ascribed to its originators, who are most charitably described as political simpletons.
There is some middle ground, but not a great deal. Careful reading of the main scientific paper reveals that the authors -Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, and Sagan (hereafter, TTAPS) - leave open many loopholes that would make the nuclear winter less certain. A subsequent report by the prestigious U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) raises even more uncertainties. This has given rise to a sub-controversy, with Professor Sagan claiming that the NAS report supports the TTAPS work, while at least one member of the NAS panel strongly disagrees.
A separate controversy has developed about the policy implications of the TTAPS study. On the one hand, supporters of the nuclear-freeze movement have taken over the theory to prove their point, with the willing cooperation of Professor Sagan. On the other hand, the nuclear-winter phenomenon has been used to support the case for the Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"). One interesting point: Soviet use of nuclear weapons is more likely to lead to world wide climate effects tan use by the United States; also, the Soviet Union is more vulnerable to these effects than the United States. European Russia could be wiped out, leaving the Asiatic apart of the USSR as a "greater Afghanistan."
A veritable cottage industry has sprung up around the nuclear-winter /nuclear-freeze issue, complete with bumper stickers, T-shirts, and, of course, a "grass roots" committee with offices in Washington, D.C. The "bible" of the movement is The Cold and the Dark, a book that reprints or rehashes what has been published. It has been gushily reviewed as the most important work since the Bible and the collected works of Shakespeare.
Even the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU) has weighed in with yet another study that elaborates much of the earlier work. An expensive undertaking, it has been expensively published. According to ICSU, all of humanity would not be wiped out, merely two to three billion people. By contrast, a sober analysis of the aftereffects of nuclear war leads to quite different prescriptions on how to avoid a holocaust.
The Scientific Basis
During all this controversy, sight has been lost of the essential scientific issue: is the nuclear-winter phenomenon real? My thesis is simple: even granting many of the artificial assumptions made by TTAPS and by the subsequent NAS study, a worldwide cooling is unlikely. On the contrary, if we take proper account of the so-called atmospheric greenhouse
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