Nuclear Winter: Scientists in the Political Arena

Phys. perspect. 3 (2001) 76–105 © Birkhauser Verlag, Basel, 20011422–6944/01/010076–30 $ 1.50+0.20/0

Nuclear Winter: Scientists in the Political Arena

Lawrence Badash*

The nuclear winter phenomenon is used to illustrate the many paths by which scientific advice reachesdecision makers in the United States government. Because the Reagan administration was hostile to thestrategic policy that the scientific discovery seemed to demand, the leading proponent of nuclear winter,Carl Sagan, used his formidable talent for popularization to reach a larger audience.

Key words: Carl Sagan; Nuclear winter; climatic catastrophe; nuclear war; urbanfires; soot; scientific advice; science policy.

Until the twentieth century it was exceedingly rare for scientists to become involvedin matters of state. Even then they did so only occasionally, as when the publicdebated the wisdom and morality of poison gas warfare after World War I. In asmall book entitled Callinicus, biochemist J. B. S. Haldane vigorously defended gasas more humane than explosives.1 Scientists next were catapulted onto the publicscene by another war and another weapon; they tried in 1945 and 1946 to explainthe political dangers of the atomic bomb to a citizenry which remained for a whilein awe of these promethean creatures. Under the banner of ‘‘civilian control ofatomic energy,’’ scientists pressured Congress into creating an Atomic EnergyCommission (AEC) of whose structure they generally approved. Yet, as lobbyists,they – and everyone else – failed to build a counterpart agency within the UnitedNations.2

By mid-century, scientists seemed to be frequent lobbyists, if not permanentfixtures, in the corridors of power. But a tension existed: while they dealt withtechnical issues, their advocacy was a political act, a value judgment. They soughtto influence policy decisions in which there was no ‘‘scientific truth,’’ but merelychoice. In the decades of the arms race that followed, scientists voiced opinions ona variety of weapons systems and arms control measures, using their professionalexpertise to explore and illuminate the viability of programs that ultimately werepolitical. Such efforts were pursued in their various roles as government officials(such as the president’s science advisor), federal employees (as in the Los Alamosand Livermore nuclear weapons laboratories – despite the fiction of having theUniversity of California manage these labs), consultants (members of the AEC’sGeneral Advisory Committee, for example), employees of defense contractors (such

* Lawrence Badash, whose primary interest is in twentieth-century physics, is professor of history ofscience at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

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as RAND Corporation staff), members of professional societies (the AmericanPhysical Society), members of scientific policy groups (Federation of AmericanScientists), and as private citizens.

The most visible occasions of policy involvement were the ‘‘Scientists’ Move-ment’’ just after World War II, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) controversyaround 1970, and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) debate beginning in 1983.3

Less noted was the nuclear winter controversy, also starting in 1983, which revealsthe rich texture of the process in which government was presented with new andominous consequences of nuclear warfare and was expected to act. Naıve logicwould have the executive branch accept the scientific advice and alter strategicpolicy accordingly, by marked reductions in the nuclear arsenal. But the politicsthat brought the administration to office required a diametrically opposite path,one of increasing offensive and defensive capabilities. It was the genius of theReagan White House to co-opt nuclear winter and claim it was preventing thisdisaster by continuing its arms buildup. Scientists thereby failed in their goal ofpolitical action. Still, historical attention to this event can illuminate the remarkablymultifaceted pathways that exist to inform the administration (and the public)about scientific issues that impinge on national policy. Just as American scientistsluxuriate in the multiple agencies from which they can request research funds – farbetter than a US Department of Science as the only source – scientific advice alsois ‘‘pluralistic,’’ reaching its destinations in a variety of ways.

Nuclear Strategy

Can a weapon be so horrible as to make war unlikely? This allegedly was claimedwhen Greek fire, the crossbow, gunpowder, the machine gun, poison gas, theairplane, and other novel technologies were first introduced. Yet, countermeasureswere created and these tools became widely employed. When nuclear weapons wereinvented in 1945, they were quickly used by the US on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Minimal opposition arose prior to these bombings while more significant andsustained criticism continued in the following decades, but the US government wascommitted to building and improving its nuclear arsenal. Scientists, includingAlbert Einstein and many Manhattan Project alumni, were active in efforts toinform both government and public of the danger in relying on nuclear weapons.They argued that such weapons were immoral, caused excessive damage, or gave afalse sense of security, yet a majority of Americans in the years immediately afterWorld War II felt that fission bombs were our best protection against a hostileSoviet Union. If necessary, citizens believed, these weapons would be used. Ourmonopoly of this technology ended in 1949 with the detonation of ‘‘Joe-1,’’ namedafter Premier Stalin, and the arms race truly became a contest in science andtechnology.4

The Soviet bomb provoked an American response: the search for fusion orhydrogen weapons. Both superpowers developed such explosives in the 1950s andboth succeeded in launching missiles of intercontinental range, capable of carryingnuclear warheads. These accomplishments inspired more people to think about the

L. Badash Phys. perspect.78

ways in which nuclear weapons could be used, or whether they could be used at all.Social scientists joined physical scientists at such ‘‘think tanks’’ as the RANDCorporation, and the public became familiar with ‘‘defense intellectuals’’ BernardBrodie, Thomas Schelling, Herman Kahn, Albert Wohlstetter, Henry Kissinger andothers. Most of their analyses concerned ways to employ nuclear weapons whilelimiting the extent of the war.5

The Truman administration’s strategy had been called ‘‘containment,’’ seeking topatrol the perimeter of the USSR against expansion. Next came ‘‘massive retalia-tion,’’ the approach enshrined by the administration of Dwight Eisenhower, whichplanned to strike at major assets if the Soviets advanced seriously beyond WarsawPact borders. Both concepts were rooted in a willingness to fight an all-out nuclearwar. Although tactical nuclear weapons had been developed in the 1950s, many feltthat the losing side on the battlefield would employ ever larger ‘‘nukes’’ and theconflict would escalate quickly to total war, despite the assurances of the strategists.When John Kennedy entered the presidency in 1961, he rejected massive retaliationand asserted a strategy of ‘‘flexible response.’’ This emphasized conventional forces,but nuclear forces were far from neglected. Increasingly, not actual use of nuclearweapons but the ability to threaten their use – deterrence – became the reason tomaintain stockpiles of them.6

In the following decades the weapons and their delivery systems were improved,with protection of the weapons becoming more and more an issue. Survivabilityoptions included an airborne alert, in which nuclear-armed B-52s were rotatedaloft, to prevent total loss if their airfields were attacked. They included nuclear-armed and nuclear-powered submarines, difficult to locate in their opaque andthree-dimensional environment. Mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs),such as the MX, were another means of evading incoming warheads. And defensesto shoot down enemy warheads were attempted (unsuccessfully), including variousNIKE systems of the early 1960s, the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) system of thelate 1960s and early 1970s, Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) ofthe 1980s, and its current incarnation, National Missile Defense. The goal in allthese endeavors was to maintain the credibility of our nuclear deterrent; an enemywould know it was impossible to destroy our entire arsenal in a surprise attack, sowould refrain from facing our wrath. On occasion these defensive systems sought toprotect urban populations, but primarily they defended ICBMs. Thus, throughoutthe years of the Cold War a tension existed among the war-fighters who plannedand trained to send nuclear weapons to their enemy targets, those who saw themvaluable only as a deterrent, and those who advocated total abolition (or nearlytotal) because they truly were doomsday machines.7

In his presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan charged that Jimmy Carterhad allowed a ‘‘window of vulnerability’’ to open, through which the Soviets couldthreaten the US with impunity. Once in office, he increased both defense spendingand the temperature of the Cold War. In preparation for a supposed Soviet attack,civil defense measures to evacuate cities were resurrected. In response to a provoca-tive deployment in Eastern Europe by the Soviets of SS-20 intermediate-rangeballistic missiles (IRBMs), the US implanted comparable Pershing II ballisticmissiles and ground-launched cruise missiles in Western Europe. In this inflamed


atmosphere the largest antinuclear demonstration ever held in America – over700,000 people marching in New York City – occurred in June 1982, and JonathanSchell’s enormously popular book, The Fate of the Earth (1982), appeared, reflect-ing public disenchantment with the casual attitude towards nuclear weaponsdisplayed by government officials.8

Research on the climatic consequences of nuclear explosions began long beforeReagan was a force on the national scene, but the policies suggested to contendwith nuclear winter were shaped by the political developments and high tensions ofthe Reagan era. Indeed, this response was a challenge to the administration’s strongemphasis on nuclear war-fighting. While many groups opposed the bellicosity of thegovernment (including the Nuclear Freeze campaign, Council for a Livable World,Federation of American Scientists, Union of Concerned Scientists, Center forDefense Information, and Physicians for Social Responsibility), the policy debateover nuclear winter was largely limited to voices from the scientific community.

Nuclear Winter

The nuclear winter phenomenon was unveiled to the public in the Parade magazinesupplement found in many Sunday newspapers on October 30, 1983. PulitzerPrize-winning author, television star, and Cornell astrophysicist Carl Sagan usedthis unorthodox venue for a scientific announcement both to reach an audience oftwenty million readers with information he considered to be vital, and also toprovide some hard copy for a meeting that opened the next day, Halloween.9 Thetwo-day event, held in Washington, D.C., was called The Conference on theLong-Term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War, but it was less ascientific congress for its audience of several hundred than a staged scientificannouncement designed to publicize a new danger from nuclear explosions and,inferentially, a new argument for the elimination of such weapons.10

Sagan and two former students (O. Brian Toon and James Pollack, both of theNASA Ames Research Center) had been joined by two other atmospheric scientists(Thomas Ackerman, also of NASA Ames, and Richard Turco, of Research andDevelopment Associates, a defense contractor) in a study of the climatic conse-quences of nuclear war (see figure 1). Their work had not been focused initially onnuclear explosions, but over the previous decade a number of their individual andjoint projects had given them the tools to address this complex question. Theastonishing conclusion they reached, called the nuclear winter phenomenon, wasthat blackened skies of long duration could result from the massive urban fires thatwere expected, and this would lead to a rapid cooling of the earth’s surface.11

Before this prediction could emerge from their computer program, however, theyhad to blend together data and processes from several scientific specialties thatnormally did not ‘‘talk’’ to one another. These included nuclear explosion effects,fire and smoke research, particle microphysics, and atmospheric chemistry, fieldsthat were logically connected to the problem. It also embraced volcanic eruptions,ozone depletion, planetary probes, and the extinction of dinosaurs, subjects thatwere more distant from conventional thinking about the consequences of nuclear


explosions. This synthesis was underway when in June 1982 it received majorencouragement from a paper published in the Swedish environmental journal,Ambio. The authors, Paul Crutzen and John Birks, suggested that nuclear-ignitedfires would be of greater consequence than formerly believed, because of the largequantities of light-absorbing soot in the smoke, and made a quantitative estimate ofthe effect of forest fires.12

With a draft of their work completed, in April 1983, Sagan and his colleaguesheld a private review with some one hundred scientists in Cambridge, Massachu-setts. While the primary goal was to see if anyone could show a fatal flaw in theirargument, it was also a time to begin gathering needed backing from the scientificcommunity for future policy choices. The scientific research, both physical andbiological, was discussed in Cambridge and supported by most of those in atten-dance, though critics then and later contended vociferously that the science wasflawed. Not until the end of December 1983, after the Parade article and theHalloween-time conference in Washington, did a paper on nuclear winter appear ina refereed periodical, Science. In a nation that loves acronyms, it was perhapsinevitable that the group would be identified by the authors’ initials as TTAPS.13 Acompanion paper on the ecological consequences of nuclear winter also appeared inScience, but the team, headed by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich (figure 2), was toolarge to be condensed into an acronym.14

Many of the effects of nuclear weapons were well known. For decades scientistsstudied the consequences of the blast, thermal pulse, prompt X rays and gammarays, radioactive fallout, and the electromagnetic pulse. More recent investigations

Fig. 1. Richard Turco, Carl Sagan, and O. Brian Toon (left to right) in 1994. Courtesy of O. BrianToon.


Fig. 2. Paul R. Ehrlich. Courtesy of Paul R. Ehrlich.

involved the fireball’s ability to affect the stratospheric ozone layer and, inspired bythe hypothesis that dinosaurs died after an asteroid slammed into the earth, theeffect of dust lofted into the air after a nuclear explosion. The new TTAPS finding,by a group that was essentially unaffiliated with the defense establishment, focusedon the fires that would be ignited in urban areas in a nuclear war. The concentra-tion of oil, gas, coal, wood, and plastics in cities made them enormous sources ofblack, sooty smoke. According to computer predictions, the soot would trap heatand light in the high troposphere for long periods, causing a dramatic drop intemperature on the earth’s darkened surface. The TTAPS group predicted thattemperatures well below freezing, lasting for months, would destroy civilization inat least the northern temperate zone (between the Tropic of Cancer and the ArcticCircle) and kill many species of flora and fauna. The climatic catastrophe would killmore humans in non-combatant nations than on the battlefields of thesuperpowers.

For many this might have been a gigantic ethical issue. Freeman Dyson, thebrilliant physicist and acclaimed author, mused in his 1988 volume entitled Infinitein All Directions, that


Nuclear winter is not primarily a technical problem; it is much more a moral andpolitical problem. It forces us to ask fundamental questions: whether the benefitswhich we derive from the possession of nuclear weapons are in any waycommensurate with the risks; whether the risk of irreparable damage to the fabricof life on Earth can in any way be morally justified.15

Yet Dyson was but one of a surprising few who raised the issue of morality in thenuclear winter debate. The Catholic bishops, other theologians, and scholars whorecently addressed concepts of just war, deterrence, and various aspects of thenuclear arms race fell virtually silent regarding nuclear winter, and would maintainthat serenity again in 1986 when the Methodist bishops condemned the policy ofdeterrence.16 So too, curiously, were the nation’s various ‘‘peace’’ groups, whosearguments were moralistic to a large degree; they seem to have decided to wait outthe technical controversy over nuclear winter before jumping into the political fray.

But politics were not to be delayed, as if awaiting the ‘‘peaceniks’’ to come onboard. Indeed, it was inevitable that politics would enter the nuclear winter picture,and do so at an early date. Not only did many of the scientist-participants lookupon nuclear winter as the ‘‘kick in the pants’’ needed to convince politicians,strategists, and the military that nuclear war could not be won, but any phe-nomenon that affected battlefield conditions and postwar recovery would have tobe part of the political calculus. From a different perspective, ‘‘hard liners’’ amongthe American public looked upon citizens who advocated anything less than anall-out arms race as agents or dupes of the Kremlin. Over the years, outspokenphysicians, physicists, and theologians were tarred with this disloyalty brush; nowbiologists who spoke of the consequences of nuclear winter joined them indisrepute. The stakes seemed particularly high in early November 1983, forPresident Reagan had just sent American forces to invade Grenada. Certainly, therewere no fears of nuclear combat over this tiny Caribbean island, but as a symbolof the administration’s bellicosity it was chilling; Americans had become all toofamiliar with Reagan’s label of the Soviet Union as the ‘‘evil empire,’’ Secretary ofDefense Caspar Weinberger’s comments about ‘‘prevailing’’ in a nuclear conflict,and Secretary of State Alexander Haig’s threat of a nuclear warning ‘‘shot acrossthe bow’’ of Soviet activities.17 New York Times columnist Tom Wicker assessedsuperpower relations as being ‘‘at the lowest level’’ since the Cuban Missile Crisis.18

Little more need be said about subsequent research on nuclear winter, the debateabout the validity of the phenomenon, or even the arms race, since these are not thefoci of this paper. From the stage set, we can appreciate how rich a vehicle nuclearwinter is in revealing the highways and byways by which government is informedabout scientific information and pressured to respond to scientific conclusions. Noserious student of this process would argue that it always follows bureaucraticorganizational flow charts, but, even expecting some diversity, nuclear winterillustrates its remarkable variety. The largely chronological story that follows windsthrough congressional hearings, mass-media magazines and newspapers, meetingsof scientific societies, television talk shows, events sponsored by citizens’ politicalaction groups, and such actions as political gamesmanship by federal laboratoryleaders, efforts to enlist the nominal enemy (the USSR), lining up support among


scientists thought to be most credible with the government, orchestrating a mediaevent, probing for interest among federal agencies, private lobbying of Congress,machinations of defense contractors, inspiring a study by the National Academy ofSciences, catching the eye of the US Navy, and authoring a major article in a policyjournal. Sagan was not, of course, responsible for all these actions and events, buthe was involved in many of them, lending a certain focus to the story.

Congress

Politics, of course, were always a part of the nuclear war picture and legislatorsdesired to be well informed. When atmospheric scientists Paul Crutzen and JohnBirks revealed the importance of black smoke to the postwar climate, Congressgrew more attentive to the subject. Just three months after the Crutzen-Birksmid-1982 paper appeared in Ambio, the Gore Subcommittee on Investigations andOversight, of the House Committee on Science and Technology, in September 1982,held a hearing called ‘‘The Consequences of Nuclear War on the Global Environ-ment.’’ Chaired by Democratic Congressman Albert Gore, Junior, who subse-quently became vice president of the United States and a noted environmentalist,the subcommittee was concerned about both the danger of conflict and theconditions in a postwar world. The panel called eight academic physicians andscientists (including Birks) to testify about the plausibility of surviving a nuclearwar. The Department of Defense and its Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA) also wereinvited, but declined to appear (probably because of expected criticism of Reaganadministration statements and policies).19

Witness James P. Friend, a chemistry professor from Drexel University who hadbeen on the 1975 National Academy of Sciences committee that studied theworldwide effects of nuclear war, provided a useful update of that report. In theyears since, the arsenals of both the US and Soviet Union had undergone changes.Missile nose cones containing several warheads (MIRVs, or Multiple Indepen-dently-targetable Reentry Vehicles) of greater accuracy and smaller yield replacedmany older versions. This suggested that a somewhat different mix of surface andaltitude detonations over targets would occur, reducing the amount of radioactivity,nitrogen oxides, and dust injected into the troposphere. However, when JuliusChang, of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, ran the new data throughhis computer model, he found relatively small changes in the results. The averagesurface temperature drop, lasting a few years, remained about half a degree Celsiusin this pre-nuclear winter calculation.20 Not until TTAPS brought soot from urbanfires into the equation would the temperature plummet.

Princeton physicist and Federation of American Scientists president Frank vonHippel highlighted the example before the committee, in which minimal funding (inSweden) produced momentous results. Ambio editor Jeannie Peterson, who com-missioned the Crutzen-Birks work, told him that the issue of the journal cost$35,000. Von Hippel reflected: ‘‘That is a pretty small amount compared to the tensof billions of dollars that we and the Soviets are spending each year on developingimproved abilities to use these weapons.’’21 Other scholars, who testified on civil


defense, ultraviolet radiation effects, radioactivity, disease, and medical response,included Sidney Drell, of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and H. JackGeiger, of the City College of New York’s School of Biomedical Education. Noknown legislation emerged from the subcommittee, but that is not uncommon.

Reader’s Digest

Congress, of course, is not the only forum for ideas. One of the country’s mostinfluential molders of public opinion – and even more so of official beliefs – hasbeen Edward Teller. Famous for his role in the development of the hydrogenbomb, infamous for his part in convincing the AEC in 1954 to withdraw J.Robert Oppenheimer’s security clearance, and notorious once again for beguilingPresident Reagan in 1983 to launch the Strategic Defense Initiative, Tellerworked seriously at pushing his ideas. He was also quite human, in that hecriticized others for doing as he did: advocating a national security policy on thebasis of a worst-case scenario that itself relied on uncertain scientific data.22

Reader’s Digest, another of the nation’s cold warriors, gave Teller a forum inNovember 1982 to warn about several ‘‘dangerous myths’’ concerning nuclearweapons. The TTAPS work, of course, would not be publicized for a year tocome and was not mentioned, but Teller was strangely silent about the Crutzen-Birks paper, now out several months. His focus, instead, was primarily on coun-tering arguments for a freeze on the production of nuclear weapons, a positionthen generating much political support, and secondarily on promoting civil de-fense measures and continued arms development, and on minimizing the fears offallout and ozone depletion. Human life, he insisted, would not be erased bynuclear war.23

This, one might say, was ‘‘vintage’’ Teller, trying to put the best face onnuclear conflict. Another venerable refrain was his cry that the data were insuffi-cient; yet, despite this lack, Teller felt that he could propose a policy position.He focused on the extent of ozone depletion following a large nuclear exchange;this needed more study. Even before such study, however, and ‘‘assuming aworst-case scenario’’ in which about half the superpowers’ strategic arsenals wereexploded in the atmosphere, with all weapons being at least one megaton in size,Teller accepted a probable 50 percent loss of the Northern Hemisphere’s ozoneshield. Such damage could be avoided, he said, by limiting warhead yield to 400kilotons, since the nitrogen oxides generated in this smaller fireball do not rise tothe stratosphere. Teller, steeped in the ways of the bargaining-chip school indealing with the Soviets, felt that ‘‘such a limitation should become an importantpart of disarmament talks.’’24

In this case, the technological imperative of reducing the weight of MIRVedwarheads so as to pack more of them atop a missile, coupled with less need forlarge yields due to improved targeting accuracy, made that 400 KT goal aunilaterally large part of the US arsenal. Regarding policy advocacy, however,before long the pot would call the kettle black.


NASA Ames Research Center

A year before the TTAPS paper appeared in Science, an abstract of the nuclearwinter concept was published in Eos, the journal of the American GeophysicalUnion (AGU). The abstract was for a paper scheduled to be read at the AGU’sannual meeting in San Francisco, on December 9, 1982, in a session entitled‘‘Climatic Variations on the Terrestrial Planets,’’ with TTAPS member JamesPollack in the chair.25 But, on December 8, Angelo Gustafero, the deputy directorof the NASA Ames Research Center, acting on his own initiative, called the AGUto say that the paper could not be presented. His explanation was that it had notbeen properly cleared at Ames; it was a bureaucratic problem. The paper waswithdrawn.

Brian Toon and James Pollack, the two co-authors of the work from Ames(Thomas Ackerman had not yet joined the group), and lead author Richard Turco,from NASA contractor R&D Associates, reluctantly agreed. When Gustaferoasked Turco, who was to be the speaker, to present something else, Turco declined,saying that he could not tell the audience ‘‘Forget about the abstract; I’m going totalk about volcanoes.’’ Even though the work was not a formally sponsoredinvestigation at Ames and in a sense had been done on their own time, the researchon atmospheric phenomena was clearly within the scope of the center’s mission andits Cray supercomputer had been used. In effect, NASA was an unwitting sponsorof this work. As such, it was normal procedure to have the paper reviewedin-house, and it had not gone through that evaluation. But, then, neither did a lotof other papers, especially work in progress to be presented at a meeting, wellbefore the stage of submission for publication in a journal.26

Sagan, however, regarded the incident as censorship, and was incensed. ToSagan, Gustafero defended his action as a preemptive step to avoid retaliation bythe Reagan administration against NASA. Two days before the AGU meeting, theHouse of Representatives had voted to stop funding the MX missile; one dayearlier, someone had tried to blow up the Washington Monument. Gustafero didnot want Reagan to hear bad news three days in a row, especially that his ci6ilianspace agency opposed his nuclear war policies. While Sagan was able to extractfrom Gustafero a commitment not to deny supercomputer time for the duration ofthe project, he claimed that the director of Ames, Clarence Syvertson, at one timethreatened to close down the entire space sciences division if they persisted inpursuing this subject. Seeking to overcome this fear of offending what he consid-ered an ideological administration, Sagan received assurances from NASA adminis-trator James M. Beggs that nuclear winter work would not be suppressed.27

Indeed, NASA Ames created a panel of three senior scientists that conducted tworeviews of the work.28 This helped improve its domestic credibility. Ames evenprovided discretionary laboratory funds to allow completion of the paper forScience when NASA bureaucrats in Washington cut funding to the TTAPSmembers at Ames.29 The withdrawn paper at the AGU meeting surprised theaudience but there was no outcry. It did not go unnoticed by the media: A6iationWeek & Space Technology reported the cancellation, printing much of theabstract.30


NASA Ames was not the only employer concerned about its good name (andperhaps retaliation by the Reagan administration); Turco’s company had similarapprehensions. R&D Associates thus conducted an internal review of a lengthyTTAPS draft, finding estimations of superpower arsenal size and configuration,urban area burned, amount of dust lofted, and the population’s burden ofradioactivity excessive, yet apparently concluding nonetheless that the TTAPS workwas solid.31

Reaching Out for International and Domestic Credibility

The AGU incident highlighted the paranoia to be expected in addressing a topicinvolved with national security. Turco, not referring to this event specifically,recalled the ‘‘tremendous political pressure on us to not get involved.’’ Indeed,many saw the study as non-science; they regarded it as politically motivated.32 If thenuclear winter research could be internationalized, Sagan reasoned, perhaps thelevel of suspicion that the science was tainted by political beliefs might be lowered.The Soviets, whose warheads were larger and thus more likely to contribute to thecreation of a nuclear winter, had more to lose if restructuring their nuclear arsenalwas necessary. Should they become convinced that the phenomenon was real, theexpected doubters in the US might be more open to conviction. If Soviet scientistsagreed with TTAPS, it followed that both superpowers should pursue similarnuclear strategies. TTAPS then could not be accused of implicitly advocatingunilateral disarmament or any other position that would place the US at adisadvantage. (With the same logic, International Physicians for the Prevention ofNuclear War had recently staged – in June 1982 – a television presentation on themedical consequences of nuclear war, by physicians from both the US and USSR.)

In early 1983, Sagan arranged to see the highest-level Soviet scientist he knew,physicist Evgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, whowas in Washington for a meeting of the inter-academy group on national security.Roald Sagdeev, director of the Soviet Institute of Space Research, joined them atthe Soviet embassy. Sagan impressed upon them the importance of Soviet participa-tion in the forthcoming April meeting in Cambridge, if only to carry news of thephenomenon back to Moscow. More compelling, though, would be independentstudy of nuclear winter.

Velikhov immediately replied that the perfect person was a young man namedVladimir Aleksandrov, head of the Climate Research Laboratory at the academy’sComputing Center in Moscow. Coyly displaying his influence, Velikhov added thatthe usual requirement for a year or so advance notice of a meeting could be waived.To Sagan’s surprise, Aleksandrov came alone to Cambridge, without the expectedsecurity agent ‘‘handlers.’’ At that meeting, Sagan urged him to make independentcalculations with his three-dimensional model. Aleksandrov resisted, saying thatcomputer time was extremely difficult to get in Moscow; he would try, but it wouldlikely take a year or a year and a half. In fact, he was able to progress much faster:Aleksandrov appeared at the Halloween-time meeting in Washington, participatedin the discussion, and distributed preprints in English of a paper he had presented


at a conference in Erice, Sicily, the previous August.33 Despite some inevitablecriticism for working closely with the Soviets, Sagan’s political sense was correct.Their participation increased the public’s perception of nuclear winter’s significance.

Also in early 1983, Sagan contacted Robert Cess, a planetary atmospheresscientist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, because he felt thatCess had good ties to the defense community, and asked him to make anindependent, back-of-the-envelope calculation on nuclear winter for the conference.Cess presented his results in Cambridge, which largely agreed with TTAPS. Hiscredibility at DOD presumably helped underscore the validity of nuclear winter.This shows, incidentally, that simple calculations can give reasonable results ofsome phenomena, even if detailed computations are ultimately required. The reasonno one did it sooner was not the lack of the idea – smoke had been named as aproblem long before – it was lack of reasonably good numbers.34

NASA Ames Again

The unusual lengths to which TTAPS (and Sagan in particular) went to defusepolitically-based hostility to their work is remarkable. But, as with Sisyphus, thetask was never-ending. In the autumn of 1983, as their paper progressed throughthe refereeing process at Science, the NASA Ames leadership insisted that there beno discussion of casualties and that the Ames affiliation of Toon, Ackerman, andPollack could not be given if the paper’s title included the phrases ‘‘nuclear war’’ or‘‘nuclear weapons.’’ They were determined to keep NASA unsullied by a connec-tion to nuclear conflict. In this case, their efforts backfired, for the phenomenonbecame far more recognizable to a wide public when the authors substitutedTurco’s inspired term ‘‘nuclear winter.’’ NASA succeeded, however, in pressuringits three employees not to attend the Halloween-time meeting in Washington.35

Inside the Beltway

Invitations to the Conference on the Long-Term Worldwide Biological Conse-quences of Nuclear War were mailed by its chairman, George M. Woodwell, to awide range of people, including many in the federal bureaucracy. The responsefrom officialdom was more of political wariness, and rather less of enlightenedinterest in the validity of nuclear winter. Typical was NASA administrator JamesBeggs’ note to a colleague in the White House: ‘‘The Administration should beaware of what Carl Sagan is up to. No doubt many in the Federal structure will besolicited. Carl is obviously trying to become a leader in the anti-nuke movement.’’36

The Reagan White House clearly felt that this was a political issue; the conferenceorganizers, for example, rented office space from Gus Speth, of the World Re-sources Institute, who had been chairman of the Council on Environmental Qualityin the Jimmy Carter administration.37

The Department of Defense, which already was sponsoring a study of nuclearwinter by the National Academy of Sciences, recognized the political dimension as


well. The assistant to the secretary of defense for atomic energy, Richard Wagner,resolved that DOD should have a stated position ‘‘on all upcoming global warmedia events,’’ such as the Halloween-time meeting and the ABC television film‘‘The Day After.’’ Further, he felt that someone from the Defense Nuclear Agencyshould attend the conference to be in position to respond to specific questions. SkipKnowles, of the office of the secretary of defense, volunteered a viewpoint that, ineffect, was adopted as DOD’s public position:

to argue technical nuances in an attempt to mollify the outcome of the [NAS]study was ill-advised and might even put us into an awkward PR position ofarguing for nuclear war. We should simply reaffirm that the Defense Departmentrecognizes that nuclear war is catastrophic and that all of our policies aredirected to preventing war.38

Except for Sagan, TTAPS members refrained from public comments on thepolitical implications of their work. They tried not to rattle their corporate andlaboratory chains. Sagan, however, bore no such constraints and, by now, he wasa man with a mission and the visibility to make the most of it. He willingly begana whirlwind of activity in pursuit of his arms control goals. Major reductions in thearsenals were vitally necessary, he felt, since we should not trust the world to thesanity of political and military leaders.

The American Committee on East-West Accord sponsored a private meeting inOctober 1983 of fewer than a dozen ‘‘of the most knowledgeable and brightestpeople’’ to hear Sagan summarize the TTAPS findings and then discuss the policyimplications of nuclear winter. The president’s national security advisor, WilliamClark, declined his invitation, though he requested a copy of the published paper.‘‘Whatever the conclusions,’’ he wrote, ‘‘no one can doubt that the consequences ofnuclear war are indeed horrible to contemplate. This is why arms control and thechallenge of peace in the nuclear age are of foremost concern to the President.’’Clark’s reply enshrined the political conundrum seen with regard to so many topics:the sincerely-desired ends were often rather alike, but the means were infuriatinglydissimilar. Peace was everyone’s goal, but would it be achieved by military strengthor arms control? Clark’s staff had provided him with a sober summary of the newnuclear war effects, including the warning that: ‘‘If the scientific community shouldreach a consensus that the US or Soviet nuclear arsenals are effectively ‘doomsdaymachines,’ that may cause a good deal more public anxiety than we have seen todate.’’39

Still seeking to reach the ‘‘movers and shakers’’ of events, even those not then inoffice, Sagan and Turco met in the capital with a small group of high-level figuresfrom previous administrations, including Averill Harriman and some ‘‘seniorpractitioners of dark arts,’’ as the astrophysicist called them. After listening toSagan’s impassioned presentation, one practitioner said, ‘‘Look, if you think thatthe mere prospect of the end of the world is sufficient to change thinking inWashington and Moscow you clearly haven’t spent much time in those places.’’ Hecautioned that the only way for nuclear winter to have an effect was in the arenaof public discourse.40


Unwilling to abandon all opportunities for personal interchange, Sagan held aprivate briefing for some members of both houses of Congress just hours before theHalloween-time conference opened.41 But congressmen need not only to be con-vinced, they require also to be lobbied, to have their constituencies behind them.Television is the modern way to reach such mass audiences, and Sagan, a master ofthis medium, was now persuaded to make his discourse as public as possible.

ABC News Nightline

In the evening of November 1, 1983, after the conference, Sagan and Ehrlichappeared on Ted Koppel’s ‘‘ABC News Nightline’’ show. With them on-stage wereEdward Teller and Assistant Secretary of State Richard Burt; on-camera inMoscow was physicist Sergei Kapitsa. In response to Koppel’s question, Saganargued that nuclear war, with its billions of casualties, had long been unthinkable.But he would be glad if recognition of the possibility of nuclear winter – with itsadditional features of the risk of extinction, the low threshold of the phenomenon,the devastation of agriculture, and particularly the danger to non-combatantnations – moved world leaders further to avoid such warfare.

Kapitsa, from the Moscow Physico-Technical Institute and the Institute forPhysical Problems (founded by his father, Nobel laureate Peter Kapitsa) said thatcalculations and models in the USSR ‘‘fully substantiate the message… stated bySagan.’’ Ehrlich stressed the suicidal nature even of a perfectly executed counter-force attack, which destroyed all strategic missiles in the targeted country and(theoretically) killed no one. The climatic consequence, nonetheless, would endgrain production in the US, Canada, and the USSR, the world’s bread baskets,leading to mass starvation. The biological conclusions, Ehrlich added, were ‘‘enor-mously robust.’’ If the climatic predictions were accurate, even as little as 100megatons ‘‘distributed properly’’ would cause the collapse of life-supportingsystems.

Teller, though asked by Koppel where he disagreed with nuclear winter, digressedto affirm the subject’s importance and the seriousness with which it was pursued atthe Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Eventually, he got around to hisdifferences: the quantitative predictions, which he thought were exaggerated. Untilthere was ‘‘thorough international agreement’’ on the technical matters, politicianscould not know the consequences of their decisions. In effect, he meant that policycould not be made on this worst-case scenario (though, as related above, he waswilling to advocate such behavior when it suited his purposes).

Some of the climatic effects, he maintained, were produced only by largeexplosions. Since the Soviet Union owned almost all of these giant warheads, theyhad a special responsibility to avoid nuclear war. Teller made the distinctionbetween aggression and defense and, without specifically mentioning SDI or hispaternity of it, added that the US was ‘‘turning from retaliation to real defense.’’42

Sagan, Ehrlich, and Teller were among the relatively few scientists consistentlyable to reach an audience with their views about defense policies. Others providedoccasional newspaper copy. One such was physicist Joseph Knox, an expert in


meteorology who was the longtime head of the Atmospheric and GeophysicalSciences Division at the Livermore Laboratory – and the boss of Michael Mac-Cracken, the laboratory’s leader in nuclear winter studies. Like the work done inthe Soviet Union and by Steven Schneider’s team at the National Center forAtmospheric Research, the Livermore results agreed in general with those ofTTAPS. Cooling was not as drastic, thanks to their ability to program themoderating influence of the oceans into their model, yet it was still awesome (tensof degrees). To Knox – who was willing to make a policy proposal on the basis of‘‘incomplete’’ scientific evidence – the political step was obvious: ‘‘we should avoidthe targeting of cities.’’43

Print Media Response to the Halloween-Time Conference

In the weeks after the Conference on the Long-Term Worldwide BiologicalConsequences of Nuclear War the media conducted a brief feeding-frenzy overnuclear winter. For them it clearly was a political issue, and they tied it to the‘‘Freeze’’ campaign and the imminent deployment of Pershing II missiles in Europe.They recognized, too, that Reagan administration actions and hardline statementshad heightened the tension about nuclear war and led opponents to increase theirown level of activism. ‘‘First it was physicians telling the world that, in the event ofa nuclear attack, there could be no adequate medical care for survivors,’’ noted areporter from Science, referring to the efforts of Physicians for Social Responsibil-ity in the early 1980s. ‘‘Now biologists and atmospheric physicists, bolstered by newcalculations, say that the ecosystem itself would be gravely and permanentlydamaged by a full-scale nuclear war.’’ Science observed that policy issues were noton the agenda at the conference, but it was obvious that at least two points stoodout: even a unilateral attack would be suicidal and non-combatant nations couldnot avoid the climatic consequences.44 To those, such as theoretical physicist VictorWeisskopf, a senior statesman of science, who lamented the failure of nuclearphysicists of his generation to impress upon the public the destructiveness ofnuclear weapons (and who lauded Physicians for Social Responsibility for theirsuccess), the reception accorded news of nuclear winter must have beenencouraging.45

The authors of an opinion-page article in the New York Times saw in the suicidalnature of the nuclear winter threat a means to calm the fears of Europeans that thesuperpowers would use their continent as a ‘‘surrogate’’ battlefield. Their cynicismextended to those who worried whether it would be better to perish or survive anuclear encounter; now, the question was moot.46 This was rephrased by somesupporters of the nuclear freeze movement as ‘‘Freeze now or freeze later.’’47

Many articles commented about the new danger revealed by TTAPS, or imputeda political agenda to the scientists, or did both. Time admitted that the news ofnuclear winter shocked people who had grown jaded by the numerous nuclear warscenarios seen so often in movies and on television. The news magazine added that‘‘disarmament enthusiasts… promptly predicted that many new adherents will nowbe won over to their cause….’’48


Not articulated but just below the surface was the distinction between thewidespread feeling that it was all right for scientists to petition their government totake stronger steps to avoid nuclear war, as for example the National Academy ofSciences did at its 1982 annual meeting,49 and a nagging uncertainty that scientistsmight be manipulating the data when they cited technical evidence in support oftheir views. Indeed, to imply that political motives might affect the design of anexperiment, the collection of data, or the interpretation of results is to discredit thescience severely. To reporters, Sagan strongly defended the purity of the TTAPSwork: ‘‘In this case I don’t think policy drives the science. I think science has todrive the policy.’’50 Newsweek read between the lines and claimed that ‘‘thescientists hope that by demonstrating the futility of a nuclear exchange, they willshow the men with their finger on the Button that a nuclear war would be the lastwar.’’51

While perhaps true, it was still the case that very few scientists publicly called forspecific policy changes. One of these exceptions was NCAR’s Stephen Schneider,who admitted that many of the scientists investigating nuclear winter hoped that itwould ignite public debate sufficient to pressure political leaders to reduce thenumber of missiles and their megatonnage,52 but he would have denied thatscientists fudged their data. Similarly, the man who first called Schneider’s attentionto nuclear winter, Stanford’s Paul Ehrlich, was cheered that ‘‘a lot of busyscientists… put aside their more parochial interests to do something directly in thecause of Homo sapiens.’’ He felt that ‘‘if a substantial portion of the global scientificcommunity can be rallied to oppose the nuclear arms race, our chances of survivalwill increase greatly.’’53 But it was just this sort of political enthusiasm that led aneven-handed reviewer of nuclear winter claims to caution that ‘‘some authors couldunintentionally exaggerate in order to gain attention.’’54

Nuclear Winter and the Freeze Movement

In May 1983, the House of Representatives passed a resolution calling for theUnited States and the Soviet Union to join in a mutual, verifiable freeze on theproduction and deployment of nuclear weapons. But this statement was watereddown from the position earlier proposed by numerous church and peace groups,and these activists looked to the Senate to make a more vigorous statement. In thisthe upper chamber failed them, for it voted to table the largely symbolic freezeresolution on October 31, the first day of the nuclear winter conference. SenatorEdward M. Kennedy (D-MA), co-sponsor of the measure with Senator Mark O.Hatfield (R-OR), argued that ‘‘the best way to stop the nuclear arms race is to stopit.’’ His opponents agreed with his goal, but not his means. Senator John Tower,for example, supported President Reagan’s desire to reduce the arsenals, not merelyto freeze them, but felt that this must await a better balance, which, he argued, atthat time favored the Soviets. A freeze would tie the president’s hands in thesenegotiations.55

Pro-freeze forces, led by the Nuclear Freeze Foundation, tried to regain theinitiative, using nuclear winter as their vehicle. Their efforts stood in sharp contrast


to the adjournment in Geneva of superpower arms control talks, without setting adate to reconvene; the Soviets had walked out in protest of the deployment inEurope by the US of ground-launched cruise missiles and Pershing II intermediate-range missiles. On December 8, 1983, Senators Kennedy and Hatfield hosted apanel of four scientists from each superpower, all of whom supported the freeze.The meeting was held in the stately Senate Caucus Room, launching pad for twoKennedy brothers’ campaigns for the presidency, and the site of such hearings asTeapot Dome, Army-McCarthy, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and Clarence Thomas’snomination to the Supreme Court. Sagan and Ehrlich, both authors of nuclearwinter work, were joined on the American side by professor of community medicineat the City College of New York, H. Jack Geiger, and by Lewis Thomas, chancellorof the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. Both physicianswere articulate spokesmen on arms control issues. For the Soviets, Evgeny Velikhovand Vladimir Aleksandrov were joined by physics professor Sergei Kapitsa, wholast had discussed nuclear winter on Ted Koppel’s ‘‘Nightline’’ show, and byAleksandr S. Pavlov, from the Moscow Scientific Institute of Radio-Biology.56

Some of the panelists pointed to the potential for the worldwide destruction ofagriculture, a deliberate slap at a just-released report by the Federal EmergencyManagement Agency (FEMA) that claimed that, despite loss of half the Americanpopulation and with crop yields reduced by fifty percent, enough land and ruralworkers would be left to grow food. A major argument of the study was thatlivestock and produce needs would be greatly reduced due to massive numbers ofhuman dead.57 Senator Kennedy, quick to ridicule the report, said that: ‘‘This kindof thinking makes nuclear war more likely because it makes nuclear war seem morebearable.’’58 In this period, after Physicians for Social Responsibility had convinc-ingly emphasized the futility of fallout shelters and ‘‘crisis relocation’’ efforts, andbefore FEMA’s better performance in the aftermath of hurricanes and earthquakesof the early 1990s, the agency, in its civil defense efforts, seemed to many to be asick joke.59

Ehrlich and Pavlov emphasized the certainty of the biological and medicalconsequences, given the dire climatic conditions. There were so many overlappingeffects, each one individually capable of massive trauma to plants or animals, thattheir sum was indeed ‘‘overkill.’’ Toxic smog, ultraviolet-B, lack of photosynthesis,high levels of radioactivity, absence of liquid water, infection, disease, a suddendecrease in the oxygen content of the air (from burning of forests), starvation, andother disturbances to the social and environmental fabric would offer little hope tothose who survived the war’s immediate effects.60 Ehrlich compared the certainty ofthe biological consequences of nuclear war to confidence in predicting the medicalconsequences of firing a double-barreled shotgun into one’s mouth.61

The worldwide nature of the problem was reaffirmed by Aleksandrov. Conven-tional wisdom, derived from studies of fallout patterns from large, single explo-sions, showed little mixing of northern and southern hemispheric atmospheres. Incontrast, Aleksandrov’s three-dimensional general circulation model of the atmo-sphere, which included a thermodynamic model of the upper level, indicated thatthe hemispheric barrier would be breached after many simultaneous detonations. Awar fought largely in the northern mid-latitudes would inject so much soot into the


atmosphere that its higher regions would absorb most of the sun’s heat and increasein temperature by more than 100°C. The resulting great temperature differencebetween north and south meant that northern air, with its debris, would pour overthe Southern Hemisphere.62

Repeating another point that he had made at the Halloween-time conference,Aleksandrov explained that, with low temperatures at the surface and high temper-atures aloft, the atmosphere would become remarkably stable. Vertical air move-ment would effectively cease, suppressing the hydrological cycle: dust and sootwould not be rained out. Indeed, he said, ‘‘the troposphere will disappear, and thestratosphere will start immediately from the surface of Earth.’’63 A Washington Postreporter saw the Soviets’ climatic predictions as more lethal than those of TTAPS.64

Kapitsa, host of a popular science program on Soviet television, linked theforum’s organizers with the nuclear winter phenomenon: ‘‘the choice is one freezeor another,’’ he said.65 In the past, Kapitsa added, it could be argued thatdeterrence was achieved by the ‘‘mutual hostage arrangement between the opposingnuclear powers.’’ But now, with nuclear winter in mind, ‘‘the whole of the earth andhuman civilization itself are held hostage.’’ Lewis Thomas, a highly skilled word-smith whose books were best sellers, said that wars in the past were fought for landor to impose an ideology upon the vanquished. Now, he added, with nuclear war,‘‘it is clear that any territory gained will be, in the end, a barren wasteland.’’ Sagan,a master of one-liners, emphasized that so many dire consequences would follownuclear war that ‘‘it would be an elaborate way of committing suicide.’’ After sucha conflict, ‘‘the ashes of communism and capitalism will be indistinguishable.’’66

With sincerity no doubt, but also perhaps as his entry in the sound bite competi-tion, Senator Kennedy concluded, ‘‘The message of this panel is that the stakes arehigher than we ever thought possible – what has been created is a doomsdaymachine. And what we have to do now is to dismantle it.’’67

Council for a Livable World

Prior to this forum and following it, the Soviet visitors were hosted by theWashington-based Federation of American Scientists in the nation’s capital, Prince-ton, and Boston, where they discussed a range of arms control and research issues.Velikhov and Kapitsa also appeared on the NBC Today show.68 And yet, despitethe publicity given to nuclear winter, traditional peace groups were not noticeablyenergized by the phenomenon. The Freeze people, as we have just seen, used itopportunistically; so did a few others. Most ‘‘peaceniks,’’ however, remainedfocused on protesting deployment of theater nuclear weapons in Europe. ThePershing II and ground-launched cruise missiles were ‘‘here and now’’; they were areality. Nuclear winter appeared too hypothetical, distant, and even controversial.Probably without any formal decisions, peace groups seem to have placed nuclearwinter in a ‘‘future use’’ category. An exception was the Council for a LivableWorld. Founded by physicist Leo Szilard decades earlier as a fund-raising politicalaction committee to support arms-control-inclined senatorial candidates, and gov-erned largely by scientists, its Education Fund reprinted Sagan’s Parade article as


a handsome booklet. Sagan, a member of the Fund’s board, willingly permitted thisand many other reprintings around the world.69

Criticism from the Right

Criticism came from expected sources, namely, those on the political far right indefense and international issues. In addition to Edward Teller, one of the perennialson this scene was Leon Goure. A political scientist who was born in Moscow, hespecialized in analyses of Soviet military and civil defense policies. For many yearsat RAND and then the University of Miami, by 1983 he was director of Sovietstudies at Science Applications International Corporation, a defense contractor inMcLean, Virginia. While he took swipes at American scientists – ‘‘who engage in‘doomsday’ predictions and advocate an immediate nuclear freeze and disarma-ment’’ – his primary focus was upon the Soviet scientists. They, he said in theWashington Times,

do not reflect the findings of independent Soviet research and analysis on nuclearwar and its consequences. Instead they merely restate and offer as their ownviews whatever Western calculations, analyses and conclusions best serve theSoviet objective of promoting an American nuclear freeze.

Goure criticized the use of worst-case scenarios. Here he was off the mark, sinceTTAPS had provided a wide range of encounters, and worst-case analysis was apractice long enshrined in the Pentagon anyway. He was on much firmer groundwhen he claimed that the work of Soviet scientists was not independent. Gourepointed out that studies of war scenarios and other activities related to defense arenot published by the Soviet Union. Consequently, Soviet authors traditionally useWestern data in their analyses seen in the West. This can be of little import if, forexample, the conditions of a war scenario (number of explosions, megatonnage,whether surface or air bursts, geographical distribution, etc.) are not controversial;then there is no reason for both sides not to use such data. But when the Sovietscientists could not use their own government’s numbers for the critical amount ofsmoke injected into the atmosphere, and when they used computer models de-scended from American models, there was some basis for concern over theindependence of their results.

Goure’s commentary, however, was not designed to promote discussion. Inca-pable of attributing honest motives to anyone east of the Iron Curtain, he washeavy handed in stigmatizing his subjects as incompetent (Aleksandrov braggedthat his team included no meteorologists), two-faced (Velikhov said civil defensewas important and then not), sinister (Velikhov was ‘‘believed to be a member ofthe Soviet Secret Police, the KGB’’), and intent on furthering the Kremlin’sobjectives, namely, ‘‘to promote defeatism among the American people and anAmerican freeze.’’ With his article entitled ‘‘Soviet scientists as shills for a freeze,’’and with an accompanying cartoon depicting ‘‘Carl Sagan’s traveling speculationshow,’’ Goure was as much self-characaturized as a mindless cold warrior as CarlSagan was seen by political conservatives to be a knee-jerk liberal.70


Defense Nuclear Agency and the National Academy of Sciences

Soon after the Halloween-time conference, a Pentagon official dismissed the signifi-cance of the cold and dark predictions. ‘‘So what,’’ he said, they already were quitewell aware that nuclear war would be catastrophic. A State Department spokesmanargued that deterrence still works even if it is suicidal – as long as the Sovietsbelieve that the US nonetheless would use its nuclear weapons. FEMA, however,was now concerned. The agency had earlier dismissed the challenge of Physiciansfor Social Responsibility, which it thought ‘‘exaggerated.’’ But the problem of foodsupply presented by nuclear winter was ‘‘even more profound than we hadanticipated.’’71

These ditherings suggest that the federal government was hopelessly muddledabout nuclear winter and politically hostile to anything that might force a reconsid-eration of its policies. In reality, however, the military behaved far more responsi-bly, recognizing quite early the significance of these studies and inclined to obtainhonest advice.

By May 1982, the Pentagon’s Defense Nuclear Agency was shuttling memos andtelephone calls in-house and to its contractors about the National Academy ofSciences study – focused primarily on dinosaur-extinction dust – then beingformulated. Aerodyne Research’s vice president, Charles E. Kolb, who served asdirector of the corporation’s Applied Sciences Division, advised that the NASsurvey and the parallel ‘‘Sagan investigation’’ would surely attract a lot of publicattention. It would be to DNA’s benefit to be able to discuss their conclusionsknowledgeably, especially if independently informed by two- and three-dimensionalmodels of atmospheric chemistry and circulation, studies that Kolb offered toundertake.72

Eugene Sevin, the assistant to DNA’s deputy director for science and technology,thought that a third study was inappropriate. DNA might fund the NAS report asthe agent of the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering (USDRE),but should do nothing ‘‘that would directly support or influence the NAS panel….NAS is responsible totally for the direction and outcome of the study.’’73

USDRE Richard DeLauer informally agreed to the NAS study. In June, theNAS’s operating agency, the National Research Council, provided formal ‘‘termsof reference’’ to T. K. Jones, DeLauer’s deputy undersecretary of defense forresearch and engineering (strategic and theater nuclear forces), who was alreadyimmortalized by his remark that Americans would survive a nuclear attack if theyhad enough shovels to dig foxholes and cover them with dirt.74 The ‘‘terms’’specified that classified data on dust that was lofted in previous weapons testsshould be made available, and that the study should take a ‘‘worst case’’ approachto the evidence of dust and smoke effects. The cost was estimated at $100,000.75

Jones dashed off a note asking for DNA’s evaluation of the need for the study,whether ‘‘worst case’’ was appropriate, and whether the available data were‘‘adequate to support any responsible conclusion.’’76 DNA replied that the studymight provide valuable information on the interaction of aircraft engines and flightcrews with nuclear dust clouds (a sensible issue, of the sort that was almost entirelyabsent in the later DOD analysis of nuclear winter). The worst-case treatment,


however, was discomforting to Edward E. Conrad, the DNA deputy director forscience and engineering, since he did not believe that ‘‘much of the dust remainsaloft for long periods.’’ Data from past tests, he added, ‘‘have been thoroughlyexploited by DNA,’’ yet there were a few things that might be useful. In closing, hesuggested that DNA join, or even chair, the NAS study group, a proposal that hisassistant, Sevin, had seen was improper, and was not adopted.77

DNA apparently farmed out the NAS terms of reference to some of itscontractors for comment. In July 1982, Science Applications Incorporated (SAI)replied that most of the dust from surface explosions drops out of the atmospherewithin a day. But the size distribution of the smallest particles, below fifty micronsand of greatest importance in this case, was poorly known, because previousstudies, looking at radioactive fallout and reentry vehicle erosion, had concentratedon larger particles. Pointing to the vital relationship among the yield of anexplosion, the size distribution of particles, and the altitude reached by each size,SAI noted that DNA contractors employ several ‘‘rise models,’’ none of which hadbeen validated. There was need to merge them with a meteorological model, a taskSAI could accomplish within six months.78

The NAS submitted to DOD the formal proposal for its study in mid-November1982, anticipating a quick start for the one-year task, and requesting $187,500 forit (including a 63% overhead rate, which was higher than that charged by mostuniversities, which have laboratories and libraries to operate). A two-phase ap-proach was planned: first, a committee of ‘‘atmospheric physicists, chemists,weapons effects experts, specialists in the optics of aerosols, and climate dynami-cists and modelers’’ would conduct a search of the open and closed literature, andbrief each other; then they would engage in an in-depth study of the subject.79

US Navy

The Department of the Navy, always technologically oriented, made its own effortsto keep abreast of nuclear winter. Vice Admiral James A. Lyons, the deputy chiefof naval operations for plans, policy, and operations, summarized for his boss, theCNO, the Halloween-time conference. He recognized that the newly predictedconsequences were far more severe than formerly assessed; the potential for humanextinction loomed large in his mind. After learning that the NAS study underwaywould probably come to a ‘‘generally similar’’ conclusion, Lyons judged theTTAPS results likely to be correct and felt that the scientific community wouldsupport them.80

Lyons was especially impressed with the research done by Vladimir Aleksandrov,whom he felt presented ‘‘the most significant new scientific work at the conference’’– quantitative results from a 3-D model that were far more advanced than thosefrom the TTAPS 1-D model. ‘‘It appears,’’ Lyons wrote, ‘‘that this problem hasgotten high level attention in the Soviet Union. Considerable scientific and compu-tational resources have been devoted to this problem by Soviet academicians andthere is clearly an interest in capitalizing on these efforts politically.’’81


The prediction of nuclear winter, Lyons believed, ‘‘may raise both long termpolicy issues and short term public relations problems.’’ Policy-issue ‘‘overtones’’were evident in Soviet support of the nuclear winter concept, during the conferenceproper and still more so in the televised satellite-linked discussion with scientists inMoscow that followed. The Soviet intent was to bolster its arms control goals. Inthe short term, Lyons expected the Kremlin to raise doubts in the minds of WesternEuropeans about the wisdom of planting American Pershing II missiles andground-launched cruise missiles on their soil. To counter this propaganda, espe-cially an anticipated charge that the Halloween-time conference was unofficial,showing little government interest, the US could point to the research on nuclearwinter done in the DOE’s Livermore Laboratory and the NAS study sponsored byDOD. Lyons also suggested that American targeting policy for nuclear weapons bereexamined in light of the new phenomenon. The Navy, however, would defer tothe Office of the Secretary of Defense as the lead agency on nuclear winter.82

In early December 1983, the assistant to the secretary of defense, RichardWagner, himself a physicist, was briefed on the nuclear winter phenomenon byMichael MacCracken of Livermore and the lab’s former director Michael May.While they might quibble over different assumptions and values used by TTAPS,they could not deny that the predictions were to be taken seriously. DOD thuscontinued to refrain from public discussion of nuclear winter, while maintaining akeen interest in further research. Journalist Thomas Powers described the Pen-tagon’s predicament: ‘‘the nuclear-winter thesis, if valid, threatens to make non-sense of every notion the planners have managed to come up with, in forty years oftrying to devise a sensible way to fight a nuclear war.’’83

Foreign Affairs

The New York Times editorialized a thought in the back of many minds: ‘‘Doesn’teveryone know by now that nuclear disaster is hazardous to human health? Surelyevery sensible person everywhere believes preventing it is the world’s most impor-tant cause.’’ How to achieve that goal, the newspaper continued, was the issue, anddeterrence, based on mutual horror, seemed to be the only practical policy. Whatalternative did the bearers of this expanded horror, nuclear winter, propose?84

Sagan entered this realm of nuclear theology with a proposal. It was not a newstrategy, for nuclear pioneer Leo Szilard had suggested it decades before. Szilardhad argued for a force of forty or so nuclear weapons, just enough to inflictunacceptable damage on the Soviet Union.85 Advocating a version of this ‘‘minimaldeterrence,’’ Sagan now based it on quantitative calculations rather than bestguesses. Speaking in early November 1983, to a group of congressional wivesbrought together by Peace Links, an antinuclear organization, Sagan encouraged abuild-down to the approximate nuclear winter threshold level of 100 megatons bythe end of the century.86 Then, in a major statement in the policy journal ForeignAffairs, he elaborated on this proposition.

Sagan portentously opened his essay with the argument that ‘‘Apocalypticpredictions require, to be taken seriously, higher standards of evidence than do


assertions on other matters where the stakes are not so great.’’87 To indicate that hewas not a solitary ‘‘Chicken Little’’ crying nonsense, he prefaced the paper withshort quotes of famous physicists – J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, I. I.Rabi, Andrei Sakharov, and even his nemesis, Edward Teller – who had also hadvisions of global doom.88

Having placed himself in such distinguished company, Sagan explained thatprophets of doomsday, including such authors as Nevil Shute (On the Beach) andJonathan Schell (The Fate of the Earth), were dismissed by many policymakers as‘‘alarmist or… irrelevant.’’ The policymakers’ reasons were partly theoretical – theywere uncomfortable with questionable extrapolations from limited data – andpartly psychological – it was easier for officials to engage in ‘‘denial.’’ To theseSagan added another interpretation: Should nuclear war really have the potential toend civilization or, worse, the species, ‘‘such a finding might be considered aretroactive rebuke to those responsible… for the global nuclear arms race.’’89

Seeking a perspective to demonstrate that nuclear winter was not just marginallyworse than the horrors of nuclear war with its hundreds of millions of fatalities, aspreviously contemplated, Sagan explained that human extinction would eliminateall future generations: possibly some 500 trillion people! Nuclear winter, thus, hadthe potential to be a million times worse than ‘‘ordinary’’ nuclear war.90

The superpowers’ arsenals, especially the more accurate and MIRVed missiles,had created an unstable condition in which some strategists argued that a Sovietdamage-limiting first strike against American ICBM silos and communication,command, control, and intelligence (C-cubed I) centers was more likely than before.Indeed, this was the scenario proclaimed by the Committee on the Present Dangerin the late 1970s, on which Ronald Reagan rode to the presidency in 1980. Eventhough a large portion of American missiles at sea would survive, it was arguedthat they would not be launched as retaliation against Soviet cities (they were notthen accurate enough to pinpoint small, hard targets) in fear that remaining Sovietmissiles would destroy American cities. This plot envisioned a surrender by the US;to avoid that disaster, Reagan embarked on a major arms buildup and especiallysought (unsuccessfully) to deploy the highly accurate MX missile in a mobile mode.An MX that could survive a first strike and threaten Soviet silos would restorestability to deterrence.

With the potential for nuclear winter, however, even if the attacked nation didnot respond in kind, the attacker would plausibly suffer an environment thatbecame cold and dark. Should the attacked nation launch retaliatory salvos,probably aiming them at cities (since many enemy silos would now be empty), theresulting conflagrations would be even more likely to produce the nuclear wintereffect. A rational aggressor, fearing unintended suicide, would thus eschew apreemptive attack, even one calculated to be below the fuzzy threshold for nuclearwinter. A further benefit of this nuclear winter-driven logic would be reducedpressure in each superpower to expand its arsenals.91

The superpowers might continue making warheads more accurate and of smalleryield, a process underway for some years, although driven by military needs, notthe desire to minimize the number of fires ignited. But if the warheads wereredesigned to penetrate the earth before detonating, a technology then being


studied, even fewer fires would burn. Sagan recognized that such weapons mightpreclude nuclear winter, yet that very consequence would make their use morelikely. The attacked nation, on the other hand, would have less reason to em-ploy these earth-burrowing warheads for retaliation; vengeance is less discrimi-nate. Endeavoring to escape the new instability, both sides would likely abandonthe 1972 Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (SALT I) in order to build largeballistic-missile defense (BMD) systems.92

BMD was much in the news at this time, President Reagan having announcedhis ‘‘Star Wars’’ scheme less than a year earlier. Sagan took a preemptive swingat BMD, seeing it as some analysts’ excuse not to worry about nuclear winter: ifthe incoming warheads could be shot down, nuclear winter would be avoided.He pointed out that the full BMD system was not expected to be completed fortwo or three decades, and even then the shield would have a ‘‘porosity’’ thatwould allow through enough warheads to cause nuclear winter. The enemy, ofcourse, need only build more warheads – a cheaper task – to degrade BMD.Sagan also called attention to the circumstance that some components of BMDwould release thermonuclear explosions just a few miles above our own cities, asthey sought to destroy the incoming warheads. Thus, our defensive system couldignite the fires of our own doom.93

Rejecting such strategic responses to nuclear winter as discussed above, Saganargued for confidence-building measures between the superpowers, including anend to harsh rhetoric, conversion of MIRVed missiles to carry less-threateningsingle warheads, abandonment of nuclear war-fighting concepts, and admissionthat nuclear war would not be limited. All this, however, was prelude to Sagan’skey proposal: to reduce arsenals below the nuclear winter threshold. Admittedly,this was a large step, a reduction of more than ninety percent – greater eventhan diplomat George Kennan’s controversial suggestion in 1981 of an initialfifty percent cut, going eventually to over eighty-four percent. But there seemedto be no rational alternative.94

We had, Sagan said, unknowingly created a doomsday machine. It took therecognition of soot’s significance in altering the postwar climate to enable usnow to see that every warhead built over the roughly 500–2000 threshold levelhad long ago moved us into a ‘‘doomsday zone.’’ It was imperative to reducearsenals such that ‘‘no concatenation of computer malfunction, carelessness,unauthorized acts, communications failure, miscalculation and madness in highoffice could unleash the nuclear winter.’’ Since 1945, counter to conventionalbelief, more weapons have not purchased more security, Sagan argued. Indeed,factoring nuclear winter into the equation, larger arsenals directly lead to adecline in security. Rather than trust global civilization to fallible humans andequipment, Sagan wrote that, for himself,

I would far rather have a world in which the climatic catastrophe cannot happen,independent of the vicissitudes of leaders, institutions and machines. This seemsto me elementary planetary hygiene, as well as elementary patriotism.95


Epilogue

Subsequent to Sagan’s paper, congressional committees held several hearings, theadministration funded (and then, when the budget deficit grew alarmingly, largelyabandoned) a research program that emphasized the use of increasingly sophisti-cated three-dimensional global circulation models, the National Academy of Sci-ences and other scientific bodies published reports on nuclear winter, and thepublic-at-large debated the validity of the phenomenon. Absent a real test – whichno one wanted, of course – nuclear winter remained a theoretical prediction. Eventhe 1991 oil well fires in Kuwait, ignited by retreating Iraqi troops, failed to resolvethe validity of nuclear winter. Temperatures did drop somewhat under the clouds ofsoot, but the cool weather kept the shroud from rising higher in the troposphere,and the Indian subcontinent downwind barely noticed any climatic effect. Believersin the nuclear winter phenomenon argued that, under the right conditions, thefeared consequences would occur, while critics invoked the experience in Kuwait todismiss any danger. By this time, however, the argument seemed almost academic,for the end of the Cold War left most people disinterested in nuclear war effects.Although sufficient warheads remained (and remain) in the United States and inRussia to ignite a nuclear winter holocaust, few anticipated their use.

The policy debate ended even earlier. Congress required the secretary of defenseto issue an annual survey on the status of nuclear winter research and thephenomenon’s policy implications. Caspar Weinberger’s first report, in March1985, was a dismissive seventeen pages in length. While it did not side with criticswho challenged the validity of the phenomenon, it did cite the uncertainties of bothdata and predictions of consequences. Remarkably, nothing was said of the abilityof troops and equipment to operate in such cold and dark conditions. Instead,Weinberger looked at the larger picture and proclaimed that the Reagan adminis-tration’s arms buildup and SDI policies made nuclear war less likely, and in thatway avoided precipitating nuclear winter.96 The Pentagon thus co-opted nuclearwinter, minimizing its significance on policy. Aside from a few scientists such asSagan, there was no significant individual or interest group to challenge thisstonewalling.

Despite the ultimate null influence of the nuclear winter debate, it opens a usefulwindow to observe the bountiful – and haphazard – process by which governmentreceives scientific advice. The information certainly does not uniquely flow up anefficient and orderly organizational chart; still, the untidiness of the process and theeclectic origins of data and ideas are refreshingly democratic. The most unusualfeature of this episode was that a physical consequence of nuclear explosions wasdiscovered by scientists unconnected to the nation’s nuclear weapon laboratories.The administration did not really want to acknowledge its existence, but govern-ment consists of many agencies and somewhere good sense had to supportinvestigation of the phenomenon. Defense contractors, who naturally professconcern with national security, encouraged research – on their payroll. Congresscast a spotlight on nuclear winter during hearings held to publicize the need formore study and a change in strategic policy. Private groups, such as the Freezecampaign and the National Resources Defense Council, even more emphatically


emphasized the need for new policy. And throughout the effort, individual scien-tists, none more visible than Carl Sagan, lobbied for recognition by the governmentthat worst-case scientific predictions should be the basis for dramatically newdirections.

The outcome may be welcomed or mourned, depending upon one’s views of thereality of nuclear winter and whether it should have affected policy even ifunproven. But the episode reveals the enormous hurdles faced by those who wishto force policy changes upon an intransigent administration. A government’swillingness to listen to scientific advice and adopt the logical policy consequencesdoes not depend upon the orderly (or disorderly) flow of information and ideasthrough bureaucratic chains of command. Despite what can amount to a virtualbombardment of advice from many points on the compass, action occurs only whenthe government is politically receptive.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful for suggestions from Jacob Hamblin, Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, TinaSkandalis, and the anonymous referee.

References

1 J. B. S. Haldane, Callinicus: A Defence of Chemical Warfare (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1925).2 Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’ Mo6ement in America, 1945–47 (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1965). See also Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: AmericanThought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985).

3 See for example Smith (ref. 2). Abram Chayes and Jerome B. Wiesner, eds., ABM: An E6aluationof the Decision to Deploy an Antiballistic Missile System (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).Sanford A. Lakoff and Herbert F. York, A Shield in Space?: Technology, Politics, and the StrategicDefense Initiati6e: How the Reagan Administration Set Out to Make Nuclear Weapons ‘‘Impotentand Obsolete’’ and Succumbed to the Fallacy of the Last Mo6e (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1989).

4 See for example Smith (ref. 2) and Boyer (ref. 2). Morton Grodzins and Eugene Rabinowitch, eds.,The Atomic Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965). Richard G. Hewlett and Oscar Anderson,The New World, 1939–1946: Volume 1 of a History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962). Richard G. Hewlett and FrancisDuncan, Atomic Shield, 1947–1952: Volume 2 of a History of the United States Atomic EnergyCommission (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969). Dexter Masters andKatherine Way, eds., One World or None: A Report to the Public on the Full Meaning of the AtomicBomb (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1946).

5 See for example Richard G. Hewlett and Jack M. Holl, Atoms for Peace and War, 1953–1961:Eisenhower and the Atomic Energy Commission: Volume 3 of a History of the United States AtomicEnergy Commission (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). Herman Kahn, Thinking Aboutthe Unthinkable (New York: Avon Books, 1962). Bruce L. R. Smith, The RAND Corporation: CaseStudy of a Nonprofit Ad6isory Corporation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966).

6 See for example Hewlett and Holl (ref. 5). Lawrence Freedman, The E6olution of Nuclear Strategy,2nd edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989). Gregg Herken, Counsels of War (New York:Oxford University Press, 1987). Richard Smoke, National Security and the Nuclear Dilemma, 3rdedition (New York: McGraw Hill, 1993).


7 See for example Herken (ref. 6) and Smoke (ref. 6). Richard G. Hewlett and Francis Duncan,Nuclear Na6y, 1946–1962 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). Milton S. Katz, Ban theBomb: A History of SANE, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, 1957–1985 (New York:Greenwood Press, 1986).

8 Boyer (ref. 2), pp. 360-67. See also Herken (ref. 6) and Smoke (ref. 6). Paul R. Loeb, Hope in HardTimes: America’s Peace Mo6ement and the Reagan Era (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1987).

9 Carl Sagan, ‘‘The nuclear winter,’’ Parade (October 30, 1983), 4–7.10 Paul R. Ehrlich, Carl Sagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts, The Cold and the Dark:

The World After Nuclear War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984) presents the proceedings of thisconference.

11 R. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and C. Sagan, ‘‘Nuclear winter: Globalconsequences of multiple nuclear explosions,’’ Science 222 (December 23, 1983), 1283–92.

12 Paul J. Crutzen and John W. Birks, ‘‘The atmosphere after a nuclear war: Twilight at noon,’’Ambio 11:2–3 (June 1982), 114–25.

13 Turco, et al. (ref. 11).14 Paul R. Ehrlich, et al., ‘‘Long-term biological consequences of nuclear war,’’ Science 222 (Decem-

ber 23, 1983), 1293–1300.15 Freeman J. Dyson, Infinite in All Directions (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), p. 264.16 See for example Eric Pace, ‘‘Methodist bishops back pastoral letter denouncing rise of nuclear

arms,’’ New York Times, (April 30, 1986), A15. John J. Goldman, ‘‘Methodists reject nucleardeterrence,’’ Los Angeles Times, (April 30, 1986), I11. Marjorie Hyer, ‘‘Methodist bishops blastSDI, A-arms,’’ Washington Post, (April 30, 1986), A1.

17 Ellen Goodman, ‘‘Can world survive another Reagan term?’’ Los Angeles Times, (November 4,1983), II7. Theodore Draper, ‘‘Dear Mr. Weinberger: An open reply to an open letter,’’ New YorkRe6iew of Books 29 (November 4, 1982), 26–31. ‘‘On nuclear war: An exchange with the Secretaryof Defense,’’ New York Re6iew of Books 30 (August 18, 1983), 27–33. Walter Isaacson, ‘‘Fightingthe backbiting,’’ Time 118 (November 16, 1981), 22–23. David M. Alpern, ‘‘There they go again,’’Newsweek 98 (November 16, 1981), 32–33.

18 Tom Wicker, ‘‘A grim agreement,’’ New York Times, (December 12, 1983), A27.19 US Congress, House, Committee on Science and Technology, Subcommittee on Investigations and

Oversight, The Consequences of Nuclear War on the Global En6ironment, Hearing, 97th Congress,2nd Session, September 15, 1982, iii, 164, 176–77.

20 Testimony by James P. Friend, ibid., pp. 115–21.21 Testimony by Frank von Hippel, ibid., p. 162.22 Teller apparently was not above misrepresenting technical data to achieve his own political goals.

Whistle blowers at the Livermore Laboratory charged him with presenting glowing progress reportsto the White House on the X-ray laser, a major component of the Strategic Defense Initiative,while simultaneously receiving internal reports detailing enormous problems with no obvioussolutions to them. See Deborah Blum, McClatchy News Service, ‘‘Probe reveals letter: Documentsays scientist misrepresented progress on ‘Star Wars,’’’ Daily Nexus (University of California, SantaBarbara student newspaper), (March 2, 1988), 6. See also William Broad, Teller’s War: TheTop-Secret Story Behind the Star Wars Deception (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

23 Edward Teller, ‘‘Dangerous myths about nuclear arms,’’ Reader’s Digest 121 (November 1982),139–44.

24 Ibid., p. 143.25 R. Turco, et al., ‘‘Global consequences of nuclear ‘warfare,’’’ Eos; Transactions, American Geophys-

ical Union 63 (November 9, 1982), 1018.26 Sagan interview by L. Badash, December 26, 1984. Turco interview by L. Badash and B. Kirtman,

February 20, 1985.27 Sagan interview by L. Badash, December 26, 1984. Carl Sagan and Richard Turco, A Path Where

No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race (New York: Random House,1990), pp. 461–62. For the events in Washington, see Richard Halloran, ‘‘President is grim,’’ NewYork Times, (December 8, 1982), A1, and David Shribman, ‘‘Man slain in capital monumentthreat,’’ New York Times, (December 9, 1982), A1.

28 Turco, Toon, and Ackerman letter to the editor, National Re6iew 38 (January 31, 1986), 4, 10.


29 Sagan and Turco, Path (ref. 27), pp. 461–62.30 Anon., ‘‘NASA withdraws presentation,’’ A6iation Week & Space Technology 117 (December 20,

1982), 67. Turco interview by L. Badash and B. Kirtman, February 20, 1985.31 Sagan and Turco, Path (ref. 27), p. 463. R. D. Speed to A. Field, ‘‘Review of Global Consequences

of Nuclear ‘War’,’’ R&D Associates interoffice correspondence, April 13, 1983. This document wasobtained via a Freedom of Information Act request by the Natural Resources Defense Council(hereafter NRDC file) in 1984, and was provided by NRDC attorney S. Jacob Scherr.

32 Turco interview on radio program ‘‘Fire and ice: Nuclear winter, part 2,’’ in the series Prescriptionfor Survival, no. 17, Pacifica Radio Archive, 1983, cat. no. KZ1379.

33 Sagan interview by L. Badash, December 26, 1984.34 Ibid.35 Ibid. Sagan and Turco, Path (ref. 27), p. 465.36 James Beggs letter to Craig Fuller, August 23, 1983, attached to G. W. Woodwell letter to Hans

Mark, July 11, 1983, Ronald Reagan Library, WHORM Subject File ND018 167459.37 Al Hill, Council on Environmental Quality, memorandum to William Clark, NSC, and others, July

13, 1983, Ronald Reagan Library, WHORM Subject File, MC 156598.38 George W. Ullrich, DNA, ‘‘Memorandum for the record: National Academy of Sciences study on

global nuclear war,’’ October 14, 1983, NRDC file.39 Jeanne Vaughn Mattison and Adm. Noel Gayler, USN-Ret., former Commander-in-Chief Pacific

Fleet and former head of the National Security Agency, letter to William Clark, September 27,1983; Ray Pollock memo to Clark, October 5, 1983; Clark letter to Mattison, nd but October 1983,all in Ronald Reagan Library, WHORM Subject File FG006-01 182481.

40 Sagan interview by L. Badash, December 26, 1984. Slightly different wording for the quote is givenin Richard Turco, ‘‘Carl Sagan and nuclear winter,’’ in Yervant Terzian and Elizabeth Bilson, eds.,Carl Sagan’s Uni6erse (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 239–46, on 243.

41 Sagan, ‘‘The atmospheric and climatic consequences of nuclear war,’’ in Paul R. Ehrlich, CarlSagan, Donald Kennedy, and Walter Orr Roberts, The Cold and the Dark: The World AfterNuclear War (New York: W. W. Norton, 1984), p. 35.

42 Transcript of ‘‘Nightline,’’ November 1, 1983 (New York: ABC, 1983), 10 pp.43 Philip J. Hilts, ‘‘‘Nuclear winter’ catastrophe confirmed by Soviet scientists,’’ Washington Post,

(November 2, 1983), A8.44 Constance Holden, ‘‘Scientists describe ‘nuclear winter,’’’ Science 222 (November 18, 1983),

822–23, quotes on 822.45 Joseph P. Evans, ‘‘The big chill: Learning about ‘nuclear winter,’’’ Commonweal 111 (April 20,

1984), 231–32.46 Robert J. Lieber and Dan Horowitz, ‘‘Live, die: moot point,’’ New York Times, (November 20,

1983), E21.47 ‘‘Fire and ice’’ (ref. 32).48 Anon., ‘‘A cold, dark apocalypse,’’ Time 122 (November 14, 1983), 43.49 Robert Reinhold, ‘‘Scientists urge more effort to cut atom risk,’’ New York Times, (April 28, 1982),

A15.50 Laura Tangley, ‘‘After nuclear war – a nuclear winter,’’ BioScience 34 (January 1984), 6–9, quote

on 9.51 Sharon Begley, ‘‘Nuclear war: The long view,’’ Newsweek 102 (November 7, 1983), 137.52 Stephen H. Schneider and Randi Londer, The Coe6olution of Climate and Life (San Francisco:

Sierra Club Books, 1984), p. 361.53 Paul R. Ehrlich, ‘‘The nuclear winter: Discovering the ecology of nuclear war,’’ The Amicus

Journal, 5 (Winter 1984), 20–30, quote on 20.54 Henning Rodhe, ‘‘A nuclear winter,’’ Ambio 13:1 (1984), 43–44, quote on 44.55 David Shribman, ‘‘Senate rejects move to make nuclear freeze an immediate goal,’’ New York

Times, (November 1, 1983), A12.56 Philip Shabecoff, ‘‘U.S.-Soviet panel sees no hope in an atomic war,’’ New York Times, (December

9, 1983), A13. Lauren Silverman, ‘‘U.S. and Soviet experts say nuclear war would destroy humanrace,’’ Los Angeles Times, (December 9, 1983), I9. Sagan, et al., ‘‘Nuclear winter: The world-wideconsequences of nuclear war,’’ UNESCO Courier 38 (May 1985), 26-31. This is an abridged


transcript of the December 8, 1983 forum in the Senate Caucus Room. A longer, but still abridged,transcript is printed as ‘‘Washington Forum on the World-Wide Consequences of Nuclear War,’’Disarmament, A Periodic Re6iew by the United Nations 7 (Autumn 1984), 32–62.

57 Anon., ‘‘Atom attack impact assayed,’’ New York Times, (December 7, 1983), A20.58 Jeffrey L. Fox, ‘‘Will there be life on the farm after the bomb?’’ Science 222 (December 23, 1983),

1308.59 An example of the criticism is Jennifer Leaning and Langley Keyes, eds., The Counterfeit Ark:

Crisis Relocation for Nuclear War (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger, 1984). This book was sponsored byPhysicians for Social Responsibility.

60 UNESCO Courier (ref. 56), pp. 29–31.61 Tom Wicker, ‘‘A grim agreement,’’ New York Times, (December 12, 1983), A27.62 UNESCO Courier (ref. 56), pp. 28–29.63 Disarmament (ref. 56), p. 41.64 A. D. Horne, ‘‘Nuclear climate more lethal than predicted, Soviets say,’’ Washington Post,

(December 9, 1983), A44.65 Anon., ‘‘U.S. – Soviet forum on nuclear winter,’’ F.A.S. Public Interest Report (Federation of

American Scientists) 37 (January 1984), 1.66 Shabecoff and Silverman (ref. 56).67 FAS (ref. 65), p. 1.68 Ibid.69 Sagan interview by L. Badash, December 26, 1984.70 Leon Goure, ‘‘Soviet scientists as shills for a freeze,’’ Washington Times, (December 19, 1983), C1.71 Holden (ref. 44), quotes on p. 823.72 George W. Ullrich, DNA, memo (apparently to himself), May 11, 1982, NRDC file.73 Ibid., May 12, 1982, NRDC file.74 See Robert Scheer, With Enough Sho6els: Reagan, Bush and Nuclear War (New York: Random

House, 1982).75 Lee M. Hunt, executive director, Naval Studies Board, NRC, letter to T. K. Jones, June 11, 1982,

NRDC file.76 T. K. Jones memo to Dr. Gordon Soper, June 21, 1982, NRDC file.77 Edward E. Conrad memo to T. K. Jones, August 5, 1982, NRDC file.78 J. McGahan, SAI, memos to D. Auton, DNA, July 22 and 28, 1982, NRDC file.79 NAS Proposal for the Support of the Workshop on Atmospheric Effects of Nuclear Weapons

Detonations, November 15, 1982, NRDC file.80 J. A. Lyons, ‘‘Memorandum for the Chief of Naval Operations: ‘The World After Nuclear War,’’’

November 7, 1983, 65B Memo 393/A112102-07 and two enclosures, NRDC file.81 Ibid. The Soviet Union ultimately disappointed American scientists by not providing data on

aerosols from large fires. Their lead scientist, Vladimir Aleksandrov, disappeared in Spain and hasnot been found; suspicions were levied against both the CIA and KGB.

82 Lyons (ref. 80).83 Thomas Powers, ‘‘Nuclear winter and nuclear strategy,’’ Atlantic Monthly 254 (November 1984),

53–64, quote on 59.84 Editorial, ‘‘The winter after the bomb,’’ New York Times, (November 6, 1983), E20.85 Leo Szilard, ‘‘‘Minimal deterrent’ vs. saturation parity,’’ Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 20 (March

1964), 6–12. The concept continues to find favor. In a talk at the Lawrence Livermore NationalLaboratory in 1990, physicist Herbert York proposed a force of one hundred weapons. This talkappears as a chapter entitled ‘‘Minimum deterrence,’’ in York, Arms and the Physicist (Woodbury,NY: American Institute of Physics Press, 1995), pp. 273–77.

86 Judy Mann, ‘‘Threshold,’’ Washington Post, (November 11, 1983), B1.87 Carl Sagan, ‘‘Nuclear war and climatic catastrophe: Some policy implications,’’ Foreign Affairs 62

(Winter 1983–84), 257–92, quote on 257–58.88 Ibid., p. 257.89 Ibid., p. 258.90 Ibid., p. 275.91 Ibid., pp. 275–78.

105Vol. 3 (2001) Nuclear Winter Politics

92 Ibid., pp. 279–80.93 Ibid., pp. 282–83.94 Ibid., pp. 283–85.95 Ibid., pp. 285–86.96 Caspar W. Weinberger, ‘‘The potential effects of nuclear war on the climate: A report to the United

States Congress’’ (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, March 1985).

Department of History,University of California, Santa BarbaraSanta Barbara, CA 93106 USAe-mail: [email protected]

Copyright © Piet Hein Illustration & GrookReprinted with kind permission from Pict Hein n/s, Middelfart, Denmark

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