The Medical Implications of Nuclear War (1986) / Chapter Skim
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Pages 555-565
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From page 555... ...
There is a kind of deadly embrace between the United States and the Soviet Union their military establishments depend on each other that goes back at least to 1945 and that has led to the construction of a kind of global doomsday machine, which has been almost entirely ignored until lately. The population of the planet has, by and large, been sleepwalking through the last 40 years.
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From page 556... ...
On the nuclear winter issue itself, there now seems to be a fairly broad consensus after the original TRAPS study that it is something worth worrying about, something probably very grave. Even the most conservative and carefully phrased reports on this subject make that apparent.
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From page 557... ...
Most estimates of nuclear winter continental temperature declines from ambient for a midsummer central strategic exchange have remained around-10 to-25°C, beginning with the original MAPS paper. Anspaugh (this volume)
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From page 558... ...
More generally, nations that have no part in the quarrel between the United States and the Soviet Union (if there are any) and nations that are far removed from the northern mid-latitude combat zone could nevertheless be utterly destroyed in a nuclear war.9 This is part of the answer to the question that I am sometimes asked: "What is new about nuclear winter?
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From page 559... ...
Some very quick and rough estimates suggest that as much as one-third to one-half of the northern mid-latitude land area might suffer radiation doses approaching 100 reds. In the vivid phrase of Greer and Rifl`in, nuclear war carries with it a kind of global case of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS)
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From page 560... ...
There have been massive species extinctions, including the extinctions at the CretaceousTertiary boundary 65 million years ago, in which most of the species of life on Earth died out. It is at least a good Beth that the K-T extinctions were produced by something like nuclear winter, caused by the impact on the Earth of a 10-kilometer-diameter object, an asteroid or cometary nucleus, that sprayed fine particles up into the atmosphere that took 1 or 2 years to fall out.
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From page 561... ...
Another aspect of some of the papers presented in this volume that struck me was the explicit or implicit seriousness of nuclear wars that fall significantly short of engaging the full strategic arsenals. In the original TTAPS nuclear winter study, ~ a heuristic calculation was performed for a nuclear war scenario in which 100 downtowns were burned and nothing else was destroyed.
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From page 562... ...
In the late winter and early spring of 1902, on the island of Martinique, there were a set of unmistakable premonitions of Me forthcoming volcanic * Note added in proof, May 9, 1986: Since I gave this presentation on September 22, 1985, my point has been tragically reinforced by the Challenger disaster and several subsequent NASA and DoD launch failures and, in the Soviet Union, by the Chernobyl disaster (for which the probability of meltdown was authoritatively stated by Soviet experts in 1985 as O.0001/yr)
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From page 563... ...
A television program much closer to the realities of a nuclear war for example, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) program Threads was widely considered to be too difficult for Americans to see and was not shown by the commercial networks or even by the Public Broadcasting System.
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From page 564... ...
They can happen again. There was a time when the divine right of kings was powerfully advocated, in which national leaders and the clergy argued, to take an American example, that it was the specific intention of God Almighty that Americans should live under the yoke of King George III.
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From page 565... ...
1986. Nuclear winter: Three-dimensional simulations including interactive transport, scavenging, and solar heating of smoke.
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