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Nuclear Winter: A Status Report
| Article
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10238 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1986 |
5,594 Words |
| Author
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Thomas P. Ackerman
Thomas Ackerman is a research scientist at NASA Ames Research
Center. He has a PhD in atmospheric science from the
University of Washington and has been actively involved in
climate research for over ten years. He is a coauthor of one
of the original papers on the nuclear-winter hypothesis and of
the SCOPE report on the Environmental Consequences of Nuclear
War. |
It is now about two and a half years since the issue of the climate consequences of nuclear war (sometimes called nuclear winter) was first brought to the attention of the American public. Since that time, a number of technical articles have been published on the subject, which examine various aspects of the original study in more detail or extend the calculations with more detailed computer models. Comprehensive scientific reviews of the problem have also been commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society of Canada, and the International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU). As a result of this intense scrutiny, a great deal has been learned about the possible climatic consequences of nuclear war, and, while many uncertainties remain to be resolved, there is a growing consensus among the scientific community that the problem is both real and urgent.
The basic steps in the casual chain connecting nuclear war and potential climatic catastrophe can be stated fairly simply. Nuclear bombs, particularly those detonated slightly above the surface of the earth, are remarkably efficient incendiary exchange between the superpowers, many fires would be ignited and burn out of control, injecting millions of tons of black smoke into the atmosphere, which would prevent the sunlight incident on the planet from reaching the ground. The ground and the atmosphere below the pall of smoke would consequently become so cold that frosts and freezing conditions might occur even in mild-summer. The smoke would eventually be dispersed around the globe by the atmosphere, bringing the cold and the dark to countries not directly involved in the nuclear holocaust.
In the discussion that follows, each of the steps in the chain will be
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