Exaagerated Threats

[Joe]

The best defense is an offense. Keep yelling wise guy. Let me guess another nuclear Physicist?

What are your credentials, turbo? I'd appreciate an honest answer.

[phongn]

The best defense is an offense. Keep yelling wise guy. Let me guess another nuclear Physicist?

As you have completely failed to address any of the arguments brought forth, your concession is accepted.

[Guest]

Let's see your figures. I am more then happy to give mine. Since you strike first the figures please. From a credibal source as well. I have a physicist right near me laughing his ass off.

[Joe]

Let's see your figures. I am more then happy to give mine. Since you strike first the figures please. From a credibal source as well. I have a physicist right near me laughing his ass off.

You flunk logic school? Burden of proof is on you to produce evidence of nuclear winter, not me.

[Guest]

fine. three seconds

[Joe]

It's been three seconds.

[phongn]

Let's see your figures. I am more then happy to give mine. Since you strike first the figures please. From a credibal source as well. I have a physicist right near me laughing his ass off.

If you wll give me a bit, I'll look up the exact numbers. However, the US arsenal at its height was worth approximately 20GT of TNT. Arsenals dropped greatly after this peak as accuracy of weaponry increased.

NASA estimates for global mass-extinction (a'la nuclear winter) have requirements far, far in excess of this energy release.

[Guest]

Nuclear Winter

In a study made by the World Health Organization, they found that a nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could kill one billion people outright. In addition, it could produce a Nuclear Winter that would probably kill an additional one billion people. It is possible that more than two billion people, one-third of all the humans on Earth would be destroyed almost immediately in the aftermath of a global thermonuclear war. The rest of humanity would be reduced to prolonged agony and barbarism. These findings are from a study chaired by Sune K. Bergstrom (the 1982 Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine) nearly 20 years ago. (1)

Subsequent studies have had similar findings. Professor Alan Robock says, "Everything from purely mathematical models to forest fire studies shows that even a small nuclear war would devastate the earth." (2)

Rich Small's work, financed by the Defense Nuclear Agency, suggests that burning cities would produce a particularly troublesome variety of smoke. The smoke of forest fires is bad enough. But the industrial targets of cities are likely to produce a rolling, black smoke, a denser shield against incoming sunlight. (3)

Nuclear explosions can produce heat intensities of 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Centigrade at ground zero. Nuclear explosions can also lift an enormous quantity of fine soil particles into the atmosphere, creating more than l00,000 tons of fine, dense, radioactive dust for every megaton exploded on the surface. (4) The late Dr. Carl Sagan said the super heating of vast quantities of atmospheric dust and soot will cover both hemispheres. (5) For those who survive a nuclear attack, it would mean living on a cold, dark, chaotic, radioactive planet.

A nuclear warhead is far more destructive than is generally realized. For example, just one average size U.S. strategic 250 Kt nuclear warhead has an explosive force equal to 250,000 tons of dynamite or 50,000 World War II type bombers each carrying 5 tons of bombs. The truck bombs that terrorists exploded at the New York World Trade Center and in Oklahoma City each had an explosive force equal to about 5 tons of dynamite. (6)

Accidental Nuclear War

The U.S. and Russia each have more than 2,000 strategic nuclear warheads set for hair-trigger release. If launched they could be delivered to targets around the world in 30 minutes. They would have an explosive force equal to l00,000 Hiroshima size bombs. (7) Russia and the U.S. have more than 90 percent of the nuclear weapons in the world. The more automated and shorter the decision process becomes the greater is the possibility of missiles being launched to false warnings.

The U.S. is trying to decide whether to build an anti-missile “star wars” defense or not. In order for an anti-ballistic missile to hit another missile traveling at incredible speed that can come from many different directions, it would be necessary to have a very complex computerized system.

President Reagan's Defense Secretary, Casper Weinberger, said that since an anti-missile defense would require decisions within seconds, completely autonomous computer control is a foregone conclusion. There would be no time for screening out false alarms and a decision to launch would have to be automated---there would be no time for White House approval. (8)

A highly automated defense system that has no time for determining whether a warning is false or not is highly likely to launch to a false warning. There are always false warnings. For example, during 1981, 1982 and 1983 there were 186, 218 and 255 false alarms, respectively, in the U.S. strategic warning system. (9)

There have been at least three times in the last 20 years that the U.S. and Russia almost launched to false warnings. Fortunately there was enough time to determine that the warnings were false before decision time ran out.

In 1979, a U.S. training tape showing a massive attack was accidentally played.

In 1983, a Soviet satellite mistakenly signaled the launch of a U.S. missile.

In 1995, Russia almost launched its missiles because of a Norwegian rocket studying the northern lights. (l0)

If the U.S. builds an anti-missile defense it appears certain that missiles would be launched to false warnings because no time is available for determining whether a warning is false or not.

Preventive Action Needed

Plans to build an anti-missile defense need to be carefully researched as to how it could increase the danger of an accidental nuclear war. As the research progresses, the findings need to be widely discussed in the news media. The more widely and clearly the danger is made known the more concerned the public should be for agreements to greatly reduce and eventually eliminate all nuclear weapons from the world.

As humanity's safety becomes more and more dependent upon technology, the technological dangers need to be guarded against. Technical errors in one system may trigger errors in others. When researching missile defense dangers the following types of factors need to be included in the assessments, e.g. Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP)), "Dead Hand" control of missiles, High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), Hazards of Electromagnetic Radiation to Ordnance (HERO). Russia's blind spots in its satellite warning system also need to be included in this research.

The U.S. and Russia are in a position where either can destroy humanity in a flash and yet there appears to be little recognition of this peril hanging over the world. Only 71 out of 435 U.S. congressional representatives signed a motion calling for nuclear weapons to be taken off of hair-trigger alert. (11) The U.S. Senate rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1999. (12)

Queen Noor al Hussein, of Jordan, said "The sheer folly of trying to defend a nation by destroying all life on the planet must be apparent to anyone capable of rational thought." (13) There is a need to greatly increase public awareness of the danger in order to provide broad, long-term understanding and support for arms agreements ridding the world of nuclear weapons.


Reference and Notes

1. Sagan, Carl. The Nuclear Winter, Council for a Livable World Education Fund, Boston, MA, 1983.

2. Robock, Alan. "New models confirm nuclear winter," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, September l989, pp 32-35.

3. Blum, Deborah. "Scientists try to predict nuclear future from forest fires," The Sacramento Bee, November 28, 1987.

4. Sagan, Op.Cit.

5. Ibid

6. Babst, Dean, Preventing An Accidental Armageddon," Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, February 2000,

7. Blair, Bruce. "Nuclear Dealerting: A Solution to Proliferation Problems," The Defense Monitor, Volume XXXIX, No.3, 2000.

8. Strategic Defense and Anti-Satellite Weapons, hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 25, 1984, pp. 69-74.

9. Letter from Air Force Space Command headquarters at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado, February 16, 1984.

10. Babst, Op.Cit.

11. The Sunflower, No. 31, Jan. 00, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, Calif.

12. Gordon, Michael R. "Russia rejects call to amend ABM treaty," Contra Costa Times, Oct. 2l, 1999.

13. Hussein, Queen Noor al. "The Responsibilities of World Citizenship," Waging Peace Series, Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Santa Barbara, Calif., Booklet No 40, July 2000.

__________________________

*Dean Babst is a retired government research scientist and Coordinator of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation's Accidental Nuclear War Studies Program. The author acknowledges the helpful suggestions of David Krieger, President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, Bob Aldridge, who heads the Pacific Life Research Center, and Andy Baltzo, who is Founder of the Mount Diable Peace Center in northern California.

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© 2002 by Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. Reproduction encouraged.
Please acknowledge source and provide Foundation contact information in all copies.

[Guest]

Nuclear Winter:
Nuclear winter is an the environmental devastation that certain scientists contend would probably result from the hundreds of nuclear explosions in a nuclear war. The damaging effects of the light, heat, blast, and radiation caused by nuclear explosions had long been known to scientists, but such explosions' indirect effects on the environment remained largely ignored for decades. In the 1970s, however, several studies posited that the layer of ozone in the stratosphere that shields living things from much of the Sun's harmful ultraviolet radiation might be depleted by the large amounts of nitrogen oxides produced by nuclear explosions. Further studies speculated that large amounts of dust kicked up into the atmosphere by nuclear explosions (or an asteroid impact) might block sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, leading to a temporary cooling of the air. Scientists then began to take into account the smoke produced by vast forests set ablaze by nuclear fireballs, and in 1983 an ambitious study, known as the TTAPS study (from the initials of the last names of its authors, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan), took into consideration the crucial factor of smoke and soot arising from the burning petroleum fuels and plastics in nuclear-devastated cities. (Smoke from such materials absorbs sunlight much more effectively than smoke from burning wood.) The TTAPS study coined the term "nuclear winter," and its ominous hypotheses about the environmental effects of a nuclear war came under intensive study by both the American and Soviet scientific communities.

The basic cause of nuclear winter, as hypothesized by researchers, would be the numerous and immense fireballs caused by exploding nuclear warheads. These fireballs would ignite huge uncontrolled fires (firestorms) over any and all cities and forests that were within range of them. Great plumes of smoke, soot, and dust would be sent aloft from these fires, lifted by their own heating to high altitudes where they could drift for weeks before dropping back or being washed out of the atmosphere onto the ground. Several hundred million tons of this smoke and soot would be shepherded by strong west-to-east winds until they would form a uniform belt of particles encircling the Northern Hemisphere from 30 to 60 latitude. These thick black clouds could block out all but a fraction of the Sun's light for a period as long as several weeks. Surface temperatures would plunge for a few weeks as a consequence, perhaps by as much as 11 to 22 C (20 to 40 F). The conditions of semidarkness, killing frosts, and subfreezing temperatures, combined with high doses of radiation from nuclear fallout, would interrupt plant photosynthesis and could thus destroy much of the Earth's vegetation and animal life. The extreme cold, high radiation levels, and the widespread destruction of industrial, medical, and transportation infrastructures along with food supplies and crops would trigger a massive death toll from starvation, exposure, and disease. A nuclear war could thus reduce the Earth's human population to a fraction of its previous numbers.

A number of scientists have disputed the results of the original calculations, and, though such a nuclear war would undoubtedly be devastating, the degree of damage to life on Earth remains controversial.

[Guest]

Is that enough. The college data bank has several thousand others.

[Joe]

I would to see the detail of these studies; chiefly, how a few thousands of megatons of nuclear warheads are going to accomplish what a million megatons of kinetic energy failed to do 65 million years ago.

[Guest]

concede defeat here comes more
:
http://www.clw.org/pub/clw/coalition/ctfallou.htm

http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/88spp.html
Brian Martin

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email: brian_martin@uow.edu.au
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Both science and politics have been involved in the debate over 'nuclear winter'. Political interests seem to have influenced the degree of scientific attention to the nuclear winter effect, some of the assumptions underlying the models developed to study it, and the criticisms made of it. Conversely, nuclear winter results have been used as tools to promote particular stands on nuclear policy-making. In all this, most scientists involved with the studies have tried to define science as separate from politics. The debate raises in acute form the contradiction involved in science allegedly being objective and apolitical while at the same time it is intermeshed with policy disputes.
Since the first nuclear explosions in 1945, scientific and popular attention has focussed at different times on different actual and potential effects of nuclear weapons. First highlighted were the immediate effects of blast and heat. Because the explosions over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were air bursts, the full implications of radioactive fallout were not realised until the extensive atmospheric testing of hydrogen bombs in the 1950s[1]. In the 1970s, it was realised that nuclear explosions could inject large amounts of nitrogen oxides into the stratosphere, acting as a catalyst to reduce ozone levels and thereby allow increased amounts of ultraviolet light to penetrate to the earth's surface[2].

It was only in 1982 and 1983 that another possible consequence became the subject of intensive scientific investigation and extensive political discussion: severe climatic effects. A major nuclear war would lead to vast amounts of soot and dust being lofted into the atmosphere, most importantly from the burning of cities. This material would absorb incoming solar radiation but continue to allow infrared heat from the earth's surface to escape to outer space. The result could be a significant drop in surface temperatures, especially in continental interiors. The temperature drop could cause massive death by freezing and destruction of ecosystems. The popular term for this is 'nuclear winter', which for convenience I will use in preference to some other less emotive but more cumbersome phrase such as 'global climatic effects of nuclear war, especially temperature decreases'.

The nuclear winter issue illustrates the interplay between what are usually called science and politics. Proponents of the strong nuclear winter position -- those who emphasise the most serious consequences -have consistently adopted the mantle of science, trying to distance themselves from political motives, while at the same time a few of them have been active in spelling out what they believe to be the policy implications of the science. Critics of the strong position -those who emphasise uncertainties and the likelihood that the effects may be less than the worst -- have also adopted the mantle of science. In addition, a few critics have questioned the motivations behind nuclear winter research.

For the sake of exposition, I will continue to talk of 'science' -- scientific knowledge, the methods used in generating and validating it, and the community of people who produce it -- and 'politics' -- the exercise of power and social arrangements embodying the distribution of power[3] -- as distinct entities. I first deal with ways in which politics may have entered the science of nuclear winter, then with ways in which the science of nuclear winter has entered politics and finally with ways by which the distinction between science and politics is maintained. In conclusion, some implications for science and public policy are spelled out.

The approach used here draws on the sociology of scientific knowledge[4-7], which examines the social mechanisms which serve to establish what counts as knowledge. These mechanisms include economic and political structures, potential applications, professional interests and interpersonal dynamics. Data, arguments, claims about method, status and tradition all can be used as 'resources' or 'tools' to persuade other scientists that certain things constitute valid knowledge.

This approach to studying science does not attempt to judge what is scientifically 'correct'. The analysis includes examination of social processes associated with all knowledge claims, whether the balance of informed scientific judgement accepts or rejects those claims now or in the future.



Politics enters science
More than 'pure science' is involved when a researcher decides that a particular area is 'scientifically interesting'. Many features of wider society influence the process of choice of research, including the availability of funding, possible applications, technological infrastructure, ideas prevalent in society and the social position of scientists. Each of these factors played a role in turning nuclear winter into a priority research area in the 1980s.

The resurgence of the peace movement in the early 1980s provided fertile ground for discovering the nuclear winter effect. The upsurge in peace activism spread throughout numerous organisations and occupational groups, including doctors, scientists and engineers. In this context, the editors of the environmental journal Ambio, published by the Swedish Academy of Sciences, planned a special issue in 1982 to cover the effects of nuclear war. Paul Crutzen was asked to deal with the effects of nuclear war on the atmosphere for this issue.

Crutzen in his Ph.D. did pioneering work in showing the important effect of nitrogen oxides in regulating the amount of ozone in the stratosphere[8]. His work came just at the height of the debate over supersonic transport (SST) aircraft in the United States. Crutzen, along with Harold Johnston, was the first to draw attention to the possible impact of SSTs on ozone due to the nitrogen oxides in their exhaust[9-10]. So from an early stage Crutzen was attuned to the sensitivity of natural systems to human impacts.

A later development in the SST debate was comparison of the effects of SST exhausts on ozone with the effects of nuclear explosions, which also produce nitrogen oxides. Ironically, the first studies of the effects of the atmospheric nuclear explosions on ozone were done in the early 1970s to show that SSTs would not affect ozone significantly[11]. The debate over the effects of past nuclear tests on ozone continued[12] for a couple of years before a few researchers pointed out that a full-scale nuclear war could have catastrophic effects on ozone[13]. This led to a study in 1975 by the US National Academy of Sciences on the long-term effects of nuclear weapons[14].

In 1981 journalist Jonathan Schell wrote a series of articles in the New Yorker arguing that nuclear war could cause extinction of human life, principally through destruction of stratospheric ozone. Schell's articles, made into a book[15], were inspired by the burgeoning peace movement and in turn were widely taken up by it. Yet by the time he made his argument, the basis for massive ozone destruction by nuclear weapons had largely evaporated.

This is what Crutzen and his collaborator John Birks found in 1982 as they ran their computer models dealing with stratospheric ozone to determine the effects of a nuclear war. Because the large multi-megatonne nuclear bombs deployed in the 1950s were being replaced by larger numbers of smaller warheads, not as much nitrogen oxides would be lofted far up into the stratosphere. Crutzen and Birks' model did not predict a significant reduction in stratospheric ozone using the Ambio reference scenario.

Crutzen and Birks each over the years had examined a wide range of physical and chemical processes which could affect the dynamics of the atmosphere. As they dealt with the problem of the effects of nuclear war on the atmosphere, they happened to think about the smoke released by fires caused by nuclear attacks. Quick calculations showed that the smoke could absorb a large fraction of sunlight, leading to 'twilight at noon'. In short order they included this in their now-famous paper for Ambio[16].

The Crutzen-Birks paper was immediately taken up as heralding an important and hitherto unrecognised effect of nuclear war. The next step, to nuclear winter, was taken by Richard Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas Ackerman, James Pollack and Carl Sagan, the so-called TTAPS group. Taking the Crutzen-Birks idea that smoke and dust from a nuclear war would block out sunlight, they calculated that this would lead to massive cooling at the earth's surface: sunlight in the visual region could not penetrate the smoke, but much infrared radiation from the earth's surface could still escape[17-18].

The nuclear winter idea was spread to a highly receptive audience, including the peace movement, the mass media and much of the general population. Research groups around the world have examined the issue in greater depth.

Previous military research had not pursued the possibility, at least for wider evaluation. Arguably, the military has been more interested in the immediate effects of nuclear war, since those are the ones of significance for fighting wars and providing an obvious deterrent. In addition, military scientists are not as free to report their results in open forums. Edward Teller refers to studies in the 1960s of the climatic effects of dust raised by nuclear explosions done at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons design laboratory[19]. But these studies were not perceived or promoted as uncovering an area potentially crucial for nuclear policy-making.

Turning now to the actual research: does the science of nuclear winter embody in any way assumptions about politics? The original TTAPS paper[20] and accompanying Ehrlich et al. paper[21] illustrate the way this can occur. I argue here that these papers make a series of assumptions which emphasise the worst case for the effects of nuclear war.

(1) Targeting. The TTAPS paper uses a baseline case of 5000 megatonnes (MT), supplemented by a wide range of other scenarios which also lead to nuclear winter effects. Though in general terms some of the scenarios appear reasonable, no detailed strategic rationale is offered for any of them[22]. A cynic might say that the key characteristic of the scenarios is that they produce sufficient smoke or dust to produce nuclear winter. This is illustrated by the 100MT scenario, which is often misinterpreted as 100 bombs on 100 cities. Actually it involves 1000 bombs and the burning of a vast number of cities each of just the right size. It is easy to misinterpret the results for this scenario as showing that any 100MT war is enough to trigger nuclear winter, whereas any militarily realistic targeting of 100MT would cause relatively few cities to burn and probably produce little cooling according to present models.

If the scenarios had been designed to produce a spread of soot injections rather than a fairly constant soot injection for different megatonnages, the result of nuclear winter would have seemed more sensitive to variations in targeting.

Ehrlich et al. concentrate on a 10,000MT scenario which generates more severe environmental effects than either the Ambio scenario[23] or the TTAPS baseline case. They state that they take the TTAPS 10,000MT 'severe' case as their reference case because of policy implications[24]. (According to Michael MacCracken, TTAPS in their draft paper presented a 10,000MT baseline. After receiving comments, they corrected an error of a factor of 2 in the smoke density and also reset the baseline to 5000MT. These two changes counteracted each other, leaving the baseline consequences unchanged. Ehrlich et al. considered a maximum but to them plausible scenario which, after the factor of 2 adjustment, turned out to be the TTAPS 10,000MT scenario[25].)

And they go on and on. Ready to surrender.

[Joe]

The basic cause of nuclear winter, as hypothesized by researchers, would be the numerous and immense fireballs caused by exploding nuclear warheads. These fireballs would ignite huge uncontrolled fires (firestorms) over any and all cities and forests that were within range of them. Great plumes of smoke, soot, and dust would be sent aloft from these fires, lifted by their own heating to high altitudes where they could drift for weeks before dropping back or being washed out of the atmosphere onto the ground. Several hundred million tons of this smoke and soot would be shepherded by strong west-to-east winds until they would form a uniform belt of particles encircling the Northern Hemisphere from 30 to 60 latitude.

Firestorms can't hurl massive amounts of soot into the air as you claim they can.

[Guest]

Start giving facts. Oh but I see you have no support. Maybe 5 thousand more articles of which you have not even read a third of these will help. Oh I guess not.

[phongn]

TTAPS has as of late been widely discredited as a study as certain critical assumptions - that of stratospheric dust loading from burning cities - have not been observed in actual firestorms.

A good try, but Sagan's old study is a dead dog.

[Joe]

Perhaps you can find a better way to debate than posting other people's work ad nauseam? Meaning, displaying some actual knowledge on the subject?

[Guest]

the data bank holds some 50 years of data. i do not have time to sift through it now. Start providing data. I see no one is.

[phongn]

Start giving facts. Oh but I see you have no support. Maybe 5 thousand more articles of which you have not even read a third of these will help. Oh I guess not.

This is sheer dishonesty. Punching a search term into a journal index and getting back a few thousand hits does not constitute five thousand articles on the validity of nuclear winter.

For that matter, with that many results I find it extremely likely that it is an 'OR' search, meaning that any keyword you typed - in any combination - would throw up a result.

[Joe]

Start giving facts. Oh but I see you have no support. Maybe 5 thousand more articles of which you have not even read a third of these will help. Oh I guess not.

Listen, asshat, posting whole articles is a lazy man's way of debating. The entire theory of nuclear winter rests on the assumption that firestorms caused by nuclear explositions will erupt and put massive amounts of soot and debris into the atmosphere, and this just doesn't fucking happen.

[Guest]

Facts now or you lose. I guess you have no facts. YOu lost.

[phongn]

Facts now or you lose. I guess you have no facts. YOu lost.

I suggest you read Nuclear Winter Reappraised by Starley L. Thompson and Stephen H. Schneider, which deals with the TTAPS model.

[Crown]

Facts now or you lose. I guess you have no facts. YOu lost.

Two self declared victories in as many posts, my aren't we eager ... interesting.

[Guest]

Interesting indeed. Yet all i get are books from authors with no credability and boring tirades on firestorms. What else? Last chance.

[Joe]

Actually, your articles fail to produce any evidence that firestorms hurl massive amounts of debris capable of blocking out the sun into the air. They just accept it as a fact.

And appealing to whomever can do a google search for the most information is not a valid criteria for deciding who wins debates.

[phongn]

Interesting indeed. Yet all i get are books from authors with no credability and boring tirades on firestorms. What else? Last chance.

I suppose I should quote Foreign Affairs on the credentials of the two authors in question: Starley L. Thompson is an atmospheric scientist and climate theorist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. Stephen H. Schneider, an atmospheric scientist and public policy analyst, is Deputy Director of the Advanced Study Program at NCAR.

I should furthermore note that these credentials were as of 1986, when the article was published.