Nuclear Winter: The Evidence and the Risks

I found this old book in a second-hand book shop. At the same time, I bought an insanely optimistic manual called "Surviving the Holocaust". Coincidentally, the lady at the counter was reading a "Planet of the Apes" comic. We must have been on the same wavelength.This book was published in 1985. That year marked the fortieth anniversary of an event that changed the world forever: the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout the ensuing Cold War years many lived in fear of a nuclear conflict and the horror it would bring. In the 1950s and 60s a plethora of science fiction books and films imagined what the world would be like After the Bomb. Some were chilling, others were unscientific nonsense. But for nearly forty years there was one after-effect of nuclear war that people had not thought of: the possibility of a nuclear winter. Owen Greene, Ian Percival and Irene Ridge wrote this sobering book when the theory of nuclear winter was just a couple of years old. The basic idea of a nuclear winter is that all the smoke and dust released from the explosions in a nuclear holocaust would linger in the atmosphere, obscuring the sun, causing a huge drop in temperature. The duration of this nuclear winter is variable. Scientists predict anything from a few weeks to a couple of years. But while it lasted, the Earth would be cold and dark, causing plants to die, which would then lead to widespread starvation for animals and humans. All this on top of radiation, disease and social chaos. Even if the survivors (who had hitherto taken a technological world for granted) managed to live through the nuclear winter and see the sun again, their troubles would not be over. The ultraviolet light from a damaged ozone layer would make the shrunken, weakened population even more susceptible to cancer, agriculture would be almost impossible, and the ever present radiation would slowly finish everything off.This all sounds like gloomy stuff. The nuclear winter theory has been a cause for heated dispute but the book makes it clear that even without a nuclear winter conditions in a post-holocaust world would be far from favourable. The scenarioes outlined here are all based on unknown quantities, estimates and a bit of educated guesswork. The nuclear winter is horribly plausible, although H.G. Wells, the first writer to imagine a nuclear holocaust as early as 1914, once wrote that the plausible theories are usually the wrong ones. Hopefully he was right. This is a case where we should hope fiction never becomes fact.