Environment: Debate over a Frozen Planet

• Share

A major study supports the grim prediction of nuclear winter

It is two weeks after a major nuclear war, and the searing white flashes of 25,000 bombs have faded into a black drizzle of radioactive fallout. Yet Armageddon is not complete: for miles above the earth, sunlight is blotted out by plumes of smoke from the vast conflagrations in which the major cities of the Northern Hemisphere have been consumed. This thick veil of soot and dust slowly circulates through various layers of the atmosphere, blanketing entire continents, creating a world of frigid darkness. As ground temperatures plummet by as much as 40° F and the sun is obscured, crops in Iowa, Nebraska and the Ukraine in the Soviet Union perish.

This grim scene is a possible approximation of the aftermath of nuclear war, according to a study released in Washington last week by the National Research Council, the principal operating agency of the nation's most august scientific body, the National Academy of Sciences. Three years ago, Paul Crutzen, a Dutch meteorologist who is now director of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, West Germany, suggested that a cataclysmic nuclear war could be followed by a period of icy gloom. Later, Atmospheric Scientist Richard Turco of R&D Associates in Marina del Rey, Calif., Astronomer Carl Sagan of Cornell University and a handful of other researchers elaborated on the idea, concluding that the cold, which they called nuclear winter, could last for months. Some scientists have disagreed with a few of the more extreme predictions of this hypothesis, which has been given its first official stamp of credibility by the 193-page N.A.S. report. Declared Committee Member Turco: "This legitimizes the problem."

The study, which was commissioned in 1983 by the Department of Defense's nuclear agency, cautioned that uncertainties remain in many of the calculations. Even so, said George E Carrier, an applied mathematician at Harvard University who was chairman of the 18-member committee, the N.A.S. findings were "consistent" with the original studies, which predicted global cooling and severe hardship for any survivors. The panel recommended that high priority be given to serious research to try to answer some of the more elusive questions that the nuclear-winter theory has raised.

The answers could eventually play a role in formulating the nation's defense strategy. Already one U.S. Government defense study, prepared by the Center for Aerospace Doctrine, Research and Education in Montgomery, Ala., has based its policy analyses on the assumption that the nuclear-winter theory is correct. Says Theodore Postol, a strategic-arms consultant at Stanford University: "I see this as a vehicle to raise questions about our whole nuclear strategy."