'Nuclear winter is not an implausible idea'
1985 1985-06Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 6 →
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6 SOCIALIST ACTION JUNE 1985 reports, if you want to be cynical, were done by political liberals and that there was some bias in them? Gould said. "But this report is done by basically conservative scientists who say that it is a plausible scenario."
According to Gould, Edward Teller, "the most conservative man in American research, grants that nuclear winter is a strong possibility.
"Although he likes to pooh-pooh it, Teller does not deny that his own calculations give nuclear winter as a not implausible scenario"' Gould said. "He is in favor of more money fo research."
Will we follow the dinosaurs?
The idea of nuclear winter was first put forth by groups headed by Cornell astronomer Carl Sagan and Stanford biologist Paul Erlich. They theorized that a nuclear war would blanket the atmosphere with sufficient dust and smoke to block out most of the light from the sun, condemning any people who survived the bomb blasts to death by starvation and freezing.
Gould compared nuclear winter to the effects caused by the asteroid or comet that—most scientists agree-collided with the earth about 65 million years ago. That catastrophe wiped out "I think the main the dinosaurs and about 50 percent of all existing species of animals and plants.
"The asteroid or cometary impact is a lot more powerful than all the megatonnage of the earth's weapons, Gould pointed out, "But the earth's weapons could have more effect because an asteroid hits in only one place and nuclear bombs hit all over."
"You don't even need
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manufacturers when they use job blackTHE FREEZE The labor involvement in the anti-
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effect of the nuclear winter argument is to mobilize opinion."