David Grinspoon Quote
The TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even a limited nuclear conflict would cause a climate disaster that could quite possibly, among other things, collapse global agriculture, dooming civilization as we know it. With these weapons, there was no destroying your enemy without also destroying yourself. It brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets create a doomsday machine that will detonate if a nuclear war starts, rendering the entire world uninhabitable. The TTAPS nuclear winter study revealed that we had, unwittingly, built such a machine. These results were widely discussed in the security communities of both superpowers, and are often cited as helping to motivate the partial disarmament that both sides undertook as the Cold War wound down. Anti-Greenhouse In all these studies, Pollack and his collaborators were discovering variations that can be induced, by changes in quantities of gases or suspended particles, in a planetary greenhouse.
The TTAPS study and the wider debate it ignited helped drive home the absurdity of nuclear strategies dependent on massive deterrence. The United States and the USSR had created a situation where even a limited nuclear conflict would cause a climate disaster that could quite possibly, among other things, collapse global agriculture, dooming civilization as we know it. With these weapons, there was no destroying your enemy without also destroying yourself. It brought to mind Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Cold War dark comedy, Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviets create a doomsday machine that will detonate if a nuclear war starts, rendering the entire world uninhabitable. The TTAPS nuclear winter study revealed that we had, unwittingly, built such a machine. These results were widely discussed in the security communities of both superpowers, and are often cited as helping to motivate the partial disarmament that both sides undertook as the Cold War wound down. Anti-Greenhouse In all these studies, Pollack and his collaborators were discovering variations that can be induced, by changes in quantities of gases or suspended particles, in a planetary greenhouse.