HOW ONE SCIENTIST MAY HAVE SAVED THE WORLD FROM NUCLEAR WAR IN 1983

After the missiles hit, firestorms engulf cities around the world - shrouding the world in black clouds of soot, and blocking out the sun.

Food crops fail, temperatures plummet - and all those who survived the bombs would die a lingering death in the ruins.


That was the terrifying vision predicted by Dr Carl Sagan in 1983 - creating an image which shocked the world, and may have changed history.

Dr Sagan said, ‘Beneath the clouds, virtually all domesticated and wild sources of food would be destroyed.

‘Most of the human survivors would starve to death. The extinction of the human species would be a real possibility.’

It was a chilling idea - immediately seized on by anti-war campaigners - and it may have helped defuse the Cold War.

The ‘nuclear winter’ was one of the major factors which hammered home the idea that nuclear wars would not, and could not, be won by either side.

It also highlighted the fact that the devastation of nuclear war would not be restricted to the countries who actually owned nuclear weapons - such as Britain, America and the U.S.S.R..

Sagan was one of a team of scientists who published a paper in 1983 in Science, using computer modelling to predict the effects of a large-scale nuclear war on Earth’s climate.

The ‘nuclear winter’ - and Sagan’s contribution to it, has been revisited this week in a documentary by Retro Report in collaboration with the New York Times.

Sagan - the most media-savvy of the team - hammered home the point that, even if there WAS a chance the prediction was wrong, it wasn’t worth gambling on it.

‘The global consequences of nuclear war is not a subject amenable to experimental verification - or at least, not more than once,’ Sagan said in October 1983. ‘Maybe we’ve all made some serious mistake in the calculations, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it.’

In 1984, six heads of government - including Indira Gandhi of India and Miguel de la Madrid of Mexico - called on the nuclear-armed powers to halt testing, referring to the arms race as 'global suicide’.

Fidel Castro, who had previously urged Kruschev to stick to his guns during the Cuban Missile Crisis, changed his ideas on nuclear weapons thanks to nuclear winter - attending speeches by scientists on the subject as late as 2010.

In 1984, Sagan’s work in popularising the idea of ‘nuclear winter’ meant that he was invited to meet Pope John Paul II.

The American team’s findings were rapidly followed by separate Soviet research on the subject.

Mikhail Gorbachev said afterwards, ‘Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation.’

In 1991, the USSR and the U.S.A. signed the START treaty - which led to an 80% reduction in the number of strategic nuclear weapons on Earth.

But Sagan’s contribution remains controversial.

Many scientists - including some of his own collaborators - believed that Sagan exaggerated the effects of nuclear winter, perhaps for political ends.

Even his colleague Dr Richard P Turco - who coined the phrase ‘nuclear winter’ - said, ‘[The idea that nuclear winter would wipe out humanity] was a speculation of others, including Carl Sagan. My personal opinion is that the human race wouldn’t become extinct, but civilization as we know it certainly would.’

Today, researchers still believe that a large nuclear exchange could change Earth’s climate - just not to the extent Sagan predicted.

A large-scale nuclear exchange could lower temperatures by up to 1.5 degrees, and changing the climate for decades.

Researchers from the University of Colorado predict that a ‘limited’ exchange in which 100 nuclear weapons were detonated would change the world’s climate for 20 years.

The release of ‘black carbon’ into the atmosphere would lead to decades of ‘killing frosts’ - and changes in the Earth’s season.

A huge loss of ozone over populated areas would lead to the coldest average surface temperatures in the last 1,000 years’

The researchers said, ‘Knowledge of the impacts of 100 small nuclear weapons should motivate the elimination of more than 17,000 nuclear weapons that exist today.’


Images: Rex Features

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