The Long and the Short of It - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 335

perceived? I think the first reason was that the number of countries holding nuclear
weapons was small. This always simplifies negotiations.
However, a second driving force was the convergence of scientific evidence for the
risks to human health and the environment and the fact that there could be no clear winner
even in the case of a limited exchange of nuclear weapons. A glimpse of Hiroshima and
Nagasaki told everyone what must be avoided. At the same time, there was a convergence
between this acceptance and a growing unease on both sides of the Iron Curtain with the
scale and speed of the 1950s-1960s arms race. The 1983 paper published in the journal
Science by Richard Turco and colleagues added a totally new way of looking at the impact
of a moderate to large-scale nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere. Their paper is today
known as the TTAPS study (after the names of the authors) and it introduced the world to
the phrase “nuclear winter”. Instead of concentrating on the then-traditional approach of
dealing with the effects of blast, heat and radiation, it focused on the scale and impacts res-
ulting from smoke and small particulates injected high into the atmosphere by the intense
heat generated by nuclear explosions. Once in the atmosphere, the resulting massive and
dense cloud would rapidly spread over much of the Northern Hemisphere, which would
be plunged into darkness (the nuclear targets were assumed to largely be in the North-
ern Hemisphere). Most sunlight would be blocked for weeks to months and surface tem-
peratures would plunge. When combined with that of high radiation levels, these impacts
would destroy much of the Northern Hemisphere's flora (including agricultural capacity)
and fauna (including human populations). The fate of the Southern Hemisphere was less
clear.
Public opposition to nuclear weapons in Western countries became widespread and
vociferous. I remember the chill of the 1962 Cuban crisis. In England, we felt little comfort
from the four minutes of warning we were promised in the event of a nuclear attack. What
would I do with those four minutes? Two years ago, Thérèse and I stood at ground zero in
Nagasaki. Memories of the Cuban crisis flooded back. Possibly the third and most power-
ful reason that fuelled the comparatively swift progress on test ban treaties was the power