Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
issue brought together nearly every major player in atmospheric science in
the 1980s, and the ensuing controversy helped to shape both the science
and politics of global warming in the years to come.
The nuclear winter debate first arose out of an unlikely mix of Cold
War politics, paleoclimatology, and ozone research. During the 1980 presi-
dential campaign, Reagan had stumped for a more robust and aggressive
national defense strategy. He attacked Carter's halting attempts to cooper-
ate with the Soviet Union on arms control as an attitude of “defeatism,” and
he called the still unratified Strategic Arms Limitations Treaty (SALT II)
“fatally flawed.”77
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He and his secretary of defense, Caspar Weinberger,
argued that Carter's policies had opened up a “window of vulnerability”
wherein the United States lacked the technological systems to respond to a
Soviet first strike.
78
The administration called for “rearmament,” an expan-
sion and updating of the U.S. military arsenal and the means to deploy
it.
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Weinberger argued that rearmament would allow the United States to
regain the nuclear parity at the heart of the policy of deterrence, but he also
launched a series of studies on strategies for fighting— and winning— a
protracted nuclear conflict with the Soviet Union.
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For foreign policy doves and American liberals already frightened by
Reagan's increasingly belligerent Cold War foreign policy and push for
rearmament, Weinberger's comments about “prevailing” in a nuclear con-
flict were a divergence from the objectionable but still useful concept of
mutually assured destruction that underpinned deterrence. Their response
included congressional hearings, public exposés on nuclear destruction
like Jonathan Schell's 1982
Fate of the Earth,
and, most notably, the grass-
roots nuclear freeze movement that led to large antinuclear demonstrations
and legislation— which passed the House— resolving to cease the produc-
tion of nuclear weapons.
81
In the United States and abroad, environmentalists stood in solidar-
ity with this resurgent antinuclear movement. Since as early as the 1972
U.N. Conference on the Human Environment— with its roots in Swedish
concerns about nuclear weapons and their dominance in international
politics— environmental activists around the world had associated wars
and nuclear armaments with environmental destruction and peace with
conservation.
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Reagan's defense policies reawakened long-standing con-
cerns over the environmental impacts of military activities. In 1981, for
example, the Sierra Club's Task Force on the Environmental Effects of
