Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Military Projects drafted a resolution recognizing the “unprecedented
destruction of the global environment” at stake in a nuclear exchange and
expressing “grave concern over the lack of progress in completing nuclear
arms reduction agreements.”
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Scientists began to build on environmentalists' concerns. In 1982, the
Swedish Academy of Sciences asked Paul Crutzen, then at the Max Planck
Institute for Chemistry, to investigate the potential effects of a nuclear
exchange on the ozone of the upper atmosphere for a special journal issue
on the environmental consequences of nuclear war.
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Ozone had become
a popular and important environmental issue both in Europe and the
United States in the early 1980s, and the scientific journal
Ambio
's editors
recognized that a global nuclear war would inject enormous amounts of
ozone-depleting nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere. Strong supporters of
disarmament, the Swedish academy hoped to use this stratospheric impact
to reinforce the global stakes of a U.S.-Soviet nuclear conflict.85
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Crutzen did
Ambio
one better. In 1980, Nobel laureate physicist Luis
Alvarez at the University of California, Berkeley, and his geologist son,
Walter, had published a controversial study that attributed the extinc-
tion of dinosaurs to climatic changes resulting from ash and dust sent into
the stratosphere by a ten-kilometer-wide asteroid some sixty-five million
years ago.
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Crutzen and his
Ambio
coauthor John Birks of the University of
Colorado realized that though scientists had studied the immediate ther-
mal impacts of nuclear blasts, nobody had yet accounted for the climatic
impacts of the soot, smoke, and other particulate matter that a nuclear war
and the resulting fires could distribute through the atmosphere. Crutzen
and Birks's “Atmosphere after a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon” consid-
ered the possibility that a nuclear war could produce climatic effects similar
to those caused by the Alvarezes' asteroid. Its title dramatically printed
over a picture of a mushroom cloud, the article also suggested that the
consequences of this climatic change might again be the extinction of the
earth's dominant species— humans.
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In the spring of 1982, a group of planetary scientists at NASA's Ames
Research Center in California made up of Brian Toon, Tom Ackerman, and
Jim Pollack took up the Crutzen and Birks hypothesis and began to work
it into their own atmospheric models. Supported by Carl Sagan of Cor-
nell University and Richard Turco of NASA defense contractor Research
Associates, the so-called TTAPS group (Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack,
