Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
in
Parade Magazine,
a popular Sunday newspaper supplement with more
than twenty million readers. Chaired by George Woodwell and kicked off
by Stanford University's eloquent president, Donald Kennedy, the con-
ference itself was less a scientific meeting than an extended, staged press
release.
98
A satellite link— relatively new technology in 1983— connected
an audience of several hundred scientists, journalists, and politicians to
members of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
99
Sagan, drawing
on a career in popular science, delivered a concise, accessible, and alarming
synthesis of the TTAPS work, which he reinforced with a video,
T h e Wo r l d
of Nuclear Winter.
100
Ehrlich, also a well-known scientist, not only for
The
Population Bomb
but also for his frequent appearances on Johnny Carson's
Tonight Show,
then summarized a parallel study on the biological impacts
of a nuclear exchange and a subsequent nuclear winter that he and his
biologist colleagues had conducted.
101
On November 1, Sagan and Ehrlich
followed up with an appearance on Ted Koppel's
ABC News Nightline.
102
As
intended, their “scientific congress” made headlines around the world.
103
In Washington, the conference organizers insisted that they had “rig-
orously avoided drawing any policy implications from their findings,”
but Sagan had a detailed and specific policy response in mind, which he
published in the journal
Foreign Affairs
shortly after the TTAPS study
appeared in
Science
in December of 1983.
104
The TTAPS one-dimensional
model identified a “crude threshold, around 500 to 2,000 warheads” for
a nuclear exchange that could trigger a nuclear winter.
105
Sagan used
this threshold to demonstrate the shortcomings of existing postures on
nuclear defense and disarmament that failed to account for the possibility
of nuclear winter. He addressed eight different defense strategies, from
new treaties on targeting and yields supported by moderates and liberals to
Reagan's proposed ballistic missile defense system (the centerpiece of the
administration's Strategic Defense Initiative, or, pejoratively, “Star Wars”).
Given that an exchange of as little as 10 percent of the U.S.-Soviet
nuclear arsenals could trigger a climatic doomsday scenario, Sagan found
all of these prospects lacking. “None of the foregoing possible strategic
and policy responses to the prospect of a nuclear war- triggered climatic
catastrophe seem adequate even for the security of the nuclear powers,”
he wrote, “much less for the rest of the world.”
106
Moreover, he contended,
in a world linked by the potential of climatic disaster, “beyond the cli-
matic threshold, an increase in the number of strategic weapons leads to
