daemon@ucbvax.UUCP (08/18/84)
From FFM@MIT-MC Sat Aug 18 10:09:55 1984
Arms-Discussion Digest Volume 2 : Issue 52
Today's Topics:
People, People(2), Nuclear Winter & Crazy States, NYTimes article on
Govt Research on Nuclear Winter,
Nuclear Winter & Crazy States(2),
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 12 August 1984 09:18-EDT
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: People
To: foy @ AEROSPACE
cc: ARMS-DISCUSSION @ MIT-MC
My sister and a former girlfriend expressed a fourth reason for not
getting involved in preventing nuclear war. It's to scary. It scares
them to nightmares every time they start to really thinking about it,
so they have to avoid the issue entirely to maintain peace of mind.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 13 Aug 84 07:49:30 PDT
From: Richard Foy <foy@AEROSPACE>
To: REM @MIT-MC
CC: ARMS-D@MIT-MC
Subject: PEOPLE
Thanks for the fourth reason. I wonder if the three reasons that I cited
are not actually subsets of the reason you gave. That is, the reasons I gave
are the means that people use to rationalize away and suppress their fears
about nuclear war.
------------------------------
Date: Wed 15 Aug 84 18:54:10-EDT
From: Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA>
Subject: Nuclear Winter & Crazy States
To: Prog-d%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA, Arms-d%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
cc: MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
I assume everyone on this list is well-acquainted with Sagan's
nuclear winter thesis, and I will not bother to recount its central
tenets. Most attention so far has focused on the horror of the nuclear
winter itself. In the New York Times of August 12, David V. Forrest,
in a letter to the editor, raises some very intriguing and creative
questions about the _strategic implications_ of the nuclear winter
scenario. His letter follows:
[begin quote]
To the Editor:
The nuclear winter concept advanced by Turco, Toon, Ackerman,
Pollack and Sagan [news story Aug. 5], if truly descriptive of the
outcome of as little as a 100-megaton exchange of nuclear weapons,
seems to lead logically to a number of strategic implications:
-All delivery systems for nuclear weapons are now obsolete. All
that is necessary for any nation to achieve nuclear deterrence (or
nuclear blackmail) is the capacity to detonate 100 megatons of devices
on its own soil. A site may be chosen for this doomsday weaponry where
prevailing winds would carry the light-blocking dust over other
nations first, but this would not affect the outcome.
-Unilateral (or bilateral or multilateral) disarmament to this
minimum number of devices for a nuclear winter doomsday is finally a
strategic reality rather than wishful thinking.
-All missile defense is obsolete, except for unknown new
technology that might prevent a nuclear opponent from exploding his
own devices on his own turf. The defense motto would become "Let them
try to figure out how to stop us in our own backyard!"
-The neutron bomb, which is antipersonnel and doesn't kick up
much dust, becomes the preferred weapon (and can use the otherwise
obsolete delivery systems). Any nation could threaten retaliatory
doomsday by nuclear winter, however.
-"Star Wars" nuclear duels -- "shoot it out up there" -- become
the new thermonuclear gaming sphere and outlet for rivalry. Potential
control of space would permit pre-emptive strikes against nuclear
winter doomsday installations if insufficiently hardened.
-An "ecology race" to develop a "stratosphere sweep" is
inevitable, because a nation in possession of it could invalidate the
nuclear winter doomsday threat, preferably after other nations have
disarmed to the minimum. (If this sounds fantastic, we might recall
that at one time the containment of oil spills and the seeding of
clouds was merely a dream).
-Ironically, the concept of unilateral introduction of a nuclear
winter makes a nuclear _exchange_ sound more limited and manageable,
with the result that the bomb-shelter and food-storage survivalist
ethic becomes more attractive, in which the goal would be to outwait a
primarily climactic period of crop shortages rather than a radioactive
interval. Semantically, to paraphrase Shelley, if a nuclear Winter
comes, can Spring be far behind?
-Then again, Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack and Sagan may be
mistaken.
[end quote]
Forrest's most disturbing speculation is his remark that "All
that is necessary for any nation to achieve nuclear deterrence (or
nuclear blackmail) is the capacity to detonante 100 megatons of
devices on its own soil." When one places that scenario next to a
passage about "nuclear crazy states" in Noam Chomsky's _The Fateful
Triangle: The United States, Israel & The Palestinians_ (1983, pp.
467-7), some of the terrifying possibilities come into clearer focus:
[begin quote]
The growing threat [of behaving like a nuclear crazy state] has
been recognized within Israel. Yaakov Sharrett writes that the
greatest danger facing Israel now is the "collective version" of
Samson's revenge against the Philistines--"Let me perish with the
Philistines"--as he brought down the Temple in ruins, killing more
Philistines than he had during his lifetime. He cites the Sharrett
diaries, the entry just cited and another one, where Defense Minister
Lavon is quoted as stating: "we will go crazy" ("nishtagea") if
crossed. Again from the diaries, he cites Labor Party official David
Hacohen after the attack on Egypt on 1956, who tells Moshe Sharett
that "we have nothing to lose so it is better that we go crazy; the
world will know to what a level we have reached," and presumably be
afraid to interfere, a position that Moshe Sharret found appalling.
This "Samson complex" is not something to be taken lightly. Aryeh
(Lova) Eliav, one of Israel's best-known and most influential doves,
writes that the attitude of "those who brought the 'Samson complex'
here, according to which we shall kill and bury all the Gentiles
around us while we ourselves shall die with them," is a sign of the
same sort of "insanity" that was manifested in the violent
counter-demonstration in which Emil Grunzweig was killed ... and is a
phenomenon of some significance in contemporary Israel. It is
reinforced by the feeling that "the whole world is against us" because
of its ineradicable anti-Semitism, a paranoid vision that owes not a
little to the contribution of supporters here, as we have seen.
In short, Israel's "secret weapon," which renders rational
calculations somewhat questionable, is that it may behave in the
manner of what have sometimes been called "crazy states" in the
international affairs literature. The concept was developed by the
Israeli scholar Yehezkel Dror of the Hebrew University. He writes that
"I am more sensitive to the possibilities and implications of
seemingly irrational political behavior than either American
strategists or the American public in general, referring to "the
dangers facing my own country." He regards "possible crazy states" as
"a main danger--to the world, to the United States, and to each
country," noting particularly the Samson complex and the special
danger of nuclear crazy states. The text is so abstract that one can
only guess as to what exactly he may have had in mind, but the usual
reference is to such states as Libya or Iraq, an equally obvious
example being pointedly omitted. This kind of "secret weapon" [keep
in mind that Chomsky didn't know about the nuclear winter when he
wrote this passage --WHM] is one to which a state that sees itself as
threatened and dependent may resort, and it becomes an extraordinarily
dangerous one in the hands of the world's fourth greatest military
power [Israel], equipped with an extremely efficient and powerful air
force capable of bombing the oil fields and nuclear weapons and
missiles that can reach the USSR, and undergoing internal social and
political developments of the kinds that have taken place in Israel
since the 1967 conquest--thanks to U.S. "support."
[end quote]
------------------------------
Date: 16 Aug 84 0023 EDT
From: Andy.Hisgen@CMU-CS-A.ARPA
To: Arms-D@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: NYTimes article on Govt Research on Nuclear Winter
Message-Id: <16Aug84.002356.AH20@CMU-CS-A.ARPA>
The story below ran in the NYTimes Sunday August 5 (it didn't show up
in the last Arms-D digest so I figured it hadn't been submitted yet):
n040 1136 04 Aug 84
BC-WINTER 2takes
(Art en route to picture service clients)
By WILLIAM J. BROAD
c.1984 N.Y. Times News Service
NEW YORK - The federal government has embarked on a broad program to
assess the theory that fires set by even a limited exchange of
nuclear weapons would blot out so much sunlight with smoke and soot
that life on earth would be all but extinguished.
According to federal officials, the scientific study is to involve
more than a dozen government agencies and cost up to $50 million.
If the theory proves valid, the threat of a ''nuclear winter'' could
force a dramatic overhaul of the nation's nuclear arsenal and the
military's plans and equipment for fighting a nuclear war, according
to scientists in and out of government.
The scientists say the shift could alter patterns of spending
millions and perhaps billions of dollars on the military.
And if the theory is valid, these experts contend, a series of new
questions would have to be answered: Will the threat of nuclear
winter hasten world disarmament? Or will it force the kinds of
changes in weaponry that in the past have fueled the arms race or
destabilized the world's balance of power? Will it affect this
nation's relationship with the Soviet Union? Will it tempt an
aggressor to launch a limited first strike?
The new federal program of research is to include simulations,
experiments, the study of large natural fires and possibly the
creation of large fires to assess how high smoke plumes rise and how
far they spread.
''Clearly this is an area of public concern,'' said Dr. George A.
Keyworth 2d, the president's science adviser. ''It deserves far
better scientific assesment than it's had to date.''
The program to study nuclear winter resulted from a series of new
theories and studies, put forth in the past nine months, suggesting
that the effects of nuclear war would be dramatically different from
what scientists had predicted in the previous four decades.
Some critics dismissed the theory as alarmist conjecture when it was
first set forth last fall by a small group of scientists. Dr. Edward
Teller, a principal developer of the hydrogen bomb, said that so many
uncertainties remained that attempts at specific predictions were
extremely premature.
But in recent months, administration officials have decided the
theory warrants serious scrutiny.
''Initially there was lots of skepticism,'' said Dr. Richard P.
Turco, a physicist at R&D Associates in Marina del Rey, Calif., and a
co-author of the theory. ''People tried to punch holes in it, but
that didn't work.
''Support has solidified,'' he added, ''and the issue now deserves a
national program. I don't think the government has been dragging its
feet. The issue is being taken seriously. It should. There are
serious implications.''
Even a modest pall of soot, smoke and dust, for instance, might
hamper the operation of radar, satellites and various airborne
command posts meant to be used by the president and military for
directing the course of a war and for negotiating a halt to
hostilities.
The nuclear winter theory was first proposed at an international
conference by Turco; Dr. Owen B. Toon, Dr. Thomas Ackerman and Dr.
James B. Pollack of the NASA Ames Research Center, and by Dr. Carl
Sagan of Cornell University. It was called the TTAPS study, an
acronym formed by the authors' last names.
It theorized that the detonation of nuclear warheads with a force of
5,000 megatons, equivalent to a blast of 5,000 million tons of TNT,
would ignite so many fires in cities and forests that smoke and soot
would block out the sun for months on end, lowering temperatures as
much as 75 degrees, first in the Northern Hemisphere and then
southward as the smoke spread with the wind. The authors said land
and water would freeze, causing harsh global effects unrelated to
radiation hazards.
The upshot, they argued, would be the extinction of a significant
proportion of the earth's animals and plants, including possibly the
human race.
The United States and the Soviet Union now possess weapons totaling
about 12,000 megatons, more than twice the number cited in the TTAPS
study. The Hiroshima bomb had a force of far less than one megaton.
The TTAPS scientists also theorized that an exchange as small as 100
megatons, aimed solely at cities, would be enough to cause a nuclear
winter.
Although persuasive in many respects, the theory was riddled with
unavoidable assumptions that could be resolved only by further study,
according to many scientists.
''It's like playing Russian roulette and not knowing if there are
one or five bullets in the gun,'' said Dr. Stephen Schneider, a
climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in
Boulder, Colo. ''The uncertainties need to be cleared up. For smoke,
soot and dust, the questions are how much, how high and how long does
it last.''
Another question, he added, is whether there is a threshold for
nuclear winter or just a spectrum of increasingly severe declines in
light and temperature.
It was obvious that Hiroshima and Nagasaki burned, yet government
scientists had not anticipated possible climatic effects from soot,
ash and smoke, and therefore no detailed measurements of them were
taken in the days of atmospheric nuclear testing.
One of the government's first responses to the theory of nuclear
winter, said Peter W. Lund, head of the Global Effects Program at the
Defense Nuclear Agency, was to finance a study on the subject in 1983
by the National Academy of Sciences. It is scheduled to be published
later this year. The defense agency, he added, is now spending about
$2 million a year on studies of nuclear winter.
As more and more federal agencies started to probe the validity of
the theory, the president's science adviser, Keyworth, in February
directed the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to
coordinate the federal response and draw up a master plan of study.
Heading this committee is Dr. Alan D. Hecht, director of the
National Climate Program Office. In a telephone interview, he said
the planning committee involved more than a dozen federal groups,
including the Department of Energy, the National Bureau of Standards,
the Agriculture Department's forest service, the National Science
Foundation and the Department of Defense.
Hecht said new financing for the overall program could be as high as
$50 million over a period of five years.
''The plan stresses the major uncertainties, which are the amount
and composition of soot and smoke injected into the atmosphere,'' he
said. ''What happens to it? How high does it go? Does it precipitate
out or form a dense cloud over the earth?
''The most crucial thing necessary for this hypothesis to come true
is for the cloud to get high into the atmosphere. If that happens, as
some preliminary modeling has shown, there is going to be a reduction
in sunlight at the earth's surface. The greatest uncertainty is
whether we get a dense cloud, not what would happen if we get it.
''A lot of the answers depend on experiments and not so much on the
evolution of technology, such as bigger computers for simulations. We
need more data, everything from fires in the laboratory to
experiments of burning small areas and structures, up to and
including managed forest fires.''
One scientific riddle, he said, was whether tiny particles of soot
and smoke remained separate in the atmosphere or clumped together,
which would hasten their fall back to earth.
The plan, he noted, requested funds for planes, satellites and
researchers to be able immediately to go to the sites of large fires
to collect data on how smoke plumes rise and develop. He added that
both the scope of the study and its conclusions would be reviewed by
the National Academy of Sciences.
An additional spur to federal action, Hecht said, was a recent spate
of congressional bills and hearings that called on the government to
assess the issue comprehensively.
At a hearing last month on nuclear winter, called by Sen. William
Proxmire, D-Wis., Proxmire said, ''It's a sad commentary on the
federal government's sense of priorities that there has been so
little reaction up to now.''
At the hearing, Dr. Richard L. Wagner Jr., assistant to the
secretary of defense for atomic energy, said, ''Not only the
Department of Defense but the scientific community in general ought
to be a bit chagrined at not realizing that smoke could produce these
effects.''
He added that much study was needed to assess the severity of this
effect. He said his own expectation was: ''We will find that in most
scenarios and most combinations of the uncertainties of the variables
that there will be a nuclear winter.''
Some scientists have asserted that the government might try to study
the issue endlessly as a way to avoid taking any action.
''I'm more pleased with the administration response than I thought I
would be,'' said Schneider, who has written widely on the theory,
independently of its authors. ''They're really going after it. But
I'm a little disappointed that they're using the uncertainty as an
excuse not to publicly react to the question. There will always be
unverifiable elements until people start burning cities, which I hope
never happens.''
At the Defense Nuclear Agency, Lund said ambiguities would doubtless
remain, no matter how much the issue was studied. ''The problem,'' he
said, ''is that you have no way of validating the work. You'll get
bits and pieces about fires, but you won't have data that puts it all
together. So the best we can expect is to put a more realistic bound
on the problem.''
One of the main federal centers studying the theory is the Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, operated by the
Department of Energy to design nuclear weapons. Late last year
scientists there said proponents of the nuclear winter theory might
be stating the case two or three times as bad as it might turn out to
be.
In an interview, Dr. Michael M. May, the laboratory's associate
director, said Livermore had already budgeted $1.5 million a year to
address the issue.
''Since there are lots of people calculating, I don't think we have
to worry about the charge of bias,'' he said. ''The public will be
able to look at what a variety of scientists come up with. It's not
an impossibly complex problem. The answer won't be black and white,
but there'll be an answer.'' nn
nyt-08-04-84 1445edt
***************
------------------------------
Received: from MIT-MC by MIT-OZ via Chaosnet; 17 Aug 84 22:54-EDT
Date: 17 August 1984 22:56-EDT
From: Steven A. Swernofsky <SASW @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Nuclear Winter & Crazy States
To: MDC.WAYNE @ MIT-OZ
cc: SASW @ MIT-MC, Arms-d @ MIT-OZ, Prog-d @ MIT-OZ
In-reply-to: Msg of Wed 15 Aug 84 18:54:10-EDT from Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ at MIT-MC.ARPA>
Date: Wed 15 Aug 84 18:54:10-EDT
From: Wayne McGuire <MDC.WAYNE%MIT-OZ at MIT-MC.ARPA>
... in the hands of the world's fourth greatest military power
[Israel], ...
Hey, this is pretty good! I guess that if you don't pay attention, you
miss all the good jokes! Ha ha ha!
-- Steve
------------------------------
[End of ARMS-D Digest]