Nuclear Winter – Alan Robock on Reality Asserts Itself
From 2014, Mr. Robock says a full-scale nuclear war between the […]
Date Posted:
April 7, 2016
From 2014, Mr. Robock says a full-scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia would produce so much smoke that temperatures would get below freezing even in the summertime, crops would die and there would be no food for the entire planet.
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Alan Robock is wrong.
1. US navy Aegis cruisers and destroyers can shoot down ICBMs.
2. Nuclear bombs are our only defense against a large comet or asteroid aimed at Earth if there is little warning. Besides my computation done decades ago there is also http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Changing_Course_On_Earth_Approach_999.html
Alan seems in a snit about the refusal of words to mean what he wants them to, rather than what they historically signify.
As a matter of record, “nuclear winter” was the name of an apocalyptic PR campaign designed to scare people into embracing the nuclear freeze movement, and abandoning the field in the Cold War
Like its contemporary cultural preoccupation, ,the Energy Crisis , which despite much ballyhoo ended up devolving into “The Oil Glut”, “nuclear winter ‘ went from being an existential threat to an embarassment to its publicts, Alan included , in a few short years.
You can inspect some of the primary sources here :
http://vvattsupwiththat.blogspot.com/2016/04/reposted-from-adamant-december-20-2006.html
That’s a very narrow framing, and fails to account for the science backing it. The New York Times recently published a broader angle on the nuclear winter scenario, http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000004306826/nuclear-winter.html