Nuclear Winter

The Classic Nuclear Winter Book now available, for the first time ever, as an e-book

Beginning of 1980’s humanity was hanging by its fingernails over a bottomless abyss.  In 1983 alone, the superpowers came twice very close of a nuclear war fought with tens of thousands of strategic nuclear weapons.

Had the situation not changed, we would have run out of luck – sooner or later.

But the situation did changed. and p Perhaps the most important factor that contributed  was the concept of nuclear winter.

The whole world suddenly realized, that a full-scale nuclear exchange would also have dramatic climatic consequences. Huge soot and dust clouds created by the vast firestorms ignited by nuclear blasts would block sunlight and reduce Earth’s temperatures by tens of degrees Celsius, plunging the planet into the middle of an artificial Ice Age.

Large majority of all agricultural production would be lost for decades. In practise nuclear war would starve a large majority of the Earth’s human population  to death. Even total extinction of the human species could no longer be excluded.

The concept of nuclear winter changed the way governments and military saw nuclear war. Before it, hawkish military leaders and politicians had insisted that only a few dozen or perhaps the maximum of a a couple of hundred million people would die even in a full-scale nuclear exchange.

It was largely because of the concept of nuclear winter that the nuclear superpowers have, since then, reduced their arsenals of nuclear weapons – counted as explosive energy– from three million Hiroshima bombs to roughly 80,000 Hiroshimas.

The concept was first introduzed to the world by an article written by the Dutch Nobel-prize winning scientist Paul Crutzen and his colleague J. Birks in an article published in the environmental magazine Ambio, in 1982. In 1983 the US scientists Carl Sagan, R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackermann and J.P. Pollack also wrote about nuclear winter in Science magazine.

However, the first full, book-sized analysis presenting the whole perspective  of the subject was Nuclear Winter – The Human and Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War by Mark A. Harwell and his co-workers. Nuclear Winter was the first volume to introduce the whole evidence and full spectrum of consequences of a nuclear exhange for the world.  Mark A. Harwell was, at the time, the Associate Director of the Ecosystems Research Center at the Cornell University, USA. He was also leading the agricultural and ecological analysis of the environmental effects of nuclear war for the International Council of Scientific Unions.

Nuclear Winter was published by Springer-Verlag in 1984, but it has been out of print for a long time and only available as a pdf file.  Into Publishing has now produced an e-book of this historically unique volume, with a licence from Springer Verlag.

We thought that it is essential to make this extremely important book once again widely available, all over the world, as we find ourselves at the verge of a new nuclear armament race.

Nuclear superpowers are, once again, talking about increasing and no longer decreasing their nuclear arsenals. Both Russia and NATO are talking about altering their nuclear doctrines to make the use of nuclear weapons easier, to lower the threshold of a nuclear war. Even some of the Green parties that were born to oppose nuclear weapons and other nuclear technologies have now endorsed nuclear weapons and started to support their dissemination to new countries.

This could be lethal, for all of us.

According to recent research even the still existing nuclear weapons arsenals could produce a nuclear winter and a global famine starving most of the Earth’s human population to death. Even a ”minor” exchange of a few tactical nuclear weapons might have apocalyptic cosequences because Russia still employs its automatized Perimetr system. According to the available information it will automatically launch Russia’s large strategic missile inventories towards pre-programmed targets if a nuclear weapon explodes near Moscow.

Nuclear Winter – The Human and Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War is hence more relevant than perhaps ever before.

During the original Cold War every politician – every head of state, every minister and every parlamentarian – knew a lot about nuclear weapons and the consequences of using them. However, the original Cold War ended in 1991, and our present politicians have become innocents, and have only very limited or next to nothing knowledge and understanding about nuclear weapons. Our governments have essentially forgotten everything governments during the original Cold War knew about nuclear weapons and nuclear war.

We have to remind the world’s governments about nuclear winter and about the other climatic, environmental and health consequences of  nuclear war. Otherwise they could, one day, lead the world into a nuclear war happily singing and rejoycing, without any real understanding about its consequences.