THE NUCLEAR WINTER

Let us start by emphasizing the obvious: The following is not meant to show that nuclear war is a picnic. It is meant to show that Carl Sagan's Nuclear Winter as published in the national Sunday supplement Parade (Oct 30) is pseudoscientific propaganda ignoring elementary relationships of energy and past experience. It is meant to warn readers that the next time Sagan lectures, they need not waste time listening to what this ex-scientist has to say. [Incidentally, readers may remember the august scientific journal Parade: the Wallechinskis stated in it that plutonium was 324 million times as deadly as strychnine and 486 million times as lethal as arsenic; I invited them to a contest [Jul 81] where I would eat (or breathe) plutonium as they consumed strychnine or arsenic in those ratios till death us do part.
I received the standard reply: none.]

We are not, of course, going to dispute the corpses that Sagan throws around by the billion, for we lack both hard data on which to base such wild guesses and his nonchalant insolence. What we do know without a shadow of doubt is that no nuclear war can change the law of the balance of energy.

As a rule of thumb, any energy that man can release is a laughable nothing in comparison with the energies unleashed every day, indeed, every minute, in the normal course of nature.

But for nuclear weapons you do not have to use any rules of thumb. The DoD defines 1 kiloton of TNT equivalent as 10^12 calories or 1,160,000 kilowatt-hours.(1) Compare this with a natural phenomenon, sunshine, which arrives at the earth's surface at roughly 1 kW/m^2. The earth's radius is 6,370 km (last time our idiot typesetter interchanged two digits, repeat: R = 6,370 km), so one megaton bomb has about the same energy as 33 milliseconds (1/30 sec) of sunshine falling on the globe (take the circular cross-section (pi)R^2 of the beam intercepted by the globe).

The world's combined nuclear arsenal is estimated to be about 10,000 megatons; that is the energy of some five minutes' sunshine. But "we also considered a war in which a mere 100 megatons were exploded," warbles Sagan, "...and this scenario... would be enough to generate an epoch of cold and darkness as severe as in the 5,000 megaton case. The threshold for the Nuclear Winter is very low." Indeed it is: 3.3 secs of sunshine. And that is all the energy you need to plunge the Northern Hemisphere into weeks of darkness and subzero temperatures (minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, quoth this sage as the Sunday supplement readers drop their beer cans or hair curlers in amazement at his accuracy), "killing virtually all crops and farm animals."

But nobody has stopped the sun for 3.3 sec, you may say. OK, then take some energies that have been released: the Mt. St.Helen eruption on the first day alone (18 May 1980) equalled 24 Sagan Thresholds;(2) the Krakatoa eruption of (27 Aug 1883) equated 240 Sagan Thresholds, and the Mt.Tambora eruption of 1815 some 2,400 Sagan Thresholds. He must really be freezing in the dark.