HOROSCOPE II

The Nuclear Winter paper of December 1983, even when con-sidered apart from the artificial hoopla surrounding it, was widely discredited by knowledgeable geophysicists and other scientists, such as Prof. Seitz of Rockefeller U. (a former president of the Am. Phys. Soc.), Prof S.F. Singer of the U. of Va., and many others. The paper was authored by Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pol-lack and Sagan (the latter a shallow astronomy popularizer and political activist), and by the authors' initials became known as the TTAPS paper. It claimed that the smoke from burning cities and vegetation in a nuclear exchange would screen off solar radiation, condemning the earth to several years of subzero temperatures. Its outstanding flaws were neglect of the cooling effect of the oceans, failure to provide a credible mechanism of soot transportation to the stratosphere, failure to explain why the soot would not be washed out by rain, and a number of other fatal errors.

The new version of TTAPS (Science 1/12/90) makes minor ad-justments like three-dimensional computer simulations (Horo-scope I simulated atmospheric and all other parameters as variable only with height), and comes to less drastic, but still catastrophic conclusions. It is clothed in formal scientific garb with 134 easy-to-come-by references and boasts that the physics of nuclear winter "has been reaffirmed through several international technical assessments." Well, yes, if you include those with the TTAPS soothsayers on the panel, but ignore the numerous studies that have thoroughly discredited it. Imagine Sen. Cranston and Mayor Berry jointly chairing the House Ethics Committee, and you get the idea.

As before, the whole exercise is based on the assumption that each side will not use its nuclear arsenal for greatest military advantage, but for inflicting maximum damage on everybody and everything including itself. None of the objections mentioned above have been properly dealt with. In addition, Prof. S. Fred Singer (private communication of letter submitted for publication) points out new and old (but simply ignored) flaws.

The patchiness of smoke clouds has been ignored. The proposed mechanism assumes a uniform distribution of smoke, which in fact would cover only about 0.2% of !he area.

Even if the cloud were uniform, its lifetime would be only a few days at low altitudes, and at high altitudes it would be washed out by the large amounts of moisture carried up by the nuclear ex-plosions and resulting fires.

The cloud is supposed to be lifted by buoyancy as it is warmed by solar radiation. But only its top layer can be moved aloft, for the rest of it, by the whole apocalyptic argument, is opaque to solar radiation.

As if these independent points were not enough, the soothsayers have overlooked one of their favorite amulets: the greenhouse ef-fect. This comes in several varieties, such as the inferno unleashed on the surface, whose heat is trapped under the postulated all-embracing cloud blanket, which Singer shows to be highly absorbing in the infrared (thermal) range. There would also be some 4 billion tons of water vapor appearing as high-altitude clouds which are known to produce a net warming of the surface. Nuclear Winter under the soothsayers' assumptions might therefore well turn into spring or summer.

To which I would add that if these astrologers were to succeed in coming up with a credible mechanism of transporting soot into the stratosphere, they might be embarrassed to explain why the new-found mechanism does not lift sea spray (containing chlorine atoms) to the ozone layer. Its direly promised depletion and resulting doomsday arrival depends, after all, on such transport of refrigerator fluids and deodorants; otherwise, God forbid, we will all be saved.