Nuclear winter

Press, 22 June 1985, Page 18

Nuclear winter

Sir—The articles “Bomb theories offered as fact” and “Cold water on nuclear winter” had a logic I found difficult to follow. They concluded that a ding-dong nuclear war would be so destructive that a resulting nuclear winter would be the least of our worries, so therefore we need not fear a nuclear war. Most biologists would agree with the author that a nuclear war would be most unlikely to extinguish life on earth. Showing that people who make such claims are misguided does not show that a nuclear war would be compatible, with continuing civilisation. It would be instructive to know who produced these mindboggling arguments. This subject could be serious for us all, and deserves serious treatment.—Yours etc., T. P. PALMER June 18, 1985. Sir, — Articles in “The Press” of June 17 urge caution before accepting the views of scientists. The same applies, of course, to statements by economists, politicians or newspaper editors. There is a difference, in that scientists try to test their hypotheses by experiment. The article headlines were promoting the point that the idea' of a “nuclear winter” is controversial. Indirect testing of the “nuclear winter” hypothesis by computer simulation tells us that there could be a serious risk to all life from a relatively small nuclear war. A commonsense conclusion is that it would be best to err on the side of caution and ban the bomb. The United States banned D.D.T. on not much stronger evidence. Dr Teller does not think that a “nuclear winter” is a very likely event. But then it was he who, in 1958, said that atmospheric nuclear bomb tests were not a hazard to human life. — Yours, etc., COLIN BURROWS. June 19, 1985.