The New Yorker - Jill Lepore*
How arguments about nuclear weapons shaped the debate over global warming.
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| "Nuclear winter" skeptics created institutions that later challenged global warming. Illustration by Paul Sahre |
A nuclear
weapon is a certain thing—atomic or hydrogen, fission or fusion, bomb
or missile, so many megatons—but nothing could be more uncertain than
the consequences of using one. Nine nations have nuclear weapons; only
the United States has ever used one, and that was in 1945. Our
nuclear-weapons policy rests on a seven-decade-long history of events
that have never happened: acts of aggression that were not committed,
wars that were not waged, an apocalypse that has not come to pass.
Strategists attribute the non-occurrence—the deterrence—of these events
to the weapons themselves, to bombs on airplanes, missiles in silos,
launchers on submarines. The power of deterrence, however, is a claim
that cannot be proved. If, while a police car is parked in front of your
house, your house is not robbed, you might suspect that a robbery would
have taken place had the police not been there, but you can't know that
for sure. Nuclear-weapons policy is a body of speculation that relies
on fearful acts of faith. Doctrinally, it has something in common with a
belief in Hell.
This belief is
about to be tested. The United States and its only nuclear rival have
been reducing their arsenals since the end of the Cold War. In 1985, the
United States and the Soviet Union held a combined stockpile of more
than sixty thousand warheads; today, the U.S. and Russia have fewer than
fifteen thousand between them. Dangers remain: a computer error, a
malfunction in a silo, a rogue state, nuclear terrorism. In 2007, the
former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and George P. Shultz, the
former Defense Secretary William J. Perry, and the former senator Sam
Nunn warned in an essay published in the
Wall Street Journal
that "the world is now on the precipice of a new and dangerous nuclear
era . . . that will be more precarious, psychologically disorienting,
and economically even more costly than was Cold War deterrence." The
time had come, they argued, for the eradication of nuclear weapons.
Global Zero, an international nuclear-abolition organization, was formed
the next year. In 2009, in a speech in Prague, Barack Obama pledged
"America's commitment to seek the peace and security of a world without
nuclear weapons." That speech helped earn him the Nobel Peace Prize. The
reality did not match the rhetoric. Congress exempted nuclear weapons
from mandatory cuts in the military budget, and, in exchange for support
for the New
START treaty, which reduced deployed
warheads by two-thirds, the President pledged eighty-five billion
dollars to modernize the nation's aging nuclear arsenal. "I think we can
safely say the President's Prague vision is dead," the Alabama
congressman Mike Rogers said in 2015, at a weapons conference sponsored
by Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, and Northrop Grumman. "And I'll
leave it to the Nobel committee to ask for its prize back."
The
new President's vision is unclear. "We have to be extremely vigilant
and extremely careful when it comes to nuclear," Donald Trump said
during the campaign. But he also refused to rule out conducting a first
strike, even on Europe ("Europe is a big place"); suggested that it
might be a good thing for more countries to acquire nuclear weapons; and
argued that it was pointless to manufacture weapons that could never be
used, asking, "Then why are we making them?" In December, Vladimir
Putin told military leaders in Moscow that he intended to bolster
Russia's nuclear arsenal. "Let it be an arms race," Trump said in
response. "We will outmatch them at every pass and outlast them all."
Trump
has often contradicted himself on the subject of nuclear weapons, but
one of the more interesting things he's said about them is that they are
far more dangerous to the planet than global warming is. It's a
revealing comparison. The damage from a nuclear explosion does not
respect national boundaries, and this adjustment in scale, from the
national to the global, was the key argument put forward by advocates of
disarmament. That argument has been won: Trump's tweets aside, there is
a bipartisan consensus in favor of significant arms reductions.
Bipartisan agreement about the future of the planet falls apart not over
the bomb but over the climate. Historically, though, they're
inseparable: the weapons and the weather are twisted together, a wire
across time, the long fuse to an ongoing debate about the credibility of
science, the fate of the Earth, and the nature of uncertainty.
In
1981, when Jimmy Carter delivered his farewell address, part of it was
written by Carl Sagan. The Senate had proved unwilling to ratify a
treaty that had come out of a second round of Strategic Arms Limitation
Talks; Carter wanted to take a moment to reckon with that loss, for the
sake of the planet. He turned to Sagan, whose thirteen-part documentary,
"Cosmos," first broadcast in 1980, was the most-watched PBS series
ever. "Nuclear weapons are an expression of one side of our human
character," Carter said, in words written by Sagan. "But there's another
side. The same rocket technology that delivers nuclear warheads has
also taken us peacefully into space. From that perspective, we see our
Earth as it really is—a small and fragile and beautiful blue globe, the
only home we have."
Sagan
was an astronomer, but he'd begun his career working on a classified
nuclear-weapons project. This was not unusual. Since the Second World
War, the military has funded the preponderance of research in the field
of physics, and, as historians have now established, a close second was
its funding of the earth sciences. Although the environmental movement
may not have started until the nineteen-sixties, the research that lies
behind it began in the fifties, in the U.S. military. Indeed, the very
term "environmental science" was coined in the fifties by military
scientists; it was another decade before civilian scientists used the
term.
Beginning on the day black
rain fell on Hiroshima, nuclear weapons shaped environmental science. In
1949, the U.S. Weather Bureau launched Project Gabriel, a classified
meteorological study of weapons and weather. The next year, the
Department of Defense, in a study titled "The Effects of Atomic
Weapons," coined the word "fallout." Researchers considered making the
quantity, spread, and duration of fallout the standard measure of the
force of a nuclear explosion, but found that approach to be too
dependent on the weather. (Instead, they chose blast radius.) They
measured and modelled the best weather conditions for explosions and the
effects of those explosions on the natural world; they invented and
refined tools to detect atmospheric weapons tests conducted by the
Soviets; and they investigated the possibility of using nuclear weapons
to alter the weather and even the climate of adversaries. Sagan, after
finishing his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, in 1960, worked on a
secret military project code-named A119, which had begun in 1958, a year
after Sputnik. Sagan was charged with calculating "the expansion of an
exploding gas/dust cloud rarifying into the space around the Moon." The
idea was to assess whether a mushroom cloud would be visible from Earth,
and therefore able to serve as an illustration of the United States'
military might.
Government-funded
environmental scientists began noticing something curious: nuclear
explosions deplete the ozone layer, which protects the Earth's
atmosphere. This finding related to observations made by scientists who
were not working for the military. In the wake of Rachel Carson's
"Silent Spring," published in 1962, the U.S. government formed a number
of advisory and oversight organizations, including the Environmental
Pollution Panel of the President's Science Advisory Committee. The
panel's 1965 report, "Restoring the Quality of Our Environment,"
included an appendix on "Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide," laying out, with
much alarm, the consequences of "the invisible pollutant" for the planet
as a whole. In 1968, S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist who had
worked on satellites and was now a Deputy Assistant Secretary of the
Interior, organized a symposium on "Global Effects of Environmental
Pollution." Four papers were presented at a panel on "Effects of
Atmospheric Pollution on Climate."
Changing
weapons policy opened new avenues of research. In 1963, the U.S. and
the U.S.S.R. signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, an agreement to stop
testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Using longitudinal data to
study the ozone both before and after the test ban, the Berkeley chemist
Harold Johnston found that stopping the testing had slowed the
depletion. Research into the environmental consequences of nuclear
explosions and of other kinds of pollution shared a planetary
perspective, a vantage greatly enhanced by the space program; gradually,
the meaning of the word "environment" changed from "habitat" to
"planet." The first photograph of the whole Earth was taken in 1972, by
the crew of Apollo 17. It became an icon of the environmental movement.
It also shaped arguments about arms control.
Nuclear-weapons
research was usually classified; other environmental research was not.
During the nineteen-seventies, military-funded environmental scientists
continued their top-secret research into the environmental effects of
nuclear weapons. Given the test ban, these studies relied less on
experiments on Earth than on computer models and on empirical findings
involving dust on other planets, most notably Mars. Meanwhile, some
environmental scientists pursued—and published—research on how
chlorofluorocarbons, the exhaust from jet engines, and fossil-fuel
consumption affected the ozone layer; this research demonstrated,
crucially, that even tiny amounts of certain chemicals could catalyze
dramatic changes, with planetary consequences. In 1974, the director of
the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency asked the National Academy
of Sciences to prepare a report on the effects of nuclear explosions on
the ozone. That report, "Long-Term Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear
Weapons Detonations," married the logic of nuclear deterrence to the
logic of environmental protection, or what might have been called
pollution deterrence. Stephen Schneider, a climatologist at the National
Center for Atmospheric Research, speculated that the fallout from a
nuclear war might make the world colder by blocking sunlight, and that
the diminished industrial production in a postwar world could change the
climate, too.
Sagan
had by this time become an advocate of nuclear disarmament, a cause
that gained a great deal of momentum early in 1982, when
The New Yorker
published a four-part series by Jonathan Schell called "The Fate of the
Earth," which did for nuclear weapons what Carson had done for chemical
pollution: freaked everyone out. That fall, Representative Al Gore, the
chair of the Subcommittee on Investigations and Oversight of the House
Committee on Science and Technology, convened hearings into "The
Consequences of Nuclear War on the Global Environment." The consequences
of nuclear war on the environment, like its consequences on the balance
of power, were difficult to prove; most data came from computer models,
and from research on other planets. A battle began between those who
were willing to place their faith in the speculations of military
strategists and those who were willing to place their faith in the
speculations of environmental scientists.
At
the center of that battle was a plan to build a defensive missile
shield: weapons that would orbit the planet. On March 23, 1983,
President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative, in
what came to be called his "Star Wars" speech: "I call upon the
scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons,
to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace:
to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and
obsolete." To its many critics, S.D.I. undermined the nuclear paralysis
that had set in with the idea of mutual assured destruction: neither the
U.S. nor the U.S.S.R. would launch a missile, the theory went, since
everyone would end up dead. But, if the U.S. could defend itself against
a missile attack, M.A.D. no longer applied. The Union of Concerned
Scientists prepared a hundred-and-six-page report opposing the project.
Sagan, who had just had an emergency appendectomy and two full-body
blood transfusions, dictated a letter of objection from his hospital
bed.
What Sagan did next is
recounted in a new book by Paul Rubinson, "Redefining Science," a
history of science in a national-security state. The story of Sagan's
campaign against S.D.I., though little remembered, has been told before,
in Lawrence Badash's 2009 book, "A Nuclear Winter's Tale"; in
"Merchants of Doubt," by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, in 2009; and,
most richly, in a terrific 2011 journal article by Matthias Dorries.
Sagan launched a campaign to warn the world about "nuclear winter"; the
very term, as Dorries points out, brought together the weapons and the
weather.
Sagan collaborated with
four scientists. James Pollack, his first graduate student, had written a
dissertation, in 1965, on the greenhouse effect on Venus. Thomas
Ackerman had attended Calvin College, a Christian school, as an
undergraduate, earned a Ph.D. at the University of Washington, and then
worked with Pollack at
NASA. (Later, he declined an
invitation to work on S.D.I., citing his moral objections as a
Christian.) Richard Turco, an atmospheric scientist, was the co-author
of a study called "Possible Ozone Depletions Following Nuclear
Explosions," which was published in
Nature in 1975, the year
that Owen Brian Toon, a graduate student at Cornell, submitted to Sagan a
dissertation called "Climatic Change on Mars and Earth." Sagan decided
to use his celebrity to bring the research of these scientists to the
broadest possible public audience, as fast as the scientific method
allowed—or maybe faster.
"To
the village square we must carry the facts of atomic energy," Albert
Einstein said in 1946. "From there must come America's voice." Sagan, in
his understanding of the role of science in a democracy, had Einstein
behind him, but, more, he had John Dewey, along with a generation of
Progressive engineers, New Deal reformers, and Manhattan Project-era
atomic scientists. In 1946, the Federation of Atomic Scientists, which
had been founded to advocate for international, civilian control of
atomic energy, had established the National Committee on Atomic
Information. Atomic scientists organized a speakers' bureau: they spoke
at Kiwanis clubs, at churches and synagogues, at schools and libraries.
In Kansas alone, eight Atomic Age Conferences were held. The F.B.I.
launched an investigation. In 1948, the head of the National Committee
on Atomic Information, suspected of being a Communist, was fired. His
entire staff resigned in protest, and the committee disbanded. The next
year, the Soviet Union tested its first nuclear weapon. Public-spirited
science yielded to the demands of a national-security state.
Sagan
received his training in that world. But that world did not survive
Vietnam, or the Love Canal disaster. This much Sagan understood. But
what he could not have fully understood were two forces that had gained
strength in the nineteen-seventies, both of which were at odds with his
neo-Deweyism: a postmodern critique of objectivity, fashionable among
intellectuals, artists, and writers; and a conservative movement
determined to expose the liberal bent of the academy and of the press.
Sagan waded into these waters early in 1983, with a paper he prepared
with Turco, Toon, Ackerman, and Pollack. The paper, known by its
authorial acronym,
TTAPS, used meteorological models
derived from the study of volcanoes to calculate the effects on light
and temperature of different kinds and numbers of nuclear explosions,
factoring in the dust, smoke, and soot produced by the burning of
cities; some of the data came from Mars. Moving beyond Schell, whose
essays had predicted the end of humanity,
TTAPS forecast a nuclear winter that might result in the end of all life on the planet.
Sagan
circulated a draft to fifty scientists, then convened a conference at
the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in April, 1983, which was
attended by twice as many. Meanwhile, he sent George F. Kennan a draft
of an essay he'd written for
Foreign Affairs. "I cannot tell
you what a great thing I feel you have done," Kennan wrote in reply,
thanking him for providing a "clear and irrefutable demonstration of the
enormity of the danger presented by these vast nuclear arsenals." Next,
Sagan and an assortment of colleagues submitted two papers to the
peer-reviewed journal
Science and planned another conference,
to be held at a Sheraton in Washington, with five hundred participants, a
hundred members of the press, and a live "Moscow Link." The day before
the conference, Sagan published an article about nuclear winter in
Parade.
Using only the worst-case numbers, he admitted no room for doubt about
what was, after all, a theory, presenting nuclear winter as the
consensus of more than a hundred scientists from around the world.
Two
charges were levelled at Sagan: that he shouldn't be writing for a
Sunday newspaper supplement, and that he'd exaggerated the certainty of
an untested theory. "In the scientific community you don't publish first
results in
Parade magazine," George Rathjens, of M.I.T., wrote. (Unknown to Sagan's critics, the two
Science papers had already been accepted for publication when the
Parade article appeared.) In the
Wall Street Journal,
S. Fred Singer, at that time a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and
later a consultant for the tobacco industry, argued that the theory
relied too heavily on predictive models. The physicist and S.D.I.
enthusiast Edward Teller wrote Sagan, privately, "My concern is that
many uncertainties remain and that these uncertainties are sufficiently
large as to cast doubt on whether the nuclear winter will actually
occur." He added, "I can compliment you on being, indeed, an excellent
propagandist—remembering that a propagandist is the better the less he
appears to be one." In
Nature, Teller attacked the theory ("A
severe climatic change must be considered dubious rather than robust"),
and offered this sermon: "Highly speculative theories of worldwide
destruction—even the end of life on Earth—used as a call for a
particular kind of political action serve neither the good reputation of
science nor dispassionate political thought." That S.D.I. rested on
highly speculative theories of worldwide destruction was not lost on
Teller's many critics.
Sagan's
grandiosity helped him gain a vast popular audience; it also hurt his
cause. So did his partisanship: he declined an invitation to dine with
the Reagans at the White House. His celebrity knew no bounds. The Pope
asked him for an audience. Talking about warheads seemed like a fabulous
way to be famous. "This morning, Trump has a new idea," Lois Romano
wrote in a Washington
Post profile of Donald Trump in November,
1984, the week after Reagan defeated Mondale. "He wants to talk about
the threat of nuclear war. He wants to talk about how the United States
should negotiate with the Soviets. He wants to be the negotiator." He
knew just how to do it. "It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn
everything there is to learn about missiles," Trump told Romano. "I
think I know most of it anyway."
Sagan
was widely resented, and he made some poor decisions, but he was a
serious scientist. Despite a number of adjustments—Stephen Schneider ran
his own numbers and determined that the likeliest consequence of
nuclear war was something more like a nuclear autumn—the theory gained
widespread scientific acceptance. Declassified documents demonstrate
that Navy scientists, for instance, were persuaded by
TTAPS.
In May, 1984, William Cohen, a Republican senator from Maine, wrote to
Reagan about the paper and suggested that the Administration conduct a
study. The House Republicans Jim Leach and Newt Gingrich joined their
Democratic colleagues Tim Wirth, Buddy Roemer, and Al Gore in proposing a
budget amendment mandating a "comprehensive study of the atmospheric,
climatic, environmental, and biological consequences of nuclear war and
the implications that such consequences have for the nuclear weapons
strategy and policy, the arms control policy, and the civil defense
policy of the United States."
Hearings
on nuclear winter were held that summer, before a House subcommittee
that, Paul Rubinson says, "essentially put deterrence on trial." If a
misfire or an accident would mean the end of all life on the planet,
could there really be any strategic argument in favor of a nuclear
stockpile? During another round of congressional hearings, Sagan said
that he'd give a recent and inconclusive Department of Defense report on
nuclear winter a D or "maybe a C-minus if I was in a friendly mood."
Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle said that he'd give Sagan
an F. "I didn't hear a word of science this morning," Perle declared. "I
heard a shallow, demagogic, rambling policy pronouncement." William
Buckley observed, "Carl Sagan gave a half-hour's performance so arrogant
he might have been confused with, well, me."
In
December, 1984, Reagan's National Security Council presented the
President with a summary of a report on nuclear winter prepared by the
National Academy of Sciences. While allowing that the model's
quantitative risk assessment involved uncertainties, the report argued
that the model's calculations suggested "temperature changes of a size
that could have devastating consequences" and, with urgency, called on
all available agencies and scientists to conduct investigations to
narrow the range of uncertainty. Nuclear winter could be debated, but it
couldn't be dismissed.
Nuclear
winter did not end the Cold War, but it did weaken the logic of
deterrence, and not merely by undermining the idea of a winnable nuclear
war. Nuclear winter relied on computer models and projections; its
predictions were uncertain. Deterrence relies on computer models and
projections; its predictions are uncertain. At one point, Richard Perle
said that he wished Sagan would go back to his laboratory and stop
"playing political scientist." And that, inadvertently, got to the heart
of the matter. However much Sagan might have overreached, his
intellectual extravagance was nothing compared with the entirely
hypothetical musings and game-theory models of the political scientists
and strategists on the basis of whose speculations the United States
government spent more than five trillion dollars between 1940 and 1996.
Reagan
was himself persuaded by nuclear winter; a nuclear war, he said, "could
just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the
earth as we know it." In the U.S.S.R., nuclear winter energized
dissidents. In 1985, when the Soviet physician Vladimir Brodsky was
arrested, one of the charges was "transmitting a letter to the Soviet
Academy of Sciences requesting greater publicity about the nuclear
winter." Protesters in Moscow's Gagarin Square chanted, "Tell the truth
about the nuclear-winter phenomenon to our people." Eduard Shevardnadze,
the Soviet foreign minister, talked about nuclear winter in a speech at
the U.N., and Mikhail Gorbachev alluded to it on another occasion. In
1985, the Federation of American Scientists presented Sagan with an
award honoring him as the "Most Visible Member of the Scientific
Community on the Planet Earth." In 1986, Turco won a MacArthur prize.
After that year, the number of nuclear weapons in the world began to
decline.
Since
the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, most
nuclear-weapons talk has been about non-proliferation and coercion.
Under the terms of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, signed in 1968,
non-nuclear powers agreed to forgo nuclear weapons in exchange for the
assurance that they could develop nuclear energy, and for a promise from
nuclear powers to pursue disarmament in good faith. Since then, no
nuclear nation except South Africa has dismantled its arsenal, which is
why non-nuclear states continue to press nuclear states to make good on
the promise they made in 1968.
In a
new book titled "Nuclear Politics: The Strategic Causes of
Proliferation," the Yale political-science professors Alexandre Debs and
Nuno P. Monteiro struggle with a very small data set. Of the eight
nations other than the U.S. that have nuclear weapons, three (the U.K.,
France, and Israel) are American allies; two (India and Pakistan) are
friendly; and three (China, North Korea, and Russia) are adversaries.
Two of these countries (North Korea and Pakistan) acquired nuclear
weapons since the eighties, which is very worrying, but both acquired
them at great cost. (Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, then the Pakistani
foreign-affairs minister, said his people could "eat grass" if that's
what it took.) The U.S. has stopped several states from developing
nuclear weapons, either by threatening to abandon an alliance (in the
cases of Taiwan and West Germany), or by threatening, indirectly, to use
military force (Libya), or by using it, a perilous course (Iraq). Under
what circumstances do states develop nuclear weapons? Debs and Monteiro
argue that most states are too weak to do so; most weak states aren't
interested; some weak states aren't especially threatened; and most weak
states that are threatened are protected by stronger states. These
findings question conventional wisdom, which has it that the bomb is a
tool of weak states. "No doubt, the atomic bomb would enable a weak
state to stand up to more powerful adversaries," they write. "So far,
however, no weak unprotected state has ever managed to obtain it."
In
"Nuclear Weapons and Coercive Diplomacy," just published, another pair
of political scientists, Todd S. Sechser and Matthew Fuhrmann,
investigate nuclear coercion, an idea that has all but replaced
deterrence in some policy circles. Deterrence involves stopping your
enemy from doing what you don't want; coercion involves getting your
enemy to do what you want. The theory of deterrence rests on an analysis
of the balance between two roughly equal superpowers. Those conditions
no longer apply. Coercion is a theory for a single superpower: a new
game, requiring a new game theory. Does it work? Not really. As Sechser
and Fuhrmann demonstrate, nuclear powers have not generally been able to
coerce other nuclear powers: in the sixties, the Soviets' nuclear
superiority didn't help solve territorial disputes with China; and, more
recently, the United States hasn't been able to coerce North Korea into
abandoning its nuclear-weapons development. Nor have nuclear powers
been able to alter the behavior of non-nuclear powers, the authors
argue, and their list is long: "The shadow of America's nuclear arsenal
did not convince Afghan leaders to hand over al Qaeda operatives after
the group conducted terrorist attacks against American targets in 1998
or 2001. Great Britain could not coerce Argentine forces to withdraw
from the Falkland Islands without a fight in 1982, despite deploying
nuclear forces to the South Atlantic. The Soviet Union could not force
Iran or Turkey to hand over disputed territory in the early 1950s, after
Moscow acquired the bomb. China has similarly been unable to make
relatively weak states—including Brunei, Malaysia, Philippines, Taiwan,
and Vietnam—abandon their claims to the disputed Spratly Islands in the
South China Sea."
These arguments are very interesting, but they are based on the shaky science of very small numbers. An
nth
case could unravel any of them. The most contested number in this
debate is zero. In 2009, Thomas Schelling, an economist,
national-security expert, and Cold War deterrence theorist, who had won a
Nobel Prize for his game-theory analysis of conflict, issued a dire
warning:
A "world
without nuclear weapons" would be a world in which the United States,
Russia, Israel, China, and half a dozen or a dozen other countries would
have hair-trigger mobilization plans to rebuild nuclear weapons and
mobilize or commandeer delivery systems, and would have prepared targets
to preempt other nations' nuclear facilities, all in a high-alert
status, with practice drills and secure emergency communications. Every
crisis would be a nuclear crisis, any war could become a nuclear war.
The urge to preempt would dominate; whoever gets the first few weapons
will coerce or preempt. It would be a nervous world.
Schelling's
nervous world is the setting for "The Case for U.S. Nuclear Weapons in
the 21st Century," a careful and balanced study by Brad Roberts, the
director of the Center for Global Security Research at Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory. Lamenting the hardened lines between
advocates and abolitionists, Roberts calls for a fresh and broad-minded
debate: "Whether nuclear weapons will continue to be effective in
preventing limited wars among major powers is an open question." The
case for deterrence began to fall apart in the nineteen-nineties and
two-thousands, he argues, owing to a lack of leadership. This isn't
entirely correct. Presidents in that period did fail to make the case
for deterrence, but deterrence had already been dismantled by the
spectre of nuclear winter.
The
biggest consequence of the nuclear-winter debate, though, has had to do
not with nuclear-weapons policy but with the environmental movement. In
the short term, the idea of a nuclear winter defeated the idea of
deterrence. In the long term, Sagan's haste and exuberance undermined
environmental science. More important, the political campaign waged
against nuclear winter—against science, and against the press—included
erecting a set of structures, arguments, and institutions that have
since been repurposed to challenge the science of global warming.
In
1984, in an effort to counter Sagan and to defend the Strategic Defense
Initiative, the George C. Marshall Institute was founded by Robert
Jastrow, a
NASA physicist; Frederick Seitz, a former
president of the National Academy of Sciences; and William Nierenberg, a
past director of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Jastrow argued
that "the Nuclear Winter scenario could not serve the needs of Soviet
leaders better if it had been designed for that purpose." One of the
Marshall Institute's first projects was to try to persuade PBS
affiliates not to air a documentary critical of S.D.I.; citing the
Fairness Doctrine, the institute argued that equal time ought to be
given to its own report, in favor of S.D.I. The report represented the
views of three scientists—Jastrow, Seitz, and Nierenberg—while a
statement expressing concerns about the science behind S.D.I. had been
signed by sixty-five hundred scientists. Nevertheless, most PBS stations
decided not to broadcast the documentary. With funding from the
Marshall Institute, Seitz's cousin Russell Seitz, a physicist at
Harvard's Center for International Affairs, published an essay in
The National Interest,
in the fall of 1986, dismissing the nuclear-winter paper as nothing but
"a long series of conjectures" and declaring nuclear winter dead:
"Cause of death: notorious lack of scientific integrity." In 1988,
funded, in part, by ExxonMobil, the Marshall Institute turned its
attention to the science behind global warming.
Another
of Sagan's most vociferous critics, S. Fred Singer, had repeatedly
challenged nuclear winter on the grounds of its uncertainty. "Sagan's
scenario may well be correct," Singer wrote in 1983, "but the range of
uncertainty is so great that the prediction is not particularly useful."
A longtime consultant to
ARCO, Exxon, Shell Oil, and Sun
Oil, Singer is currently the director of the Science and Environmental
Policy Project at the Heartland Institute, founded in 1984. Its position
on global warming: "Most scientists do not believe human greenhouse gas
emissions are a proven threat to the environment or to human
well-being, despite a barrage of propaganda insisting otherwise coming
from the environmental movement and echoed by its sycophants in the
mainstream media."
The
nuclear-winter debate has long since been forgotten, but you can still
spy it behind every cloud and confusion. It holds a lesson or two. A
public understanding of science is not well served by shackling science
to a national-security state. The public may not naturally have much
tolerance for uncertainty, but uncertainty is the best that many
scientific arguments can produce. Critics of climate-change science who
ground their argument on uncertainty have either got to apply that same
standard of evidence to nuclear-weapons strategy or else find a better
argument. Because, as Sagan once put it, theories that involve the end
of the world are not amenable to experimental verification—at least, not
more than once.
*Jill Lepore is a staff writer and a professor of history at Harvard. "The Secret History of Wonder Woman" is her latest book.
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