[ExI] nuclear... winter? summer?

[David Lubkin]

Spike wrote:

>Back in the 70s Carl Sagan proposed a model for what would happen 
>should the US and the commies go at it.
         :
>Has anyone here followed nuclear winter models?

Not recently. But the original 1983 TTAPS (Turco, Toon, Ackerman, 
Pollack, and Sagan) paper was bad science. The scenario was 
unrealistic, the modeling was simplistic, and it appears that it was 
basically a no-nukes propaganda exercise. I was at LLNL then, and our 
atmospheric modeling group demolished their paper.

(That same group was given exclusive use of all the main computer 
center's Crays to model the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl two 
years later. Their work went to Reagan, who used it to force the 
Soviets to acknowledge the extent of the disaster and to provide 
warning to the countries in the cloud's path.)


-- David.