WAR WATCH WEDNESDAY #14

 WAR WATCH WEDNESDAY #14

 

CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR WAR
A CONFLUENCE OF CLIMATE CHANGE AND NUCLEAR WAR/WINTER As related by Michael Mann in The New Climate War, pp. 17-20.
     The infamous George C. Marshall Institute is the climate science-denying think tank of the 1990s, founded by the climate-change denier Frederick Seitz.  But what started GMI was mainly the military-industrial complex during the escalating arms race between the US and the Soviet Union (US/SU) during the 1980s.  Leading pro-war profiteers, including Lockheed-Martin and Northrop Grumman benefitted particularly from Reagan’s “Strategic Defense Initiative” (SDI, known as “Star Wars”).  Its antiballistic missile program was designed to shoot down nuclear missiles in space.   All was full speed ahead for alleged safety and certain profit, except for one scientist.

     The distinguished Carl Sagan was aware of the mounting global, existential threat of a nuclear arms race, and was raising awareness of a global thermonuclear war   The threat transcended immediate death and destruction of populations.  “The massive detonation of nuclear warheads” in an all-out nuclear war “might produce enough dust and debris to block out a sufficient amount of sunlight to induce a state of nuclear winter” permanently. Humanity “might suffer the same fate” of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.”   Sagan feared that Reagan’s Star Wars “would lead to an escalation of tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union and a dangerous buildup in nuclear arms, portending the very nuclear winter scenario he so feared.”

     “Here’s why Sagan’s anti-SDI campaign is germane to the central topic of this book.”. . . . The nuclear winter simulations that Sagan and his colleagues conducted were based on early generation global climate models.   So if you didn’t like the science of nuclear winter, you really weren’t going to like the science of climate change, which revealed the culpability of the same powerful polluting interest that groups like GMI were defending.  With the collapse of the cold war in the late 1980s. . . GMI “needed another issue to focus on,” that is, “another scientific boogeyman to justify their existence.  Climate change surely fit the bill.”  --Dick

TAKE ACTION
Read Mann’s The New Climate War.  Tell friends about it.