Nuclear Winter - Policy Implications

Policy Implications

During the early 1980s, Fidel Castro recommended to the Kremlin a harder line against Washington, even suggesting the possibility of nuclear strikes. The pressure stopped after Soviet officials gave Castro a briefing on the ecological impact on Cuba of nuclear strikes on the United States.

In an interview in 2000, Mikhail Gorbachev, in response to the comment "In the 1980s, you warned about the unprecedented dangers of nuclear weapons and took very daring steps to reverse the arms race," said "Models made by Russian and American scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on Earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation."

As the implications of nuclear winter began to be taken seriously in the late 1980s, military analysts turned their attention to the development of nuclear warheads that would explode at low altitudes and cause less fire, thus reducing the likelihood of a nuclear winter. The TTAPS paper had described a 3000 MT counterforce attack on ICBM sites; Michael Altfed of Michigan State University and political scientist Stephen Cimbala of Pennsylvania State University argued that smaller, more accurate warheads could produce the same counterforce with only 3 MT, resulting in less climate change even if cities were targeted, but such warheads would loft more dust into the atmospheres and produce more radioactive fallout. Altfred and Cimbala suggested that belief in the possibility of nuclear winter has actually made nuclear war more likely, contrary to the views of Sagan and others, because it has inspired the development of more accurate nuclear weapons.