Date

Oct 1, 1983

Description

Michael MacCracken, a physicist and climate expert at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, played a central role in the lab’s research on nuclear winter. In this conference paper, representing his initial take on the recent research by TTAPS and other analysts, MacCracken wrote that the climatic effect of nuclear war that was of “most concern … is the very large, nearly instantaneous injection of soot … which is a strong absorber of solar radiation.” The resulting “hundred to thousand fold increase in atmospheric soot concentration would prevent sunlight from reaching the surface over those latitudes wherever substantial amounts of the smoke spread.” While the scenarios that could produce soot concentrations were uncertain, they indicated the “potential for substantial impacts on the hemispheric, and perhaps global, radiation balance and climate.” Thus, McCracken estimated that nuclear war could produce “substantial cooling … that would last weeks to months over most continental regions of the Northern Hemisphere.” This finding, significant cooling if not necessarily a deep freeze, would inform his later work on the subject.

Source

OSTI Web site

Document published in following posting(s):

Nuclear Winter: U.S. Government Thinking During the 1980s

Jun 2, 2022

Investigating the Climate Impacts of Nuclear War

Oct 30, 2024