First Study on Nuclear Winter
In January 2011, an old Japanese meteorologist expressed his theory about the global warming.
As the temperature gap between tropical areas and polar zones is getting smaller, the prevailing westerlies, a strong and continuous wind blowing from the west to the east 10 km or 30,000 feet above the ground, lose its strength to wind their way out of old almost-fixed courses around the earth. This zigzagging flows of wind sometimes trap a cold air mass or a hot air mass, causing extreme coldness or hotness.
Of course it will be impossible that this temperature gap will be ultimately taken away. But this climate condition must trigger a big change on the earth. For instance, there would be little or no spring and autumn. People would come to see a cold winter suddenly shifting to/from a hot summer without passing a spring or an autumn.
This old meteorologist Yoshinobu Masuda (1923- ) once studied an effect of nuclear bomb tests carried out by the US in Bikini Atoll of the South Pacific.
After the US conducted hydrogen-bomb tests in Bikini Atoll in March 1954, air temperatures all over Japan strangely showed a decreasing trend. Frost was formed in various regions of Japan while it was not in a very cold season. So, Mr. Masuda, then working as head of a laboratory of Japan Meteorological Agency, doubted an influence of the Bikini hydrogen bomb testing which generated a huge amount of ashes.
Scientist Masuda paid attention to a low-temperature phenomenon which usually ensued from a large scale of volcanic eruption. He collected temperature data from various locations in the world to conclude that the state of the Northern Hemisphere after the Bikini hydrogen-bomb tests resembled a state of an area being affected by eruption of a volcano
This pioneering work by Mr. Masuda was made public five months after the US nuclear testing in 1954. However, next year many American and British scientists wrote and issued papers to deny Mr. Masuda's findings. Eventually this theme soon ceased to be a matter of controversy among scientists. Mr. Masuda's tentative theory is forgotten.
Howeveｒ in November 1983, US scientist Carl Segan presented his theory of "Nuclear Winter" in a special conference joined by US and USSR scientists. Segan and his collaborator Richard P. Turco made public their theory in The Science next month, which widely shocked the general public in the world. A nuclear war could not only kill so many soldiers and citizens but also destroy the environment and agriculture for years after the war due to clouds, made of ashes generated by nuclear blasts, which forcibly brought about a winter or cold temperature in the air.
Mr. Masuda is now chagrined at his having abandoned his study on Nuclear Winter which was the world first in 1954.
So, Mr. Masuda's work is omitted in most of expository writing on Nuclear Winter, unfortunately.
Nuclear winter (also known as atomic winter) is a hypothetical climatic effect of countervalue nuclear war. Models suggest that detonating nuclear weapons could have a profound and severe effect on the climate causing cold weather and reduced sunlight for a period of months or even years if the nuclear weapon strikes are on cities, comparable to Hiroshima, where it is modelled that large amounts of smoke and soot would be ejected into the Earth's stratosphere.
Similar climatic effects can be caused by comets or an asteroid impact, also sometimes termed an impact winter, or by a supervolcano eruption, known as a volcanic winter....
Early work
In June 1957, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Samuel Glasstone was published containing a section entitled "Nuclear Bombs and the Weather" (pages 69–71), which states: "The dust raised in severe volcanic eruptions, such as that at Krakatoa in 1883, is known to cause a noticeable reduction in the sunlight reaching the earth ... The amount of debris remaining in the atmosphere after the explosion of even the largest nuclear weapons is probably not more than about 1 percent or so of that raised by the Krakatoa eruption. Further, solar radiation records reveal that none of the nuclear explosions to date has resulted in any detectable change in the direct sunlight recorded on the ground."
In 1974, John Hampson suggested that a full-scale nuclear exchange could result in depletion of the ozone shield, possibly subjecting the earth to ultraviolet radiation for a year or more.[38][39] In 1975, the United States National Research Council (NRC) reported on ozone depletion following nuclear war, judging that the effect of dust would probably be slight climatic cooling.[38][40]
According to Dr. Vitalii Nikolaevich Tsygichko, a Senior Analyst at the Academy of Sciences, the author of the study, Mathematical Model of Soviet Strategic Operations on the Continental Theater, and a former member of the General Staff, military analysts discussed the idea of a "nuclear winter" (although they did not use that exact term) years before U.S. scientists wrote about it in the 1980s.[41]
1982
In 1981, William J. Moran began discussions and research in the NRC on the dust effects of a large exchange of nuclear warheads. An NRC study panel on the topic met in December 1981 and April 1982.[38]
As part of a study launched in 1980 by Ambio, a journal of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Paul Crutzen and John Birks circulated a draft paper in early 1982 with the first quantitative evidence of alterations in short-term climate after a nuclear war.[38] In 1982, a special issue of Ambio devoted to the possible environmental consequences of nuclear war included a paper by Crutzen and Birks anticipating the nuclear winter scenario.[42] The paper discussed particulates from large fires, nitrogen oxide, ozone depletion and the effect of nuclear twilight on agriculture. Crutzen and Birks showed that smoke injected into the atmosphere by fires in cities, forests and petroleum reserves could prevent up to 99% of sunlight from reaching the Earth's surface, with major climatic consequences: "The normal dynamic and temperature structure of the atmosphere would therefore change considerably over a large fraction of the Northern Hemisphere, which will probably lead to important changes in land surface temperatures and wind systems."[42] An important implication of their work was that a "first strike" nuclear attack would have severe consequences for the perpetrator.
1983
In 1982, the so-called TTAPS team (Richard P. Turco, Owen Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, James B. Pollack and Carl Sagan) undertook a computational modeling study of the atmospheric consequences of nuclear war, publishing their results in Science in December 1983.[43] The phrase "nuclear winter" was coined by Turco just prior to publication.[44] In this early work, TTAPS carried out the first estimates of the total smoke and dust emissions that would result from a major nuclear exchange, and determined quantitatively the subsequent effects on the atmospheric radiation balance and temperature structure. To compute dust and smoke impacts, they employed a one-dimensional microphysics/radiative-transfer model of the Earth's lower atmosphere (to the mesopause), which defined only the vertical characteristics of the global climate perturbation.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
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Mar 8:23 And he took the blind man by the hand, and led him out of the town; and when he had spit on his eyes, and put his hands upon him, he asked him if he saw ought.
Mar 8:24 And he looked up, and said, I see men as trees, walking.
Mar 8:25 After that he put his hands again upon his eyes, and made him look up: and he was restored, and saw every man clearly.
Mar 8:26 And he sent him away to his house, saying, Neither go into the town, nor tell it to any in the town.