Dyson VS Sagan on Nuclear Winter

I do not wish here to get into a technical argument about the details of nuclear winter. I will merely summarize my own struggles with the technical issues. I spent a few weeks in 1985 trying to make nuclear winter go away. The phrase "go away" here is used in the sense customary among scientists. To destroy a new theory, you try to find a simple situation where the theory predicts that something happens and you can prove that the same something does not happen. Then you say that the thing pr...

 Suburbs are the Result of Fear of Nuclear War

The Federal Civil Defense Administration determined that the country that would win a nuclear war was the one best prepared to survive the initial attack. Achieving this required a homeland mobilization on an unprecedented scale, and our children needed to know what to do when nuclear war came. They commissioned a nine-minute film called Duck and Cover that showed Bert the turtle pulling into his shell to survive a nuclear explosion that burns everything else. The film exhorted millions of sc...