Nuclear Winter

It seems to me that Gregg Easterbrook ("When Nutty Ideas Collide: SDI, Meet Nuclear Winter," Opinion, May 30) displays a bit of "nutty" thinking of his own. The "nuttiest" aspect of his article is his analogy between the two ideas as if the consequences of accepting either were equivalent. They aren't. He is correct when he argues that SDI would not protect us from nuclear destruction, and was just a vehicle that was created for the purpose of funneling "pork" to defense contractors.

When Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan set out to make vampires frightening again with their novel "The Strain," the writing partners had their work cut out for them. The scariest thing about the sexy, brooding bad boys that seemed to be everywhere in pop culture was just how much of their initial bite they'd lost. Under the right circumstances, you could even take one home to meet Mom. Del Toro and Hogan had a noble aim, and they certainly put their hearts into the endeavor. In "The Strain," the calculating monster known only as the Master embarks on the first phase of his plan to subjugate humanity, stowing away on a plane bound for JFK and infecting the passengers with a virus that turns them into mindless, hairless, crimson-eyed minions who feast on blood through fleshy stingers in their throats.

The dreadful wildfires that ravaged the forests in California and other parts of the West, while causing much devastation, managed to serve science. They have yielded information concerning a scientific controversy that may be of the greatest importance to the survival of humanity.

The first sign of inclement weather in the so-called nuclear winter arrived Tuesday when Carmelo Anthony, Kevin Durant and a handful of other players sued the NBA with antitrust lawsuits at federal courts in Oakland and Minneapolis. Perennial All-Stars Anthony and Durant said the NBA violated antitrust laws and conspired to "boycott players" by attempting to force them to take massive reductions in compensation. The 30 NBA teams were named as defendants in the class-action suit filed in Oakland on behalf of the NBA's 439 players.

The soot, smoke and dust raised by a nuclear war would bring about "far more extensive" requirements for the care of survivors than current civil defense plans anticipate, the Pentagon's nuclear war experts have been warned. In an unreleased report prepared by a private consulting firm for the Defense Nuclear Agency, the Pentagon was told that "present plans for evacuation of the population from cities to rural areas would not necessarily enhance long-term prospects for survival."

The article by Edward Cornish seems reasonable at first. It seems almost inconceivable that we can produce such a horrendous destruction as to even raise the question, would mankind survive a nuclear war. Yet we have produced so many nuclear weapons as to be 6,000 times as destructive as all of the destruction in WW II. As Mr. Cornish acknowledges, the nuclear winter theory provides a credible scenario to possibly end all human life on earth....

In the three years since "nuclear winter" was first postulated, controversy has raged in the absence of any hard data to either support or refute the theory that smoke from fires ignited during a nuclear war would block out sunlight, plunging Earth into a deadly deep freeze.

Fears that Saddam Hussein could set off a fire storm in Kuwait's 850 or so oil wells have raised the specter of a world-scale environmental disaster, with billowing clouds of black smoke that could eventually create a "nuclear winter." Not so, oil experts said Monday. At worst, 1 million to 2 million barrels of oil a day would be burned in Kuwait, said Larry Flak, chief engineer for OGE Drilling Co. in Houston.

The Pentagon, in a report made available Saturday, said that the smoke and dust created by a nuclear war could block sunlight and lead to lowered temperatures, but that there is insufficient evidence to determine the length or severity of such a "nuclear winter."

The Pentagon agreed with Administration critics today that an atomic war would cause a "nuclear winter" which might wipe out all life on Earth, but told Congress that is all the more reason to continue President Reagan's weapons buildup and try to win arms cuts. "The Administration accepts that a nuclear exchange would produce a nuclear winter effect," Richard Perle, assistant defense secretary, told a pair of House subcommittees.

The prospects for a 2011-12 NBA season might have ended Monday. The 138th day of the NBA lockout failed to land a deal between players and owners, prompting Commissioner David Stern's ominous midday statement that the season was "now in jeopardy. " The players' union began the process of disbanding and filed a "disclaimer of interest" so it could soon deliver a more weighty document — an antitrust lawsuit against the NBA in which players could claim the league conspired to prevent them from marketing themselves and making a living.

One analyst called it the "nuclear winter scenario" for Netflix. Shares in the company plummeted 35% on Tuesday, the day after the streaming video and DVD rental service revealed it had lost 800,000 subscribers in the third quarter and projected far slower growth for the rest of the year and early 2012 than investors had expected. The consumer exodus came after a series of public gaffes over the last few months, including a surprise pricing change that raised some subscribers' fees by 60%, the impending loss of recently released movies from Sony Pictures and Walt Disney Pictures, and a hasty retreat from plans to separate its DVDs-by-mail business into a new brand called Qwikster.

On the surface, the house built by Bruce Francisco in Saranac, N.Y., looks like a modest mountain chalet, with a wraparound porch and a big sun room to take in the view. Then look at what lies below. A heavy steel door opens to stairs descending into a cool, silent habitat built within the cylindrical remains of a Cold War relic. Francisco and his cousin converted a former Atlas F missile silo site into a luxury home. Now they're trying to sell it on eBay.

Give peace a chance? In an NBA lockout marked by polarization and paranoia on both sides, the union took a small step away from the brink, renouncing decertification as a tactic--for the moment, of course, the lion and the lamb have yet to lie down together--in favor of returning to the bargaining table. "We don't think decertification is necessary at this point," Billy Hunter, director of the National Basketball Players Assn., said Wednesday after meeting with the agents' advisory committee.

Forgive the Thais if they seem a bit skeptical about their government's promise to clean up its financial act. They haven't forgotten Rakesh Saxena. More than a year after the Bangkok Bank of Commerce executive fled the country, accused of embezzling millions of dollars and saddling the bank with a staggering $3 billion in bad loans, he is ensconced in Vancouver, Canada, fighting his extradition to Thailand.

James B. Pollack, 55, luminary among the world's planetary scientists who helped formulate the theory of nuclear winter. Pollack discovered that Venus' clouds are made of sulfuric acid and his work led to the discovery that Saturn's rings are made of ice chunks. But he was best known for the nuclear winter theory. He, mentor Carl Sagan and three colleagues theorized that airborne soot from a nuclear war would block the sun's rays and drop temperatures below freezing worldwide.

Astronomer Carl Sagan clashed Thursday with a top Pentagon official over a new Defense Department study that acknowledges nuclear war could plunge the world's climate into a civilization-ending deep freeze but dismisses the need to re-examine nuclear strategy in light of the findings.

Forestry officials gathered Friday to set 2 1/2 square miles of dead fir trees on fire as part of an experiment to help U.S. and Canadian scientists test the theory of a "nuclear winter." "It will embody some of the characteristics of the firestorm that will follow a nuclear blast," said Andrew Forester, who brought the researchers together. The experiment, which begins today, was timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary Aug.

It seems to me that Gregg Easterbrook ("When Nutty Ideas Collide: SDI, Meet Nuclear Winter," Opinion, May 30) displays a bit of "nutty" thinking of his own. The "nuttiest" aspect of his article is his analogy between the two ideas as if the consequences of accepting either were equivalent. They aren't. He is correct when he argues that SDI would not protect us from nuclear destruction, and was just a vehicle that was created for the purpose of funneling "pork" to defense contractors.

The year 1993 marks the 10th anniversary of two important ideas about nuclear war--the Strategic Defense Initiative, announced by President Ronald Reagan in a 1983 speech, and the nuclear-winter theory, pronounced a few months later by a group of scientists led by Carl Sagan. The premise of SDI was that nuclear warheads aboard ICBMs could be rendered "impotent and obsolete," in Reagan's phrase, by orbital defenses.