PLANS FOR ARMAGEDDON 31Fred Iklé, the US Under Secretary of Defense, was not alone in the
American administration in worrying about the conflicting interests
inside the NATO alliance. He himself imagined a scenario where the
Americans might feel the need for a pre-emptive strike on the USSR
but would be thwarted by Western Europe. Britain, France and West
Germany would for sure calculate that Soviet retaliation would lead to
their total incineration. This in turn would expose Western Europe to
the threat of ‘nuclear blackmail’.^30
In 1982 there was also an outbreak of controversy about the global
physical consequences of a Third World War after the Swedish Acad-
emy of Sciences journal Ambio published an article on the likely
consequences of fires on earth produced by the detonation of nuclear
bombs. The authors were Paul J. Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute
and John W. Birks of the University of Colorado. They took as their
starting point a military conflict involving 14,700 warheads and 5,700
megatons of explosive power. They assumed that most cities with a
population greater than 100,000 would be hit. According to their
calculations, about 750 million people would instantly be killed by the
bombing.^31 The focus of their contribution, though, was on the world-
wide calamity that would ensue from the smoke, ashes and soot alone.
Sunlight would be drastically reduced. All forms of animal and plant
life would be threatened.^32 This hypothesis was quickly picked up by
scientists in America. Some were sympathetic to the arguments, and
on 31 October 1983 a conference was opened in Washington on the
topic. Dr Carl Sagan published an article on ‘Nuclear War and Climatic
Catastrophe’ in Foreign Affairs in the winter of 1983–1984. He sug-
gested that any conflict involving nuclear weapons would wreak a
planetary environmental disaster. It would make no difference if only
a few such detonations took place. Sagan asked why, if Reagan genu-
inely wanted peace, he gave 10,000 times greater financial support to
the Defense Department than to the Arms Control and Disarmament
Agency.^33
When Edward Teller poured scorn on him as a ‘propagandizer’
who did not know what he was talking about, Sagan wrote a letter
deploring that Teller himself had written that ‘nuclear winter’ was the
only possible outcome of a war involving nuclear ballistic missiles; he
objected to Teller’s readiness to engage in personalized polemics.^34
Sagan’s article was manna from heaven for Soviet leaders and
propagandists. Already in March 1980 an appeal had gone from 654
American scientists to Presidents Carter and Brezhnev. The title was