Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

When Scientists Know Sin
The global temperature declines predicted in the original (1983)
nuclear winter scientific paper were 15-20°C; current estimates
are 10-15°C. The two values are in good agreement considering
the irreducible uncertainties in the calculations. Both temperature
declines are much greater than the difference between current
global temperatures and those of the last Ice Age. The long-term
consequences of global thermonuclear war have been estimated
by an international team of 200 scientists, who concluded that
through nuclear winter the global civilization and most of the
people on Earth, including those far from the northern midlatitude
target zone, would be at risk, mainly from starvation. If
large-scale nuclear war ever occurs, with cities targeted, the effort
of Edward Teller and his colleagues in the United States (and the
counterpart team headed by Andrei Sakharov in the Soviet
Union) might be responsible for lowering the curtain on the
human future. The hydrogen bomb is by far the most horrific
weapon ever invented.
When nuclear winter was discovered in 1983, Teller was quick
to argue both (1) that the physics was mistaken, and (2) that the
discovery had been made years earlier under his tutelage at the
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. There is in fact no
evidence for such a prior discovery, and considerable evidence
that those in every nation charged to inform their national leaders
of the effects of nuclear weapons had consistently overlooked
nuclear winter. But if Teller is right, then it was unconscionable of
him not to have disclosed the purported discovery to the affected
parties - the citizens and leaders of his nation and the world. As in
the Stanley Kubrick movie Dr Strangelove, classifying the ultimate
weapon - so no one knows that it exists or what it can do - is the
ultimate absurdity.
It seems to me impossible for any normal human being to be
untroubled by helping to make such an invention, even putting
nuclear winter aside. The stresses, conscious or unconscious, on
those who take credit for the contrivance must be considerable.
Whatever his actual contributions, Edward Teller has been widely
described as the 'father' of the hydrogen bomb. In an admiring
1954 article, Life magazine described his 'almost fanatic determination'
to build the hydrogen bomb. Much of his subsequent
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