Winter is Coming

24:12In October 1981, Brian took the model he and some colleagues had made to a conference organized exclusively to discuss and test Louis and Walter Avarez's hypothesis. But for Brian, this wasn't just about dinosaurs or the past anymore. It could be the key to humanity's future, to avoiding our own potential end. This was a big idea, and they wanted one of the most well-known scientific thinkers of the time on the case. So we call up Carl. Carl Sagan. The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. Yes, that Carl Sagan. The journey for each of us begins here. We're going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination.

25:00Carl Sagan was in people's living rooms talking about the wonders of the universe. Drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies, it can take us anywhere in space and time. Carl was an astronomer turned bonafide celebrity, the so-called showman of science by Time magazine. His television show, Cosmos, A Personal Voyage, was the highest rated PBS program at the time, reaching over 500 million viewers worldwide. He had an almost like kind of Mr. Rogers-like demeanor, you know, to him. calm, almost gentle. Contemplating the stars, organized collections of 10 billion, billion, billion atoms. Billions and billions, you know, that was sort of his catchphrase.

25:45He was completely authentic. This is Anne Druyanne. She co-wrote and co-created Cosmos with Carl. And from the moment they'd met... I heard this laugh that was so thrilling. And it was the laugh of a person who had no fear. Her life would never be the same. There was no facade. There was no baloney. There was no presentation of self to impress. Carl Sagan was magnetic. And he was busy. He was on TV. He and Anne, his future wife, were falling in love. Oh, and he was also Brian Toon's Ph.D. advisor. You gave him an idea, he would respond to that idea, and you'd often come back with some related idea that you would have never thought of.

26:39A lot of them were not right, but he just threw ideas out right and left. He had this gift for not just kind of simplifying complex science, but making science feel personal and important to an everyday person, right? Why should we care about what happened 14 billion years ago or even hundreds of millions of years ago? It was thinking about why science gives us insight into the big questions that matter about existence. And at that time, there was no bigger question than whether nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union could end our existence altogether. So when Carl got Brian's call, he eagerly agreed to start working alongside Brian and the other scientists to answer that very question.

27:33I'm pretty sure it was named Nuclear Winter in my living room. Nuclear Winter. Those two words summed up everything the model showed. But not everyone was so excited about their research. The head of NASA Ames was so mad it looked like steam was coming out of his ears. His face was bright red. Said, I'm going to fire you and everybody in your building if you keep working on this. Why was it seen as being so threatening? He was afraid Ronald Reagan would shut down NASA Ames to stop it. President Ronald Reagan wasn't a fan of any science that called for more government regulation. And he believed that the more nuclear weapons the U.S.

28:15had, the less likely the Soviets would be to attack. But Carl talked to the head of NASA Ames and convinced him to let this research continue. For the scientists working on this, this wasn't about politics. It was about following where the science took them. And some of them, like Brian Toon, thought. We thought if science people came up and said nuclear weapons are going to kill most of the people on the planet, that the major political figures and politicians, the Department of Defense, would say, oh my gosh, this is an important thing. We should do something about it. We were just as naive as Louis Alvarez, who thought nuclear weapons would end wars.

28:56But Carl knew better. He didn't think a single scientific paper was going to be enough to get people's attention. Carl's pretty much a loose cannon.

29:08You're now reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel. November 20th, 1983. Ted Koppel, the host of Nightline. The most watched news program at the time. Was hosting a roundtable all about nuclear weapons. We are joined here in Washington by a live audience and a distinguished panel of guests. Carl Sagan was one of the guests, along with some of the country's most powerful people. Former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. William F. Buckley Jr. Former Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara. Along with Holocaust survivor, Elie Wiesel. And former National Security Advisor, Brent Snowcroft. So it's like these people are talking and, you know, many, many millions of people stayed up and stayed tuned for this.

29:58Most Americans tuning into this roundtable would have just seen a made-for-TV movie called The Day After, which debuted that night to an audience of 100 million viewers in the U.S. This is not an exercise. Roger, understand. Major Reinhardt, we have a massive attack against the U.S. at this time. Over 300 missiles inbound now.

30:20and it's billed as an authentic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war.

30:29And this is one of the first times that anybody's tried to actually realistically reproduce what a nuclear war would look like.

30:43Hello? Is anybody there? Anybody at all?

30:51And a text appears on screen at the very end saying, the catastrophic events you've just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States. And then, as soon as the day after credits end, Carl and the other roundtable guests appear, ready to discuss the film everyone just saw. Henry Kissinger, not a fan. I think that this film presents a very simple-minded notion of the nuclear problem. Neither was William F. Buckley Jr. The guy who wrote it says, I would like to see people starting to question the value of defending this country with a nuclear arsenal.

31:38But Sagan... Sagan turns to the camera and says, It's my unhappy duty to point out. that the reality is much worse than what has been portrayed in this movie. And this new emerging reality has significant policy implications. The nuclear winter... The nuclear winter that will follow even a small nuclear war involves a pall of dust and smoke, which would reduce the temperatures, not just in the northern mid-latitudes, but pretty much globally, to sub-freezing temperatures for months. There is a real possibility of the extinction of the human species from such a war. It was a mic drop moment. Imagine a room, a wash in gasoline.

32:26And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9 ,000 matches. The other has 7 ,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in. Soon after that roundtable, Carl, Brian Toon, and the other scientists published their scientific paper on nuclear winter. But the message was already out there, and Carl and Anne made sure people outside of the scientific community kept talking about it. That same year, they wrote an article together explaining the theory in one of the most popular publications of the time, Parade Magazine.

33:12Because it was inserted in the Sunday papers across the nation. Which most people would have gotten delivered to their front doorstep. And that morning when they opened up the paper, they would have seen a photo of planet Earth alight with nuclear flashes. And the words, would nuclear war be the end of the world? A special report by Carl Sagan. He was proud of the fact that the public would be getting this information at the same time as the scientific elite. By the end of 1983, tens of millions of Americans had heard of nuclear winter. And as far as the average American was concerned, the messenger and man behind it all was Carl Sagan.

33:58People are used to having a shaman. goes back 100 ,000 generations, you know, since we've been telling stories to each other at night and around the campfire. Coming up, Carl Sagan sets out to tell the story of nuclear winter to anyone who'll listen and finds himself in a battle for the future of the human race.

34:35My name's Amanda. I'm calling from Portland, Maine, and you're listening to Through One. Part Three, The Pale Blue Dot.

34:49I remember it vividly. Carl would have a look on his face like he had something really great to tell me. And he said, I've been told that Gorbachev wants to know more about nuclear winter. Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, America's enemy in the Cold War. And not long after, Carl, Anne, and their young daughter found themselves on a plane to Moscow. There was a reception the day before. And Gorbachev was there. and so was our daughter, who was wearing the most adorable outfit, which made people confuse her with the Azerbaijani junior skating champion. The following day, Karl made his way to the Kremlin to meet with the Soviet Central Committee and Gorbachev.

35:45A few hours went by, and then... He came back from this meeting. And could instantly tell it went well. He was completely energized. He started off talking about how the room looked, who was there, but mostly... Mostly, he was really talking about just how interested they were and how sober, how sober they were at this information. You know, the possibility that there could be a nuclear winter was a waking nightmare.

36:22It was 1986 when Carl got that invitation to meet with Gorbachev. He'd spent the years since the parade article on a campaign to warn the world of the existential threat of nuclear war. Going everywhere. Spreading the gospel of nuclear winter. We didn't have anybody to do PR. We didn't have anybody financing this. It was personal. He hosted a TV special. For months, there would be a dark, cold, and deadly nuclear winter, no matter in what season the war might occur. Gave lectures around the country. Anything that involves the future is fundamentally threatened by the danger of nuclear war. Testified before Congress.

37:08One response by a senior practitioner was the following. He said, look, if you think that the mere prospect of the end of the world is enough to change thinking in Washington and Moscow, you clearly have not spent much time in those places. He even met with the Pope at the Vatican. We were in the Pope's personal apartments briefing him on nuclear winter. Meanwhile, a symphony of media coverage continued to surround the idea. I just felt eager to be on the cutting edge of understanding. What's the world like? Why is it changing? This is Andrew Revkin. He's a longtime science journalist who got his start back in the 80s covering nuclear winter.

37:53There were so many things happening in that period between the United States and the Soviet Union. There was this arms race. There was the economics. These competing views of what the world economy should be. There was a technology race. Computers were advancing rapidly. And then each country had these client states that were actually killing each other. But for Carl, this competitive approach missed the bigger picture. This was about all of our futures. So people on the other side of the Iron Curtain needed to hear about nuclear winter, too. For that, he needed the help of scientists inside the Soviet Union.

38:34to try to beat the drama of disarmament and that nuclear winter demonstrated that nuclear war was unwinnable. And they did, because they really, you know, anyone who knows anything about science realizes that it's a global enterprise.

38:52Eventually, nuclear winter theory began to gain traction in the Soviet Union. The way it felt to me at the time when I was reporting this, it seemed pretty clear that the Soviets saw an advantage in playing up the specter of nuclear winter as a counterweight to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars. Many of you seriously believe that a nuclear freeze would further the cause of peace. But a freeze now would make us less, not more secure, and would raise, not reduce, the risks of war. Around the same time nuclear winter theory was bubbling up, President Ronald Reagan had announced a new idea of his own. The Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars.

39:40Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope. Reagan proposed a high-tech space shield that would shoot down enemy nukes before they could strike the U.S. In other words, Reagan was saying we could actually win a nuclear war, with the asterisk that the technology hadn't been developed yet. Still, that introduced a scary possibility. If destruction was no longer mutually assured, what would stop an invulnerable country from launching a nuclear attack? And a lot of peace activists, including many scientists, were alarmed by that. If we were so foolish as to go ahead with it, we would be far less safe than we are today.

40:25Carl Sagan was a vocal opponent of Star Wars. It is ruinously expensive. It abrogates in a large number of treaties that the United States has solemnly signed. And in addition, it is likely to bring about nuclear war itself if the Soviets were to believe, as they say, that it is part of an American plan for a first strike. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev condemned the U.S. Star Wars missile defense program, warning that it will increase the risk of accidental war.

41:04Carl Sagan found himself in the middle of a delicate political chess match, which is how he ended up at the Kremlin explaining nuclear winter theory to Gorbachev. By the way, he and Ann were also invited to the White House three times to dine with Reagan. And we said no each time, very politely, but no thank you. Because this was when his administration was committing unspeakable atrocities in Central America. Ronald Reagan was the person who ripped Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the roof of the White House. His contempt for science. and reality even. You know, it was just the headline always about him.

41:49We just didn't want to be complicit. Anne also acknowledges that while Carl and other scientists working on nuclear winter theory never let politics impact the science itself, when it came to telling the story, they did have a political agenda. The entire human species was living in a hostage drama. And so, yes, we had definite political feelings. We're parents. We have children. Is that political or is that biological? I don't know. I think it's biological. It's survival. And although they never met with him, it's clear Reagan was aware of nuclear winter. During one press conference in 1985, he mentioned a volcanic eruption from the 1800s, which had cooled the earth and produced famines.

42:40Then Reagan asked, quote, If one volcano can do that, what are we talking about with the whole nuclear exchange? The nuclear winter that scientists have been talking about.

42:54Since the original nuclear winter idea was proposed, several groups have tried to study the problem, and each has come up with a different computer model for the global effects of nuclear war. I learned something about science through that period. New science often leads to more questions. And that was absolutely the case for Nuclear Winter. I think that some people were worried in the scientific community about overstating the case. David Sapkoski again. Nuclear Winter essentially exists in data and models. And models are highly imperfect simulations of how the world works. And this is, I think, part of the reason why some folks did resent Carl Sagan.

43:38I think they thought he was a showboat a little bit, you know? He jumped the gun. Scientists are human beings, and they realize they have the capacity to influence world events. The scientists who were involved with Sagan, they all kind of were riding this wave. And journalists like me were riding the wave, too. By the mid-1980s, a few scientists had begun rebranding the theory. Nuclear fall, a chill, rather than the dramatic bitter cold hypothesized for a nuclear winter. They argued it wouldn't lead to full extinction of the human race. But it would still be really bad. Anybody who needs to know the weather report after a nuclear war in order to be deterred is already crazy.

44:20But one scientist, Fred Singer, disagreed and said it could actually bring on a nuclear summer. What they've forgotten is that the smoke cloud also keeps in the heat. Singer was a prominent climate change skeptic. And it was later discovered that throughout his career, he had been paid by oil and tobacco companies who had hired a handful of scientists to quell concerns about the impact these companies were having on the environment. Some historians call them merchants of doubt. Professional purveyors of uncertainty. People who have set out deliberately to confuse the public about science. Who would just frame the questions around overstatement and uncertainties being the real story on any issue.

45:11And these voices got a lot of airtime. We in the media were addicted to conflict and debate, and so it's easy to build stories that kind of mischaracterize the uncertainty by making it a us-and-them fight. At the same time, David Sapkowski says there was some truth to the claim that Carl Sagan and other scientists sounding the alarm about nuclear winter were making things sound as catastrophic as possible. Absolutely, they were fear-mongering, They're presenting us with some of the more pessimistic models because they want us to wake up. I call it prophecy, not fear-mongering. If something will happen that will destroy absolutely everything you care about, even if that's a small possibility, especially human-made possibility, we've engineered for ourselves, what you have to do is sound the alarm.

46:13as many people as possible should have the ability to do something to avert it this goes back to um plato and aristotle and what's called the uh the noble lie where you're consciously not speaking the entire truth in service of the better outcome for society because you know it would be inconveniently complicated or contentious to lay out the entire issue. To prove a theory really means to get everyone to accept it. And that's a matter of personal taste. And the more evidence you see, the more likely you are to believe it. Luis Alvarez, who had helped kickstart all of this with that dinosaur extinction theory, had some doubts about nuclear winter, though he made sure never to share them publicly.

47:13It was a means to achieving that long-awaited peace he'd hoped nuclear weapons would bring. He wrote in his memoir, The most encouraging feature of the nuclear winter scenario is that no one has been able to disprove it. It has had a very salutary effect on the thinking of military planners on both sides of the world. In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lured for the last time, and an era comes to an end.

47:48Gorbachev said it best today, just moments before he resigned his post as the last president of the Soviet Union. If you have to go, you have to go. It's that time, he said. Both Gorbachev and Reagan wrote that the reason that they controlled nuclear weapons was because of this discovery of nuclear winter. And while there were economic and political realities that pushed the Soviet Union towards collapse... I do think that it had a role in the, you know, quote-unquote fall of communism.

48:28Louis Alvarez died in 1988. He didn't see the end of the Cold War in 1991 or the discovery of the asteroid crater a year before that, which put to rest most doubts about the dinosaur extinction theory.

48:44Soon after the Cold War ended, Anne remembers sitting in the audience of a talk given by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov. Who was the very first human ever to walk in space. He had also been in the room at the Kremlin several years earlier, when Carl Sagan explained nuclear winter to Gorbachev. Alexei Leonov, he began his talk by saying words to the effect of, there's someone in our audience who we owe more to than any other. And that's Carl Sagan. Because when Carl Sagan came to debrief us on the nuclear winter, after it was over and Dr. Sagan left the room, Gorbachev said to us, well, it's over, isn't it?

49:41Carl Sagan died in 1996, with some questions still hanging over exactly how nuclear winter theory would play out in reality. While some more recent models suggest it could be better than he predicted, others show it might actually be even worse.

50:08the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena when someone tells you that's earth on it as carl brilliantly said everyone you ever loved everyone you know everyone you ever heard of. Every human being who ever was lived out their lives. That's it. That's the reality of our true circumstances in the universe. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. You see how nonsensical it is to divide that planet up and to be willing to destroy it. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

51:25That's it for this week's show. I'm Randa Abdel-Fattah. And I'm Ramtin Arablui. And you've been listening to ThruLine from NPR. This episode was produced by me. And me. And. Lawrence Wu. Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg. Casey Miner. Christina Kim. Devin Kadiyama. Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi. Voice over work in this episode was done by Casey Herman. And thank you to NPR's Indicator podcast co-host and reporter Weyland Wong for letting her husband, Alec Naval Ali, use her home studio to record with us for this episode. Thank you to Johnette Oaks, Keiondre Starling, Johannes Durgey, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancey, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

52:11Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band Drop Electric, which includes...

52:27And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at throughline at npr.org. Or leave us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Like this one, Ramtin's going to read you from Amy in Carlsbad, California. Okay, I'm low-key feeling kind of shy about reading this, but here it goes. Your show blows my mind every episode. You too, et al., are so talented at bringing a multisensory, immersive, educational listening experience. I always feel a little smarter and more hopeful. Thank you for what you do. And thank you for that nice message. Amy, thank you. And if you're listening and you're thinking, I love you guys too, we want to hear from you.

53:15Leave us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. You might even hear us read it right here on the show. Thanks for listening.