![]() In that same period, Presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev recognized the potential environmental damage attending the use of nuclear weapons and devised treaties to reduce the numbers from their peak in 1986-a decline that continues today. Subsequent investigations in the mid- and late 1980s by the US National Academy of Sciences 2 and the International Council of Scientific Unions 3, 4 supported those initial studies and shed further light on the phenomena involved. Vladimir Aleksandrov and Georgiy Stenchikov conducted the first general circulation model simulations in the USSR. Extending their work, two of us (Toon and Turco) and colleagues discovered “nuclear winter,” which posited that worldwide climatic cooling from stratospheric smoke would cause agricultural collapse that threatened the majority of the human population with starvation. 1 Paul Crutzen and John Birks proposed that massive fires and smoke emissions in the lower atmosphere after a global nuclear exchange would create severe short-term environmental aftereffects. ![]() More than 25 years ago, three independent research groups made valuable contributions to elaborating the consequences of nuclear warfare.
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