It’s blood curdling how cavalier some American officials and politicians have been about mentioning “limited” and “winnable” nuclear war. From Caitlin Johnstone at caitlinjohnstone.com:
Sometimes I’m not sure what presents a greater threat to humanity, nuclear war or the colossal stupidity that has made it possible.
Due to the skyrocketing risk of a world-ending confrontation between the United States and Russia, World Socialist Website is re-releasing a series of interviews it conducted in 2017 with experts on the subject of nuclear war. One of them is with a senior scientist at Physicians for Social Responsibility named Steven Starr, which WSWS has titled “Nuclear winter—the long-suppressed reality of nuclear war”.
Starr discusses the research which has shown that in addition to the unthinkable horrors of flattened cities and nuclear fallout we’ve all been told about, “a war fought with existing US and Russian nuclear arsenals is predicted to make agriculture impossible for a decade or longer, dooming most people to die from a nuclear famine.”
Starr says a false narrative has been spun that the science behind nuclear winter theory is weak, a narrative I’ve had parroted at me from time to time in my commentary on this subject. He says the science is in fact peer-reviewed and robust, and actually makes very conservative estimates of the environmental havoc that would be unleashed by black carbon soot thrown into the stratosphere by a large nuclear exchange. But this science has been actively suppressed and marginalized by a junk science smear campaign and the slashing of research funding.
