By Ken Silva
Updated: June 6, 2022
Newly released government documents from the 1980s outline the devastation that would be wrought on the planet if nuclear superpowers go to war—which should serve as a reminder for policymakers to prioritize peace negotiations as the war in Ukraine rages on, according to Scott Horton, editorial director of Antiwar.com.
Horton told The Epoch Times on June 6 that the nuclear winter documents, released last week by the George Washington University-affiliated National Security Archive, come “with the American and NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine bringing the threat of war to its highest point since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Such a war would kill “billions,” said Horton, author of the forthcoming book “Hotter than the Sun: Time to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.” According to the National Security Archive documents, the country’s top scientists feared such a scenario played out by Horton: Two superpowers fire nuclear weapons at each other, producing enough smoke to blot out the sun for weeks. Temperatures fall, crops die, and world starvation ensues.
Now commonly referred to as “nuclear winter,” such a scenario was once thought implausible by many U.S. national security officials. But that thinking began to change in the 1980s, when the then-Defense Nuclear Agency (DNA)—now the Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA)—began researching the issue, according to newly released documents from that era.
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