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Debunking Pete Earley's
Comrade J 
This commentary on Pete Earley's
Comrade J 
arose as a result of private research study on the history of environmental denialism. I hope it will help to clarify somemisconceptions and outright lies about the history of American and Soviet nuclear winterresearch.Since Earley's account is wrong in so many points, I will quote the whole part (with oneunimportant omission, see below) dealing with the nuclear winter theory, interrupted only  by my commentary. Quotes from
Comrade J 
are given on grey background, to differentiatethem from other quotes.
Not long after NATO voted to approve the Pershing missiles, the Soviet Union'snews service released a story to the West that was picked up by the BritishBroadcasting Corporation. The story, which had been approved by KGBpropagandists, described experiments in the Karakum desert in South CentralAsia that were being done by a Soviet specialist in atmospheric physics, Dr. KirillKondrayev [sic!]. He and other Soviet scientists were part of a research teambeing funded by the Aleksandr Voyeykov Main Geophysical Observatory andLeningrad University, according to the Soviet release. The story said thatKondrayev had made a startling discovery. “Even in the sweltering deserts at theheight of summer, the Earth's surface can remain comparatively cold if duststorms are raging in the air,” the news report declared. Kondrayev called thisphenomenon the “anti-hothouse effect” and explained that the reason why theearth's temperature could be cooler was that dust particles filling the atmosphereduring a major dust storm were “capable of shutting out the Sun's rays.”Neither Kondrayev nor his collegues ever submitted their experiments to theWest for scientific peer review. However, their claim—that dust particles couldeffectively block out the sun, causing temperatures to drop—would later bewidely accepted as a scientific fact. Only a top KGB officials and a handful ofSoviet scientists would know that Kondrayev's dramatic discovery was not theresult of painstaking research, but the first step in a carefully choreographedKGB propaganda campaign(Earley 170-171).
Kondratyev (note spelling!) published (with Moskalenko and Pozdnyakov) a monograph
 Atmospheric aerosols
in 1982, so maybe there is a grain of truth about the publicity hegained in the Soviet Union about that time. But his research on aerosols, especially famousCAENEX Kara-kum expedition, was widely published and known to every atmosphericscientist in the USA and USSR, years before NATO approved the deployment of thePershing missiles.
1
The claim that it was not peer-reviewed is a plain nonsense: for
1See for example “Programmes of atmospheric aerosol experiments: The history of studies,” in: Kondratyev, Ivlev,Krapivin, Varotsos,
 Atmoshperic Aerosol Properties
, Springer 2006; Cracknell et al, “The seminal nature of the work of Kirill Kondratyev,” in:
Global Climatology and Ecodynamics
, Springer 2008.
 
example Kondratyev cooperated with Western scientists during the GARP,
Global  Atmospheric Research Programme
.I don't even want to comment on an idea that the KGB invented the optical properties of dust particles.
The next step forward in satisfying Andropov's demand for a cataclysmicscenario came from the Institute of Terrestrial Physics of the Soviet Academy ofSciences. It prepared a study drafted by Georgi Golitsyn, a geophysicist; N. N.Moiseyev, a mathematician; and V. V. Aleksandrov, a computer expert, underthe direction of Yuri Israel, chairman of the USSR State Committee for Hydro-Meteorology and Environmental Control. The scientists claimed they had used amathematical model to estimate how much dirt and debris would be blasted intothe atmosphere during a nuclear attack in Germany. They then appliedKondrayev's “anti-hothouse effect” to see what impact the airborne debris wouldhave on the planet. Their conclusion: The use of nuclear weapons in Germanyduring a Soviet invasion of Europe would lodge so much dirt in the atmospherethat the sun would be unable to shine through and temperatures across Europewould plunge.“I was told the Soviet scientists knew this theory was completely ridiculous,”Sergei said later. “There were no legitimate scientific facts to support it. But itwas exactly what Andropov needed to cause terror in the West” (Earley 171).
There is no evidence that such a study was ever written. First Soviet paper about nuclear winter was a conference paper by Aleksandrov and Stenchikov, published in middle 1983,
2
  when TTAPS study was already under peer-review. Also note that there were no nuclear winter studies dealing specifically with “the use of nuclear weapons in Germany.”
Andropov suspected that Western scientists would be skeptical of a Soviet studythat made such a spectacular claim, so instead of publishing it in a scientific journal, the KGB began using
aktivnye meropriiatiia
—covert active measures—todisseminate the doomsday findings. Information from the study's key findingswas distributed by KGB officers to their contacts in peace, anti-nuclear,disarmament, and environmental organizations in an effort to get these groups topublicize the propagandists' script. One of the publications that the KGB targetedwas
 Ambio
—
 A Journal of the Human Environment
(Earley 171).
So Earley claims that the mythical study of Golitsyn, Moiseyev and Aleksandrov was
not 
published. Fair enough.
Founded in 1972 in Stockholm by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences,Ambio prided itself on investigating scientific, social, economic, and culturalfactors that, according to its mandate, “influence the condition of the humanenvironment.” In 1982—a year before the first Pershing missiles were set to arrivein Germany—an editor at Ambio contacted Paul J. Crutzen at the Max PlanckInstitute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Crutzen, who would be awarded theNobel Prize in Chemistry later in his career, had recently moved to the Germaninstitute after spending three years as director of research at the National Center
2Aleksandrov, V. V., Stenchikov, G. L.,
The Proceedings on Applied Mathematics
. USSR Academy of Sciences,Moscow, 1983.
 
of Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, where he had been investigatinghow fires and other natural disasters affected atmospheric conditions.The editor explained that
 Ambio
was preparing a special issue that wouldexamine how a nuclear war would impact the planet. The editor asked Crutzento write specifically about the effect of nuclear blasts on the atmosphere. Crutzenand one of his former colleagues from Colorado, John W. Birks, submitted anarticle called “The Atmosphere After a Nuclear War: Twilight at Noon.” In it,they wrote that a nuclear blas would cause soot and dust to rise in theatmosphere, creating a thick layer of smoke that could alter the world's climate.There is no evidence or reason to suspect that
 Ambio
, Crutzen, or Birks knew theKGB was trying to instigate anti-U.S. feelings by circulating fraudulent scientificdata about the atmospheric dangers of a nuclear war in Western Europe (Earley172).
Besides handwaving, Earley is not able to explain how on earth the KGB managed toinfluence Crutzen and Birks. The idea that the scientists wouldn't be convinced by a Soviet
 published 
study, but they would believe
circulating
fruadulent scientific data is ridiculous.Of course, there is a first-hand account by one of the authors of the
 Ambio
paper. PaulCrutzen remarked that at the beginning they intended to write about ozone depletioncaused by the nuclear explosions, and that the idea of nuclear smoke came later:
3
My research interests both in the effects of NOx on stratospheric ozone and inbiomass burning explain my involvement in the “nuclear winter” studies. Whenin 1981 I was asked by the editor of Ambio to contribute to a special issue on theenvironmental consequences of a major nuclear war, an issue coedited by Dr. Joseph Rotblat, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize awardee, the initial thought wasthat I would make an update on predictions of the destruction of ozone by theNOx that would be produced and carried up by the fireballs into thestratosphere. Prof. John Birks of the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of theco-authors of the Johnston study on this topic, who spent a sabbatical in myresearch division in Mainz, joined me in this study. Although the ozonedepletion effects were significant, it was also clear to us that these effects couldnot compete with the direct impacts of the nuclear explosions. However, we thencame to think about the potential climatic effects of the large amounts of sootysmoke from fires in the forests and in urban and industrial centers and oil storagefacilities, which would reach the middle and higher troposphere.
No connection with Soviet research on aerosols whatsoever.
The
 Ambio
article reached the United States even before it was published inSweden. Audubon Society president Russell Peterson, whose wife was an editorat
 Ambio
, was later identified in news reports as having given an advance copy ofthe Crutzen story to Robert Scrivner of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Other newsreports would credit George Carrier, a Harvard mathematician in charge of aNational Academy of Sciences committee studying nuclear war, with spottingthe article and deciding to pursue it in the U.S. Regardless, the
 Ambio
story endedup in the hands of Carl Sagan, an astronomer and professor at Cornell
3Crutzen Paul, “My Life with O
3
, NO
x
and Other YZO
x
s”, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1995.http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1995/crutzen-lecture.pdf 
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Marshall46

An excellent piece of debunking. Here is my own take on Earley and Tretyakov. The account comes third hand from Earley. In the book Treyakov says that "nuclear winter" was cooked up by the KGB and deceitfully foisted on the west. Tretyakov was not involved in the operation, but says that he was told about it by a former KGB official and that he researched it at the Red Banner Institute. He does

reply11 / 09 / 2009
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