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 some
misconceptions and outright lies about the history of American and Soviet nuclear winter
research.
Since Earley's account is wrong in so many points, I will quote the whole part (with one
unimportant omission, see below) dealing with the nuclear winter theory, interrupted only
by my commentary. Quotes from Comrade J are given on grey background, to differentiate
them from other quotes.

Not long after NATO voted to approve the Pershing missiles, the Soviet Union's
news service released a story to the West that was picked up by the British
Broadcasting Corporation. The story, which had been approved by KGB
propagandists, described experiments in the Karakum desert in South Central
Asia that were being done by a Soviet specialist in atmospheric physics, Dr. Kirill
Kondrayev [sic!]. He and other Soviet scientists were part of a research team
being funded by the Aleksandr Voyeykov Main Geophysical Observatory and
Leningrad University, according to the Soviet release. The story said that
Kondrayev had made a startling discovery. “Even in the sweltering deserts at the
height of summer, the Earth's surface can remain comparatively cold if dust
storms are raging in the air,” the news report declared. Kondrayev called this
phenomenon the “anti-hothouse effect” and explained that the reason why the
earth's temperature could be cooler was that dust particles filling the atmosphere
during a major dust storm were “capable of shutting out the Sun's rays.”

Neither Kondrayev nor his collegues ever submitted their experiments to the
West for scientific peer review. However, their claim—that dust particles could
effectively block out the sun, causing temperatures to drop—would later be
widely accepted as a scientific fact. Only a top KGB officials and a handful of
Soviet scientists would know that Kondrayev's dramatic discovery was not the
result of painstaking research, but the first step in a carefully choreographed
KGB 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 he
gained in the Soviet Union about that time. But his research on aerosols, especially famous
CAENEX Kara-kum expedition, was widely published and known to every atmospheric
scientist in the USA and USSR, years before NATO approved the deployment of the
Pershing missiles.1 The claim that it was not peer-reviewed is a plain nonsense: for

1 See 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 cataclysmic

scenario came from the Institute of Terrestrial Physics of the Soviet Academy of
Sciences. It prepared a study drafted by Georgi Golitsyn, a geophysicist; N. N.
Moiseyev, a mathematician; and V. V. Aleksandrov, a computer expert, under
the direction of Yuri Israel, chairman of the USSR State Committee for Hydro-
Meteorology and Environmental Control. The scientists claimed they had used a
mathematical model to estimate how much dirt and debris would be blasted into
the atmosphere during a nuclear attack in Germany. They then applied
Kondrayev's “anti-hothouse effect” to see what impact the airborne debris would
have on the planet. Their conclusion: The use of nuclear weapons in Germany
during a Soviet invasion of Europe would lodge so much dirt in the atmosphere
that the sun would be unable to shine through and temperatures across Europe
would 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 it
was 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 study

that made such a spectacular claim, so instead of publishing it in a scientific
journal, the KGB began using aktivnye meropriiatiia—covert active measures—to
disseminate the doomsday findings. Information from the study's key findings
was distributed by KGB officers to their contacts in peace, anti-nuclear,
disarmament, and environmental organizations in an effort to get these groups to
publicize the propagandists' script. One of the publications that the KGB targeted
was 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 cultural
factors that, according to its mandate, “influence the condition of the human
environment.” In 1982—a year before the first Pershing missiles were set to arrive
in Germany—an editor at Ambio contacted Paul J. Crutzen at the Max Planck
Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. Crutzen, who would be awarded the
Nobel Prize in Chemistry later in his career, had recently moved to the German
institute after spending three years as director of research at the National Center
2 Aleksandrov, 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 investigating
how fires and other natural disasters affected atmospheric conditions.

The editor explained that Ambio was preparing a special issue that would
examine how a nuclear war would impact the planet. The editor asked Crutzen
to write specifically about the effect of nuclear blasts on the atmosphere. Crutzen
and one of his former colleagues from Colorado, John W. Birks, submitted an
article 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 the
atmosphere, 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 the
KGB was trying to instigate anti-U.S. feelings by circulating fraudulent scientific
data about the atmospheric dangers of a nuclear war in Western Europe (Earley
172).

Besides handwaving, Earley is not able to explain how on earth the KGB managed to
influence 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. Paul
Crutzen remarked that at the beginning they intended to write about ozone depletion
caused 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 in

biomass burning explain my involvement in the “nuclear winter” studies. When
in 1981 I was asked by the editor of Ambio to contribute to a special issue on the
environmental consequences of a major nuclear war, an issue coedited by Dr.
Joseph Rotblat, this year’s Nobel Peace Prize awardee, the initial thought was
that I would make an update on predictions of the destruction of ozone by the
NOx that would be produced and carried up by the fireballs into the
stratosphere. Prof. John Birks of the University of Colorado, Boulder, one of the
co-authors of the Johnston study on this topic, who spent a sabbatical in my
research division in Mainz, joined me in this study. Although the ozone
depletion effects were significant, it was also clear to us that these effects could
not compete with the direct impacts of the nuclear explosions. However, we then
came to think about the potential climatic effects of the large amounts of sooty
smoke from fires in the forests and in urban and industrial centers and oil storage
facilities, 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 in
Sweden. Audubon Society president Russell Peterson, whose wife was an editor
at Ambio, was later identified in news reports as having given an advance copy of
the Crutzen story to Robert Scrivner of the Rockefeller Family Fund. Other news
reports would credit George Carrier, a Harvard mathematician in charge of a
National Academy of Sciences committee studying nuclear war, with spotting
the article and deciding to pursue it in the U.S. Regardless, the Ambio story ended
up in the hands of Carl Sagan, an astronomer and professor at Cornell
3 Crutzen Paul, “My Life with O3, NOx and Other YZOxs”, Nobel Lecture, December 8, 1995.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1995/crutzen-lecture.pdf
 University, and an ardent anti-nuclear activist. Sagan was one of the best-known
scientists in America because of a thirteen-part televison [sic!] series called
Cosmos that first aired in 1980. Hosted by Sagan, the show traced the history of
the universe from the time of the “big bang” up to the present. More than 500
million people in sixty countries had watched it.

Sagan would later explain during interviews that he had already been studying
completely on his own possible impacts of dust stirred up by a nuclear blast
when he read the Ambio article. He recruited a team of scientists, including
Richard P. Turco, Owen B. Toon, Thomas P. Ackerman, and James B. Pollack, to
delve deeper into the impact on the planet of a nuclear war in Europe. They
dubbed their report “the TTAPS study,” which was the first initial of their last
names. Sagan and the others announced that a nuclear blast would cause dust to
block out the sun's rays, but they took the scenario even further. They claimed
the layer of debris would be so thick that much of Europe would be thrust into a
new ice age (Earley 172-173).

TTAPS version of this story is described in Appendix C of A Path Where No Man

Thought,4 and it is easy to verify it in documents published by NAS. 5 In 1980 Alvarez
published his impact theory of the K-T extinction. Year later Geological Society of America
organized a conference in Snowbird (Utah), on October 19-22, 1981. During this
conference Toon delivered a paper “Large body impacts: Evolution of the dust cloud and
its effects on the atmoshpere.” It described experiments done by Toon and his collegues
using stratospheric computer model developed for the NASA Ames Research Center. 6
Attending the Snowbird conference were two NRC members: Lee Hunt and Adm. William
Moran, who decided it is worth to reevaluate the question of climate impacts of nuclear
war. So they asked Toon and Turco (who worked for RDA) to do some preliminary
estimates and present them at an ad hoc meeting at the NAS on April 6, 1982. Two weeks
before the meeting, at a workshop on atmospheric radiation, Toon learned about Ambio
paper, so he brought it to the NAS too.
The preliminary results were disturbing enough, and the NAS decided to begin an in-
depth assessement of the problem. In the meantime, TTAPS decided pursue the Nuclear
Winter hypothesis on their own, expanding the computer model to include not only dust,
but also Crutzen's “nuclear smoke.”

Years later, National Review magazine would investigate the TTAPS study and
publish a scalding review of it and Sagan's actions. According to the magazine,
Sagan first approached the scientific heads of the NASA Ames Research Center
and asked them to host a conference in late 1982 so that he and his colleagues
could make the results of their frightening findings public. But when the space
agency chiefs examined the TTAPS study, they questioned the validity of the
mathematical model that the scientists had used. They refused to help Sagan.
Undeterred, he used his national popularity to publish the group's findings on
his own – on October 30, 1982, in the Sunday newspaper supplement Parade
magazine. In an unusual step, he released it before the TTAPS findings could
undergo scientific review – the normal channel used by scientists to verify
findings. One of Sagan's coauthors, Richard Turco, would later be credited with
coining the eye-popping phrase that would emerge from the magazine story and
4 Sagan C., Turco R. (1990) A Path Where No Man Thought: Nuclear Winter and the End of the Arms Race, Random
House.
5 The Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear Exchange, NRC 1985.
6 See for example NASA Technical Paper 1002 (1977), NASA Technical Paper 1362 (1979), available at NTRS.
 captive the public. Turco said an attack in Europe would cause a “nuclear
winter” (Earley 173-4).

This one is really hillarious: Earley pontificates TTAPS on “scientific review,” but
himself he relies exclusively on a right-wing popular magazine and its “investigation,”
conducted mostly by Russell Seitz.
This is how Lawrence Badash7 describes the same incident:

A year before the TTAPS paper appeared in Science, an abstract of the nuclear
winter concept was published in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical
Union (AGU). The abstract was for a paper scheduled to be read at the AGU’s
annual meeting in San Francisco, on December 9, 1982, in a session entitled
‘‘Climatic Variations on the Terrestrial Planets,’’ with TTAPS member James
Pollack in the chair. But, on December 8, Angelo Gustafero, the deputy director
of the NASA Ames Research Center, acting on his own initiative, called the AGU
to say that the paper could not be presented. His explanation was that it had not
been properly cleared at Ames; it was a bureaucratic problem. The paper was
withdrawn.

Brian Toon and James Pollack, the two co-authors of the work from Ames
(Thomas Ackerman had not yet joined the group), and lead author Richard
Turco,from NASA contractor R&D Associates, reluctantly agreed. When
Gustafero asked Turco, who was to be the speaker, to present something else,
Turco declined, saying that he could not tell the audience ‘‘Forget about the
abstract; I’m going to talk about volcanoes.’’ Even though the work was not a
formally sponsored investigation at Ames and in a sense had been done on their
own time, the research on atmospheric phenomena was clearly within the scope
of the center’s mission and its Cray supercomputer had been used. In effect,
NASA was an unwitting sponsor of this work. As such, it was normal procedure
to have the paper reviewed in-house, and it had not gone through that
evaluation. But, then, neither did a lot of other papers, especially work in
progress to be presented at a meeting, well before the stage of submission for
publication in a journal.

Sagan, however, regarded the incident as censorship, and was incensed. To

Sagan, Gustafero defended his action as a preemptive step to avoid retaliation by
the Reagan administration against NASA. Two days before the AGU meeting,
the House of Representatives had voted to stop funding the MX missile; one day
earlier, someone had tried to blow up the Washington Monument. Gustafero did
not want Reagan to hear bad news three days in a row, especially that his civilian
space agency opposed his nuclear war policies. While Sagan was able to extract
from Gustafero a commitment not to deny supercomputer time for the duration
of the project, he claimed that the director of Ames, Clarence Syvertson, at one
time threatened to close down the entire space sciences division if they persisted
in pursuing this subject. Seeking to overcome this fear of offending what he
considered an ideological administration, Sagan received assurances from NASA
administrator James M. Beggs that nuclear winter work would not be
suppressed.

7 “Nuclear Winter: Scientists in the Political Arena”, Phys. perspect. 3 (2001) 76–105. Book by Badash on the same
subject was published recently, and I hope I will read it in few days.
 Indeed, NASA Ames created a panel of three senior scientists that conducted two
reviews of the work. This helped improve its domestic credibility. Ames even
provided discretionary laboratory funds to allow completion of the paper for
Science when NASA bureaucrats in Washington cut funding to the TTAPS
members at Ames. The withdrawn paper at the AGU meeting surprised
theaudience but there was no outcry. It did not go unnoticed by the media:
Aviation Week & Space Technology reported the cancellation, printing much of
the abstract.

NASA Ames was not the only employer concerned about its good name (and
perhaps retaliation by the Reagan administration); Turco’s company had similar
apprehensions. R&D Associates thus conducted an internal review of a lengthy
TTAPS draft, finding estimations of superpower arsenal size and configuration,
urban area burned, amount of dust lofted, and the population’s burden of
radioactivity excessive, yet apparently concluding nonetheless that the TTAPS
work was solid.

Earley claims that after NASA Ames “refused to help Sagan” in October 1982, he
“published the group's findings” in the Parade magazine in October 1983. What happened
during the 12 months inbetween – Earley says no word. More about it later.
Badash explains the origin of “nuclear winter” catch-phrase this way:

In the autumn of 1983, as their paper progressed through the refereeing process
at Science, the NASA Ames leadership insisted that there be no discussion of
casualties and that the Ames affiliation of Toon, Ackerman, and Pollack could
not be given if the paper’s title included the phrases ‘‘nuclear war’’ or ‘‘nuclear
weapons.’’ They were determined to keep NASA unsullied by a connection to
nuclear conflict. In this case, their efforts backfired, for the phenomenonbecame
far more recognizable to a wide public when the authors substituted Turco’s
inspired term ‘‘nuclear winter.’’

Early drafts of TTAPS study were entitled “Global Atmospheric Consequences of

Nuclear War” (see for example NTRS 19900067303_1990067303, or the “Blue Book”).
This title was replaced in Science by “Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple
Nuclear Explosions.”

The Wall Street Journal would later join the National Review in writing critical
accounts of Sagan's actions. According to the newspaper, the Washington, D.C.,
public relations firm Porter, Noveilli and Associates was hired to launch a
$100,000 campain to publicize the threat of a nuclear winter. The Kendall
Foundation, which financed environmental causes, paid for the national ad
campaign. Sagan appeared on The Phil Donahue Show and dozens of other radio
and television programs in 1983, explaining “nuclear winter” and denouncing
the use of nuclear weapons, especially in Europe. Peace, anti-nuclear,
disarmament, and environmental groups, including Common Cause, Friends of
the Earth, the Institute for Policy Studies, the International Physicians for the
Prevention of Nuclear War, Physicians for Social Responsibility, Planned
Parenthood, Scientists Against Nuclear Arms, the Sierra Club, the United
Nations Association of the United States of America, and the Union of Concerned
Scientists rallied behind him and the TTAPS study.
 Incredibly, Sagan and his fellow authors still had not submitted the study for
scientific peer review at this point. Despite this breach of protocol, they appeared
at an international conference in November 1983, “The World After Nuclear
War,” which was hosted in Washington, D.C., by a conglomeration of U.S.
Environmental organizations and scientific foundations. During their
presentation, the TTAPS team released several frightening details from the study,
which was officially titled Global Atmospheric Consequences of Nuclear War. They
said their findings were based on a mathematical model that examined a
hypothetical nuclear exchange of 5,000 megatons and a total number of 10,400
explosions. The scientists estimated a 5,000-megaton nuclear exchange would
result in the deaths of 1.1 billion people and would leave another 1.1 billion
seriously injured. Based on this mode, the scientists projected that at least 100,000
tons of soot and dust would be catapulted into the upper atmosphere by each
megaton exploded in a ground burst. The dense clouds, held aloft by winds for
months, would blanket most of the Northern Hemisphere, cutting off the heat
and light. The authors claimed that sunlight would be about 5 percent of normal,
causing temperatures to plunge to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 25
degrees Celsius). The surface of the earth would remain that way for months
(Earley 174-5).

I find it plausible that someone hired PR company to organize a conference in D.C., so

maybe this part of a story is true. But the claim that “Sagan and his fellow authors still had
not submitted the study for scientific peer review at this point” is a lie.
First of all, preliminary TTAPS report was presented and discussed a special two-day
review meeting organized at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge,
Massachusetts, April 22-23 and 25-26, 1983 (Conference on the Long-Term Global
Atmospheric and Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War).
Lawrence Badash describes this meeting as follows:

With a draft of their work completed, in April 1983, Sagan and his colleagues
held a private review with some one hundred scientists in Cambridge,
Massachusetts. While the primary goal was to see if anyone could show a fatal
flaw in their argument, it was also a time to begin gathering needed backing from
the scientific community for future policy choices. The scientific research, both
physical and biological, was discussed in Cambridge and supported by most of
those in attendance, though critics then and later contended vociferously that the
science was flawed.

[…]

Also in early 1983, Sagan contacted Robert Cess, a planetary atmospheres

scientist at the State University of New York in Stony Brook, because he felt that
Cess had good ties to the defense community, and asked him to make an
independent, back-of-the-envelope calculation on nuclear winter for the
conference. Cess presented his results in Cambridge, which largely agreed with
TTAPS. His credibility at DOD presumably helped underscore the validity of
nuclear winter. This shows, incidentally, that simple calculations can give
reasonable results of some phenomena, even if detailed computations are
ultimately required. The reason no one did it sooner was not the lack of the idea
– smoke had been named as a problem long before – it was lack of reasonably
 good numbers.

Stephen Schneider from NCAR adds his personal experience8:

In April of 1983, I joined nearly 100 other scientists in a five-day meeting at the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts at the
request of Carl Sagan, the last author of a then draft manuscript known as TTAPS
[…]. The meeting was called so that physical and biological scientists could peer
review the conclusions of the TTAPS authors, suggest what biological
implications might follow if their dramatic conclusions were true, and plan for a
subsequent meeting to release the report to the world in a way that would be
maximally effective.

After the meeting the original 144 pages long report (“Blue Book”) was corrected,
condensed and submitted to Science magazine on August 4. Hence, at the time of
Halloween conference (October 31-November 1, 1983), it has been already during a peer
review, contrary to Earley's claims.

In addition to Sagan and the TTAPS authors, the conference sponsors asked the
Soviet Union to send over a group of its scientists to speak. Moscow sent
Moiseyev, Golitsin, and Aleksandrov — the three Soviet scientists who had
concocted Andropov's original doomsday report. They confirmed the TTAPS
study, saying their research concurred completely with their Western colleagues'.
At a news conference Sagan cited the Soviet study as proof that the TTAPS study
was valid (Earley 175).

Earley is lying again. First of all, only Sagan and Turco were present at this conference
(NASA pressured its employees – Toon, Ackermann and Pollack – not to attend). From the
Soviet side, only one Aleksandrov arrived, presenting an English translation of his August
conference paper (from International Seminar on Nuclear War, Erice, Italy, August 19-24
1983). Maybe Earley was confused about the “Moscow Link,” a teleconference between
Washington and Moscow.9

[The next paragraph in “Comrade J” describes a television broadcast of The Day

After, so I ommited it since it had nothing to do with TTAPS]

Sagan and his coauthors finally released the TTAPS study for peer review on
December 23, 1983, when it was published by Science magazine. But their article
did not satisfy their colleagues. Some 136 pages of promised data to back up their
“nuclear winter” theory were not included. A notation in the article said those
pages were “in preparation.” A week after that Science article appeared, Sagan
published another article, this time in Foreign Affairs magazine, titled “Nuclear
War and Climatic Catastrophe.” In it, he argued that the U.S. and Soviet Union
needed a “coherent, mutually agreed upon, long-term policy for dramatic
reductions in nuclear armaments.” Once again, he declared that a nuclear winter
was inevitable if nuclear weapons were launched (175-6).

This fragment proves that Earley has no clue about how science works – and he doesn't

8 “Whatever happened to nuclear winter?”, Climatic Change 12 (1988) 215-219.

9 During this teleconference Kondratyev mentioned the “extrapolations from nuclear tests in 1961-1962 indicated that
stratospheric additions of nitrogen dioxide would strongly absorb solar radiation, producing a surface cooling of 9.5
degrees centigrade in a full-scale war.”
know the difference between peer review and publication. TTAPS study (note that Richard
Turco was in fact the leading author – but he was rasooled, 10 like others except Sagan) was
submitted for peer review three months before the Halloween conference. The claim that
the authors haven't included “136 pages of promised data” is ridiculous: science journals
hardly ever publish papers this length, and in the pre-internet age we didn't have
“Supplementary Information” section on journal's webpage.
Moreover, the “136 pages of promised data” is original “Blue Book”, i.e. draft version of
TTAPS study (“R & D Associates Report U122878”), and it was published (like other Turco
et al. papers describing the details of numerical model they used), although not in peer-
reviewed journal, for reasons described above.

How much influence, if any, the KGB's active measure efforts played in pushing
the nuclear winter concept would be impossible to discern. But Andropov and
his KGB propagandists were convinced their handiwork had prepared the stage
for Sagan, according to Sergei. Sagan's appearances and the TTAPS study did
not, however, stop NATO from installing the Persing missiles.

To summarize: the whole Earley's theory about KGB involvement is based on claims of
that “Sergei” guy.

In coming years, several scientists challenged Sagan and the TTAPS results.
Princeton's eminent theoretician Freeman Dyson was quoted in the National
Review article stating: “Frankly, I think it's an absolutely atrocious piece of
physics, but I quite despair of setting the public record straight. … Who wants to
be accused of being in favor of nuclear war?” An MIT scientist, Victor Weisskopf,
was quoted by National Journal writer Brad Sparks sating, “The science is terrible,
but perhaps the psychology is good.” In January 1986, the leading British
scientific journal Nature wrote about the politicalizating of science. “Nowhere is
this more evident than in the recent literature on 'Nuclear Winter' — research
which has become notorious for its lack of scientific integrity.” Russell Seitz, an
MIT-trained physicist and visiting scholar at Harvard University, joined in the
criticism by writing that nuclear winter was a theory based on a “notorious lack
of scientific integrity.” Even well-known author Michael Crichton eventually
joined the chorus, pointing out that Sagan had appeared on Johnny Carson's
Tonight Show forty times, pushing his nuclear winter argument as part of a “well-
orchestrated media campaign. … This is not the way science is done, it is the way
products are sold.”

Earley doesn't mention many scientific studies that supported TTAPS conclusions, done
in LLNL,11 LANL12 and NCAR.13 Nor he mentions scientific assessements of the problem:
reports by U.S. National Research Council (Effects on the Atmosphere of a Major Nuclear
Exchange, 1985), The Royal Society of Canada (Nuclear Winter and Associated Effects,
1985) and SCOPE (Environmental Consequences of Nuclear War, 1986).

10 See Eli Rabett.

11 MacCracken, M. (1983), “Nuclear War: Preliminary Estimates of the Climatic Effects of a Nuclear Exchange,”
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Report No. 83-84.
12 E.g. Malone, Auer, Glatzmaier, Wood and Toon (1986), “Nuclear Winter: Three-Dimensional Simulations Including
Interactive Transport, Scavenging and Solar Heating of Smoke,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 91, 1986,
pp. 1039-1053.
13 Covey, Schneider, and Thompson (1984), “Global Atmospheric Effects of Massive Smoke Injections from a Nuclear
War: Results from General Circulation Model Simulation,” Nature (March 1984), pp. 21-25; Thompson,
Ramaswamy, Covey (1987), “Atmospheric Effects of Nuclear War Aerosols in General Circulation Model
Simulations: Influence of Smoke Optical Properties,” Journal of Geophysical Research, Vol. 92: 10,942-60.
 Instead he quotes two scientists who never did any research on nuclear winter or
publish anything on that subject in scientific literature; Michael Crichton, a science-fiction
author; and Russell Seitz, who, having “spent many hours tracking down the history of the
nuclear-winter movement,” had “announced his findings publicly at a Heritage Foundation
symposium on nuclear winter on May 21, 1985.”14

Sagan never backed down. In 1991, he appeared on Nightline and predicted that
fires caused by the burning of 526 Kuwaiti oil wells—set by retreating Iraqi
soldiers during the first Gulf War—would send black smoke into the upper
atmosphere, disrupt the monsoons, and significantly alter the environment.
Sagan's predicitons were called “ridiculous” on that same broadcast by Dr. S.
Fred Singer, who predicted the smoke would go up only a few thousand feet and
then be washed out of the atmosphere by rain. Three days later, black rain began
falling over Iran, which essencially put an end to the argument. There were no
dramatic temperature drops. Sagan died in December 1996.

The story behind Sagan's claims about Kuwaiti oil fires is well covered in wikipedia. But
note that Earley tries (after R. Seitz15) to make an impression that the whole nuclear winter
theory was almost solely Sagan's idea, which died with him. However, most of the TTAPS
publications about the nuclear winter theory didn't even been coauthored with Sagan, 16
and the research continued well after Sagan's death in 1996.17

“I am not a scientist, nor did I ever meet Mr. Sagan or his coauthors,” Sergei said
later. “I did have several conversations with the former KGB official responsible
for scientific propaganda during this time period, and she told me repeatedly the
KGB was responsible for creating the entire nuclear winter story to stop the
Pershing missiles. I don't know if Mr. Sagan ever knew the KGB was behind this
effort, but inside the KGB, the nuclear winter propaganda was considered the
ultimate example of how the KGB had completely alarmed the West with science
that no one in Moscow ever believed was true.”

So Earley got that one covered: he is only quoting his KGB source who in return is
quoting another KGB official.

General remarks

Most of Earley's account is directly lifted from “The Scandal of Nuclear Winter” by Brad
Sparks published in National Review (November 15, 1985), and “The Melting of 'Nuclear
Winter'” by R. Seitz published in The World Street Journal (December 12, 1986). Even if
14 Brad Sparks, “The Scandal of Nuclear Winter”, National Review (November 15, 1985).
15 When David E. Fischer, author of 1990s Fire and Ice book, responded to Seitz' hostile review asking “why Mr. Seitz
continually attacks his name alone,” Seitz responded: “I had hoped to spare Carl Sagan's coauhors the approbrium of
further association with him.”
16 For example: Ackerman, Turco, Toon: "Persistent effects of residual smoke layers" (1988), in: Aerosols and Climate,
ed Hobbs & McCormick; Haberle, Ackerman, Toon, Hollingsworth (1985): "Global transport of atmospheric smoke
following a major nuclear exchange," Geophysical Research Letters 12: 405-8; Malone, Auer, Glatzmaier, Wood,
Toon (1985): "The influence of solar heating and precipitation scavenging on the simulated lifetame of post-nuclear
war smoke," Science 230:317-19; Malone, Auer, Glatzmaier, Wood, Toon (1986): "Nuclear winter: three-
dimensional simulations including interactive transport, scavenging and solar heating of smoke," Journal of
Geophysical Research 91:1039-53; Turco, Golitsyn: "Global effects of nuclear war: a status report," Environment
30:8-16.
17 See review by Toon, Robock and Turco: “Environmental consequences of nuclear war,” Physics Today, December
2008.
“Sergei” really existed, and was not made up by Earley, many of his claims are easily
falsifiable, as shown above. One can wonder why Pulitzer winner hadn't done the basic fact
checking and hadn't consulted other sources.
What I find most revealing is the thing that Earley didn't mention in his book at all: the
mysterious disappearance of Aleksandrov after attending Spanish conference on March 31,
1985. Why he didn't say a word about the one fact that could possibly validate his claims
about KGB involvement? I think I know the answer: it's because Earley (and/or his
“sources”) knew only National Review and WSJ articles which hadn't covered
Aleksandrov's story.
The idea that the nuclear winter was a fraud invented to stop Pershing II deployment
isn't original either. For example Lyndon Larouche's Carol White wrote:

The nuclear winter lie was given wide currency by the Soviets, who used it to
foster illusions in U.S. Military and policy-making circles that nuclear war was
unwinnable, and therefore unthinkable.18

This was mirrored by words of Russell Seitz:

In the instance of nuclear winter and the dinosaur theory [i.e. Alvarez' impact
theory], an educated guess would be that the “scientists” were more moved by
the vast and emotional campaign against the deployment of the Pershing II
missile than by anything that can properly be called science.19

To conclude: Comrade J is, at least in the part dealing with the nuclear winter theory,
wrong and extremely poor researched. Most of Earley's defaming claims are demonstrably
false, and the other ones are not confirmed by anything but Earley's “sources.” In my
opinion if something should be called a fraud, it's Comrade J and its account.

18 “CFR Journal Confirms Nuclear Winter Hoax,” New Solidarity, July 14, 1986.
19 “Nuclear Thaw”, National Review, February 19, 1990.