The voluminous literature on this subject produced since the original paper in 1983 by Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, and Sagen (TTAPS) has been reviewed. ''Nuclear Winter'' is the term given to hypothesized cooling in the northern hemisphere following a nuclear war due to injection of smoke from burning cities into the atmosphere. This may be especially true if disturbances of rainfall amounts and distribution persist for more than a year. The consequences of nuclear winter could be expected to fall more heavily on the Soviet Union than the United States due to its higher latitude and less productive agriculture. Both face formidable organizational problems in distributing their reserves in a war-damaged environment. Both have at least a year's food reserve at all times. Loss of a crop year is neither a new nor an unexpected threat from nuclear war to the United States and more ยป the Soviet Union. The principal threat from nuclear winter is to food production, and this could present problems to third parties who are without food reserves. We believe the state of knowledge about nuclear winter is sufficiently developed to conclude: Neither cold nor drought is likely to be a direct threat to human survival for populations with the wherewithal to survive normal January temperatures. However, very large uncertainties remain in input parameters, the models, and the results of calculations. More serious may be the possibility of suppression of convective precipitation by the altered temperature profiles in the atmosphere. Three-dimensional global circulation models have resulted in reduced estimates of cooling-15 to 25/degree/C for a summer war and a few degrees for a winter war. The voluminous literature on this subject produced since the paper was published in 1983 by Turco, Toon, Ackerman, Pollack, and Sagen (TTAPS) has been reviewed. ''Nuclear Winter'' is the term given to the cooling hypothesized to occur in the Northern Hemisphere following a nuclear war as the result of the injection of smoke from burning cities into the atmosphere.
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