SIX MINUTES TO WINTER

Nobody ever said a nuclear holocaust would be nice. Here’s a book to prove it.

The odds are depressingly good that someone, sometime, somewhere will deploy a nuclear weapon. British environmental journalist Lynas reckons it at a probability of about 63% within a century; given that it’s been 80 years since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that gives us until 2045 to test the prediction. And given wars in Ukraine, Syria, Palestine, and other sundry odd places, the odds may be poorer still, which, by Lynas’ account, ought to put us to worrying about nuclear war more than we do. There’s plenty to worry about, as Lynas counts off the sequelae in grim detail: There’s nuclear winter, for instance, which means that much of the Northern Hemisphere will undergo a new ice age (which is at least a break from global warming). With that ice will come starvation, since crops won’t grow, which raises another unwholesome prospect: Once the canned foods are gone, “the absolute last resort is the consumption of human corpses.” A person might want to go vegan, since those corpses will be irradiated and probably highly carcinogenic. And so on. Lynas takes a too-long side tour into the asteroid-induced nuclear winter that did in the dinosaurs and sent up a tsunami that crested as high as Mont Blanc, but the point is well taken; nukes will do the same trick, and, as the kids say, FAFO. Much of this isn’t new; Jonathan Schell was making many of the same points in his 1982 book, The Fate of the Earth. However, Lynas does a good job of sounding alarms anew and calling for meaningful action: “We cannot be another movement of hippies, eating vegan food in protest camps with smelly compost toilets, and obsessing over women-only spaces,” he writes; instead, we need to bring science and realpolitik to bear if we’re to survive.

A rightfully urgent call to ban the Bomb—and stat.