Winter is Coming

Late last month, President Trump announced that the United States would be restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of over 30 years. We’ve since learned that they won’t be the explosive kind of tests, but this sent us down a rabbit hole — where we found a story about dinosaurs, Carl Sagan, and nuclear war. Because there was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what drove the dinosaurs extinct... and that discovery, made during the Cold War, may have helped save humans from the same fate. This episode originally published in March 2025. Guests: David Sepkoski, Thomas M. Siebel Chair in History of Science at the University of Illinois and author of Catastrophic Thinking: Extinction and the Value of Diversity. Owen Brian Toon, professor of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. Alec Nevala-Lee, novelist, critic, and biographer and author of the forthcoming book Collisions: A Physicist's Journey from Hiroshima to the Death of the Dinosaurs. Ann Druyan, co-writer and co-creator of the television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Andrew Revkin, science and environmental journalist. To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This message comes from the Southern Environmental Law Center. No one voted for dirty air and water. That's why S E L C is fighting back to defend the healthy environment everyone depends on. Because it's not political, it's fundamental. Learn more at S E L C dot org.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Hey, it's Ramtin. A quick note before we start. While on a trip to Asia, President Trump announced that the United States was restarting nuclear weapons tests after a break of 30 years. We've since learned that they won't be the explosive kind of tests. But it got us thinking about one of our favorite episodes so far this year. All about the connections between nuclear war, the dinosaurs, the relationship between a father and son, and the one and only Carl Sagan. We bring you "Winter Is Coming," which, despite the subject matter, actually really is a hopeful story.

• 0:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Planet Earth, 66 million years ago. The moment just before the end.

• 1:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  The wind tickles a patch of ferns. The shadow of a pine leaf dances lazily over a footprint in the dirt. Somewhere nearby, a lumbering beast stops mid-stride. It's a hulking mass of a creature, three horns, teeth like shears, and it swings its head down in a low arc, listening.

• 1:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Then, suddenly.

• 1:56Speaker 03

  A flash of light, thousands of times more blinding than the sun.

• 2:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  An asteroid.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  The size of Mount Everest.

• 2:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Enters the Earth's atmosphere, moving incredibly fast.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  Ten times faster than the fastest bullet from a rifle.

• 2:15Speaker 01

  In the blink of an eye, this asteroid will crash into Earth's surface on the edge of the ocean with an impact equivalent to 5,000 times.

• 2:25Speaker 03

  The combined destructiveness of the entire nuclear arsenal at the height of the Cold War.

• 2:30Speaker 01

  It whirls into the Earth 20 miles deep.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Everything within 90 miles.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  Every living thing.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Is instantly vaporized.

• 2:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  But this is just the beginning of the end.

• 2:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  A giant fireball.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  All of the rock and dust and gas.

• 3:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Climbs back up and up and up.

• 3:06Speaker 03

  All the way into space.

• 3:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  And bursts.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  Burst through the atmosphere.

• 3:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  As the Earth below shakes violently.

• 3:13Speaker 03

  Magnitude 12 or 13, rippling the entire crust of the Earth.

• 3:18Rund Abdelfatah?

  Triggering unimaginably high tsunamis.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  The real bummer was all of that material that got ejected into space began to fall back.

• 3:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Millions of tiny specks, each the size of a grain of sand, re-enter the atmosphere and catch fire again.

• 3:41Speaker 04

  This is like an uncountable number of huge stars coming into the sky above you, heating the air and the rock.

• 3:48Speaker 01

  A sea of lava descending from the heavens, unleashing hell on Earth.

• 3:54Speaker 04

  If you want to see it, open up your oven, turn the broiler on, and look at the glow bar. In this case, the whole sky is glowing, there are no shadows, so you're not going to get away from it.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Swaths of life, the culmination of millions of years of evolution, wilt under the broiler of asteroid debris. Forests catch fire, the air teems with ash and smoke.

• 4:19Speaker 01

  And then...

• 4:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  Comes winter.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  The soot that stayed in the atmosphere blocked out the sun.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  Blocked out the sun.

• 4:29Speaker 04

  The amount of light that would get through would be 100 millionth of the amount of light we normally see.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  It effectively turned day into night.

• 4:39Speaker 04

  Temperatures fell below freezing over all the land.

• 4:43Speaker 01

  No light meant no food.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Plants can't photosynthesize.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  The food chains in the ocean probably collapsed.

• 4:49Speaker 03

  To say that this was a challenging environment, you know, for life to survive and continue to evolve would be an understatement.

• 5:01Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was the end of a world.

• 5:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  And the beginning of another.

• 5:20Speaker 01

  Over the last few years here at Throughline, we've been finding ourselves thinking about the end a lot, what that might look like and feel like, partly because we live in a world with climate change and nuclear weapons. So we're kind of engineering the asteroid that might destroy us as we speak.

• 5:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  And also because a bunch of us have become new parents in that time, asking ourselves, what future will our kids inherit?

• 5:47Speaker 01

  What do dinosaurs have to do with any of that? Well, it turns out that for most of human history, no one had a clue that dinosaurs had walked to Earth before us, or that they disappeared in a sudden flash.

• 6:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  But there was a moment in the not-so-distant past when we learned what caused their extinction. And that discovery may have helped save humans from the same fate. That moment is where we'll be taking you in this episode. I'm Randa Abdel Fattah.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 6:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Today, we're traveling deep inside the Earth's layers, up above the clouds as the first nuclear weapon is dropped, and all the way to the cosmos.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  Sometimes we can avoid the worst fate that we can imagine.

• 6:41Speaker 05

  Yes, hello. My name is Janice Beck. I live in Iwakuni, Japan. True Line is one of the best, if not the best. I wait each week for a new episode, and I'm never disappointed. Keep on doing it, please. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

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• 8:10Speaker 09

  Part one, 45,000 miles per hour.

• 8:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was 1977. A geologist named Walter Alvarez was spending a summer in Gubio, a town in Italy about halfway between Venice and Rome. It sits in a valley alongside a mountain formed by a fault line. And what was once an ancient seafloor became exposed over time, so you can actually see inside the earth and look at millions of years of the planet's history.

• 8:44Speaker 03

  So you can think of like a layer cake.

• 8:47Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is David Sepkoski. He's a historian of science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and author of the book Catastrophic Thinking. His dad, Jack Sepkoski, was a prominent paleontologist around this time.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  A layer cake, going from the top being the most recent layers of the history of life, all the way down to the earliest ones.

• 9:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  Try to picture it. A swirl of colors, rusty orange, dull brown, chalk white, with fossilized creatures sprinkled throughout. Each layer is a different thickness, and Walter Alvarez was focused on one layer in particular: the KT boundary.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  The KT boundary had been well-studied around the world.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  It's striking. A very thin layer of clay, much thinner than the others around it, with a distinctive, dark, ashy color, kind of like coal. Below the KT boundary is the Cretaceous layer, marking the age of dinosaurs. It's filled with shards of dinosaur bones and teeth, the outline of their footprints. And above the KT boundary is the Tertiary layer, marking the age of mammals. In that one, you won't see many dinosaur fossils.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  In fact, none.

• 10:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  None.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  None.

• 10:05Speaker 01

  Given that, paleontologists had already figured out that the dinosaurs went extinct many millions of years ago between the Cretaceous and Tertiary layers. They didn't know how it happened or the amount of time it took, but they assumed-

• 10:19Speaker 03

  Natural selection was a really gradual process.

• 10:22Speaker 01

  The Darwinian view of the world, that over time, the strongest and brightest species went out. As a geologist, Walter wasn't really interested in dinosaurs. He was just trying to measure how long it had taken these layers of sediment to form. This would be a big breakthrough if he could figure it out. But nothing had worked so far. Until-

• 10:49Speaker 10

  One day, his father calls up with an idea that has just occurred to him.

• 10:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  We'll get to that idea in a bit. But first, we need to take you on a little detour to learn more about Walter's father, Louis Alvarez. We promise it's going to be worth it. See, Louis Alvarez wasn't just some guy with an idea. He was a Nobel Prize winning physicist.

• 11:11Speaker 10

  The most Walter has ever said to me on the record was that he and his father were not close. You know, that's, that's an exact quote.

• 11:19Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the way, this is Alec Navalle Lee.

• 11:22Speaker 10

  I am a novelist, critic and biographer.

• 11:24Rund Abdelfatah?

  His upcoming biography is about Louis Alvarez. And he says Walter and Louis weren't close because from the time Walter was born in 1940.

• 11:34Speaker 10

  His father was occupied elsewhere.

• 11:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was the middle of World War II. American scientists were racing to build an atomic bomb before the Germans did. Louis, a young, up and coming physicist, gets involved and helps the American team figure out the missing link to actually make the bomb detonate. And when the order comes down to use the bomb on Hiroshima, he volunteers to be on the plane.

• 12:08Speaker 10

  On the observation plane.

• 12:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  Following closely behind the Inolagay as it unleashed, for the first time in history, the power of a nuclear weapon onto a city of 350,000 people.

• 12:25Speaker 10

  When the bomb goes off, there's a flash of white light that comes from the cockpit. And so at that moment, he knows the bomb has gone off. The entire plane bounds upward when the shock wave from the bomb hits the plane. So they, they feel it. They feel that shock wave even from the air. And you can see the mushroom cloud. But when he looks down, he thinks that they've missed. It's so empty that he thinks that they missed entirely.

• 13:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  Peering out the plane window at the devastation wrought by a bomb they'd named Little Boy, the gravity of what just happened begins to dawn on Louis. And then his mind turns to his own little boy, Walter, who was four years old at this point. Louis pulls out a pen and paper and begins writing him a letter.

• 13:22Speaker 10

  Dear Walter.

• 13:26Speaker 11

  This is the first grown-up letter I have ever written to you. It is really for you to read when you were older. During the last few hours, I've been thinking of you and your mother and our little sister, Jean. It was tough to take off on this flight, not knowing whether I would ever see any of you again.

• 13:45Speaker 10

  It's partially in account of what happened that day. But he's also trying to like, get his thoughts together about what it means to use this bomb.

• 13:54Speaker 11

  A single plane disguised as a friendly transport can now wipe out a city.

• 14:00Speaker 10

  Because he's trying to, in some ways justify it to himself.

• 14:04Speaker 11

  What regrets I have.

• 14:06Speaker 10

  This is kind of like the paragraph that I come back to a lot. What regrets I have about being a party to killing and maiming thousands of Japanese civilians this morning are tempered with the hope that this terrible weapon we have created may bring countries of the world together and prevent further wars.

• 14:24Speaker 11

  Alfred Nobel thought his invention of high explosives.

• 14:28Speaker 10

  Dynamite, you know, Nobel's invention.

• 14:30Speaker 11

  Would have that effect by making wars too terrible. But unfortunately, it had just the opposite reaction.

• 14:38Speaker 10

  He believes on some level that the atomic bomb is just so destructive that it's going to force the world to approach things differently.

• 14:47Speaker 11

  Our new destructive force is so many thousands of times worse that it may realize Nobel's dream.

• 14:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  The dream of ending all war.

• 14:59Speaker 10

  Walter did not read it until much later.

• 15:03Rund Abdelfatah?

  Over the next few decades, Louis threw himself into work. He did wild things like search for hidden chambers in the pyramids and investigate the assassination of JFK. Louis had this kind of superpower for finding things others had missed, all using physics, a tool that had brought humans closer than ever to playing God.

• 15:25Speaker 10

  So we aren't just passively observing nature, we are actively making things happen.

• 15:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  Meanwhile, his relationship with his son grew more distant. But eventually.

• 15:37Speaker 10

  Walter did read that letter.

• 15:39Speaker 11

  Dear Walter.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Okay, detour over. Let's get back to Gubio. By this point, father and son are on better terms. Walter is feeling stuck in his research, and Louis, hoping to help him out, gives Walter a call.

• 15:58Speaker 10

  An idea has just occurred to him.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  He's staring at this gif Walter had given him.

• 16:02Speaker 10

  A chunk of rock.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  From Gubio.

• 16:05Speaker 10

  Which shows the KT boundary.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  Which he'd never seen before.

• 16:10Speaker 10

  He thinks it's one of the most exciting things he's ever seen.

• 16:13Speaker 01

  Why is it so thin? What's up with that color? And why did the dinosaur-era fossils just disappear? For Louis, it was a revelation.

• 16:22Speaker 10

  It's almost an emotional reaction.

• 16:24Speaker 01

  Keep in mind, the KT boundary visible at Gubio wasn't a secret. Plenty of geologists and paleontologists had seen it. But Louis had an idea using some tools from his universe.

• 16:36Speaker 03

  Louis, in his physics work, had developed the ability to measure very trace amounts of rare elements in samples.

• 16:47Speaker 01

  Rare meaning there's not much of it on Earth. So if you find the same amount of it in a layer in different parts of the world...

• 16:53Speaker 03

  Then we can be pretty sure that they must have gotten formed at the same time.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  And you can figure out how long that layer took to form. So then the question was, which rare element to choose? They went with one called iridium, which, besides tiny trace elements at the planet's core...

• 17:10Speaker 03

  Doesn't naturally occur on Earth.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  Where can you find it?

• 17:13Speaker 03

  It tends to be found more in meteorites and asteroids.

• 17:17Speaker 10

  What happens is that they find iridium...

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Like, too much of it.

• 17:23Speaker 10

  30 times as much as they are expecting.

• 17:25Speaker 01

  That's way more than they were expecting, way more than seemed possible even, which makes them think, "Shoot, we messed up."

• 17:33Speaker 03

  You know, figure that maybe there had been contamination in the sample, or some other explanation.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  They run more tests with samples from different parts of the world. And after a couple of years...

• 17:44Speaker 03

  In 1980, concluded the only place it could have come from was a very large asteroid.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  A very large asteroid.

• 17:59Rund Abdelfatah?

  They had stumbled across the answer to a question they hadn't even been asking. What happened to the dinosaurs? Louis couldn't wait to tell the world their theory.

• 18:09Speaker 10

  And Walter knows better, right? He knows that they're going to be very skeptical.

• 18:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  Soon after, in June 1980, they published a paper with their findings.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  A very long paper in the journal Science.

• 18:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  And to sum up a very long paper, they theorized that an asteroid found its way into the Earth's atmosphere and then, boom, goodbye dinosaurs. Some paleontologists were immediately skeptical.

• 18:36Speaker 10

  Reminds them of stuff like the flood narrative.

• 18:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  It sounds religious. It sounds biblical.

• 18:41Speaker 10

  Yeah, to them, it sounds like crackpot science.

• 18:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Louis had witnessed the atomic bomb level a city in an instant. So imagining an asteroid with more than a billion times that power leveling the world, wasn't that wild to him? Sure, it might feel apocalyptic in the way that something like Noah's Ark does. But this was different.

• 19:03Speaker 03

  We can think of the extinction of the dinosaurs as an apocalypse because it is a revelation to us, not necessarily a scriptural one, but a no less profound revelation of how violent and unpredictable nature can actually be. Even people who have some religious sensibility, I think, would see this new story as undermining human significance.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  And even if you had doubts about what came to be known as the Alvarez hypothesis, it was hard to deny that it was a really good story.

• 19:47Speaker 03

  We can kind of vividly imagine this horrific final moment, those individual dinosaurs looking up at that bright flash in the sky.

• 20:00Speaker 12

  A new consciousness is developing which sees the Earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed.

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Coming up, some scientists begin to connect that bright flash in the sky that wiped out the dinosaurs to a bright flash that could wipe out all of humanity.

• 20:23Speaker 12

  We are one planet.

• 20:36Speaker 13

  I am Paul Ekla from Petaluma, California. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

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• 21:43Speaker 14

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• 21:55Speaker 15

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• 22:01Speaker 14

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• 22:08Speaker 09

  Part two. It's the end of the world as we know it.

• 22:15Speaker 15

  Whatever happened to the dinosaurs? That's one of the great mysteries of archaeology.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  By the early 1980s, Louis and Walter Alvarez's dinosaur hypothesis was starting to get attention in local papers, on TV and radio.

• 22:31Speaker 16

  Alvarez says that an asteroid crashed into the Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  But there were still some things Louis and Walter Alvarez didn't know, potential flaws in their hypothesis. For one, where was the crater that this massive asteroid supposedly left behind? And was the environment really inhospitable enough to kill off all the dinosaurs, even the ones way outside the impact zone, on different continents, in different hemispheres? They needed more information, more evidence, and more scientists across disciplines were getting involved.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  So we knew about the Alvarez discovery before it was published.

• 23:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  Enter Brian Toon.

• 23:17Speaker 04

  At the time, I lived in the San Francisco Bay area and worked at NASA Ames. We're working on the Earth's atmosphere and climates.

• 23:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Brian had grown up in the shadow of the Cold War. And by the time he was at NASA in the early 80s...

• 23:37Speaker 04

  There were 70,000 nuclear weapons on the planet.

• 23:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Most of those weapons were part of the Soviet or US arsenals, and they were pointed at each other.

• 23:48Speaker 04

  70,000 nuclear weapons.

• 23:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  So when he came across the Alvarez hypothesis about a single asteroid strike wiping out the dinosaurs, his mind immediately went to that. Because this asteroid strike, which had the estimated energy of tens of millions of nuclear weapons, would have produced a massive fireball, a fireball which would likely have risen hundreds of kilometers above the surface of the Earth.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  Then Brian called up a friend of his.

• 24:18Speaker 04

  Richard Turco.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Who worked for a company called R and D Associates, which did research for the Pentagon and Department of Energy and had already done modeling of nuclear explosions.

• 24:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  So anyway, Brian asked his friend if hypothetically, a nuclear weapon went off, is there a way to calculate how much dust it would kick up?

• 24:38Speaker 04

  He said, well, yeah, I know how much dust would be raised by a nuclear weapon.

• 24:43Speaker 01

  But what if all of them went off? How much dust would be raised then?

• 24:48Speaker 04

  Let me go think about that. So he went out.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Ran the numbers.

• 24:51Speaker 04

  Tens of thousands of weapons go off.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  And concluded.

• 24:55Speaker 04

  They're going to put enough dust into the upper atmosphere to cause a big climate problem.

• 25:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then there were the fires. A nuclear blast emits enough light to ignite flammable materials in cities and forests, pumping even more smoke into the atmosphere.

• 25:12Speaker 04

  And so we heard about their idea of smoke. And we thought, oh, my gosh, we didn't think of the smoke. So we put the fires into the model in urban areas.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Computer models were a relatively new thing at this time. Simulations of reality that were helping scientists like Brian test out theories in a virtual world.

• 25:31Speaker 04

  And so we discovered that, you know, there might be a prolonged period where there'd be so much smoke in the atmosphere that it would cause temperatures below freezing over the lands.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  A long winter.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  In October 1981, Brian took the model he and some colleagues had made to a conference organized exclusively to discuss and test Louis and Walter Alvarez's hypothesis.

• 26:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  But for Brian, this wasn't just about dinosaurs or the past anymore. It could be the key to humanity's future, to avoiding our own potential end. This was a big idea, and they wanted one of the most well-known scientific thinkers of the time on the case.

• 26:20Speaker 04

  So we called up Carl.

• 26:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Sagan.

• 26:24Speaker 12

  The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff.

• 26:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yes, that Carl Sagan.

• 26:31Speaker 12

  The journey for each of us begins here. We're going to explore the cosmos in a ship of the imagination.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  Carl Sagan was in people's living rooms, talking about the wonders of the universe.

• 26:42Speaker 12

  Drawn by the music of cosmic harmonies. It can take us anywhere in space and time.

• 26:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl was an astronomer turned bona fide celebrity, the so-called showman of science by Time Magazine. His television show, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, was the highest rated PBS program at the time, reaching over 500 million viewers worldwide.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  He had an almost like kind of Mr. Rogers like demeanor, you know, to him. Calm, almost gentle.

• 27:13Speaker 12

  Contemplating the stars. Organized collections of 10 billion, billion, billion atoms.

• 27:19Speaker 03

  Billions and billions, you know, that was sort of his catchphrase.

• 27:22Speaker 17

  It was completely authentic.

• 27:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is Anne Druyan. She co-wrote and co-created Cosmos with Carl. And from the moment they'd met.

• 27:31Speaker 17

  I heard this laugh that was so thrilling. And it was the laugh of a person who had no fear.

• 27:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Her life would never be the same.

• 27:45Speaker 17

  There was no facade. There was no baloney. There was no presentation of self to impress.

• 27:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Sagan was magnetic. And he was busy. He was on TV. He and Anne, his future wife, were falling in love. Oh, and he was also Brian Toon's PhD advisor.

• 28:08Speaker 04

  You gave him an idea. He would respond to that idea. And you'd often come back with some related idea that you would have never thought of. A lot of them were not right. But he just threw ideas out right and left.

• 28:21Speaker 03

  He had this gift for not just kind of simplifying complex science, but making science feel personal and important to an everyday person, right? Why should we care about what happened 14 billion years ago? Or even, you know, hundreds of millions of years ago? That was thinking about why science gives us insight into the big questions that matter about existence.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  And at that time, there was no bigger question than whether nuclear war between the US and the Soviet Union could end our existence altogether. So when Carl got Brian's call, he eagerly agreed to start working alongside Brian and the other scientists to answer that very question.

• 29:09Speaker 17

  I'm pretty sure it was named "nuclear winter" in my living room.

• 29:13Speaker 01

  "Nuclear winter." Those two words summed up everything the model showed, but not everyone was so excited about their research.

• 29:24Speaker 04

  The head of NASA Ames was so mad, it looked like steam was coming out of his ears, and his face was bright red, said, "I'm going to fire you and everybody in your building if you keep working on this."

• 29:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  Why was it seen as being so threatening?

• 29:39Speaker 04

  He was afraid Ronald Reagan would shut down NASA Ames to stop it.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  President Ronald Reagan wasn't a fan of any science that called for more government regulation, and he believed that the more nuclear weapons the US had, the less likely the Soviets would be to attack. But Carl talked to the head of NASA Ames and convinced him to let this research continue. For the scientists working on this, this wasn't about politics. It was about following where the science took them. And some of them, like Brian Toon, thought...

• 30:12Speaker 04

  We thought if science people came up and said nuclear weapons are going to kill most of the people on the planet, that the major political figures and politicians, the Department of Defense would say, "Oh, my gosh, this is an important thing. We should do something about it." We were just as naive as Louis Alvarez, who thought nuclear weapons would end wars.

• 30:33Speaker 01

  But Carl knew better. He didn't think a single scientific paper was going to be enough to get people's attention.

• 30:40Speaker 04

  Carl's pretty much a loose cannon.

• 30:46Speaker 18

  Here now, reporting from Washington, Ted Koppel.

• 30:50Rund Abdelfatah?

  November 20th, 1983. Ted Koppel, the host of Nightline.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  The most-watched news program at the time.

• 30:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  Was hosting a roundtable all about nuclear weapons.

• 31:00Speaker 19

  We are joined here in Washington by a live audience and a distinguished panel of guests.

• 31:07Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Sagan was one of the guests, along with some of the country's most powerful people.

• 31:12Speaker 19

  Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  William F. Buckley Jr.

• 31:16Speaker 19

  Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara.

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Along with Holocaust survivor L.E.V. Sell.

• 31:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  And former National Security Advisor Brent Snowcroft.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  So it's like, these people are talking, and, you know, many, many millions of people stayed up and stayed tuned for this.

• 31:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Most Americans tuning into this roundtable would have just seen a made-for-TV movie called "The Day After," which debuted that night to an audience of 100 million viewers in the U.S.

• 31:46Speaker 20

  Roger, copy. This is not an exercise.

• 31:49Speaker 15

  Roger, understand. Major Reiner, we have a massive attack against a U.S. missile this time. Over 300 missiles inbound now.

• 31:58Speaker 03

  And it's billed as an authentic depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  And this is one of the first times that anybody's tried to actually realistically reproduce what a nuclear war would look like.

• 32:21Speaker 06

  Hello? Is anybody there? Anybody at all?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  And a text appears on screen at the very end, saying, "The catastrophic events you've just witnessed are, in all likelihood, less severe than the destruction that would actually occur in the event of a full nuclear strike against the United States."

• 32:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  And then, as soon as the day after credits end, Carl and the other roundtable guests appear, ready to discuss the film everyone just saw. Henry Kissinger, not a fan.

• 32:56Speaker 21

  I think that this film presents a very simple-minded notion of the nuclear problem.

• 33:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Neither was William F. Buckley Jr.

• 33:06Speaker 21

  The guy who wrote it says, "I would like to see people starting to question the value of defending this country with a nuclear arsenal."

• 33:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Sagan...

• 33:16Speaker 03

  Sagan turns to the camera and says,

• 33:19Speaker 12

  It's my unhappy duty to point out that the reality is much worse than what has been portrayed in this movie. And this new emerging reality has significant policy implications. The nuclear winter...

• 33:36Speaker 03

  The nuclear winter that will follow even a small nuclear war involves a pall of dust and smoke, which would reduce the temperatures, not just in the northern mid-lattitudes, but pretty much globally, to sub-freezing temperatures for months.

• 33:48Speaker 12

  There is a real possibility of the extinction of the human species from such a war.

• 33:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was a mic drop moment.

• 33:57Speaker 12

  Imagine a room awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. The other has 7,000 matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Soon after that roundtable, Carl, Brian Toon, and the other scientists published their scientific paper on nuclear winter. But the message was already out there. And Carl and Anne made sure people outside of the scientific community kept talking about it. That same year, they wrote an article together explaining the theory in one of the most popular publications of the time, Parade Magazine.

• 34:49Speaker 17

  Because it was inserted in the Sunday papers across the nation.

• 34:55Speaker 01

  Which most people would have gotten delivered to their front doorstep. And that morning, when they opened up the paper, they would have seen a photo of Planet Earth alight with nuclear flashes and the words, "Would nuclear war be the end of the world? A special report by Carl Sagan."

• 35:12Speaker 17

  He was proud of the fact that the public would be getting this information at the same time as the scientific elite.

• 35:22Speaker 01

  By the end of 1983, tens of millions of Americans had heard of nuclear winter. And as far as the average American was concerned, the messenger and man behind it all was Carl Sagan.

• 35:35Speaker 17

  People are used to having a shaman. Goes back 100,000 generations, you know, since we've been telling stories to each other at night in round the campfire.

• 35:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, Carl Sagan sets out to tell the story of nuclear winter to anyone who will listen and finds himself in a battle for the future of the human race.

• 36:13Speaker 22

  My name's Amanda. I'm calling from Portland, Maine, and you're listening to Throughline.

• 36:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 36:24Speaker 06

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• 36:55Speaker 20

  On the latest episode of Sources and Methods, in Israel this week, an election with no clear winner. Next week, in the US, an election that could shift the balance of power in Washington. And in both countries, a defining issue for voters, the war in Iran. We look at where things could be headed in that conflict. Listen this week to Sources and Methods, the national security podcast from NPR.

• 37:20Speaker 23

  Happy fall. Yes, the days are getting shorter and colder, and the rain can be a drag. But this is also the perfect time of year to get cozy. Life Kit has lots of ideas so you can embrace the change of seasons, with episodes on everything from making soup to exercising outdoors. Listen to the Life Kit podcast in the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Part three, The Pale Blue Dot.

• 37:50Speaker 17

  I remember it vividly.

• 37:53Speaker 17

  Carl would have a look on his face, like he had something really great to tell me.

• 38:00Speaker 17

  And he said, I've been told that Gorbachev wants to know more about nuclear winter.

• 38:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, America's enemy in the Cold War. And not long after, Carl, Anne, and their young daughter found themselves on a plane to Moscow.

• 38:20Speaker 17

  There was a reception the day before, and Gorbachev was there. And so was our daughter, who was wearing the most adorable outfit, which made people confuse her with the Azerbaijani junior skating champion.

• 38:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  The following day, Carl made his way to the Kremlin to meet with the Soviet Central Committee and Gorbachev. A few hours went by, and then...

• 38:48Speaker 17

  He came back from this meeting.

• 38:51Rund Abdelfatah?

  Anne could instantly tell it went well.

• 38:53Speaker 17

  He was completely energized.

• 38:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  He started off talking about how the room looked, who was there, but mostly...

• 39:01Speaker 17

  Mostly, he was really talking about just how interested they were and how sober, how sober they were at this information.

• 39:11Speaker 17

  You know, the possibility that there could be a nuclear winter was a waking nightmare.

• 39:22Speaker 01

  It was 1986 when Carl got that invitation to meet with Gorbachev. He'd spent the years since the parade article on a campaign to warn the world of the existential threat of nuclear war.

• 39:35Speaker 17

  Going everywhere.

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Spreading the gospel of nuclear winter.

• 39:38Speaker 17

  We didn't have anybody to do PR. We didn't have anybody financing this. It was personal.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  He hosted a TV special.

• 39:48Speaker 12

  For months, there would be a dark, cold, and deadly nuclear winter, no matter in what season the war might occur.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Gave lectures around the country.

• 40:00Speaker 12

  Anything that involves the future is fundamentally threatened by the danger of nuclear war.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Testified before Congress.

• 40:08Speaker 12

  One response by a senior practitioner was the following. He said, "Look, if you think that the mere prospect of the end of the world is enough to change thinking in Washington and Moscow, you clearly have not spent much time in those places."

• 40:23Speaker 01

  He even met with the Pope at the Vatican.

• 40:26Speaker 17

  We were in the Pope's personal apartments briefing him on nuclear winter.

• 40:32Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, a symphony of media coverage continued to surround the idea.

• 40:38Speaker 24

  I just felt eager to be on the cutting edge of understanding. What's the world like? Why is it changing?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  This is Andrew Revkin. He's a longtime science journalist who got his start back in the 80s covering nuclear winter.

• 40:53Speaker 24

  There were so many things happening in that period between the United States and the Soviet Union. There was this arms race. There was the economics.

• 41:02Speaker 17

  These competing views of what the world economy should be.

• 41:07Speaker 24

  There was a technology race. Computers were advancing rapidly.

• 41:11Speaker 17

  And then each country had these client states that were actually killing each other.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  But for Carl, this competitive approach missed the bigger picture. This was about all of our futures. So people on the other side of the Iron Curtain needed to hear about nuclear winter too. For that, he needed the help of scientists inside the Soviet Union.

• 41:34Speaker 24

  To try to beat the drama of disarmament and that nuclear winter demonstrated that nuclear war was unwinnable.

• 41:40Speaker 17

  And they did because they really, you know, anyone who knows anything about science realizes. That is a global enterprise.

• 41:52Speaker 01

  Eventually, nuclear winter theory began to gain traction in the Soviet Union.

• 41:58Speaker 24

  The way it felt to me at the time when I was reporting this, it seemed pretty clear that the Soviets saw an advantage in playing up the specter of nuclear winter as a counterweight to Ronald Reagan's Star Wars.

• 42:16Speaker 25

  Many of you seriously believe that a nuclear freeze would further the cause of peace. But a freeze now would make us less, not more, secure and would raise, not reduce, the risks of war.

• 42:29Rund Abdelfatah?

  Around the same time nuclear winter theory was bubbling up, President Ronald Reagan had announced a new idea of his own.

• 42:36Speaker 24

  The Strategic Defense Initiative, better known as Star Wars.

• 42:40Speaker 25

  Let me share with you a vision of the future which offers hope.

• 42:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Reagan proposed a high-tech space shield that would shoot down enemy nukes before they could strike the US. In other words, Reagan was saying we could actually win a nuclear war, with the asterisk that the technology hadn't been developed yet. Still, that introduced a scary possibility. If destruction was no longer mutually assured, what would stop an invulnerable country from launching a nuclear attack?

• 43:14Speaker 24

  And a lot of peace activists, including many scientists, were alarmed by that.

• 43:20Speaker 26

  If we were so foolish as to go ahead with it, we would be far less safe than we are today.

• 43:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Sagan was a vocal opponent of Star Wars.

• 43:29Speaker 26

  It is ruinously expensive. It abrogates a large number of treaties that the United States has solemnly signed. And in addition, it is likely to bring about nuclear war itself if the Soviets were to believe, as they say, that it is part of an American plan for first strike.

• 43:49Speaker 27

  Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev condemned the US Star Wars missile defense program, warning that it will increase the risk of accidental war.

• 44:04Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Sagan found himself in the middle of a delicate political chess match, which is how he ended up at the Kremlin explaining nuclear winter theory to Gorbachev.

• 44:14Speaker 01

  By the way, he and Anne were also invited to the White House three times to dine with Reagan.

• 44:20Speaker 17

  And we said no each time, very politely, but no, thank you. Because this was when his administration was committing unspeakable atrocities in Central America. Ronald Reagan was the person who ripped Jimmy Carter's solar panels off the roof of the White House. His contempt for science, and reality even. You know, it was just the headline always about him. We just didn't want to be complicit.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Anne also acknowledges that while Carl and other scientists working on nuclear winter theory never let politics impact the science itself, when it came to telling the story, they did have a political agenda.

• 45:04Speaker 17

  The entire human species was living in a hostage drama. And so, yes, we had definite political feelings, we're parents. We have children. Is that political or is that biological? I don't know. I think it's biological. It's survival.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  And although they never met with him, it's clear Reagan was aware of nuclear winter. During one press conference in 1985, he mentioned a volcanic eruption from the 1800s, which had cooled the Earth and produced famines. Then Reagan asked, quote, "If one volcano can do that, what are we talking about with the whole nuclear exchange? The nuclear winter that scientists have been talking about."

• 45:54Speaker 28

  Since the original nuclear winter idea was proposed, several groups have tried to study the problem, and each has come up with a different computer model for the global effects of nuclear war.

• 46:05Speaker 24

  I learned something about science through that period.

• 46:09Speaker 24

  New science often leads to more questions, and that was absolutely the case for nuclear winter.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  I think that some people were worried in the scientific community about overstating the case.

• 46:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  David Sepkoski again.

• 46:24Speaker 24

  Nuclear winter essentially exists in data, in models. And models are highly imperfect simulations of how the world works.

• 46:33Speaker 03

  And this is, I think, part of the reason why some folks did resent Carl Sagan. I think they thought he was a showboat, a little bit, you know? He jumped the gun.

• 46:41Speaker 24

  Scientists are human beings, and they realize they have the capacity to influence world events. The scientists who were involved with Sagan, they all kind of were riding this wave. And journalists like me were riding the wave, too.

• 46:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  By the mid-1980s, a few scientists had begun rebranding the theory.

• 47:01Speaker 28

  Nuclear fall, a chill rather than the dramatic bitter cold hypothesized for a nuclear winter.

• 47:08Rund Abdelfatah?

  They argued it wouldn't lead to full extinction of the human race, but it would still be really bad.

• 47:15Speaker 29

  Anybody who needs to know the weather report after a nuclear war in order to be deterred is already crazy.

• 47:21Rund Abdelfatah?

  But one scientist, Fred Singer, disagreed and said it could actually bring on a nuclear summer.

• 47:27Speaker 30

  What they've forgotten is that the smoke cloud also keeps in the heat.

• 47:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  Singer was a prominent climate change skeptic, and it was later discovered that throughout his career he had been paid by oil and tobacco companies who had hired a handful of scientists to quell concerns about the impact these companies were having on the environment. Some historians call them merchants of doubt.

• 47:52Speaker 24

  Professional purveyors of uncertainty.

• 47:54Speaker 03

  People who have set out deliberately to confuse the public about science.

• 48:00Speaker 24

  Who would just frame the questions around overstatement and uncertainties being the real story on any issue.

• 48:11Speaker 01

  And these voices got a lot of airtime.

• 48:14Speaker 24

  We in the media, we're addicted to conflict and debate. And so it's easy to build stories that kind of mischaracterize the uncertainty by making it a us and them fight.

• 48:29Speaker 01

  At the same time, David Sepkoski says, there was some truth to the claim that Carl Sagan and other scientists sounding the alarm about nuclear winter were making things sound as catastrophic as possible.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Absolutely, they were fear mongering. They're presenting us with some of the more pessimistic models because they want us to wake up.

• 48:50Speaker 17

  I call it prophecy, not fear mongering. If something will happen that will destroy absolutely everything you care about, even if that's a small possibility, especially human made possibility, we've engineered for ourselves, what you have to do is sound the alarm.

• 49:13Speaker 17

  As many people as possible should have the ability to do something to avert it.

• 49:23Speaker 24

  This goes back to Plato and Aristotle in what's called the noble lie, where you're consciously not speaking the entire truth in service of the better outcome for society. Because you know it would be inconveniently complicated or contentious to lay out the entire issue.

• 49:51Speaker 12

  To prove a theory really means to get everyone to accept it. And that's a matter of personal taste. And the more evidence you see, the more likely you are to believe it.

• 50:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Louis Alvarez, who had helped kickstart all of this with that dinosaur extinction theory, had some doubts about nuclear winter, though he made sure never to share them publicly. It was a means to achieving that long awaited peace he'd hoped nuclear weapons would bring. He wrote in his memoir, "The most encouraging feature of the nuclear winter scenario is that no one has been able to disprove it. It has had a very salutary effect on the thinking of military planners on both sides of the world."

• 50:36Speaker 18

  In Moscow, the hammer and sickle is lowered for the last time, and an era comes to an end.

• 50:48Speaker 18

  Gorbachev said it best today, just moments before he resigned his post as the last president of the Soviet Union. "If you have to go, you have to go. It's that time," he said.

• 50:58Speaker 04

  Both Gorbachev and Reagan wrote that the reason that they controlled nuclear weapons was because of this discovery of nuclear winter.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  And while there were economic and political realities that pushed the Soviet Union towards collapse...

• 51:19Speaker 03

  I do think that it had a role in the, you know, quote-unquote, "fall of communism."

• 51:27Speaker 01

  Louis Alvarez died in 1988. He didn't see the end of the Cold War in 1991, or the discovery of the asteroid crater a year before that, which put to rest most doubts about the dinosaur extinction theory.

• 51:44Rund Abdelfatah?

  Soon after the Cold War ended, Anne remembers sitting in the audience of a talk given by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov.

• 51:52Speaker 17

  Who was the very first human ever to walk in space.

• 51:57Rund Abdelfatah?

  He had also been in the room at the Kremlin several years earlier, when Carl Sagan explained nuclear winter to Gorbachev.

• 52:04Speaker 17

  Alexei Leonov, he began his talk by saying words to the effect of, "There's someone in our audience who we owe more to than any other, and that's Carl Sagan. Because when Carl Sagan came to debrief us on the nuclear winter, after it was over and Dr. Sagan left the room, Gorbachev said to us, 'Well, it's over, isn't it?'"

• 52:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  Carl Sagan died in 1996, with some questions still hanging over exactly how nuclear winter theory would play out in reality. While some more recent models suggest it could be better than he predicted, others show it might actually be even worse.

• 53:09Speaker 31

  The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

• 53:16Speaker 17

  When someone tells you that's Earth.

• 53:20Speaker 31

  On it.

• 53:20Speaker 17

  As Carl Brilliant, he said, everyone you ever loved.

• 53:23Speaker 31

  Everyone you know.

• 53:24Speaker 17

  Everyone you ever heard of.

• 53:26Speaker 31

  Every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

• 53:30Speaker 17

  That's it. That's the reality of our true circumstances in the universe.

• 53:36Speaker 31

  Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors. So that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

• 53:51Speaker 17

  You see how nonsensical it is to divide that planet up and to be willing to destroy it.

• 53:58Speaker 31

  To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

• 54:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 54:33Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And me, and. Lawrence Wu.

• 54:38Rund Abdelfatah?

  Julie Kane. Anya Steinberg.

• 54:40Speaker 23

  Casey Minor.

• 54:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Christina Kim.

• 54:42Speaker 20

  Devon Katayama.

• 54:43Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sarah Wyman. Irene Noguchi. Voiceover work in this episode was done by Casey Herman. And thank you to NPR's Indicator podcast co-host and reporter Wayland Wong for letting her husband, Alec Navalle Lee, use her home studio to record with us for this episode.

• 55:01Speaker 01

  Thank you to Jonnette Oakes, Keondre Starling, Johannes Dergey, Tony Cavan, Nadia Lancy, Edith Chapin, and Colin Campbell.

• 55:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel. This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes.

• 55:22Speaker 32

  Navid Marvi. Cho Fujiwara.

• 55:25Speaker 00

  Anya Mizani.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  And finally, if you have an idea or like something you heard on the show, write us at [email protected].

• 55:34Rund Abdelfatah?

  Or leave us a rating and review on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Like this one, Ramtin's going to read to you from Amy in Carlsbad, California.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  OK, I'm low-key feeling kind of shy about reading this, but here it goes. "Your show blows my mind every episode. You two at all are so talented at bringing a multi-sensory, immersive, educational listening experience. I always feel a little smarter and more hopeful. Thank you for what you do." And thank you for that nice message.

• 56:09Rund Abdelfatah?

  Aw, Amy, thank you. And if you're listening and you're thinking, "I love you guys, too," we want to hear from you. Leave us a rating and review on Apple or Spotify. You might even hear us read it right here on the show. Thanks for listening.

• 56:29Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.