Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research

Abstract

Climate science and nuclear weapons testing have a long and surprisingly intimate relationship. The global networks that monitored the Fukushima radiation plume and forecasted its movement are the direct descendants of systems and computer models developed to trace fallout from weapons tests. Tracing radioactive carbon as it cycles through the atmosphere, the oceans, and the biosphere has been crucial to understanding anthropogenic climate change. The earliest global climate models relied on numerical methods very similar to those developed by nuclear weapons designers for solving the fluid dynamics equations needed to analyze shock waves produced in nuclear explosions. The climatic consequences of nuclear war also represent a major historical intersection between climate science and nuclear affairs. Without the work done by nuclear weapons designers and testers, scientists would know much less than they now do about the atmosphere. In particular, this research has contributed enormously to knowledge about both carbon dioxide, which raises Earth’s temperature, and aerosols, which lower it. Without climate models, scientists and political leaders would not have understood the full extent of nuclear weapons’ power to annihilate not only human beings, but other species as well. In the post-Cold War era, US national laboratories built to create the most fearsome arsenal in history are now using their powerful supercomputers, their expertise in modeling, and their skills in managing very large data sets to address the threat of catastrophic climate change.

• aerosols
• climate change
• climate models
• fallout monitoring
• Fukushima
• nuclear weapons
• nuclear winter
• radiocarbon

Acknowledgements

The author thanks Alan Robock, Jerry Potter, and Warren Washington for helpful comments.

Funding

This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes

Notes

1 John Tyndall, Svante Arrhenius, Thomas Chamberlin, and others first established the carbon dioxide theory of climate change in the nineteenth century (Arrhenius, 1896; Chamberlin, 1897, 1898). However, climatologists abandoned the theory in the early twentieth century, when measurements by Knut Angström seemed to show that water vapor absorbed radiation in the same spectral regions as carbon dioxide. Since water vapor exists in much higher concentrations than carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere, it would wipe out any additive effect from carbon dioxide. Later, more precise measurements revealed that this was not the case. Callendar was among the first to revive the carbon dioxide theory of climate change, but even 15 years after his 1938 paper, most climatologists still viewed the carbon dioxide theory as discredited (Brooks, 1951; Fleming, 2007; Weart, 2007).

2 Lynn Eden has chronicled this story beautifully in Whole World on Fire (2004).

Additional information

Author biography

Paul N. Edwards is a professor in the School of Information and Department of History at the University of Michigan, where he directs the university’s Science, Technology, and Society Program. His research explores the history, politics, and cultural aspects of computers, information infrastructures, and global climate science. His most recent book is A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming (MIT Press, 2010). In 2012 and 2013, he will be teaching at the Institut d’études politiques (SciencesPo) in Paris, working on a book tentatively titled After Fukushima: Climate Science, Nuclear Power, and Global Warming and co-authored with Gabrielle Hecht.