Twilight World And Nuclear Winter
There Will Be Time III
"Winter lay heavily on the north, a huge gray sky seeming frozen solid over the rolling white plains. The last three winters had come early and stayed long. Colloidal dust of the bombs, suspended in the atmosphere and cutting down the solar constant by a deadly percent or two."
-Poul Anderson, Twilight World, Prologue, 3, p. 19.
In some projections, a cloud of radioactive dust would surround the Earth, completing blocking the sun and killing every blade of grass.
I would like to post once more this morning but other duties call.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The use of colloidal dust in nuclear weapons, as we see them in Anderson/Waldrop's "Tomorrow's Children" (the first part of TWILIGHT WORLD and Heinlein's "Solution Unsatisfactory, both pub. in the 1940's, struck me as dated. My vague recollection is that is not how nuclear weapons work.
I think we need to remember that TWILIGHT WORLD, containing as well a story first pub. in 1947, is in some ways a dated book. For example, Anderson himself later refuted the ideas seen in that early story about how radiation would affect human heredity.
Sean
I feel the need to correct a possible misunderstanding. I should have revised the last paragraph of my first comment above to state that Anderson came to believe, in THERMONUCLEAR WARFARE, that for all practical purposes any mutations caused by nuclear weapons would not be beneficial.
Sean
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