I think in this country we’ve been sleepwalking during the last 38 years and passed this problem without really coming to grips with how dire and compelling it is, and I think ABC should be congratulated for spurring what I hope will be a year-long debate on this issue, but 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 that will follow even a small nuclear war, especially if cities are targeted, as they almost certainly would be, involves a pall of dust and smoke which would reduce the temperatures of not just in northern and mid latitudes, but pretty much globally to sub-freezing temperatures for months. In addition, it’s dark, the radiation is much more than we’ve been told before. Agriculture will be wiped out, and it’s very clear that beyond the one or two billion people who would be killed directly in a major nuclear war–five to seven thousand megatons, something like that–that the overall consequences would be much more dire and the biologists who have been studying this think that there is a real possibility of the extinction of the human species from such a war.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I think in this country we’ve been sleepwalking during the last 38 years and passed this problem without really coming to grips with how dire and compelling it is, and I think ABC should be congratulated for spurring what I hope will be a year-long debate on this issue, but 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 that will follow even a small nuclear war, especially if cities are targeted, as they almost certainly would be, involves a pall of dust and smoke which would reduce the temperatures of not just in northern and mid latitudes, but pretty much globally to sub-freezing temperatures for months. In addition, it’s dark, the radiation is much more than we’ve been told before. Agriculture will be wiped out, and it’s very clear that beyond the one or two billion people who would be killed directly in a major nuclear war–five to seven thousand megatons, something like that–that the overall consequences would be much more dire and the biologists who have been studying this think that there is a real possibility of the extinction of the human species from such a war." in the context of "Carl Sagan" to mean that wisdom is timeless.