Summary Of Nuclear Winter By Carl Sagan

The article, ‘Nuclear Winter’ was written in 1983 by renown professor of astronomy at Harvard, and later, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell University, Carl Sagan. This piece of scientific writing was published in Parade magazine, reaching approximately 20 million readers, informing them of the possibility and dangers of a nuclear war. The term ‘Nuclear Winter’ was first coined by Carl Sagan himself, and has since come to refer to the expected global climatic cooling after worldwide firestorms as a result of a nuclear war. Sagan’s article regarding this topic aimed to explore the catastrophic effects of a nuclear war on the Earth’s biosphere, and to educate the general public about the truth of the dangers that it would pose. This article was extremely relevant in the 1980s because of the looming threat of a nuclear war between the United States and Russia. In his publication, Sagan assesses the environmental, social and economical consequences of a nuclear war; he relies more on facts and figures, rather than rhetoric devices, and makes use of personal anecdotes and prior knowledge about the subject to support his claims, along with simple, but slightly harsh and threatening language to get the urgency of his message across to his readers. Sagan begins the article with some facts and figures to discuss what he believes would be the possible outcomes of a nuclear war; he explores the occurrence of increased ozone depletion due to conversion of nitrogen in