Nuclear
weapons testing may at first glance appear to have little connection
with climate change research. But key Cold War research laboratories and
the science used to track radioactivity and model nuclear bomb blasts
have today been repurposed by climate scientists. The full story appears
in The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, published by SAGE.
In his article for the July-August issue of the Bulletin,
“Entangled histories: Climate science and nuclear weapons research,”
University of Michigan historian Paul Edwards notes that climate science
and nuclear weapons testing have a long and surprisingly intimate
relationship. In the wake of the Fukushima disaster, for example, the
Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization tracked the radioactive plume
emanating from damaged Japanese nuclear reactors via a global network
of monitoring stations designed to measure airborne radionuclides. That
network is a direct descendant of systems and computer models created to
trace the fallout from weapons tests, Edwards explains.
But
ways of tracking radiation as it moves through the atmosphere have
applications that extend far beyond the nuclear industry. Tracing
radioactive carbon as it cycles through the atmosphere, the oceans, and
the biosphere has been crucial to understanding anthropogenic climate
change.
Mathematical
models with nuclear science roots have also found a place in the
environmental scientists’ toolboxes. 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
impacts of nuclear war on the climate represent another 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 do now 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.
Facilities
built during the Cold War, including US national laboratories
constructed to create weapons, now use their powerful supercomputers,
expertise in modeling, and skills in managing large data sets to address
the threat of catastrophic climate change. This has benefitted the labs
themselves—without a new direction, the argument to continue funding
these laboratories would have been less compelling—and the science and
scientists who are studying climate change.
“Today,
the laboratories built to create the most fearsome arsenal in history
are doing what they can to prevent another catastrophe—this one caused
not by behemoth governments at war, but by billions of ordinary people
living ordinary lives within an energy economy that we must now
reinvent,” Edwards says.
Limited-time free access article
Source: SAGE
