In the summer of 1985, what a nuclear war would actually do to the planet was still a live scientific argument. A small group of American scientists, the researchers behind the Nuclear Winter hypothesis, published in 1983, argued that a large-scale exchange would throw enough smoke and soot into the stratosphere to block out the sun, dropping temperatures worldwide for months or years and threatening a famine no side would survive, winner or not. Soviet physicists ran their own models and largely agreed, though the … Continue reading about The Nuclear Winter Theory