Environmental and biospheric impacts of nuclear war

We start with a sketch of earlier findings on worldwide environmental risks of nuclear testing and nuclear war. An overview is then given of the evolving new awareness since the turn of the 1970s, when international tensions gave way to the concern that a large military confrontation could be triggered soon. The ʼnuclear winter’ hypothesis plays a central role here, but the discussion of environmental and biospheric effects extends beyond this issue to emphasize the complexity of the disturbance induced by any nuclear war, including potential ‘modern’ regional nuclear conflicts. Unresolved issues include the stability of the present climatic regime and the structural role the global atmospheric water cycle appears to play. We mean to substantiate that nuclear war is the ultima irratio (Willy Brandt) and beg for pardon when falling into a strange terminology.