The frosty diplomacy of nuclear winter: Scientific predictions and their role in global affairs

This case study appears in: Mays C, Laborie L, Griset P (eds) (2022) Inventing a shared science diplomacy for Europe: Interdisciplinary case studies to think with history. 

The formulation and reception of nuclear winter is paradigmatic of how scientific predictions can work as stimuli for science diplomacy activities and, in turn, inflate or deflate these forecasts’ public resonance. Elaborated in the early 1980s, this theory predicted that the environmental consequences of a future nuclear conflict would have been catastrophic, rendering the whole earth uninhabitable and possibly leading to the extinction of humankind. This essay focuses on how the theory took center stage in competing science diplomacy exercises that, on the one hand, encouraged the sponsorship of new research in light of its policy implications for ridding the world of nuclear weapons and, on the other hand, actively sought to remove it because of the negative light it cast on organizations involved in nuclear deterrence.