Annie Jacobsen

So nuclear winter is very well described by a fellow called Professor Brian Toon, who I interview in the book.

He was

One of the original five authors of... Do you remember the nuclear winter theory of our sort of high school years?

Yes.

Right?

So that was... Carl Sagan was the lead author on the paper.

Toon was the young student.

And he's dedicated decades to looking at nuclear winter.

Now, originally, it was very paw-pawed by the Defense Department.

It was said, this is Soviet propaganda.

This is never going to happen.

And the computer systems and climate modeling have changed to the degree where...

We can see not only is nuclear winter what was thought in the 80s, it's actually much worse.

So whereby originally they thought there would be a year of ice sheets across large bodies of water from Iowa to Ukraine, across the mid-latitudes of the globe.

Now that could be up to seven or ten years.

So think about that much frozen land for that long.

You have the death of agriculture.

You have, like you are talking about, you have the complete disruption of the ability for people to grow food and eat food.

And so man reverts to his hunter-gatherer state.

And this is all – But hunting and gathering what?