I reviewed The Cold and the Dark when it hit print
Nuclear War Simulation by Princeton: exchange lasts 6 hours; DC, Norfolk, Jacksonville prime targets; resulting disease and famine kills millions
Princeton-SGS developed a new simulation for a plausible escalating war between the United States and Russia using realistic nuclear force postures, targets and fatality estimates. It is estimated that there would be more than 90 million people dead and injured within the first few hours of the conflict.
This project is motivated by the need to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans. The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years as the United States and Russia have abandoned long-standing nuclear arms control treaties, started to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons and expanded the circumstances in which they might use nuclear weapons.
In the Cold and the Dark a discussion of a 100 megaton atomic war. In three selections: The Atmospheric and Climatic Consequences of Nuclear War; The Biological Consequences of Nuclear War; and The Moscow Link: A Diaglogue between U.S. and Soviet Scientists. https://ia600304.us.archive.org/8/items/the-carl-sagan-book-collection/Carl%20Sagan%20-%20Cold%20and%20the%20Dark.pdf#:~:text=The%20Cold%20and%20the%20Dark%20The
Once upon a time, when younger, smarter, not as Kaliforniacated as today, 1974, really up to the Challenger explosion, where I learned my IR professor was a spook, a major interest was International Relations. My sub-interest nuclear war. As an avid reader I devoured Arms Control books. I read essays. I believed that nuclear disarmament was achievable and desirable. 1974 and based my thinking on books 10 years older or more and some more recent works. Erich Fromm was my go to scholar.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20026628. THERE IS LITTLE DOUBT that the proposal for a unilateral disarmament-in the broad sense of the unconditional dismantling of a country's military establishment-will be acceptable neither to the United
States nor to the Soviet Union in the immediate future. Hence, in as much as this paper is concerned with practical suggestions for arms control, it proposes another and very limited concept of unilateral dis
armament, one which has been called by Charles Osgood "graduated unilateral action (or disengagement)" or which might be called unilateral initiative in taking practical steps towards disarmament.
The basic idea underlying this concept is that of a radical change of our method of negotiating multilateral disarmament. This change implies that we give up the present method of bargaining in which every concession we make is dependent on a corresponding and guaranteed concession on the part of the Russians; that, instead, we take, unilaterally, gradual steps toward disarmament in the expectation that the Russians will reciprocate and that, thus, the present deadlock in the negotiations for universal disarmament can be broken.
https://nationalinterest.org/feature/us-nuclear-strategy-and-future-arms-control-212784#:~:text=As%20he%20explains,%20the%20current%20U.S.
Princeton below.
If my personal ruination is the cost of theirs, it would still be worth it, to have the world truly go bankrupt, pull the plug. No delusions of starting over.