Some stuff I learned

Last month I had to do a research paper on the differences between American-Russian Cold-War-era espionage and modern espionage. One of the books I read for this paper was Comrade J, an expose by Pete Earley, who wrote the book based on extensive interviews with Sergey Tretyakov. Tretyakov is a Russian general who worked in the KGB and its successor agency, the SVR. He defected to the US in 2000 and in 2008, his story was published. It didn't cause a huge splash in the media, but in my opinion it probably should have. Among other things, he says that Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, was manipulated by the SVR and provided them with information (although he was not a spy in the traditional sense). So that's an interesting story.

The best story, at least the one that was the most interesting and surprising to me, was about nuclear winter. Apparently, it is a myth concocted by the KGB and propagated in American by Carl Sagan (not that he was working for the KGB).

I realize this makes me sound like a crazy person.

But seriously, even if you detonated a whole shitload of nukes, it would not have the sort of long-lasting apocalyptic scenario that people refer to as "nuclear winter." Now, people like Premie can tell you that enough nukes (we're talking LOTS) will affect the climate. They will cite the non-existent winter of 1816 as an example of how massive amounts of dust can drastically alter the world's atmospheric conditions. Even so, my perception of "nuclear winter," which I think is probably congruous with the general public perception, is that a sustained nuclear war would cause a long-term nuclear winter.

So where does the KGB fit in? Well, according to Tretyakov (who was, again, a general in the aforementioned entity), Andropov really wanted to destabilize the Western alliance. So, in an effort to undermine military buildup in Western Europe, he funneled money into anti-war and anti-nuclear activist groups. When the U.S. decided to put Pershing-2 missiles in Europe, Andropov really wanted to support anti-nuclear activists. The Soviets began publicizing the work of some scientist who had determined, via atmospheric studies in Central Asia, that large amounts of dust in the air could change the local climate.

This claim was never published for review by Western scientists, of course. The Soviets combined this claim with a study by some other scientists who had calculated how much dust would be created by a nuclear war centered on Western Europe. Together, they were published in little-known activist journals -- publications that hippies would read, but not scientists. Through the Rockefeller funding organization and Harvard University, the story made its way to anti-nuclear activist and widely respected nerd Carl Sagan. He hired some other scientists and tried to publish some stuff.

After they started their study, NASA said their math was full of shit. The National Review and Wall Street Journal also called "shenanigans" on the study, and it was not actually peer reviewed until some conference where Soviet scientists were asked to help verify their findings. Naturally, the Soviets were only too happy to confirm the findings. Sagan then embarked on a well-orchestrated media campaign to convince the public that he was right. That's why so many other scientists got mad at him -- media campaigns are not the way to confirm scientific hypotheses. Sagan never backed down and died in 1996 still sticking to his guns.

Lots of scientists publicly criticized the phuzzy physics involved in the whole nuclear winter scenario. Tretyakov says that since he's not a scientist, he can't say if it's bunk or not, but even the Soviets scientists definitely knew they were creating a paper tiger for the purpose of destabilizing the politics of NATO countries. The KGB still views the propagation of this concept as a great success.

Interesting, huh? The book is a good read and only around 300 pages. I read it in a day or so, and thus I can comfortably say that it's an easy read. It's interesting if not somewhat poorly documented. It also doesn't have an index, which is annoying as shit.