In a recent war game 7 million kilotons of nuclear explosives had been detonated. Anticipating the concept of nuclear winter by decades, Cutler worried that “the effect of any such exchange is quite incalculable. No one knows what the concentrated explosion of 7,000,000 KTs involving nuclear material would do [to] the weather, to crop cycles, to human reproduction, to the population of all areas of the world….It is possible that life on the planet might be extinguished.”

Martin J. Sherwin, Gambling with armageddon: Nuclear roulette from hiroshima to the cuban missile crisis, 1945-1962, New York, 2020, p. 147