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Nuclear war analysts often compared nuclear detonations to volcanic eruptions. The connection between volcanic eruptions and climatic changes, suggested long ago by Benjamin Franklin and others, received serious interest from researchers only in the early twentieth century. Today, however, a direct comparison between volcanic eruptions and nuclear war is deemed inappropriate owing to the different absorption properties of sulfuric acid and silica dust than dark smoke. Furthermore, the distributions of particle sizes are different, and warfare would give rise to fine particles from a variety of sources rather than a single location. This chapter examines scientific disciplines with less obvious connections to nuclear war, including volcanic eruptions, ozone depletion, planetary studies, dinosaur extinction, and the asteroid impact hypothesis.

What kind of place was Bronte? Nobody knew anything about it. The community was located on the remote, western side of Mount Etna: it was a beautiful spot with commercial potential but it was also isolated, dangerous and unfriendly. The town was filled with poor peasants who were oppressed by a few rich landowners; the whole area was threatened by regular volcanic eruptions and outbreaks of disease (notably, malaria); and the Duchy headquarters at Maniace, where the British planned to live, had been destroyed by an earthquake in 1693 and never rebuilt again. The community also enjoyed a dubious reputation for violence and savagery.

A first-hand account of Vesuvius' eruption in 79 CE has survived in the form of two letters by Pliny the Younger, who witnessed the event from his uncle's villa at Misenum. Pliny's physical presence on the Bay of Naples in late August of 79 CE has lent his letters a canonical authority, and they have functioned in the modern era as a sort of window through which to witness the eruption. This chapter proposes that, rather than being the last word in describing the eruption, Pliny stands as the first in a long and distinguished tradition of re-creating it in the service of formal history — a tradition that 1,700 years later inspired one of the quintessential history painters of the era, the Swiss Angelica Kauffmann, to compose the Pliny the Younger and his Mother at Misenum, now at Princeton. It is argued that the letters and painting in question are unified by more than the standard relationship between an ancient text and a modern image. Both Pliny and Kauffmann had a vested interest in making history, which was something of a leap for this particular author and artist.

Classical archaeology is something generically different from archaeology. It is almost as if the resemblances of names, like that between history and natural history, resulted from the survival of an obsolete usage. It is time that this was changed. There is first the exceptionally thorough coverage through field-work of certain parts of the ancient Mediterranean: how many areas are there, up to sixty miles by thirty, which have more than 650 established ancient sites, as Messenia has? Secondly, there is the possibility of recognising the handiwork of a single artist in a series of works: by this means, some precision can be given to the chronology of Greek pottery in the eighth century BC; and it is this, more surprisingly, which enables two crucial episodes 800 years earlier still, the burials in the shaft-graves at Mycenae and the volcanic eruption of Thera, to be shown to be contemporary.

Research on the nuclear winter phenomenon involved more than half a dozen scientific disciplines, from particle microphysics and atmospheric chemistry to ozone depletion, studies on the effects of nuclear weapons, fire and smoke research, volcanic eruptions, planetary studies, and even dinosaur extinction. This chapter describes some relevant aspects of fields with obvious connections to nuclear war.