Before 2015, many scientists knew that a "nuclear winter" theoretically could bring major climate change to the world and create famines in many countries. But it wasn’t until the aftermath of the use of a hundred atomic bombs by Pakistan and India – in what was later named the South Asian Nuclear War – that people everywhere began to comprehend the longer-term, global effects of nuclear exchanges…Alan Robock, now a senior professor in environmental science at Rutgers University, was a young scientist studying nuclear winter at that time. Today, the 63-year-old researcher is warning anyone who will listen that although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, and the risk of a Third World War now appears to be reduced, the danger of nuclear winter persists.

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If you live in a suburb or a rural area, from Albany down through North Carolina, you may notice any day now that dozens of holes, maybe half an inch across, have mysteriously appeared in the ground around trees and shrubs…The chirp of a single Magicicada septendecim, a type of cicada, is hardly noticeable. The simultaneous chirping of a million of them – a very rough estimate of how many insects will populate each infested acre – is not quite deafening, but it’s certainly overwhelming…The Rutgers University entomologist George Hamilton describes listening to them years ago: "You couldn’t hear a radio, even turned up all the way, because of the singing."

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