* Contributed commentary on ‘The World After Nuclear War: Conference on the Long-term Worldwide Biological Consequences of Nuclear War’, held in the Sheraton Washington Hotel, Washington, DC, USA, during 31 October and 1 November 1983, and, we feel, obviating the need for an account of that ‘media event’ in our Conferences & Meetings section. The Author has asked us to cite our own earlier treatments of aspects of this most horrendous topic, including those in our Winter issue of 1981 and ‘The Environmental Imperative of Nuclear Disarmament’ in our Summer issue of last year.—Ed.

† See ‘Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions’, by R.P. Turco, O.B. Toon, T.P. Ackerman, J.B. Pollack & Carl Sagan, Science, 222, pp. 1283–92, 1983Google Scholar, and ‘Long-term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War’, by Paul R. Ehrlich and 19 others [including the Author of the present comment], Science, 222, pp. 1293–300, 1983.Google Scholar

‡ In answer to a referee's questions Dr Myers replied (in lift. 21 December 1983), ‘the television hook-up was indeed live, with scientists sitting in a studio in Moscow. Whether or not it was transmitted to the general viewing public in the Soviet Union, I do not know.’ Yet we can guess that it may well have been, with Academician Evgueni Chazov still the Kremlin doctor, as it was he who earlier ‘spelt out the horrors of nuclear war to audiences of 100 million on Soviet television’—see our comment in Environmental Conservation, 8(4), pp. 261–2, 1981.—Ed.