Good point, but I think people worried about extinction risk from nuclear war before a really plausible mechanism-nuclear winter-was found by which that would occur following a US-Soviet exchange. There’s a nuclear doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove, a novel about post-nuclear war human extinction from the 50s etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) Though to be fair, these are fiction, and it’s not clear the idea was without foundation pre-nuclear winter research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bombhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device
Good point, but I think people worried about extinction risk from nuclear war before a really plausible mechanism-nuclear winter-was found by which that would occur following a US-Soviet exchange. There’s a nuclear doomsday device in Dr. Strangelove, a novel about post-nuclear war human extinction from the 50s etc.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Beach_(novel) Though to be fair, these are fiction, and it’s not clear the idea was without foundation pre-nuclear winter research: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobalt_bomb
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_device