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Toon warned that nuclear explosions could fill the stratosphere with soot, causing temperatures to plummet, agriculture to fail and, as a result, billions of people to die from starvation. That's on top of millions of deaths from the explosions themselves.
While the possibility of nuclear war can't be known, Toon provided data on the global arsenal: 4,000 weapons could be deployed instantaneously and, with only 500 major cities to attack, thousands of bombs would have nothing but rubble left to destroy.
On the topic of nuclear energy, Toon pointed to the vulnerability of nuclear reactors and the very large amounts of radiation they contain.
"If you start blowing up a bunch of nuclear reactors," Toon said, "it's going to release much more radiation than what's in the bombs themselves."
The safety of nuclear power plants cannot be guaranteed, he said. Nor, for that matter, can the security of nuclear waste. In San Onofre, Southern California Edison is storing 3.6 million pounds of waste right on the shoreline and within 50 miles of 9 million people.
Terrorists can get ahold of stored nuclear waste.
"This is a widespread and unsolved problem in nuclear power," Toon said. "It can't just keep going this way. Society must solve the problem of getting rid of this waste."
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