Notes in the News

...Local fallout is infinitely more deadly...

...Life did not enlarge upon this warning, but if it had it might have pointed out that an area with a radius of fifteen miles is equal to 700 square miles...

...f Donald Jackson, a former Congressman from California and onetime member of the House Un-American Activities Committee, began his address by saying, "I'm so non-partisan I don't care which Republican you elect to Congress," and concluded by calling for a book-burning campaign to rid schools of what he called textbooks that mold children into Communist patterns...

...All this, he observed, would happen within one minute following an explosion...

...No miracles are in sight, nor is there any prospect, as President Kennedy said, for a perfect solution...

...There is a world of sense in these reflections, delivered in the typically clipped Kennedy manner...

...A twenty-megaton bomb is a thousand times as powerful as the Hiroshima "baby" bomb, and is equal to twenty million tons of TNT, more than all the explosives used in World War II...

...Wolfe, a specialist in the problem of man's survival, made application of his formidable scientific background to the totally new equation of nuclear war...

...In 1959, the Draper Committee, composed of distinguished Americans, reported to President Eisenhower that "no realistic discussion of economic development can fail to note that development efforts in many areas of the world are being offset by increasingly rapid population growth...

...The Walker Case One of the most flagrant cases of political indoctrination within the Army involved Major General Edwin A. Walker, then commander of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division in West Germany...

...In a sweeping revision and clarification of a secret directive adopted by the National Security Council in 1958, McNamara forbade civilian and military officials to express politically partisan views at meetings sponsored by non-governmental groups, decreed that they may speak only on subjects within the cognizance of the Defense Department, ordered them to limit their expression of views to those that are "in accord with established national policy," and required them not to "lend an air of sponsorship to statements of others which may be either partisan in character or contrary to established national policy...

...Thermal and blast effects, and concomitant radiation, would create vast areas that would be useless to the survival of man . . . "Fallout shelters in many areas seem only a means of delaying death and represent only a part of a survival plan...

...and three times the area of Chicago...

...It is drivel of this kind that McNamara's recent order is intended to banish from the military establishment...

...In a recent paper exercise involving a hypothetical nuclear attack on the western part of the United States, it was concluded that even in a city as open as Los Angeles, which would probably not develop a "fire storm," the resultant conflagration "would burn at will from ocean to the desert," an area of several thousand square miles...

...Mr...

...No Safety in Numbers All these predictions are based on the explosion of a twenty-megaton bomb at ground level, which produces maximum local fallout, but minimizes blast and fire effects...

...It is because the radioactivity of fallout decays in fourteen days to about one per cent of its peak strength that a shelter stay of two weeks is stressed...

...This is what they heard: f General A. C. Wedemeyer denounced the Kennedy Administration for "appeasing" Soviet Russia, lashed out at "pro-Communist" influences in the State Department, attacked the Episcopalian clergy for supporting the Freedom Rides, and vilified liberalism as un-American...

...It was also wise and statesmanlike because you realized the importance of economic advance in India in a democratic system...

...He is aware that any honorable settlements he may negotiate will subject him to know-nothing cries of 'appeasement.' He is genuinely disturbed by the frustrated fury of many of his countrymen who believe our national manhood can be affirmed only by some act of bloody bluster...

...Civil Defense survey has revealed that the material in structures that make up our cities ranges from more than ninetynine per cent combustible in San Francisco, to a low of 96.4 per cent in Washington, D.C...

...it is twice the size of greater New York City...

...Death Delayed There is still a chance that one might survive in a fallout shelter, especially if it were far enough removed from the site of the blast...

...Peace and freedom can prevail, he asserted, "if we can do our duty undeterred by fanatics or frenzy at home or abroad...

...Kennedy reaffirmed the nation's determination not to abandon its "vital interests and deep commitments," but he went on to emphasize that "we are committed to no rigid formula...

...But what happens after the fallout has dissipated its lethal dosages, and a family emerges into an uninhabitable and contaminated desert, devoid of civil order, heat, light, food, and water...

...Great credit for the revision of the Defense Department's directive belongs to Senator William Fulbright, Arkansas Democrat and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee...

...The President's Problem The sentence in the Chief Executive's address that struck us as especially revealing and significant in illuminating the domestic problem that confronts him in the conduct of foreign affairs was this one: "Men no longer pretend that the quest for disarmament is a sign of weakness— for in a spiraling arms race, a nation's security may well be shrinking even as its arms increase...

...Our basic quarrel with General Walker, and the others like him, is not his choice of material designed to indoctrinate his troops, wrong though we think that choice is...

...James E. McDonald of the University of Arizona's Institute of Atmospheric Physics has prepared a layman's analysis of the Atomic Energy Commission's highly technical report, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, which pictures in vivid detail the results of the explosion at ground level of a twenty-megaton weapon, the size presumed in the AEC report...

...James A. Wechsler, the brilliant editor of the New York Post, recently returned from a visit with the President to emphasize this point...

...The ACA Index to which Walker referred his forces rated John F. Kennedy, then a Senator, as having been right only eleven per cent of the time on Senate roll calls...

...The Committee recommended that the United States provide, if and when requested, assistance in population planning to countries where we are providing economic aid...

...There is still no place to hide...

...A. Broido, a fire specialist with the U.S...

...Unless population growth can be restrained, we may have to abandon for this generation our hopes of economic progress in the crowded lands of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East...

...Most homes more than eight but within seventeen miles of the blast would be rendered uninhabitable...

...When he was relieved of his command, the politicians and press of the radical Right denounced the Administration for "gagging a great patriot" whose "only crime" was that he was a "zealous anti-Communist...

...When Nikita Khrushchev boasted recently of plans to develop a 100megaton bomb, the boast was widely discredited as propaganada...

...The exhortation to act ends there...

...He seemed to be speaking to the Pentagon no less than to the Kremlin when he warned that "the risks inherent in disarmament pale in comparison to the risks inherent in an unlimited arms race...

...It recaptured some of the greatness and rekindled some of the fire of his Inaugural Address...

...The effects of nuclear war on man and his environment are awesome to contemplate," he reported...

...Life, for example, modified its own cover claim in the smaller print of the text by revealing that the ninetyseven "saved" figure was based on optimum conditions—the attack would come at night, everyone would be at home, there would be sufficient warning, and the prepared shelter would provide entirely adequate protection...

...Even an area of ten-mile radius is larger than any American city except Los Angeles...

...Louis, Missouri, are each sixty-one square miles in area...

...Lest anyone think American cities are not so vulnerable to fire as were the Japanese cities, a U.S...

...As a result of triumphs of modern medicine and sanitation in reducing infant mortality, prolonging life, and wiping out diseases like malaria, the human family, the United Nations reported recently, is increasing at the staggering rate of 500 million persons in this decade—or more than the total number of people now living in Soviet Russia, the United States, Great Britain, and France combined...

...But physicist Ralph Lapp had pointed out two years earlier that if the enemy were aiming for the underground "hardened" ICBM sites— many of which are on the outskirts of cities—present missile accuracies would dictate the use of enemy weapons of well over twenty megatons in order to insure the destruction of the missile bases, and that "100-megatons is not too much from an aggressor's standpoint...

...We see no perfect solution...

...McDonald noted...

...This is more than half again the area of Los Angeles, the largest city in area in the United States...

...A member of the John Birch Society, Walker sought to influence his troops and their families to vote for candidates on the far Right...

...Lyndon Johnson scored ten per cent, Senator Hubert Humphrey managed only one per cent, as did Senator Henry M. Jackson...

...If our population continues to increase at the present rate," he said, "it will ultimately lead to a standard of living which will be little better than that of animals...

...To tolerate such conduct on the part of a commanding officer is to abandon the democratic American concept of the supremacy of the civil establishment over the military...

...He could do much, for example, to combat the treacherously unreliable oversimplifications of most of the press if he talked to the nation in a series of fireside chats...

...It is also impossible, he said, "to believe we shall soon meet total victory or total defeat...

...His need to protest that the pursuit of disarmament is not "a sign of weakness" shows how sensitive he is to the strident clamor in some quarters at home against any policy that does not embody total intransigence toward the Soviets...

...Hope in a Shelter One of the more significant phenomena of the day is the sudden and soaring public interest in family fallout shelters, amid a commotion of contradictory reports and recommendations that has led to guilt, confusion, and uncertainty among genuinely concerned citizens...

...The ACA Index is published by Americans for Constitutional Action, an organization so far to the Right that it equates social security with Communism...

...This scientist's words cannot be dismissed lightly...

...And he stood largely alone...

...Kennedy was on sound ground when he said, in his recent speech at Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that it is impossible to encompass worldwide policies in these complicated times "in one slogan, or one adjective, hard or soft or otherwise...

...All scientists agree that it is possible to build a shelter that can offer protection of as much as ninetynine per cent against local, shortterm fallout...

...Population and Aid Recent passage of a new and more ambitious foreign aid program has been accompanied by a deepening concern that the force of much of our aid may be diluted if not nullified unless constructive steps are taken soon to cope with the soaring curve of population growth in the povertystricken, underdeveloped areas of the world...

...Mankind must put an end to war," the President said, "or war will put an end to mankind...

...McNamara's action was a direct consequence of recent revelations that military personnel and organizations were becoming increasingly involved in the politics of the radical Right, so much so that, in the name of "fighting Communism," they were equating democratic social reform with Marxism and negotiation with appeasement...

...But this is what the man said: " . . . presumably one of the reasons why the Administration did not lift a finger against East Germany when the wall was erected may have been the dread that any action on our part against that wretched government might have risked succeeding...

...But there are factors which have been soft-pedaled in the current enthusiasm for home shelters that cast grave doubts on the optimism of those backing the program...

...The answer, he seemed to say, was more patriots like General Walker...

...It is the latter mood that has been in the ascendancy during the fortnight before this issue of The Progressive went to press...

...All frame and brick houses within a radius of eight miles would be totally destroyed by the shock wave and tornado-like winds generated by the blast, Dr...

...There have been moments when we were convinced that he had chained himself to the most sterile and selfdefeating of the Eisenhower-Dulles policies, but there have been moments, too, when we were confident that he was breaking with the worst of the past and embarking on a more hopeful and creative course...

...With an environment so completely modified, the question is, where does man go after his sojourn in shelters...

...It is imperative, it seems to us, for the President to exercise more sustained and effective leadership in carrying the issues to the people...

...the circular area of instantaneous ignition would be almost 4,000 square miles...

...One of the most shocking examples was on display recently in San Antonio, Texas, where the Fourth Army joined forces with the Junior Chamber of Commerce in promoting a two-day-seminar entitled "Let's Look at America...

...In the more densely populated cities, "fire storms" of the kind that consumed Tokyo and Hamburg and Dresden and Leipzig in World War II would be almost inevitable, asphyxiating and then cremating anyone in a bomb shelter below...

...But we believe a peaceful agreement is possible which protects the freedom of West Berlin and Allied presence and access, while recognizing the historic and legitimate interests of others in assuring European security...

...We admit to suffering a slight relapse when the Administration came forward with its specific proposals to implement the President's eloquent plea for general disarmament, but the glow of the overall message persisted...

...From his vantage post as president of the World Bank, where he must deal first-hand with the urgent problems of the impoverished nations, Eugene R. Black recently reported to the United Nations Economic and Social Council: "Population growth threatens to nullify all our efforts to raise Jiving standards in the poorer countries...

...For this reason some people prefer to place their shelter outside, as far from the house as possible...

...But the effect of this aid is, to a large extent, being nullified by the increase in population...

...What does he do upon emergence...

...India was trying to demonstrate to the world that a poor, underdeveloped country can become prosperous without sacrificing freedom or democratic institutions...

...Regarding the crisis over Berlin, Mr...

...It is one of the saddest commentaries on our times that when Senator Fulbright was being pilloried in the Senate by such radical Rightists as Senators Thurmond, Barry Goldwater, and Styles Bridges, the liberal bloc in the Senate sat silent...

...Kennedy's address to the United Nations Assembly was a magnificent presentation...

...The mood that demands some act of bloody bluster is often expressed in such publications as Time and the Chicago Tribune...

...A series of speeches developing these concepts could do much to educate the country to an understanding of the magnitude of the problems he faces and the character of the course he must pursue to meet them...

...These questions go to the heart of the problem...

...Kennedy, he reported, "has no simpleminded view that the deep discords of our time can be deftly and finally resolved by diplomatic gamesmanship...

...Failure to take this modest step places the entire foreign economic aid program, and the hopes we have bound up in it, in grave jeopardy...

...More recently it turned up in a highly agitated if somewhat incomprehensible editorial in The Reporter...

...President Ayub Khan of Pakistan was even more emphatic on his recent visit to the United States...

...Life's Claim It is important to understand that the fallout shelter program now mushrooming is designed for protection against local fallout resulting from a nuclear explosion at or near ground level, as distinct from the world-wide fallout which has been the target of the international campaign against nuclear testing in the past decade...

...Chester Bowles, incidentally, then a Congressman, rated zero on the scorecard Walker was urging his men to read and be guided by...

...Life magazine raised Teller's ante and irresponsibly headlined on a recent cover, "Ninety-seven out of one hundred people can be saved . . ." At the same time, however, a respected scientist on the staff of the Atomic Energy Commission described fallout shelters as only a means of delaying death, but the press paid little attention...

...Ascoli's interpretation is that the President was afraid—not afraid of the Russians, or the possibility of provoking war, mind you, but afraid that a policy of action would succeed...

...But patience and persistence, no matter how great the provocations from the Soviets or how loud the clamor at home to "do something," hold out the greatest hope to achieve a settlement that would preserve our national honor and world peace...

...Any persons caught in the open at that distance or even for some miles beyond would receive third-degree burns...

...Within minutes following an explosion it begins raining down, in the form of a fine or invisible dust or ash, on the area surrounding and downwind from the explosion, an area which might vary, with bombs of the same size, from two thousand to thirty thousand or more square miles, depending on wind direction and velocity...

...John M. Wolfe, chief of the environmental sciences branch and director of biology and medicine for the Atomic Energy Commission, has made a careful study of that problem...

...there is nothing in the editorial to suggest what we might have done or could do now to demolish that wall in Soviet-controlled East Berlin short of triggering all-out war...

...This, it seems to us, is a sound and affirmative approach to a difficult and delicate problem...

...The consequences, in terms of the effect of American foreign aid, were frankly stated recently by Ambassador Chagla of India when he said: "We have received from the United States foreign aid to the extent of three billion dollars since our independence...

...Ninety per cent of trees and utility poles out to thirteen miles would be knocked flat...

...Now that the shelter program has finally found some degree of public acceptance, it is being pressed eagerly by those who see a golden opportunity to make people feel the Hbomb isn't so bad after all...

...Regarding the new nations of Africa, the General said it was "unfortunate" they were admitted to the United Nations since "they can contribute nothing to it...

...Thus, we are told that "if we act quickly and firmly when the Communists do something like the walling of Berlin, then they will not just stop...

...Forest Service who made a recent study of the fire effects of nuclear weapons for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, determined that a bomb of only ten megatons in size exploded in the air could ignite fires out to thirty-five miles...

...The public was invited...

...Sense in the Pentagon Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara, who has been steadily forging to the front as one of the ablest members of President Kennedy's Cabinet, earned the applause of all thoughtful Americans, whatever their political or ideological indentification, when he ruled recently that the military establishment must stay out of non-military affairs...

...The upsurge in interest in a home shelter program followed closely the greatly heightened tensions created by the Berlin crisis, the calling to duty of National Guard units and reservists, the Soviets' resumption of atmospheric nuclear testing, plus a new sense of urgency resulting from the moving of most civil defense functions to the Defense Department, and President Kennedy's vigorous endorsement of the shelter program...

...In a symposium at Colorado State University on the way living creatures, including man, get along in their environment, Dr...

...It was he who courageously called the government's and the nation's attention to the outrageously partisan character of programs allegedly designed to alert the armed forces and the country to "the menace of Communism...

...Walker, according to the 973-page transcript of the Army hearings, advised the men under his command and their families to consult the "ACA Index" before voting in Congressional elections last fall...

...It rang with affirmative challenge— the challenge to complete and universal disarmament, to build a stronger and more effective United Nations, to settle conflicts through honorable negotiation, and to assist the underdeveloped areas of the world through cooperative action...

...Edward Teller, the "father of the H-bomb," cheerfully claimed in a nationally syndicated series of articles that fallout shelters would save ninety out of a hundred victims of a nuclear attack...

...Sound Ground The Kennedy Administration's current quest for a negotiated settlement of the issues of Berlin and Germany will doubtless prove to be a long and painful process...

...A shelter will effectively shield a person from flash burns, but there is no way to shield buildings and trees...

...R. B. Thieme, a colonel in the Air Force Reserve and pastor of the non-denominational Berachah Church in Houston, told the audience that the Communist strategy was to employ psychology, mysticism, and liberal cults to discredit the Bible and religion, destroy marriage and the family, promote ugly, futuristic art and music, create unrest among workers, and undermine all patriotism...

...It was a generous gesture on the part of this country...

...This was partly the fault of civil defense officials themselves, who earned little more than apathy or contempt with their confused programs which vacillated back and forth between an obviously impractical mass exodus from cities to hiding in cellars...

...The Seminars The conduct of characters like General Walker has not been the only means by which the military establishment has sought to influence and dominate domestic politics and foreign policy...

...Facts recently revealed—but little publicized—tell a sharply different story...

...Unless we face them squarely, we are in danger of deluding ourselves into the cozy notion that in making a minimum response to a forbiddingly formidable problem we have found an acceptably safe answer to nuclear war...

...At one point, when a civil defense official was asked which to do, he replied, "Both...

...Army reservists in the area were given point credits for attending the sessions...

...And whether Right or Left, it is unlawful for a man in his position to engage in political activity...

...Probably no one of these factors would in itself have produced such a sharp change in public attitude, but taken together, in a brief span of time, they greatly intensified the growing concern of a troubled people...

...they will fall back...

...An air burst produces much less local fallout, but blast and fire effects are intensified and are therefore more likely to be used by the enemy if the purpose of the attack is to destroy military and industrial sites—property—rather than people...

...On a number of occasions since 1958 the armed forces have collaborated with private or quasi-public organizations in sponsoring seminars on "anti-communism" which, in practice, have turned out to be political rallies dedicated, again, to promoting the position of the radical Right...

...There is no need for such a bomb, said many experts and most pundits, because twenty megatons is enough to destroy a city...

...He has no right, under law or custom, to persuade his men to any political position in an election campaign...

...The military establishment has no business, under our system, to engage in political indoctrination, whether Right, Left, or Center, and Secretary McNamara's new directive, if scrupulously enforced, should do much to lift the Pentagon out of politics...

...Washington, D.C., and St...

...On the other hand, Senator Barry Goldwater scored ninety-eight per cent, and Senators Styles Bridges and Harry Byrd, ninety-two per cent...

...The social and economic impact of this unprecedented population explosion is felt most critically, of course, in the poorest nations on earth...

...National acceptance of a negotiated settlement, no matter how honorable, will be gravely jeopardized unless he talks sense to the people now—over the heads of a triggerhappy press and a political opposition bent on branding him an "appeaser" who is "soft on Communism...

...Further on in the article, in recommending a particular basement shelter, Life issues "One word of warning: if a nuclear warhead should hit within ten to fifteen miles of you, the house might catch on fire or be blown down around you...

...McDonald noted, "that about a third of the World War II Japanese Abomb fatalities resulted from such flash burns from air bursts emitting only a thousandth of the radiation of the twenty-megaton weapon considered here...

...The idea seems to be to "do something"—anything— whatever the consequences...

...We don't know if we succeeded in penetrating Editor Max Ascoli's obscure prose, but we came away from a reading of the editorial with the conclusion that he views the Kennedy Administration's foreign policy as pretty spineless stuff because it exhausts itself in "verbal formulation" instead of "action...

...You may think we are exaggerating, or perhaps baffled by the subtleties of Ascoli's syntax...

...The sudden interest in shelters is striking because for ten years the public's response to civil defense has been almost wholly nil or negative...

...Hell on Earth The intensity of the heat from the fireball, emitted at the speed of light, is such that within twenty seconds inflammable materials would be ignited as far out as seventeen miles...

...It is relevant to recall," Dr...

...In India, for example, the rate of population growth in this decade is sixty-one per cent faster than it was in the preceding decade...

...Why didn't the Kennedy Administration "act" when the wall went up between East and West Berlin...