THE DEVIOUS ARITHMETIC OF CIVIL DEFENSE
Part III The Devious Arithmetic of Civil Defense When the current shelter program was launched almost a year ago, it was immediately confronted with major hurdles in public relations. The American...
...Mi Donald, "that throughout all of Tucson and Phoenix proper, persons who happen to be outdoors and who do not take evasive action within seconds of detonation will suffer very severe flashburns on face, hands, and other exposed or thinly protected areas...
...But adhering to Dr...
...Human eardrums would be ruptured over an area of 300 square miles, and lungs would be damaged within an area of 100 square miles...
...An exposed person (on a clear day) would suffer severe burns seventeen miles from ground zero, and first degree burns twenty-seven miles away...
...Assume that the transport system is intact, ready and waiting...
...The problem was compounded by the fact that for a long time government spokesmen had taken just the opposite approach...
...Or the prisoners in jails—220,000 in state and Federal prisons alone...
...McDonald deals in this instance only with the local or early fallout that would descend in the vicinity of the explosion a few minutes to ten hours after the attack...
...The result is far more harrowing than that normally presented to the public by the advocates of fallout shelters who deal with only one hazard at a time...
...President Kennedy told the United Nations in September, 1961, that "mankind must end war or war will put an end to mankind...
...He sets up the usual optimistic chart and comes out with the usual optimistic conclusions...
...its very objectivity is terrifying...
...Utility poles would snap at distances out to ten to thirteen miles, and they, with uprooted and shattered trees, would block practically every street and road...
...One of the most immediate effects of a nuclear explosion is blinding...
...The forty roentgens absorbed by a shelter-dweller are not likely, therefore, to kill him or make him sick...
...McDonald, not by car or vehicle, but only on foot...
...Representative Holifield had asked the scientists to compute how many people would have died from a hypothetical attack on the United States of 1,446 megatons (equivalent to 1,446 million tons of TNT...
...Army magazine estimates Soviet capability at 10,000 megatons...
...The "two weeks" figure might apply to areas where the first-hour radiation dose is much less than 3,000 roentgens, but certainly not to everyone subjected to local fallout from nuclear attack...
...There are 1.6 million beds in America's hospitals, almost all occupied...
...In the two-and-a-half years since these hearings, Soviet nuclear capability has presumably grown considerably, as was evidenced by its recent test series...
...Combining a number of problems (fallout, destroyed homes, genetic effects) as they would be combined in an actual nuclear attack creates a much more distressing result than considering each factor in isolation...
...Nunnally's advice of making information concerning nuclear war "simple," the opinion-makers either fail to correlate one difficulty with another or fail to mention some difficulties entirely...
...The Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, in a handbook published in 1957, noted that building "an ideal shelter is . . . virtually impossible...
...This "world" fallout is also dangerous to health and life, but Dr...
...Their problem is to kill SAC...
...Eight miles away from ground zero, trucks and automobiles would be rolled along the ground or flung against other objects...
...There are so many variables and so many unknowns in the equation of nuclear war that one can arrive at almost any conclusion he seeks providing he can choose his own underlying assumptions...
...John M. Fowler, with a foreword by Adlai E. Stevenson), add several other hazards that supplement the graphic picture drawn by Dr...
...Four months later, on January 12, 1962, Life published another article on fallout shelters which presented the problem of nuclear war in more sober terms...
...Lethal doses of fallout radiation could be expected in an area of 2,000 to 20,000 square miles downwind...
...American bombers and missiles now stand poised to retaliate on Soviet cities, as well as on military targets...
...Even fourteen miles from the detonation point of a ten-megaton bomb, pieces of glass and masonry would be hurled like missiles...
...In following Dr...
...Would the man who emerged from his shelter sleep outdoors...
...Yet, having drawn this dismal picture, Winter cannot resist the lure of the numbers game...
...What would happen to them...
...Our Central Intelligence Agency quietly leaked stories to writers like Stewart Alsop that the Kremlin had a stockpile of 500 missiles, while ours totaled a mere seventy...
...Nunnally's prescription, the "gore" has been taken out of a very gory tale, and only occasionally does a scientist rise above the "you-can-survive" din to hint at the full dimensions of our problem...
...where he will get food or water when he comes out...
...The Rand Corporation has compiled a chart: "Possible Recovery of the Economy after 50-City, 1,500 Megaton Attack, Based on Two Economic Policies...
...Herman Kahn put it—to lead "normal and happy" lives afterwards...
...Most of the Catalina Mountains would become "a nearly solid bank of flaming vegetation...
...Each danger is considered by itself without allowing for the interplay of a variety of hazards...
...Obviously, this method of calculation will produce any desired answer...
...Might not the Soviets react by greatly increasing the power of their bombs and aiming them at cities...
...another 8.1 million would be so greatly damaged they would need major repairs...
...When Henry Luce's Life, for instance, claims that only five million people, three per cent of our population, would perish if we had shelters, its figures are reasonably accurate within the limited framework it has chosen...
...It is this study, with all its wealth of scientific detail and international ramifications, that has become a sort of "bible" for those now writing on the subject...
...Few weapons could be spared [by the Kremlin] for cities as such...
...Visualize the hysteria of men trying to move, either in traffic jams or by foot, to the sanctuary of a shelter...
...The Administration's new booklet, "Fallout Protection," notes that "enemy missiles could arrive unannounced...
...Anyone interested in protecting more than a minute fraction of the American people ought to devote himself to obtaining—while there still is time—an enforceable peace...
...In the hypothetical Holifield attack, 11.8 million dwellings—or more than one-fourth of all those in the United States—would be destroyed...
...Who can estimate how many people would die from illness due to increased susceptibility to disease...
...Ralph E. Lapp, "are two-fold...
...The fireball "blasts into itself some million tons of debris . . . [and] instantly vaporizes it...
...It needs the active support of individual citizens...
...The winds might extinguish the flames in some cases, but in others they would add to the fire...
...Or because their ventilating system failed to function...
...After a few weeks they would be dead...
...Even with its muted tone, Life's new ap proach—this time advocating community shelters—was still an exaggeration of the possibilities of survival...
...Lapp, "these [small fires] would fuse into large fires and ultimately might produce a 'firestorm.' " One group of experts told the Holifield investigators in 1959: "It is no exaggeration to say that, after a nuclear attack, burn casualties [would] represent the most serious medical problem facing the nation...
...Twenty thousand people in Tucson and 30,000 in Phoenix would be affected by third degree burns—charring of the skin...
...This, admittedly, is a longer period than most scientists now claim, yet it indicates how far from the mark the assured two-week figure may be...
...The shelters are cramped and monotonous...
...Against some nuclear weapons (for example, those fired from submarines), there may be no warning at all...
...hence its figure of three per cent dead...
...Winter's secret of losing one-half of our industry without creating "severe bottlenecks" is worth learning...
...All of it is scientifically based on the Holifield reports—only the assumption of enemy power is reduced...
...Hoegh now manufactures shelters, and such optimism may be good for business, but it is hardly realistic...
...What does he do upon emergence...
...The Holifield Committee did not dare suggest that the Soviets are capable of only such a small offensive...
...Thermal and blast effects, and concomitant radiation would create vast areas that would be useless to the survival of man...
...A state of shock that prevents intelligent action within fifteen or twenty minutes of detonation will insure radiological death for tens of thousands of residents not blast-killed...
...1 Failing to allow for aspects of nuclear warfare of which we know little or nothing...
...Since Tucson is an important hardened missile base, he believes this type of attack is not unlikely...
...In June, 1959, the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy of the U. S. Congress conducted hearings on the "biological and environmental effects of nuclear war...
...Russia's ability to deliver its bomb by conventional aircraft has also been downgraded...
...The shock wave would move outward at four or five times the speed of sound, creating a sudden and intense pressure on all objects in its path...
...Then, there is the threat of fire, which grows rapidly with the increase in the power of the bomb...
...Fallout shelters in many areas seem only a means of delaying death and represent only a part of a survival plan...
...Whether or not Dr...
...Some of the delayed effects, such as cancer, will appear many years after irradiation...
...McDonald...
...omissions and disagreements are slurred over, so that a relatively optimistic picture of nuclear war can be drawn for the public...
...Certainly, in a few years when delivery of bombs will be primarily by missile rather than airplane, the period of warning would be continuously reduced...
...McDonald points out that basement shelters are impractical in Arizona if for no other reason than that few dwellings there have basements...
...McDonald assumed that two twenty-megaton bombs were exploded at the surface, one in Tucson, another in Phoenix...
...f Considering each hazard separately, as an isolated phenomenon...
...That concept died with Hiroshima...
...McDonald, eight miles away from ground zero, and those seventeen miles out would be "badly damaged...
...But if one puts only two of the hazards of nuclear attack together—the danger from fallout and from destroyed or contaminated dwellings —the total hazard looms not twice but many times larger...
...To overcome this paralysis he proposed that the Administration "supply fewer of the gory details . . . Communicate simple, easily understood information...
...Unless "the Russians just got mad" they would aim for places like Omaha, Nebraska, and Tucson, Arizona— which house the Strategic Air Command (SAC) and hardened missile sites—rather than Washington, D. C. Dr...
...If after two weeks a person were to leave his shelter and spend several hours a day outdoors in such activities as rescue work and decontaminating food, he would receive another twenty-four to thirty roentgens of radiation a day...
...The American people had to build emergency retreats, insisted civil defense proponents, to prove to the Russians we were "hardening" ourselves to the prospect of death...
...The 'Only One Solution' "There is only one solution: peace...
...Nowhere is this approach more transparent than in graphs which purport to chart the recovery of the nation following a nuclear war...
...Who can estimate how many people would die because they were blinded, permanently or temporarily, and had no way of finding their shelters...
...When I spoke with Colonel Mawrence, he estimated American nuclear capacity at 35,000 megatons and that of the Soviets at only five per cent that amount—1,750 megatons...
...One way this is being done is to discuss one problem at a time, without relating it to other problems...
...Interrelation is seldom taken into account...
...and 12.5 million would be so contaminated by fallout they would be dangerous for as much as several months...
...Herman Kahn echoes this thesis: "If the Russians consider attacking the United States, by and large they will not worry about their ability to kill all of the Americans...
...No expert has yet synthesized all the hazards of nuclear war...
...Just assume that there are "no bottlenecks...
...But the same graphs from which Life did its arithmetic (Holifield hearings, 1961, pages 213 and 216) also show that the same attack of 300 megatons, directed against cities, would leave twenty-five to thirty per cent of our population dead...
...Though most of the scientists called were from the Rand Corporation—the Air Force's "think" factory—and other military-minded groups, the testimony seemed expert and objective...
...Citizens would refuse a shelter program if at the end of the line they could see nothing better than the very totalitarianism they are trying to destroy...
...The transformation has been attempted by employing a brand of devious arithmetic appropriate to an embezzler but a disgrace to the writers and men of science using it with impressive success...
...There are 665,000 mental patients in hospitals and institutions, and 180,000 mental defectives and epileptics...
...The fireball would expand to a diameter of two miles in ten seconds, and the mushroom cloud would reach altitudes as high as seventeen miles or more...
...Only four years ago Civil Defense Director Val Peterson told Congress: "We believe in shelters but we don't want to mislead people...
...If the shelter were not airtight and if there were not enough oxygen in cylinders to last a half or full day, the occupants might suffocate...
...The shock, in the dim light of kerosene lamps or battery flashlights, as persons who have received radiation vomit, and those with burned hands have difficulty turning the hand ventilator...
...What about our many older citizens in homes for the aged...
...A second after detonation the "effective emission temperature [of the fireball] would be near 8,000 degrees centigrade...
...McDonald considers is fallout...
...Those who absorbed 400 to 500 roentgens would have only one chance in two of surviving, and almost all those exposed to 550 to 750 roentgens would die...
...We are building a stockpile of weapons to deter the Soviets from attacking us...
...After moving upward, some of the particles, now radiated, begin to cool and solidify, and fall back to earth...
...The authors assume there will be twenty-seven million casualties (as against the seventy million in the Holifield hypothesis...
...Suppose we concede that the Russians are rational and aim only at our bases...
...The confusion as men search for their wives and wives for their children...
...If we had to contend with only fallout, we could build shelters that would make us impregnable...
...Sidney G. Winter, Jr., a Rand Corporation economist, testified before the Holifield Committee in 1961 on "how long it might take to restore gross national product to its prewar level after a thermonuclear attack...
...Most experts feel we would have less than a half hour...
...But no responsible citizen was likely to invest time and money in a shelter if the prospect of death were near-certain...
...Overhead the house might be burning, consuming the available oxygen...
...McDonald, would cover the ground for thousands of square miles downwind from the target...
...General Douglas MacArthur has warned, "War has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides...
...Or, consider this possibility: We are now "hardening" our bases, burying them beneath the surface in heavy concrete and making them impregnable except to large bombs...
...It is to protect against local fallout, not the longer-range world fallout, that shelters are being advocated...
...Time judged that we could reduce—with shelters—the number of casualties from 160 million to eighty-five million "given between thirty minutes' and an hour's warning...
...But the making of a genuine peace is too important lo be left to governments alone...
...Linus Pauling, Nobel-prize winner, puts the figure at three or four times that amount...
...The Soviets, it was assumed, would use 263 weapons, none larger than ten megatons, and direct them at 224 targets, of which only seventy-one were cities and industrial areas...
...By making known to their governments the growing strength of their commitment to peace, they can create a mandate so powerful it will not long be denied...
...By comparison, the surface of the sun is 13,000 degrees, but it is ninety-three million miles away...
...Even the optimistic Dr...
...Running water "would almost certainly be unavailable for use in fighting such fires...
...When it "slows down," it would still be moving at 750 miles per hour...
...Starvation, disease, and exposure would take a heavy toll of lives before such an equilibrium could be reached—and when achieved, the United States would have a primitive economy...
...The shelter-dweller's problems have only begun...
...If you correlate all the hazards, you get a qualitatively different picture of the horrors of nuclear war...
...But if a war does start, then the Pentagon and its supporters expect the enemy not to "get mad"— to be rational enough to aim for military bases rather than cities...
...But since most experts' estimates of Soviet capability range upwards from 10,000 megatons, Mawrence's assumption seems far removed from probable reality...
...Human beings, too, would be thrown about violently...
...Let us assume, he says—tongue in cheek—that all 180 million Americans will survive...
...Life assumes a small attack of 300 megatons, primarily on military targets rather than on cities...
...The sleight-of-hand was accomplished by: % Downgrading Soviet nuclear and missile capability...
...People could move about, says Dr...
...But if it is "investment-oriented" and its people are "disciplined," the nation can be as bountiful as now in about twelve years...
...Most of them study only a single major problem, such as radiation, and report on it in a vacuum...
...eighty million—a half-century...
...160 million—a full century...
...It may be that some scientists are too close to their particular trees to see the forest...
...Children would have to stay in a shelter much longer—at least a month, perhaps several months...
...only later would they experience a skin sensation, then they would suffer from nausea, vomiting, and hemorrhaging...
...At the end of seven hours it would be down to 300 roentgens per hour...
...There are, first, all the obstacles of getting to the shelter, particularly if a warning came during a time when families were scattered—at home, at work, at school...
...Life merely chose the small "300" size to underplay the effects of nuclear war...
...Yet in the numbers game played on the American public these last several months, a little devious arithmetic has achieved remarkable success...
...how he will decontaminate his dwelling, if it still exists...
...James E. McDonald, of the Institute of Atmospheric Physics at the University of Arizona, recently published in the Journal of the Arizona Academy of Science an evaluation of what would happen in his state in case of an attack...
...In the next twenty seconds there would be flash-burning of skin and ignition of inflammable objects...
...McDonald has by no means exhausted the subject, but he does relate a number of factors to one another...
...Herman Kahn presents a neat formula: If two million U. S. citizens are killed in the war, the nation will be back on its feet in a year...
...Armed with elaborate graphs anil charts, Winter "proves" that we can return to present levels of production "in just over a decade...
...Ralph E. Lapp and others, in their contribution to the book Fallout (edited by physicist Dr...
...Only twenty-five per cent of all fatalities would have resulted from fallout...
...Winter begins by pointing out that "our knowledge is much less complete than it needs to be and could be . . . There are too many unexamined mechanisms and interactions which might produce considerably greater problems of recovery than the work done so far suggests...
...If all we had to worry about was fire, we could build airtight shelters of concrete, stocked with tanks of oxygen...
...Though it correlates only the major hazards, it is a sobering document...
...The blast, though it might not destroy a well-constructed shelter, could crack the concrete or steel shell...
...Wood frame and brick dwellings would be destroyed, says Dr...
...The evidence mounts daily that nuclear war can win nothing for anyone—we are all the losers...
...It may not be the individual problem by itself that is so dangerous...
...So ioes Dr...
...In the light of Soviet space achievements, does anyone have the right to speak with such assurance ol such a minimal Soviet nuclear capacity...
...There were no facts in Life's January article which were not known when the magazine made its cheery prediction in September that ninety-seven per cent of the nation could be saved with family fallout shelters...
...In less than a half minute ninety per cent of Tucson would be homeless...
...But this is only the beginning— the first hour...
...Such underestimates may erase the dangers on Kahn's or Yar-molinsky's drawing boards, but not in the real-life struggle for survival...
...In a war situation, intelligent strategists usually prepare for the worst, but in the present civil defense climate, civil defense proponents are talking only of minimal dangers...
...Such reasoning would flunk a college freshman, but it pours out of tbe Pentagon in torrents...
...Even on the synthetic assumptions of Yarmolinsky and Kahn, however, cities are not immune...
...If a ten-megaton bomb were exploded three miles in the air, according to geochemist Dr...
...Even more, he has some fears that we may "go into a spiral of cumulative disorganization . . . When people are unable to meet their minimum needs by the usual and socially desirable means of participating in the production process, they are likely to turn to unusual and socially undesirable means, such as foraging, plunder, and sterile trading in household goods...
...The clear purpose is to reassure city-dwellers that Russia does not have enough weapons to "waste" on them...
...Add shock to the high probability that families will not be able to assemble for flight, and the overall psychological obstacles become as great as the purely physical obstacles...
...Or because they could not get medical attention...
...John N. Wolfe, chief of the Environmental Sciences Branch of AEC, said last year: "The effects of nuclear war on man and his environment are awesome to contemplate...
...President Eisenhower, after an H-Bomb test, proclaimed: "There is now no alternative to peace...
...At the end of five days he might be a very sick man, and at the end of ten days his chances of dying would be one in five...
...The reasons for this," explains Dr...
...Nonetheless, for the purposes of his calculations he did assume that our transportation system would be intact...
...There is no such thing as a nation being prepared for nuclear war...
...If by chance, however, they are not rational, they might launch a war anyway, and that is why we need shelters...
...The nation was brooding then over a "missile gap" which would continue to widen in the Soviets' favor until 1963...
...Thus "a reasonably planned enemy attack, now or in the next few years, would concentrate on military targets...
...Plaster would crack and windows break as far out as 100 miles...
...Thus the "expert" view emerges less "gory," but also less real...
...Taking fallout radiation by itself, we know that the danger declines appreciably in two weeks...
...Thus, Colonel Mel Mawrence, co-author of You Can Survive, concludes that "with planning—and preparation— the odds for survival could range from fifty-to-one to 200-to-one in any feasible type of attack...
...In summer the heat of the Arizona desert would make such an attempt futile...
...Teller estimates that if ninety per cent of our population outlives an attack "we will have lost all, or almost all of our industry...
...Maurice B. Visscher, head of the University of Minnesota's Department of Physiology for the past twenty-five years, said recently, "To survive fallout one must also be able to live at least a year in the shelter if there has been a real nuclear war...
...No longer does it possess the chance of the winner of the duel—it contains, rather, the germs of double suicide...
...Water or gas might seep in from broken mains...
...Now translate this interplay of hazards into human terms...
...Ralph E. Lapp, former assistant director of Argonne Laboratories...
...It is when still one more problem keeps piling up on the others, and when scores of auxiliary and unexpected difficulties arise, that a point is reached at which survival as a nation can finally become impossible...
...This conclusion is obviously no source of optimism for those promoting fallout shelters...
...What has emerged, therefore, is devious arithmetic that fails to consider the human pain and agony of nuclear war...
...The panic when the bombs explode with blinding light, searing heat, and deafening roar...
...It has created, he said, a "paralysis of anxiety...
...To change this dread of war, based on a scientific assessment of its probable effects, into confidence of survival was no easy task...
...The totality of radioactivity in local fallout declines rapidly...
...The answer is bound to look good...
...In any case, the publicized safe emergence from a shelter after a brief stay is highly misleading: It is assumed that you will have a home to return to, that you will not have to stay outdoors for many hours each day, that the problem of decontamination has been solved, that you will be able to get medical care if you are sick, that edible food and potable water will be available, and that innumerable other factors all operate in the direction of safety and survival...
...Now, combine the radiation problem with damage to dwellings...
...Life's cover comment, however—"New Facts You Must Know About Fallout"—was another shoddy attempt at deception...
...The Atomic Energy Commission and Office of Civil Defense say: "A maximum of two weeks is the current estimate...
...How can anyone be certain that if one-half the clothing industry remains intact there will be a matching portion of the textile industry to supply it with cloth...
...Would their nurses and doctors stay on to tend to them, or run for shelter with their own families, leaving the sick helpless...
...It is only a matter of what assumptions are made, and what factors are ignored...
...Whatever the reason, the conclusions many of them tend to draw lack realism for they fail to take this interplay into account...
...He won't have a chance to make more than one attack because of our capabilities...
...In the handbook, "The Effects of Nuclear War," published by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1957, it was estimated that a dose of 130 to 170 roentgens inflicted on a general population would result in no deaths, but a quarter of those exposed would suffer such ailments as nausea, vomiting, loss of hair, bloody diarrhea/ bleeding from the gums, anemia, and gangrene...
...From a grim picture of fifty million dead and twenty million injured, the emphasis was shifted to "You Can Survive"—which even became the title of a book...
...It might be possible that man could find answers to all of the problems if he attacks them one at a time...
...Consider this example—the estimate of how long we would have to remain in shelters should war break out...
...Hundreds of minor factors continue to be disregarded...
...John Lofton, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, analyzed the effort accurately: "Nuclear war, once almost universally presented as an unspeakable and unthinkable horror, is being gradually transformed by the folklore of power politics into a bearable, although unpleasant, experience . . . people are being psychologically conditioned to believe that nuclear war would not be as catastrophic as it has heretofore been pictured...
...However, in 1957 the Defense Department and the AEC stated that "it is impossible to indicate in advance at what value of external dose rate it may be permissible to leave the shelter...
...Assume that the whole population survives...
...If they are rational—we are told—they will respect this display of power and will not embark on nuclear war...
...With an environment so completely modified, the question is, where does man go after his sojourn in shelters...
...His only recourse would be to return to his shelter for extended periods...
...Or because a gas main caught fire...
...Again and again in speaking with civil defense officals, Pentagon theorists, and shelter builders, I found the same proclivity to downgrade Soviet potential...
...More flagrant than the under-evaluation of Soviet capability is the isolation of one hazard from another...
...Furthermore, as Dr...
...Minimizing the horrors and exaggerating the hopes of surviving nuclear war are concomitants of the shelter program and an accelerated civil defense program...
...The fission products produced by the bomb explosion in this hypothetical attack would reach multi-million-degree temperatures a fraction of a second after detonation, creating incandescent gases and a shock wave...
...Under certain conditions," reports Dr...
...The last effect Dr...
...If the public is thus built up gradually for calamities it can be controlled...
...After Winter's testimony was concluded, Representative F. Bradford Morse, Massachusetts Republican, asked him a simple question: "Did you assume in your calculations no disturbance to the national transportation system...
...And when Time, also published by Henry Luce, claims that "an adequate national system of fallout shelters might well cut the death rate from 160 million to eighty-five million," its arithmetic, while less optimistic than its sister publication's estimates, is also acceptable within its chosen framework...
...If our "second strike"—launched from bases which escape destruction in the Soviets' "first strike"-—hits Moscow or Leningrad, will the Russians remain calm enough to continue lobbing at our SAC headquarters and remaining weapon sites, or would they "get mad" and explode bombs over New York and Chicago...
...He can pass the time thinking of how he will fight off epidemics such, as typhoid fever or amoebic dysentery...
...Underneath, a crater 300 feet deep and 3,500 feet in diameter would be dug into the earth...
...At the same time, more than half of the surviving injured would have radiation injuries...
...If we would heed these warnings, there would be no effective civil defense program...
...No amount of devious arithmetic can long hide that somber truth...
...In May, 1961, a group of psychologists and anthropologists held a symposium in Washington on "Behavioral Science and Civil Defense...
...Evacuation following an attack, to escape fallout, would be possible, but only by foot and only in winter and even then to a limited extent...
...Now the figures have been blandly reversed...
...The rest of the radioactive debris rides the winds for weeks before it falls back, or rises to the stratosphere where it travels across hemispheres to fall on other parts of the world months or years later...
...Just a year ago military writers' estimates of Soviet missile might ran ten times higher than their more recently published guesses...
...The Committee concluded that "under present conditions such an attack would have cost the lives of approximately fifty million Americans, with some twenty million others sustaining serious injuries . . . nearly seventy-five per cent of the deaths would have resulted from the blast and thermal effects, combined with immediate radiation effects...
...McDonald estimates that Tucson is fifteen minutes by intercontinental ballistic missile from the Anadyr Peninsula in Siberia...
...The tragedy as people everywhere beg for doctors—doctors who are themselves either dead, injured, or in their own shelters...
...Leaves of deciduous trees would be ignited twenty miles out from the explosion, and dry pine needles about fourteen miles out...
...Harrison Brown, it would burn everything combustible over an area of 5,000 square miles...
...at the end of forty-nine hours to only thirty roentgens...
...Eventually, some form of social organization would be reestablished, but that organization may be at the level of self-sufficient families, communities, or regions...
...Thus, while protesting to the Soviets our willingness to die, we had to convince our own citizens they had an excellent chance to live, and —as Dr...
...A dose of 270 to 330 roentgens would result in sickness for everyone and death for twenty per cent...
...How much warning time would there be...
...If his home has collapsed over him he must wait until the radiation danger decreases, and hope that he can get out or be dug out...
...After all, why "waste" bombs on hardened and invulnerable sites when the "yield" from bombing cities is so much more "productive...
...Winter's reply is classic: "It is quite true that one cannot necessarily say that the capacity of the railroad system is exactly half of what it used to be if half of all the railroad tracks are destroyed...
...Lapp cites an authority who claims that this factor alone might cause injuries over an area of 800 square miles, almost four times the size of Chicago...
...First, one wishes to protect those whose child-bearing years lie ahead in order to minimize the number of mutations introduced into the next generation...
...The book, we are told by the publishers, "points out that attack on most of our cities is doubtful if nuclear war should erupt in the early 1960's...
...To "harden the American will," such vital questions are left unanswered...
...Adam Yarmolinsky asserted last October that the Kremlin does not have enough deliverable weapons to aim for both military bases and cities...
...Somehow a magic figure of "two weeks" has been firmly planted in the public mind...
...It is blurred by what Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American, calls "fraud by computer...
...Consider another aspect of devious arithmetic...
...This type of injury might occur even in a shelter if there were not a proper valve or if the valve were not closed...
...Three-quarters of the population would be virtually homeless...
...Secondly, young people are more likely to suffer the long-range bodily effects of radiation...
...Or because they were held up in a traffic jam...
...The only shelter against a nuclear war is a workable peace...
...Ninety per cent of the trees would be torn from the earth within eight miles from the explosion, and even at eleven miles thirty per cent would be uprooted...
...Or that if one-half of the telephone wires are destroyed it will still be possible to make a telephone call...
...Former Covernor Robert Meyner of New Jersey Coronet, September, 1960 dangers of such a war and its aftermath are presented in the same tran-quilizing manner as Madison Avenue advertisements: only the lesser of the unfavorable points are stressed, while the more unfavorable ones are buried or camouflaged...
...It will, however, adversely affect his lifespan, his ability to reproduce, and his susceptibility to cancer and other diseases...
...Even forty miles away there would be "moderate damage...
...If recovery is "consumer-oriented," they say, it will take the United States much longer to return to present levels...
...The magazine failed even to mention that the graph indicates that a 3,000 megaton attack directed against population centers would leave 120 million dead—sixty-six per cent of the total population...
...Removing" cities as target possibilities...
...If twenty million are killed, it will take ten years...
...Nun-nally's advice to "supply fewer of the gory details," the press and the Pentagon spoon-feed known and available information so as to make the prospect of nuclear war more palatable to the public...
...At first the people who received even such death-dealing doses would feel nothing...
...Let us assume further that half of our industrial capacity is destroyed but "in such a way as to leave no severe bottlenecks...
...If you stay in that long, you are safe...
...The rationalizing of those who advocate a huge shelter program leads to some amazing logic...
...The Pentagon and its allies, however, did not shrink from attempting it...
...Newsweek, in reporting this speech, commented: "There is evidence that the new Administration and its new civil defense officials agree with Nunnally...
...There is no electric power, no running water, probably no heat...
...Nunnally was indeed the father of the present approach to civil defense, it is clear that the effects of nuclear war are now being put before the nation in "simple, easily understood" doses, with "gore" reduced to a bare minimum...
...The "national will" can be "hardened" only if the possibility for survival on a basis similar to that we now know is made to appear as a reasonable probability...
...Thus, if a man were in a better-than-average shelter, which reduced the dose 250 times, he would absorb only forty roentgens in two weeks...
...and after two weeks it is reduced to three roentgens per hour...
...Following Dr...
...Leo A. Hoegh, formerly civil defense chief under President Eisenhower, told me: "The enemy would be foolish to go for people...
...In the next few days there will be problems of "normal" illnessess, such as virus infections, because bodies that have received radiation are more susceptible to disease...
...General H. H. Arnold has declared that "one nation cannot defeat another nation today...
...Local fallout, says Dr...
...Three-quarters of the imaginary deaths had nothing to do with fallout radiation, and even if all those who theoretically did perish from it could be saved, the number of dead would still be thirty-eight million and the number of seriously injured nine or ten million...
...One must conclude," says Dr...
...If he did, the radiation dose would no longer be twenty-four to thirty roentgens but fifty to seventy-two roentgens a day—far too great for safety...
...What will be the subtle psychological effect," he asks, "on already stunned target area personnel by the almost instantaneous imposition of this huge dark cloud above them...
...The "missile gap" has disappeared, and the same CIA is leaking stories that the Soviets have only forty-eight to seventy missiles and that the United States may even be a little ahead in this field...
...Anyone looking at the fireball even for an instant would be either permanently blinded, temporarily blinded, or suffer serious retina damage...
...In the Holifield hypothetical attack, experts concluded that twenty per cent of the population would be ev posed to a dose of 3,000 roentgens— a roentgen is a measure of radiation —the first hour after fallout, and a total of 10,000 in the first two weeks...
...There is no easy answer to this thing except to have peace...
...If this is all that the Kremlin has in its stockpile, Colonel Mawrence's optimistic conclusion may be correct...
...Dr...
...the chart was prepared to show the hypothetical death "yield" from nuclear attacks of various megaton values...
...J. C. Nunnally, a psychologist from Van-derbilt University, blamed the government for the nation's apathy on civil defense...
...McDonald points out, "studies of what are, by comparison, small-scale disasters show that a kind of dazed paralysis often immobilizes uninjured persons for several hours after the disaster...
...This is more than four times the amount he might receive in an entire normal lifetime, but it is still a "safe" amount...
...Who can estimate how many people would die—not from blast, fire, or fallout—just because their hands were charred and they could not properly care for themselves in their shelter...
...The Holifield committee and Dr...
...Yet it is this kind of minimization that underlies the optimistic view...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
