THE NARROW LIMITS OF NUCLEAR KNOWLEDGE
Part IV The Narrow Limits of Nuclear Knowledge Tn an interview with a newspaper-man soon after the shelter program promotion began, Dr. Edward Teller evaluated the benefits of shielding citizens...
...The Committee, to be sure, records in its summary that "the combination of blast, fire, and radiation effects from megaton-yield weapons detonated in densely populated areas, would be catastrophic in nature...
...They know that their families are safe, and they can come out whenever they want to...
...Libby says a person could safely breathe air in shelters...
...That is the certainty...
...In succeeding days the Allies dropped tens of thousands of small fire bombs, as well as more blockbusters—8,000 tons in all...
...It is unobtainable, though there are other bargains that the t'nited States could probably secure...
...From an airburst," he explained, "you get a massive firestorm which might set all Chicago on fire...
...I hope no one ever has to live in a bomb shelter...
...However, in Portland, Seattle, and a number of other points, a combination of favorable circumstances (on paper, at leajst) kept estimates of fire damage to a fairly low level...
...Consider water...
...Our research," a Delense Department official told me, "is onlv in its infancy...
...And Christiansen insists that the Naval LaboraThe End of Human History The report on "Science and Human Survival" put before the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its Denver meeting apocalyptically concludes that a thermonuclear war "in the future course of human history" might run the risk of "ending human history altogether...
...But radiation is not the only enemy of man's water supply, nor, in Dr...
...Other countries join in...
...That is the "either...
...Some fallout products, like strontium 90, cesium 137, and carbon 14, live for decades, even centuries...
...Even if such facilities were protected by blast shelters, the debris in the streets would make it impossible to get to the fires...
...Some other uncalculated problems include decontamination of radioactivity, water pollution, burying the dead...
...Experts disagree sharply on the effects of the fallout products strontium 90 and cesium 137 on food, soil, and water...
...Rogers S. Cannell of Stanford University, a Defense Department adviser, says that a two-year supply of surplus food will still be available after attack and that at least thirty per cent of cropland would be usable soon after hostilities...
...If an attack should come in the fall the victims would be faced with winter in the northern half of the United States and in all of Canada...
...What will happen if millions of tons of radiated and biologically contaminated debris drop into it...
...One day after Stonier made his report...
...Hot gasses rose, while surrounding cool air was pulled in and acted as a bellow...
...Libby estimate that people could leave their fallout shelters after two weeks...
...Within, at the most, six years, China and several other states will have a stock of nuclear bombs...
...I'm a failure . . ." The diary is filled with minor tragedies such as the failure of the chemical toilet to work and the occasion when it burst into flames...
...On the one side, therefore, we have a finite risk...
...Concrete containers used for radioactive wastes would disintegrate in sea water...
...I can't be optimistic about the water problem...
...Norman A. Hanunian, a Rand Corporation expert, told the Holifield Committee that scientists formerly believed that the "fallout from each kiloton of fission yield" would produce a dose of 1,200 roentgens per hour, an hour after detonation...
...Psychologist Nunnally, in the Washington symposium discussed earlier, warned that "when anxiety is high and experts disagree on what to do, the public panics...
...We know equally little about problems of recovery or what might happen to the delicate balance of nature, the balance among trees, water, insects, animals, man...
...I'll rush out like a wild woman...
...Is he so skilled in psychology that he can tell us at what point the "national will" can be broken...
...British scientists have pointed out that stillbirths occur with as little as three strontium units in the bone...
...They can only guess how many people would die of cancer...
...Libby, against whom this particular criticism was leveled, has written that, with shelters, "ninety per cent of the population can survive...
...Libby concurs...
...In Baltimore, he said, and this would be true of many cities, there are more rats than people...
...But Dr...
...On the other side we have a certainty of disaster...
...There would be little meat and no milk...
...But Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American, charges that "no adequate consideration has been given to the incendiary aspect of thermonuclear war...
...If some of our dams or reservoirs were directly hit, the result might be catastrophic in itself...
...How many, then, of our 237,000 doctors would be ready for duty...
...Another problem, largely undiscussed yet filled with uncertainties, is medical care following a nuclear attack...
...Willard F. Libby, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission who has been subjected to considerable criticism by his profes-.sional associates on this very ground,' pointed out recently that "nothing is less true or less certain than that a prominent, capable scientist will have sound judgment in non-scientific fields...
...Wolfe turned next to the animal world...
...A 1,000-megaton bomb—foreseeable in this decade— if exploded at the optimum altitude would set afire six of our largest Western states...
...Which figure is more nearly correct...
...If, as Dr...
...Thousands and thousands of people were in shelters at the time...
...Cold weather would greatly intensify the problem of providing adequate food, clothing, and shelter...
...It's too confining...
...Wolfe made it clear that other cities might not be affected so severely...
...Which is correct...
...Not only would they need medical care, but others with them would almost certainly require treatment...
...Last October two experimenters in shelter-living in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, were almost asphyxiated when their air supply gave out...
...Wolfe didn't know...
...Ritchie Calder, one of the best and best-known British authorities on the role of science in society, expressed it more sharply in the December, 1961, issue of Exchange, a Canadian publication, when he wrote: "What has become increasingly obvious over the years, since the first bomb was exploded at Alamogordo in 1945 and the first humans were exposed to bomb-effects at Hiroshima and Nagasaki two months later, is that experts get out of step...
...James Van Allen, the physicist who detected the radiation belts circling the earth and who heads the University of Iowa's physics department, says: "It is extremely dangerous to give the impression to the public that the building of fallout shelters will enable the average citizen to survive a nuclear war . . . The percentagewise small margin of safety gained in no way detracts from the very real possibility that an atomic war will mean the end of civilizations of both countries...
...In I960, according to the U. S. Department of Commerce, the oxygen industry produced fifty-one billion cubic feet of high purity oxygen—only a little of it in cylinders suitable for shelter use...
...Even with fans it would be necessary to have large stores of chemicals to decontaminate the air...
...James R. Newman, who was chief intelligence officer for the U. S. Embassy in London during World War II, described to me what happened during the Hamburg firestorm...
...Many of the injured who could normally be saved with good hospitalization and medical care would succumb to infection and shock...
...Whose opinion is most accurate: Dr...
...If they didn't burn, they would probably suffocate, because all the oxygen would be consumed...
...The t'nited States is not going to get the 99.9 per cent "security" that it has been asking for...
...and the I'.S.S.R...
...The rat population at Eniwetok, for instance, has survived several nuclear blasts...
...in his own two shelters he is well supplied...
...If you destroyed the bird population you'd get an explosion of insects that birds now keep under control...
...I asked Dr...
...Man, presumably, would scoop his water off the top of the lake, free from radioactive particles...
...Visscher claims that "famine within a year would seem to be inevitable...
...If the carbon dioxide is not removed the man will die of poisoning from it...
...The inability to cope with disrupted biological relations, says Dr...
...Most of the city's three-and-a-half million cars and trucks would be "lifted and thrown like grotesque Molotov cocktails," spewing gasoline and "automobile shrapnel...
...Teller is a liavesu on science...
...Since the sewage systems will be disrupted," said Dr...
...This is going to begin, just as a token, with an agreement on the stopping of nuclear tests...
...The Washington Star published the full text of the diary October 29, 1961...
...Of the 1,800 nurses and orderlies, only 500 were available for duty...
...Wolfe's opinion, the most serious...
...The Pentagon has continued to downgrade the danger from fire...
...Just three days after I spoke with Dr...
...Lapp denies this categorically...
...In the Los Angeles area, only a few weeks after the disastrous Bel Air fire, rainstorms caused huge mud slides on the slopes which had been denuded of vegetation...
...On the other hand, fire in Arkansas wouldn't modify the environment much beyond the blast area...
...The Federal Radiation Council, a government policy body, says that one-half rem of radiation to bone marrow a year is a dangerous dose...
...It seems safe to speculate that in Los Angeles at least a twenty-five mile radius and an unknown distance beyond it would be, within minutes, engulfed in a suffocating firestorm that would persist for a long time...
...There has been some reaction since," said Hanunian, "and the quantity is still uncertain...
...Wolfe, "no one of these things will be difficult to handle by itself, but when they all come at once and when there are problems of food, clothing, and shelter as well...
...Wolfe whether he agreed with the scientists who said that even if a substantial number of people survived an attack, many of them would be dead in a year anyway...
...And, in the opinion of Dr...
...The fire lasted for seven days...
...You wouldn't get the pollination...
...he had absolutely no hope for its survival...
...Yet his conclusions are disputed by scientists of equal or near-equal competence...
...There is no agreement on tests...
...In the Copper Basin of Tennessee, according to H. H. Mitchell of the Rand Corporation, fumes from a copper smelter killed rooted plants over a large area...
...Langsdorf's, or that of the Defense Department...
...But according to Dr...
...But Gordon S. Christiansen, a chemistry professor at Connecticut College, has estimated that New London, Connecticut, would be subjected to 15,000 roentgens, even if the city itself were not hit by nuclear bombs...
...It is possible, he points out, to remove strontium 90 from milk, but "even for milk other contaminants would not be removed by treatment suitable to take out strontium...
...Sir Chariles P. Snow before the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1961 subsoil on top...
...Has he studied sufficiently the lessons of history to estimate with any degree of accuracy whether a foreign power would send an army to our devastated shores should we lie prostrate...
...Disturbing the balance of nature, he said, would create problems we can only guess at —and problems much greater than some of the more obvious hazards...
...History offers conflicting evidence...
...But revised estimates two years ago put it at 2,600 roentgens...
...I asked officials of the Defense Department what they thought of the Brown-Real prognosis...
...Pauling is an outstanding scientist, a Nobel prize winner...
...This is the terrifying picture presented in a study, Community of Fear, published by the Fund for the Republic...
...not only is the life of the victim shortened (by one to ten days for each roentgen he absorbs), but he is always more receptive to disease...
...There were, admittedly, circumstances favoring combustion—dry weather, some wooden houses...
...Normal disaster-aid facilities would be completely overwhelmed...
...Bentley Glass, geneticist of Johns Hopkins University, speaking to the 128th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, December SO, 1961, made much the same general point...
...But Dr...
...Damage might have been much greater, but the fires never joined because firemen were available to fight them, and aircraft were available to spray the areas with 200,000 gallons of borate, a fire-retarding chemical...
...In addition to oxygen cylinders (each adequate for one person for ten days), he thinks the shelter-dweller will have to include twenty-five pounds of soda-lime to absorb the carbon dioxide...
...But aren't we reaching a point," I asked, "where the problems become so towering that they can't be resolved...
...I chose a particular kind of attack which is considered most probable...
...There is "no scientific basis at present for a useful prediction of what kind of society—if any—would emerge from the ruins of a thermonuclear war...
...Yet, for all our 180 million people we have only about 237,000 doctors to minister to them—now, in peacetime...
...The Holifield Committee, while it referred to this peril as a "major threat," did not develop the subject much further...
...The nuclear arms race between the U.S.A...
...Yet we have no realistic estimate as to how many of the injured might die, what proportion of hospital facilities would be knocked out, how many doctors, firemen, police, and sanitation employees would be incapacitated...
...Maybe," observed Dr...
...I just hate it...
...For instance, pine, spruce, and fir trees are more susceptible to radiation than broad leaf trees...
...On the fifth day she recorded: "I'm about shot...
...Occasionally someone had to be removed from a shelter because of "bizarre behavior," but most of the tests showed favorable results...
...The point," Dr...
...Los Angeles would be the biggest tinderbox because of the chaparral around it...
...There are innumerable tatets of nuclear war of which scientific knowledge is admittedly in!initesimal...
...His laconic reply was: "Los Angeles doesn't have the chance of a snowball in hell...
...Disease - producing bacteria in sewerage disposal units and sewers would very likely be a considerable problem because they are practically immune to radiation...
...In an interview with Chicago columnist Jack Mabley, published on October 27, 1961, Langsdorf said that if the Russians knew we had adequate fallout protection, they would explode the bomb in the air rather than on the surface...
...I put the same question to Dr...
...Rats are less susceptible to radiation than men...
...Even a battle-seasoned general like Dwight Eisenhower evidently can not abide all the psychological implications of a shelter...
...Under present circumstances they are relatively under control...
...Between a risk and a certainty, a sane man does not hesitate...
...it might not be solved in time to save the population from disastrous epidemics...
...A 100-megaton bomb detonated 300 miles above the earth's surface would cause retinal damage to persons observing it as far as 800 miles from the point directly below the airburst...
...An hour before the experiment ended she wrote: "One more hour . . . just wait 'til they open the door...
...Turning to the food supply, Dr...
...Visscher points out, we also need large quantities of soda lime or other chemicals to absorb carbon dioxide, the task of protecting sheltered persons from fire becomes even more formidable...
...It did not, however, estimate results from bigger bombs, such as those exploded in the recent Soviet test series...
...The statement that we need shelters, and we need good shelters, is about the best information we have...
...A. Broido, fire specialist of the Forest Service of the United States Department of Agriculture, calls some of the placating testimony on the fire hazard given the Holifield Committee "misleading...
...After an attack, they would feed on the filth of the city and transfer disease to human beings whose resistance already would be seriously lowered by radiation and deprivation...
...Some minimize or even disregard the problem...
...Wolfe, nuclear attack would initiate large scale wind erosion and create a spreading dustbowl...
...Linus Pauling, however, places the figure many times higher...
...I am not going Co conceal from you that this course involves certain risks...
...Alexander Langsdorf, Jr., a physicist at the Argonne Laboratories is even less sanguine...
...This sort of thing would happen in varying degree throughout the country...
...Fire-fighting in heavily hit areas would become "virtually impossible...
...Lapp disagrees...
...Currently planned fallout shelters, he says, would be almost totally vulnerable to heat, flame, and carbon monoxide...
...He now believes that it would be only sixty roentgens...
...The military experts concluded from this that the problem is minimal...
...But the resulting soil would be only one-half as fertile...
...The roster of sick would grow simply because radiated persons are more susceptible to infection...
...The "or" is not a risk but a certainty...
...In the 1957 study on "The Effects of Nuclear War," the Atomic Energy Commission arrived at a certain formula for measuring fallout...
...It could not be dropped into the sea because currents would cany it somewhere else...
...We don't really know, he said, whether there would be lirestorms or how they will behave if we do have them...
...We think it's safe to assume," he said, "that anyone caught in the basement of a small house that was burning intensely would be in trouble...
...Attempts to reforest this area have failed so far, and what was formerly a forest is now a desert...
...Insects, flies, bees—all more resistant to radiation than men—can wreak havoc on the balance between organisms and nature...
...But one could make an attack with no fallout at all . . . or an attack where all casualties were due to fallout and there was no blast damage at all...
...Washington, D.C., with its wide streets, would have a good chance of escaping this hazard altogether...
...I'm so sick of it here...
...When I asked a Defense Department official on what he based the statement that "fires from nuclear war might not be so serious as the ones in Hamburg or Hiroshima," he argued that our cities are built of brick and steel, rather than wood...
...Instead of being taken up by plants, water runs off into( the sea, drastically reducing the sup-1 ply of food...
...Automobiles were buried and homes moved from their foundations by the force of the flowing earth...
...But according to the formula of the Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, the figure would be 7,500 roentgens —three times as much...
...If I was in the finest shelter in the world," he said in a press conference last October, "all alone, with all my family somewhere else, I just think I'd walk out...
...In the Great Plains states, according to Dr...
...Seventy thousand of Hamburg's 100,000 street trees splintered to earth...
...Wolfe pointed to the problem of strontium 90...
...And such people . . . would be made blind instantly, even at a distance of forty miles from the explosion...
...Suppose, for example, that the Hoover Dam and one or two others in California were destroyed...
...In Dresden, where another firestorm occurred, "300,000 were killed in a single night, and only 2,000 tons of explosives were dropped...
...Why did Dr...
...When an explosion occurred in the Helene Curtis plant in Chicago recently, no one was immediately killed, but 150 women in the damaged factory next door fainted...
...George P. Larrick, U. S. Commissioner of Food and Drugs, said in late 1960: "We do not have facilities to safeguard the food and drug supply adequately from contamination with radioactivity...
...But psychologist Donald N. Michael of the Peace Research Institute claims that these tests are not comparable to the "real thing...
...But Dr...
...This is what Dr...
...Major General John B. Medaris, former chief of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, holds a diametrically opposite view...
...Lapp insists an oxygen supply will be necessary...
...It's only that man shows his greatest ingenuity in time of war...
...All the domestic animals—cattle, sheep, hogs, birds, and wild animals will be killed...
...Many had to be taken to hospitals and treated for shock...
...Temperatures flared to 1,400 and 1,800 degrees so that the bricks themselves actually burned...
...Wolfe, "but I would rate that as a secondary hazard...
...They had died of suffocation and carbon monoxide— 70,000 in all...
...The shelter advocates are "only thinking of one thing, radiation," said Dr...
...Assuming, however, that cylinders could be manufactured quickly and we stopped using oxygen for blow torches and other industrial uses, current production would be enough for only a ten-day supply for 3,530,000 people—less than one-fiftieth of the population...
...After an attack there would be millions of acres of land and millions of homes filled with radioactive dust...
...They can withstand a million roentgens...
...There has been virtually no emphasis on ecological hazards...
...whose dice are human bones.' " Nuclear war is a highly complex, largely uncharted, changing phenomenon...
...Civil Defense authorities issued a disclaimer...
...A faster method would be to remove the topsoil with special plows, which are now being developed, and put the 'Either-Or' For we know the risks...
...Fires joined together in a radius of three miles...
...Chauncey D. Leake, dean of the College of Medicine at Ohio State University, says that the dumping of radioactive waste in the sea would be "the most serious potential danger to our long-range health as far as water pollution is concerned...
...How could he be so certain...
...In the San Francisco area the fire theoretically resulting from the simulated attack was held to 200 square miles (unfortunately including most of the urbanized Bay area...
...Which figure is closer to the truth...
...If we have stockpiled the tools to rebuild and the food to sustain us, we can rebuild into incomparably the strongest country in a few years...
...Any shelter system short of one that places the nation's entire population and industry permanently underground can be negated by a corresponding increase in the attacker's power...
...But Libby's design and cost estimates are based partly on the presumption that radiation travels only in a straight line, and cannot turn corners to get into the shelter...
...But by killing trees or destroying wheat they can further complicate the problem of recovery...
...Within, at the most, ten years, some of these bombs are going off...
...Until strontium 90 were removed or dissipated from the land, planting of edible foods would be impossible...
...Such pockets of erosion would spread from year to year, with little to retard the process...
...Both the earlier OCDM advice and the current Defense Department's folder on fallout shelters are mute on the subject of oxygen...
...His figures were precise: nine out of ten people would survive if we had fallout shelters for everyone...
...Author Philip Wylie, who served as consultant to civil defense authorities during both the Truman and Eisenhower Administrations, wrote in the September, 1960...
...Consider the matter of fire and firestorms, one of the most hotly debated disputes...
...I know of no shelter program to put cattle underground or save our chickens or seed...
...Rats would probably be more protected than humans by additional shielding, since they burrow into buildings and rubble...
...Colonel Mel Maw-rence expects fire to rage for only eighty minutes...
...Christiansen based his figure on the same assumptions as the Holifield hypothetical attack—eighty megatons dropped on nearby cities such as Boston, New York, and Albany...
...Everything is cluttered and getting dirty...
...On Thermonuclear ]Var, complained at the Holifield hearings only little more than a year ago that "there is almost no work aimed directly at thermonuclear war...
...Crops may be grown in contaminated soil, but it would take forty generations of crops—forty years—before the strontium 90 could be filtered out...
...I can multiply these examples a thousand times...
...A civil defense official in Chicago believes that the great winds churned up by the blast will actually blow out many flames...
...Tens of millions of people would be either sick or dying...
...No one as yet has computed these figures—or correlated them with the fire hazard...
...Is he sufficiently conversant with politics to estimate the possibility of revolution following nuclear war...
...Take the matter of radiation...
...Rand Corporation experts and Dr...
...Otherwise they remain calm and self-sacrificing...
...They are quite obvious, and no honest man is going to blink them...
...On another occasion Dr...
...But many reputable men with experience in this field think otherwise...
...As part of a team that assessed a simulated attack on the western part of the country, he concluded that in the Los Angeles area "on the basis of extreme weather and fuel conditions . . . fire would burn at will from ocean to desert...
...Rotarian: "Granting clear weather, the explosion of a medium-sized H-weapon, day or night, would cause all persons indoors or out within view of the fireball to look at it by uncontrollable reflex...
...Perkins talked with a civil defense official by telephone every day, and on Sunday received a telephoned sermon from her minister, she wrote on the second day: "I'm getting a little down and this is only the second day...
...But when interviewed some months later by the Associated Press he conceded that "to estimate how many will be saved by shelters means having to estimate what the attack is...
...Vis-scher says: "There is as yet no practical method for decontaminating foodstuffs grown on soil on which there is radioactive bomb debris...
...Destruction of trees and vegetation in hilly or mountainous country sets in a cycle of floods and erosion...
...The 1959 Holifield Committee summary notes that in the hearings "the extent to which fire would be swept by the wind" beyond the immediate blast area "was not estimated...
...Glass pointed out that all the pines, spruces, firs, cedars and redwoods would be dead...
...How many of them would survive to fight the conflagrations, big and small...
...If you killed bumble bees you'd have a hard time growing clover...
...How many people, who might have lived if doctors were available, would survive without medical care...
...What would happen today if five thousand times that tonnage (a ten megaton bomb) were released over a big city...
...The Holifield Committee believes that such hazards "would be negligible" if the weapons were only one to ten megatons...
...There coidd be no planting for six to eight months...
...The Holifield Committee report of 1959 is noncommittal on the problem of food consumption following a nuclear war...
...Perkins expresses when it is restored to normal operation offers some insight into the heightened tension of shelter-living...
...Maybe it's just me . . . but when something goes wrong it 'throws' me...
...Stonier's, Dr...
...Of the 300 registered doctors in Hiroshima when the "small" twenty-kiloton bomb fell, 260 were immediate casualties, unfit for service...
...For every field in which there is some degree of knowledge, there are many others in which there is little or none...
...It would break surface vegetation and the roots beneath it...
...But even if he had computed on the Holifield Committee basis, the figures would not jibe...
...Among some of the other environmental terrors he listed were weather and season...
...Jerald E. Hill, of the Rand Corporation, testified that "a large percentage of unsheltered fire fighting personnel . . . would be killed or injured and their equipment destroyed by the blast...
...He did not agree, but he admitted he had no scientific basis for this conclusion...
...Studying the statistics of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Pauling concludes that from the bomb tests alone (before the recent Russian series), 140,000 people now living will die of leukemia and bone cancer and one million from cancer of all kinds...
...It has been estimated," says Tunc, "that a great majority of the deaths suffered in an atomic attack would come from fallout radiation...
...But Dr...
...Broido, it should be noted, nevertheless feels' that shelters "properly designed and located" can protect lives from the hazard of fire as well as fallout...
...There are only 220,000 local firemen in the United States...
...There is a significant chance that a major accidental war may occur sometime in the sixties...
...Reflecting the paucity of knowledge even about fallout, Wal-mer E. Strope, a Defense Department research chief, told a California audience: "We know far less than we would like to about fallout lrom a major weapon...
...A scientist who gave an extensive report on the fire danger conceded that he had been studying the problem only four or five weeks...
...This jeremiad also warns that: "Modern systems of warfare have become so complex and swift that they can no longer be controlled consistently by human judgment alone...
...The first bombs were especially powerful and put the water mains out of commission...
...The people involved are always in contact with the outside world...
...Tom T. Stonier of the Rockefeller Institute estimates that hundreds of thousands of people in New York alone would die of the firestorm effect from a twenty-megaton bomb —even if they survived blast and fallout radiation...
...all but a negligible fraction died anyway...
...It is conceded that in the field of physics Teller is an expert...
...Lapp contends that a nuclear war would produce 6,000 strontium units per square mile and an average dose of eighteen rem ("roentgen equivalent man," a measure of biological absorption of radiation) to the bones of human beings for each of ten years, or 180 rem in all...
...And in the East, the hardwood forests would have been burned out...
...Wolfe, would be some of the side effects of nuclear war...
...But in the Korean War captured American soldiers threw sick men into the snow to perish, while others stood by inactive...
...The Pentagon has made a number of tests on how people would react in shelters...
...Perhaps more illustrative of reality than either of these conjectural views is the diary of Mrs...
...oil cans and pumps would rupture and explode, pipes would be sheared...
...Fire, he says, is far and away the greatest hazard we would have to face...
...How many would die because there were no firemen...
...Without birds to eat them, insects would multiply in dangerous numbers...
...I don't know if I could take it for another week or not...
...It demands, at the minimum, an airtight shelter, with proper vent and valve, oxygen supplies in cylinders with regulators, and chemicals for decontaminating the air inside the shelter...
...Even in those areas in which scientists have a reasonable body of research to guide them, their answers to the special problems of nuclear war are often only educated guesses...
...Above all, they are volunteers who want the project to succeed...
...When you come out of the shelters," he said, "you can count on this...
...If a relatively minor accident of this sort creates such havoc, what would result from a nuclear attack...
...Medical facilities and supplies would be inadequate to cope with the situation...
...Visscher places the "safe" time at one year, and some scientists estimate as much as two years...
...But then," he continued, "you must look at the multiplicity of problems...
...Lapp where we could get enough for the whole nation, he replied: "We'll just have to rise to the occasion...
...Water running off the barren soil carries silt and pebbles before it, and in a single season carves out great gullies and ravines...
...We got a phenomenon," t Newman reported, "that man has never seen before, except perhaps in pre-history...
...And neither, I suspect, does anyone else...
...Experts are disagreeing, and disagreeing as vigorously as factions in a political convention...
...When I asked Dr...
...If our filtration plants are destroyed, it would be an almost impossible problem to purify our supply of drinking water...
...It settles in the soil, however, and from there is absorbed by plants and vegetables, then eaten by man...
...The Holifield Committee summary of 1959 almost ignores it: the preoccupation is on fallout...
...They are, to paraphrase Lord Byron, gamblers 'whose table's earth...
...Thus the dangers arise as much from scientific ignorance as from the applications of scientific knowledge...
...A century ago, the great French biologist, Claude Bernard, counselled his scientific colleagues, 'True science teaches us to doubt and, in ignorance, to refrain.' "This is imperative advice in these days when scientists are in a position of ignorance and power and can impose a veto on posterity...
...The emphasis of testimony of official spokesmen and most press comment is on "one problem at a time...
...Teller presume to know these things...
...Perhaps the reason is that the nation is not equipped today to meet the demand of a full-scale shelter program...
...But such easy solutions are not likely to be available in wartime...
...A leading Defense Department scientist said that a firestorm could occur only in an area of approximately one square mile...
...Wolfe, "the bacteria won't be confined as in normal circumstances, and disease levels will rise appreciably...
...We are faced with an "cither-or," and we haven't much time Either we accept a restriction of nuclear armaments...
...In any case decontamination of food will be a complex technical process requiring special chemicals not readily available now, and unless great strides are made, they will not be available to the general population at all...
...The fallout shelters recommended by the Federal government do not include oxygen tanks...
...On the sixth, and next-to-the-last day in the shelter, she recorded: "I hope the day goes by fast...
...During World War II the British stood heroically in the face of tremendous odds...
...No one has estimated what might happen when water mains are broken, gas stoves overturned, electric wires shorted...
...They can only guess about the effects of fire, psychological panic, the value of shelters, or the time required for physical and economic recovery, and their guesses vary not only as much as two hundred per cent from one scientist to another, but in their own judgments by equally large degrees from year to year...
...Two hundred and fifty thousand dwelling units, out of 556,000, were completely destroyed...
...The kids are all dressed and excited—going home at last...
...Despite the expert and usually objective testimony before the Holifield Committee, no one has correlated all the dangers or made a total estimate of the effects of nuclear war...
...To be as positively assertive as Dr...
...John N. Wolfe, whom I interviewed in his AEC office, fallout is "far down on the list" of dangers...
...But the consensus seems to be that the truth is nearer the new estimate than the old...
...Most scientists are respectfully cautious of uncertainties and aware that what seems acceptable today may be outdated tomorrow...
...Ironically, Libby's own shelter collapsed when an extensive brush-fire swept his home area near Los Angeles last fall...
...However, his calculations are based on the formula provided by thei Naval Radiological Defense Laboratory, which assumes three times the radiation assumed by the Holifield experts...
...Based on these calculations, a 3,000 megaton attack would result, over a large area, in radiation of 2,500 roentgens one hour after explosion...
...It may be "best," but it is—even by Dr...
...Fires," he said, "would vary with the type of vegetation...
...The exact scientists, deploying vast amounts of money to produce the physical and chemical effects, have run far ahead of the biologists who deal with much more complex effects upon the body and upon the hereditary processes...
...The guesses, therefore, often vary —and sometimes radically...
...But judgment is not, as all well know, primarily a matter of intelligence...
...Wolfe emphasizes, "is that nuclear war triggers a whole series of effects...
...John N. Wolfe of the AEC...
...He will be intelligent...
...In the two fires 13,150 acres of land were consumed by flame...
...It is assumed by many of the more optimistic civil defense advocates that relatively soon after local fallout reached the earth's surface, the radiated particles would settle to the bottom of a lake or reservoir...
...Strope's calculations—only a guess...
...Most of the people who received a lethal dose of radiation would linger on, vomiting and bleeding internally, for weeks...
...I am saving this as responsibly as I can...
...The relief Mrs...
...They do not have to attack man directly...
...Fortunately, they had a telephone and were able to arouse one of their wives to open the reinforced steel door...
...Visscher goes even further...
...The fires whipped up wiffds of one hundred miles an hour...
...There is also the auxiliary problem of what to do with the radiated waste...
...This, according to Dr...
...Where would we put them...
...Wolfe, "would be man's biggest problem after coming out of shelters...
...Herman Kahn would call a "second-order effect," one that need not be studied carefully until we know more about "first order effects" like fire and fallout...
...The destruction would not only create incredibly devastating floods, but would leave millions of people in Southern California completely without water...
...It could not be buried because it would get into underground water and eventually into man...
...Our experts have listed the number of injured, in the hypothetical attack, at twenty million, but they have not computed how many more would die simply because no proper medical care was available...
...Oh, I hope I can get through tomorrow...
...Or to know what the impact of shock and panic would be on America's ability to save itself after a nuclear attack...
...Harrison Brown, professor of geochemistry at the California Institute of Technology, has estimated that all of Los Angeles would be set on fire by only one such bomb...
...The Holifield Committee report pointed out that a firestorm could poison the air with carbon monoxide for as much as a full day...
...Wolfe, two fires broke out in the Los Angeles area which consumed 456 homes...
...The Holifield Committee estimated that in its hypothetical attack "potential deaths from [leukemia and other forms of cancer] would fall in the range of about two per cent of the deaths attributable to acute radiation injury"—a few hundred thousand...
...Los Angeles, because of the nature of its vegetation, would be the most susceptible city in the country...
...But if current relationships were radically upset, a cycle of disease would set in...
...What proportion of our hospital facilities would remain intact...
...They stampede only when the danger is visible and immediate, such as a .theater fire...
...Our present water supply is so impure that it needs constant filtration...
...But at best, there would be a great many citizens requiring medical attention, and quickly...
...A body can recover from small doses of radiation, but an estimated ten per cent of the damage is never thrown off, the Holifield Committee reported...
...Everything is closing in on me...
...Shelters, he says, "would convert our people into a horde of rabbits, scurrying for warrens where they would cower helplessly while waiting the coming of a conqueror...
...As I listened to him, the chain reaction seemed staggering...
...On July 24, 1943, the British dropped the equivalent of 2,400 tons of conventional explosives on that city...
...Lapp, was an "overestimate...
...Consider, too, the neglected matter of ecology—the relationship between organisms and environment...
...I wouldn't want to live in that kind of a world...
...The disputes, therefore, remain hidden in scientific journals or private symposia and are not readily available for public study...
...Jeanine Perkins, who, with her husband and two children, spent an experimental week in a shelter...
...But is he also expert in chemistry, genetics, ecology, politics, and history...
...The implication is that the problem can be solved but would be difficult...
...Washington Post Editorial December 28, 1961 tory's method is "corroborated quite closely by computations based on two other independent sets of data...
...The warring nations, he said, would be reduced to barbarism...
...According to Herman Kahn, a respected scientific study indicates that men act with nobility during disaster...
...Teller wrote that "an all-out nuclear attack would not leave our nation uninhabitable...
...How many would be forced to remain in shelters for two weeks, or more, while the fires raged...
...They can only guess how much radioactivity a bomb might unleash...
...It is this...
...They would be killed by total doses of 5,000 to 10,000 roentgens...
...But Dr...
...To be effective they would have to be airtight and stocked with tanks of oxygen...
...Edward Teller evaluated the benefits of shielding citizens from the fallout that would result from nuclear war...
...Libby has proposed an inexpensive fallout shelter without a tight-fitting door, purported to cost only S30, which he claims would increase chances for survival by 100 times...
...Broido disparages this: "The structures that make up our major cities range from more than ninety-nine per cent combustible construction in San Francisco to a low of 96.4 per cent combustible construction in Washington, D. C." In the realm of psychology the calculations are just as conflicting and inconclusive...
...A thermonuclear attack "would largely destroy our present social structure...
...It is true that radiation itself does not turn corners, he says, but air does, and radiated dust and particles would be carried by air through ventilating systems or open doors, greatly increasing the radiation hazard...
...Though Mrs...
...With adequate civil defense, he added, the United States could not only survive, but would recover faster than any other nation...
...A few years ago scientists believed that after a 3,000 megaton attack the fallout radiation in the second half of the first year would total 500 roentgens...
...Bodies were still being dug up six months later, most of them completely unmarked by fire...
...Even Dr...
...The Holifield Committee, in evaluating its hypothetical attack, left the impression that the largest dose of radiation we might have to contend with in the first hour was 3,000 roentgens...
...No one knows...
...What, 1 asked Dr...
...Concrete fallout shelters would turn into ovens, cooking the people inside...
...Unfortunately, the press usually gives space freely to authorities like Teller, Kahn, and Libby who voice "official" views or reflect Pentagon opinion, but only a • few lines to those scientists of equal competence with opposing views...
...But persons in the basement of a large building that won't burn intensely or in a shelter in a relatively open area will probably be able to get the oxygen they need...
...We must conclude that society can no longer be defended by an unlimited War...
...Ralph E. Lapp, the dangerous rays would total an intermediate 4,000 roentgens...
...They replied, "We have little knowledge of this phenomenon, but we think it is an exaggeration...
...Herman Kahn, a physicist and mathematician who has written a 688 page book...
...This is a long-lived fallout product that presents relatively little danger to man unless taken into the body...
...That is, there is no attempt to apply the data at all...
...Ten per cent of the nation's population would receive three times that amount...
...not only continues, but accelerates...
...We do not even have the facilities to determine on a statistically sound basis whether the amounts of radioactivity now occuring in food constitute a near-range or a long-range threat to the public health...
...in that case the first hour dose would be 5,000 roentgens...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
