THE CALCULUS OF WAR
Part V The Calculus of War VjrVHAT are some of the important " long-range implications of civil defense? Where is a shelter program liable to lead? If it is conceded that distorted estimates of...
...For this a surface blast is more effective because it explodes closer to the steel and concrete structures that "harden" the installations...
...Even to think of war as acceptable is an impulse to suicide...
...Cities near the ocean would be swamped, and shelter inhabitants drowned...
...This ratio, however, can be modified...
...There appears to be no practical program that would avoid large-scale loss of life...
...By his own strictures Kahn can look forward to renouncing the arms race within the next few years: The "price" that will be demanded will certainly exceed even his outer limits...
...But the many other dangers—blindness, fire, world-fallout, and ecological, genetic, and psychological effects— are either played down or omitted...
...The Russians could make bombs with cobalt or sodium blankets rather than uranium...
...It would last in heavy enough doses so that people under it would have to stay in shelters for years...
...The conclusion is inescapable that other factors are at least as important as the consideration of defense...
...Emphasis added...
...The New York Times of July 31, 1960, reported that the Atomic Energy Commission is working on a new "cluster warhead...
...Statement by National Committee for A .Sane Nuciear Policy Holifield Committee Hearings (Pages 546-547) nology and now Presidential science adviser, made this cogent observation on still another defect oijht shelter thesis: "If you look ahead ten years, the security that you think you will buy in four or five years is a mirage...
...Kahn's use of the word "unduly" constitutes a tacit admission that even a small shelter program escalates the arms race...
...Thus, even if the Soviets' stationary military bases and cities were destroyed, there might well be many mobile missiles to continue a war...
...On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy, in response to the Berlin crisis, asked for the shelter program and a substantial increase in armaments...
...Almost nobody," says gamesman Kahn, "wants to go down in history as the first man to kill 100,000,000 people...
...Whatever else we may be confused about, there is one factor in the arms race that is definite, certain, and incontrovertible: we are reaching the point of total destructiveness...
...Hugh Everett III and George E. Pugh of the Institute for Defense Analysis told the Holifield Committee that a 10,000-megaton attack on an unsheltered America would cause 170 million deaths...
...Is it not possible that the Soviets would change the ratio of their mobile and -stationary bases so they would always be able to make additional strikes...
...The 1954 U. S. nuclear tests in the Pacific taught our military theorists that fallout might be a greater danger than blast, since fallout covered 7,000 square miles in contrast to the 300 square miles affected by blast...
...I asked this question of high Pentagon officials and was stunned by the answer: "Why should they want to kill more people...
...Then in 1957, the Soviets sent Sputnik I hurtling around the earth...
...One hundred and eighty-three scientists and scholars of five universities in the Boston area published an Open Letter to President Kennedy in the form of an advertisement in the New York Times November 10, 1961, telling the President that "the principal danger of the present program is the false sense of security engendered...
...Bates has informed us that there were no signs of shelters being built into the thousands of apartment houses which he saw in the process of construction...
...Some experts think the Soviet Union may have such a stockpile now, though most agree that she does not...
...Cannell, who has himself been urging combination shelters that can protect not only against fallout but against blast, admits that the heavier structures will probably be useless in a decade...
...By far the strongest single objection [to shelters]," reported pollster Samuel Lubell, "is the thought that 'if those big ones fall, a shelter won't be worth anything,' or, 'if you're going to die, you might as well die quickly.' The Gallup Poll of October 28, 1961, confirmed these observations: nine out of ten people so far had done nothing, not even stored food...
...1 Mil ii Press Interna [tonal from Deiner...
...The Soviets, incidentally, are doing little by way of civil defense...
...If we build shelters, the Russians will certainly perfect means to overcome this "deterrent" advantage...
...Yet even Pentagon officials, the New York Times reported January 1, 1962, acknowledged that the tone of the folder was "bland...
...At a press conference he told reporters that "the central responsibility, it seems to me, is for us [the Federal government] to provide community shelters...
...The government booklet's description of first aid techniques following radiation suffered in a nuclear attack reads like measures more appropriately used against hurricanes or floods rather than after the holocaust of nuclear war...
...For instance, if they dropped chemical or biological weapons a few hours or a few days after the bombs, the pumps drawing in air for the shelters would simultaneously draw in poison...
...A Philadelphia workingman argued: "Why should we do anything...
...Early in 1962 President Kennedy announced he would add two more divisions to the army...
...It was now conceded, in Life's words, that "no shelter program can ever make nuclear war less than a catastrophe...
...The money is to be used to build gymnasiums, libraries, underground classrooms, storage spaces, and auditoriums so designed that they can be used for community functions in peacetime and as fallout shelters in wartime...
...similar letters and statements were issued in Chicago, Madison, Princeton, Washington, and other areas...
...This would increase radioactivity by a similar proportion...
...As Gerard Piel, publisher of Scientific American, points out: "The civil defense program of our Federal government, however else intended, must be regarded as a step in the escalation process...
...Perhaps the most dangerous element in the Administration's approach is that it isolates the shelter program from the armaments race of which it is an integral part...
...Our own response was the civil defense program of "evacuation" as a means of saving lives...
...If it is conceded that distorted estimates of survival whipped up a mood of near-hysteria for a time...
...The report of the House Military Operations Subcommittee on 'Civil Defense in Western Europe and the Soviet Union,' issued April 27, 1959, shows that the Russians gave out civil defense manuals which are incongruously old-fashioned in the thermonuclear age...
...It has six Polaris submarines at sea, with ninety-six missiles...
...This humanitarian argument carries a great deal of weight...
...There would also be more Windings...
...One nationally-prominent scientist told me while it was being prepared that if Time's version were to be adopted by the Defense Department and distributed to the public he would make a tour of the nation giving televised speeches in an effort to expose its fraudulent character...
...This would result in little radiation, but it would raise a tidal wave...
...The sharpest observers see no signs of stepped-up construction of air-raid shelters (although the new subways could double in that role...
...The booklet minimizes the danger far below that of even the 1959 Holifield findings and the AEC studies published in 1957...
...This technique has the additional military advantage of providing little or no warning, catching a whole city unaware...
...f The Russians could combine nuclear attack with other forms of destruction...
...The booklet discusses what would happen if a /iwe-megaton bomb were to drop—five megatons, only a few weeks after the Soviets exploded a fifty-seven-megaton bomb and Khrushchev boasted he had and could deliver bombs with power greater than 100 megatons...
...Such instruments are almost invulnerable since it is virtually impossible to know where they are...
...In the balance of terror each side must strive for equilibrium: if shelters strengthen our hand, then the other camp seeks ways to offset this favorable factor...
...The Pentagon recently announced that it will ask for several additional billions in the next budget, and the Soviets have increased their own military expenditures for this year by $4 billion over 1961...
...In cold fact, however, this is another uneasy compromise, another concession to pressure, another continuation of the deadly illusion that there is a defense against nuclear attack...
...Emphasis added...
...again we can expect the Soviets to answer with an escalation of their own...
...They are encouraged by the fact that towards the end of 1961 the "hard sell" in behalf of civil defense had spent itself...
...On the initiative of some of the spokesmen for the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), the American Friends Service Committee, and others, twenty-seven organizations joined in a cooperative venture called Turn Toward Peace...
...If the Russians were to judge American efforts in the civil defense field from viewing CDM manuals, film strips, and other propaganda media, they would no doubt come to the conclusion that every American family has a fallout shelter resembling the average Soviet apartment, complete with attractively packaged canned goods, toilet paper, and recreational materials...
...Teller, and others omit...
...Why, indeed, if the enemy is "irrational" to begin with...
...The United States, he said, has hundreds of intercontinental bombers that can reach the Soviet Union, including 600 heavy bombers...
...If exploded in water two miles deep, it would create a wave 100 feet high 200 miles away...
...Then something else would be objectionable, and that would be cut...
...In the Holifield Committee's calculations it was assumed that each bomb yielded half its energy from fission, half from fusion...
...A youngster who spends thirty hours a week at school would be unshielded for the other 138 hours (unless his parents had a private shelter...
...It was obvious now that we would have only thirty minutes or less warning time against missiles, as opposed to the six hours that had previously been presumed...
...One favorable feature of the sodium boml>—favorable to the nation dropping it—is that it loses its radioactivity rapidly, so that there would be no "backlash" on the Soviet Union...
...Many people, of all political shades, have been willing to accept a shelter program on the basis of this thesis...
...On June 5, 1961, Newsweek reported: "'Moscow.—It sounds odd...
...The Pentagon's campaign to make war "thinkable" was suffering its first setback...
...Moscow's sirens, in fact, haven't sounded since World' War II.' "Osgood Caruthers, reporting from Moscow in the July 18, 1961 issue of the New York Times, confirms this impression...
...In a major attack upon our country, millions of people would be killed...
...Matter in the bomb is converted to energy either by fission, splitting of a nucleus in two, or fusion, uniting light nuclei...
...Herman Kahn, who equates war with games, poses the dilemma in its most irrational form...
...A bomb can also be placed in a cobalt-00 blanket which would increase the total radiation, according to James R. Newman, by as much as forty times...
...As one member of the Administration put it to me: "Somebody would say, 'such a phrase will scare such-and-such a group...
...Or, the Russians could drop small magnesium bombs on a smoldering city a few days after the initial attack, rekindling old fires and perhaps creating new firestorms...
...The staff of Time, Inc., was originally assigned the task of preparing the booklet, but the early drafts were so extremely optimistic that the responsibility was removed from Time's hands...
...Tenants are not about to be building shelters for their landlords...
...Theoretically, either we or the Soviets can come up with a "surprise" weapon, such as the neutron bomb (which mainly kills people rather than destroys property) or the antimissile-missile, which could change the balance of terror...
...People who stayed in shelters would, like so many who perished in the Hamburg firestorm of 1943, die from carbon monoxide poisoning...
...Dr...
...Life magazine, and many others, caught in the crossfire of scientists who exposed the idiot arithmetic of Teller, Libby, and Kahn, retreated...
...If only one person can be spared," said a liberal Illinois Congressman, "the shelter campaign will be worth every cent...
...Each year we spend more than the year before on the weapons of mass death, and the other side retaliates...
...As yet—according to physicists David R. Inglis and William Davidon—such weapons are not realistic...
...In their Open Letter to President Kennedy, the 183 scientists and scholars in the Boston area make this point with rare insight: "We believe," said the scientists, "that although the present civil defense program and in particular the construction of fallout shelters might save a small fraction of the population in a nuclear war, this potential gain is more than offset by the fact that such activity prepares the people for the acceptance of thermonuclear war as an instrument of national policy...
...Civil defense is only a small part of the calculus, but even a cursory examination of the problem indicates that for every life it can save in theory, it endangers far more lives because it escalates the arms race towards the final catastrophe...
...But the end result is always an escalation of the arms race...
...Nothing, however, can any longer narrow the dimensions of war—except disarmament...
...We lose our monopoly...
...Nor does he say how he could know precisely how many deaths would result from a given exchange of nuclear weapons...
...Bluffs and counter-bluffs...
...The damage would be to us...
...And if the fifty million "spaces" in office buildings and subways now being surveyed are included, and the same computer technique applied, a total fallout shelter "insurance" for perhaps seventeen to twenty million Americans would be available under the new program...
...Walter Lippmann characterized civil defense as "a delusion," adding "there is no shelter program . . . which could possibly be a real protection against full-scale nuclear war...
...Bewildered by the confusion among scientists and public officials, the public refused to be stampeded...
...The most we can expect by continued vigorous participation in the arms race is a postponement of the fateful day...
...I could justify," Kahn said, "the government spending between $5 billion and $15 billion a year on civil defense preparations...
...Dr...
...In the Holifield hearings it was assumed that there will be only one attack, and that shelters can protect us from this radiation long enough so that in two weeks we can come out and begin life anew...
...If you want to threaten us from a position of strength, we will show you our strength...
...Assistant Secretary of Defense Steuart Pittman, who is in charge of the national civil defense program, told the Chicago Tribune that he had not built a shelter for his family because he was studying the "range of choices...
...The Russians could explode bombs under water and inundate coastal and lakeshore cities like New York, Boston, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco with billions of gallons of water carrying radioactive material...
...By the time the "winds carry the bomb products to the next continent, [radiation] will have decayed almost completely," according to Clark...
...Its tone is sober, and it notes that "there is no panacea for protection from nuclear attack...
...For instance: the booklet states that "a few such elements as strontium 90, cesium 137 and carbon 14 are long-lived and could harm humans, in some way...
...But suppose that in the next few years the enemy creates a highly mobile force of missiles that can be moved from place to place without detection— such as a Minuteman mounted on a railroad car, or a Polaris submarine that moves at will beneath the seas...
...It assumes that the development of weaponry will remain at the present level, that the Russians will not respond to our action, that the equation of war is set and will not change...
...These claims are based largely, we submit, on Soviet manuals and not on eye-witness observations...
...Aspirin for headache . . . " The whole booklet is a contrived aspirin tablet, which, the Washington Post notes, "has said only enough to raise hopes of survival but not enough to make those hopes reasonable...
...In recent efforts to justify its expenditures, the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization has cited claims to the contrary...
...This would enormously increase radiation from local fallout...
...Air blasts, on the other hand, reduce the fallout danger, but dramatically increase the firestorm and asphyxiation potential...
...Response: evacuation theory of civil defense...
...Admittedly, chemical and biological weapons are far from perfected, but they are almost certain to become manageable in the near future...
...Jerome Wiesner, formerly professor of electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of TechNo Counterpart in Soviet Union "To date, the evidence is overwhelming [hat the Russians have taken their civil defense program no more seriously than we have our own...
...Shelters—whether family or community—inevitably change the very nature of the arms race itself...
...it is our total population...
...Defense Department spokesmen like Adam Yarmolinsky have pointed out repeatedly that our civil defense program is so "modest" it would not cause the Russians to become panicky, or to think they are about to be attacked...
...That the motivation for the program is political at least in part is illustrated by the program announced in December, 1961, by Deputy Defense Secretary Roswell L. Gilpatric, who called for "dual purpose" community shelters...
...College students from more than a dozen schools picketed and fasted in front of the White House...
...A change in strategy on one side causes a change on the other...
...What, then, is to prevent a second, third, or fourth strike, spaced a few weeks apart...
...President Kennedy shifted his ground somewhat...
...If there were really a "defense" against nuclear war no government could afford to be so minimal in its program...
...The Russians could "space" their attacks, dropping one load of bombs one month and another the next...
...Shelter building . . . brings the Third World War closer...
...But the report fails to show any substantial civil defense activities in being...
...If Cabinet officers don't have shelters," a woman in Northhampton, Pennsylvania, told an interviewer, "why should I spend for one...
...This lack of current preparation is consistent with reports coming from the Soviet Union for the past several years...
...and a public employe who spends forty hours on the job where fallout protection was available would be relatively helpless against fallout the other three-quarters of the week...
...Physicist W. H. Clark, writing recently in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, estimates that the difference in the cost of fuel between a one-megaton and a ten-megaton bomb is less than $100,000, and for each additional megaton the cost is perhaps only $5,000...
...The problem with cobalt bombs is that radiation decays more slowly—they do have a backlash, and can inflict damage on the attacker as well...
...Our response was to formulate a plan for shelters...
...Neither had Vice-President Lyndon Johnson or Attorney General Robert Kennedy...
...Not only would those in shelters be subjected to flooding and drowning, but radiation, too, would last longer...
...This, clearly, is a distorted estimate, but it throws light on the process by which each power increases its armaments in response to the other side's escalation...
...All deaths from fallout," the Holifield Committee had reported, "can be prevented—but not in existing buildings, even when improved...
...Some of the groups are pacifist, but the effort included an even larger number of non-pacifist organizations, such as labor unions, the American Veterans Committee, and Americans for Democratic Action...
...Van Allen, Dr...
...In talking to Edward McDermott, deputy director of the Office of Emergency Planning, and his public affairs officer, I was struck by their insight into the phenomenon of "challenge and response...
...Another, less dramatic, change would be to "salt" or "dirty" the bomb...
...See box on this page...
...A. Allan Bates, vice president of the Portland Cement Association of Chicago, visited construction projects throughout the country in 1960 as a member of an exchange delegation from the cement and concrete industry...
...if it is conceded, too, that there is a considerable element of deception in using civil defense as a means of "hardening the national will" or adding "muscle" to our diplomatic bargaining—it is still a scientific fact that shelters can lessen the dangers from fallout and to a limited extent from blast...
...You can build a steel shelter that can, to some extent, resist blast...
...Subsequently Miss Landers wrote she would not take her own advice "because I have no desire to survive in a world of maimed and sick people...
...According to the Atomic Energy Commission, a fifty-megaton bomb, burst in 2,700 feet of water, would create waves that would still be twenty to fifty feet in height one hundred miles away, and five to twelve feet at 400 miles...
...Kahn does not say—exactly—what the "price" is he himself would be willing to pay...
...This can be one of the most significant indicators of its intentions, if and when it gets ready to launch a surprise attack...
...According to Dr...
...President Kennedy's new approach seemed to meet some of these objections, to answer some of the protests...
...Motivational researcher Louis Cheskin reported that citizens were thoroughly frightened...
...Here is the way they record the history of civil defense: "In 1949—Soviet Union conducts first nuclear explosion...
...Scientists like Dr...
...Jerome B. Wiesner, the President's science adviser, states briefly the facts of nuclear war correctly, and it points up some of the dangers that Time, Life, Dr...
...nine to one, she reported, opposed her advice...
...What price, he asks, are we willing "to pay for punishing the Soviets for their aggression...
...Air Force theorists discount this possibility because they assume the Kremlin will be "rational" enough to concentrate on military bases and missile sites...
...The official Defense Department's pamphlet showed all the markings of a tug-of-war among those officials within the Administration responsible for the final version...
...Whether we have already reached that point or whether it is still a few years off is not significant...
...The instrument we feel may be saving our lives and our freedom could speed the loss of both...
...If we respond consistently to the Soviet escalation of weapons, why should they not respond to ours...
...The calculus of war is pushing us rapidly to the edge of the precipice...
...Harrison Brown of the California Institute of Technology told a national meeting of Sigma Xi and Phi Beta Kappa that neither nation desires such a war now or will in the future...
...But in real life wars are not fought that way...
...The AEC estimates that a fifty- or one hundred-megaton bomb exploded thirty miles above ground could cause blindness to anyone looking directly at the fireball for a fraction of a second even at a distance of 500 miles...
...The possibility of firestorm is dealt with in one sentence—and minimized by the word "can...
...A shelter program is not, as many believe, a phenomenon-in-isolation, but part of a military escalation process which leads closer to war and nearer to the garrison state...
...You do not have fifty- and one hundred-megaton bombs...
...Gilpatric also observed that the fallout security offered was only on a part-time basis—during school or working hours—and that still more Federal funds would have to be spent in subsequent years to assure sheltering during other daytime and the night hours...
...This will probably be a boon to many school districts—and a boondoggle to others—but whether it will "defend" American lives is dubious...
...But would not the Soviets read our own shelter program in the same way—as preparation for surprise attack...
...Gilpatric noted that shelters which served a "dual purpose" were preferable to those having only a "single purpose" because in a few years they might be obsolete as shelters anyway...
...On October 21, 1961, Deputy Secretary of Defense Roswell L. Gilpatric told an audience of businessmen "that this nation has a nuclear retaliatory force of such lethal power that an enemy move which brought it into play would be an act of self-destruction on his part...
...Response: civil defense program...
...Herman Kahn, testifying before the Holifield Committee, expressed a different view...
...A few years ago, Inevitable A prominent scientist said Friday night that if the arms race continues, an all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union is "inevitable...
...A factor in the Administration's current civil defense approach more important than its attempt to minimize the hazards of nuclear war is that, like civil defense theories since discarded, the new program is based on the concept of a static world...
...Visscher challenged the "you can survive" thesis...
...In many parts of the country there are not enough basements or even backyard spaces for widespread family shelter construction...
...Nothing is said about the destruction or uselessness of dwelling units...
...However, I wouldn't care to see it do that because I take the arms race seriously...
...We have bombs stronger than one hundred megatons...
...and so that part would come out...
...Would they not then feel forced to take counter-measures...
...Small A-bombs would be packed together in a single missile and would scatter, as the missile came close to its target, like so much nuclear buckshot...
...but the 1957 AEC document and the Holifield hearings experts agreed that almost everyone who receives 550 to 750 roentgens would be dead soon...
...only one in ten, he said, believed that the gadgets of survival were of any value...
...Nor would I wish to be confronted with the decision of whether to shoot my neighbor if he tried to get into my shelter because he has none of his own...
...But even if they were operational, they would only change the means by which men die, not the totality of national death...
...Libby, Dr...
...A one hundred-megaton bomb dropped in 4,000 feet of water would result in waves of twenty-eight to seventy feet one hundred miles away and three to seven feet at 1,000 miles...
...Pauling, and Dr...
...The St...
...But if not 180 million, what is the figure...
...Chicago American columnist Jack Mabley visited the Argonne Laboratories, where the A-bomb had been pioneered, and found that neither the institution itself nor any of the scientists he interviewed had a shelter...
...A reaction had set in...
...One bit of advice in the folder perhaps sums up its overall tone: "Treat [radiation] symptoms in this way: General rest...
...Public institutions such as schools and city halls, and non-profit institutions such as parochial schools or hospitals will be granted five dollars for every three dollars they themselves provide for shelters...
...Gentlemen imperialists, keep your heads cool...
...On the other hand, it is also possible to make bombs with fission yields of sixty per cent or seventy per cent or more instead of fifty...
...Air-raid drills are held in factories but rarely for the general public...
...Threats and counter-threats...
...It is much like a quack cure for cancer...
...action, limited or unlimited, would be justified...
...The words "may" and "might" and "could" appear throughout the new government booklet, instead of "will" or "would...
...Obviously it is too high...
...If that bomb is dropped, we'll be blown to bits anyway...
...Nothing is said of the probability that water and fire-fighting equipment and manpower would be lacking...
...The Defense Department's booklet now informs us, for example, that "exposure to more than 300 roentgens over a period of a few days will cause sickness in the form of nausea, and may cause death...
...The fifty-and one hundred-megaton bombs," said Khrushchev, "will always hang over their heads like the sword of Damocles...
...Warfare is reaching the totality from which nothing can save an appreciable number of lives...
...It seems clear that the Soviet calculus of war was bound to change if the United States planned to shelter its citizens...
...The lack of medical attention is dismissed in an innocuous sentence: "Doctors, medical supplies and other aids may not be available to everyone for days or even weeks in some areas...
...Neither side as yet has tested such an explosion, but it is feasible, according to Dr...
...Putting people in shelters changes the calculus of war itself...
...Taken up in dust and debris, these bits of radioactive particles fall back to earth and do their damage...
...Two weeks after the Defense Department's program was anounced by Gilpatric, the Administration finally issued its long-talked about booklet, "Fallout Protection: What to Know and Do About Nuclear Attack...
...Despite all the Time, Life, and Associated Press propaganda, a gnawing doubt gained momentum...
...Emphasis added...
...Official Washington refuses to engage in debate on this vital problem...
...The Soviets presumably would be knocked out by our retaliatory power and would not be able to deliver another blow...
...The Russians could explode their bombs in the air, rather than on the surface...
...If the nation were "sheltered," the same result could be achieved from a 40,000 megaton drop...
...In the light of this, to engage in the game of numbers, to tarry over "idiot arithmetic," is short-sighted folly...
...30, 19G1 and again recently, there was much talk of a "clean" bomb—in which almost all of the energy would be released by fusion...
...Why not build them, then, and save "ten or fifteen million lives...
...This soothed some liberals who felt that private shelters discriminated against the poor, since they could not afford them or did not own their own homes...
...Boasts and counter-boasts...
...The forty-eight page folder that was finally fashioned by the Civil Defense Committee of the National Academy of Sciences and Dr...
...In November, 1961, the Kennedy Administration, according to the Chicago Sun-Times correspondent Thomas B. Ross, took "a hard second look at its civil defense program for fear it is getting out of hand...
...The President repeated again what Secretary of Defense McNamara had said months before, that there was no realistic protection against blast...
...The public had not responded as the civil defense lobbyists had hoped...
...But there is considerable agreement that she could have that totally destructive capacity before the end of this decade...
...Louis Post-Dispatch, the Christian Science Monitor, and a number of other papers ran "sober articles pointing to dangers that had been overlooked in the "hard sell" approach...
...Neither the civil-defense-as-a-deter-rent theory nor family fallout insurance seemed to make sense to many people...
...Using the computer method so favored by civil defense advocates, shelter for twenty million people for one-fourth or one-fifth the total time is around-the-clock shelter for four million to five million people...
...No American that I have spoken to who was at all serious about the matter believed that any U.S...
...A one hundred-megaton bomb, says Scientific American, would set an area of 15,000 square miles afire (2,000 square miles larger than the state of Vermont) and deprive millions in crowded areas of oxygen...
...The cost of fabricating larger bombs is not so much greater than the expense of smaller ones as one might presume...
...Kennedy...
...What has emerged is a tepid instruction booklet that greatly minimizes the known dangers of nuclear war...
...Columnists like Marquis Childs, John Crosby, and Jack Mabley debunked the shelter program...
...if more than half of our population would be killed in retaliation...
...The new booklet says that death is certain for those who receive "an exposure of 1,000 roentgens...
...Theoretically, if you put a man in A fallout shelter with a sufficient factor of protection—and he faces no other equally perilous dangers—he can survive the fallout danger...
...But government reports published in 1957, 1959, and 1961 insist that these radioactive elements would harm people, and in very definite ways...
...He indicates that there are no practice alerts in Moscow, no outward sign of even the most rudimentary preparations against nuclear blast and fallout, and no evidence of construction of shelters visible to foreign military experts who have traveled through the Soviet Union...
...But we do know that the kind of situation toward which we are heading is basically unstable—that any major rocking of the boat, whether accidental, by the action of a third power, or by escalation, can trigger it," he said...
...I believe such a startling change in policy would, in fact, accelerate the arms race unduly...
...Clark, a bomb containing 1,000 tons of heavy water with a sodium blanket, and "assuming one-tenth of the radioactive sodium formed actually reached the ground in this area (200,000 square miles) [would produce an] average radiation dose [of] a million roentgens...
...Even the top government officials seemed to have little faith in the idea, for as late as a few months ago not a single one of the fourteen high officials of the National Security Council had built a shelter for his own family...
...Clark says that a heavy water bomb could be produced with a boron blanket...
...A spontaneous women's movement, initiated in Washington, spread to fifty-eight cities where thousands of women picketed for peace on November 1. Their simple appeal to "end the arms race, save the human race," received unexpectedly extensive and sympathetic treatment in the press and on radio and television, and evoked well-publicized replies from both Mrs...
...the enemy would be safe...
...The civil defense budget, which amounted to only 160-odd million annually during the Eisenhower years, was slated for an increase to $700 million, but it was still far short of the amount Chet Holifield or Nelson Rockefeller wanted...
...This would destroy all animal life including people in an average basement bomb shelter, all active vegetation, and nearly all seeds...
...One hundred and eighty million, he concludes, "is too high...
...The antimissile-missile would be answered by an anti-anti-missile-missile, and the neutron bomb would escalate the arms race to a still higher peak of terror...
...Furthermore, nowhere does the folder estimate the overall scope of a Soviet attack...
...When columnist Ann Landers encouraged one of her inquiring readers to build a nuclear retreat, she received thousands of letters...
...Relatively little radioactivity results from fusion, but fission products emit alpha, beta, and gamma rays, which are the source of our fallout problem...
...The revised Administration emphasis on community shelters repaired some defects in the shelter program and answered effective criticisms by critics like Holifield...
...If we "harden" our missile sites, the Soviets doubtless begin planning to deliver bigger bombs that can blast them out...
...General Carl Spaatz, retired Air Force Chief of Staff, pointed out in 1960: "It will be particularly important for us to know from now on whether the Soviet Union is building civilian shelters for its own people...
...What military purpose would that serve...
...The Soviets immediately announced their decision to keep men in their armed services who were scheduled to be released, and hardened their attitude towards a pact to suspend nuclear tests...
...but Washington's clamor for bigger and better civil defense has no counterpart here...
...But the Atomic Energy Commission handbook, "The Effects of Nuclear War," in 1957 said that a dose of 270 to 330 roentgens would make everyone sick and kill twenty per cent of those exposed...
...Here are just a few shifts in Soviet war policy that can make up for our shelter "advantage": % The Soviets can build bigger bombs—100-megaton, 1,000-megaton, and upwards, until the shelters we depend on today become as vulnerable and outdated as the evacuation concept of a few years ago...
...In the calculus of war, every action has a reaction, every challenge a response...
...David R. Inglis, a prominent nuclear physicist associated with the Argonne Laboratory...
...Premier Khrushchev, speaking to British Laborite Konni Zilliacus, said: "When we proposed negotiations and a peace treaty, we were met with saber-rattling, increases in defense budgets and armed forces, and threats of war...
...Other, perhaps more startling, changes in weaponry are doubtless on the drawing board, each capable of changing the calculus of war and escalating the arms race still further...
...The capacity of military science for innovation seems limitless...
...In a recent speech Holifield struck an appealing note when he said: "Many individual families do not have the economic means [to build shelters...
...We believe that this acceptance would substantially increase the likelihood of war—a war which would be permanently fatal to our democratic society, even if not to all of us...
...If you calculate the effects of such structures in a vacuum, you get a nice mark for "saves...
...What is to prevent the Soviets, if they know that Americans are burrowed into shelters, from increasing the fission yield...
...If the slanted propaganda could be sifted out and the program presented in modest terms, why not accept a plan which would protect an undetermined number of Americans...
...As the Washington Post pointed out in an editorial December 31, 1961: "This tends to encourage an illusion of safety where there is no safety...
...Surface blasts produce more fallout because they scoop up tens of thousands of tons of earth and debris, which soon fall back to earth...
...Will we, then, continue digging deeper, building ever more powerful structures, until at last we live in underground fortresses and factories, hundreds of feet below the surface...
...Two hun-dren professors did the same thing in Cleveland...
...1953—Soviet Union explodes first thermonuclear weapon, raising potential destructive power...
...The Defense Department's folder is devoted almost entirely to the hazards of early fallout radiation...
...The technical problem of delivering these giant bombs may present a more serious obstacle, but that, too, can almost certainly be solved...
...On December 8, Premier Khrushchev in Moscow boasted that Russia has bombs even larger than one hundred megatons...
...Khrushchev and Mrs...
...You would first start a massive shelter program, but by the time you had finished you'd find you were facing the counter-weapons to such protection, and what appears to be a short-run security turns into a long-range increase of the danger...
Vol. 26 • February 1962 • No. 2
