UNFATHOMABLE RISK

...What will it matter that our lights and telephones are out while dozens of cities are being reduced to rubble...

...Were it not for this ozone shield, "life as currently known could not exist except possibly in the ocean," scientists Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan wrote in a study for the Pentagon entitled The Effects of Nuclear Weapons...

...otherwise, ozone depletion is not believed to be likely...

...Unfathomable Risk Stumbling into the Twilight Zone BY SIDNEY LENS From 1945, when the first atomic bomb was exploded at Alamo-gordo, New Mexico, until 1963, when a treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union banned further atmospheric testing, some 282 U.S...

...Are we in an "emergency...

...At a point in space 248 miles above the Earth," William J. Broad wrote recently in Science 83 magazine, "the rocket turned into a ball of fire" and "something so unexpected happened that today, two decades later, military planners still ponder its dark implications for the fighting of nuclear war...

...Such equanimity would be admirable were it not so willfully misplaced...

...Just four years later, in 1979, the National Academy of Sciences took a much more sanguine view of the potential danger to the ozone shield, concluding that it would take 1,000 or more one-megaton warheads detonated at an altitude of at least fifteen miles to deplete the ozone to a serious degree...

...Late-model automobiles equipped with microprocessors would stall...

...His latest book, "The Maginot Line Syndrome: America's Hopeless For-eign Policy," was published recently by Bal-linger...

...Now the Reagan Administration has proposed to elevate the arms race to a new level—outer space— about which we know even less than we do about earthbound warfare...

...It wasn't until 1962—seventeen years after the Alamogordo test—that scientists picked up on the potential consequences of EMP...

...But few were aware of another effect called electromagnetic pulse (EMP...

...In 1975, for example, a National Academy of Sciences report warned that a nuclear war would seriously damage the ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation...

...A one-megaton bomb carried by a space satellite and exploded 250 miles over Omaha could immobilize telephones, radio, television, computers, radar systems, and power grids all over the United States...

...The restoration of normal service would take hours, days, perhaps weeks...

...It represented, he said, "a revolutionary change in the relations of man and the universe...

...On a July evening of that year, a rocket bearing a nuclear bomb was propelled into the skies above Johnston Island in the Pacific...

...Even if not permanently damaged," Princeton University physicist Daniel L. Stein wrote in a recent issue of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, "computer memories would be erased, digital systems might process incorrect signals, trajectories of missiles in flight could be altered, and power outages might occur...

...Are they still blissfully unaware of other primary effects, let alone secondary and indirect consequences of nuclear detonation...

...With loss of radio contact and radar readings, aircraft would search desperately for emergency landing sites...

...Communications between the Pentagon and its bases at home and abroad would lapse...

...Almost every projection has later been discredited...

...If the Nineteenth Century inventors of the machine gun had blundered, if the producers of a World War II fighter plane had built a faulty machine, the results might have been tragic, but they would not have been calamitous...

...It cannot rationally be argued that such risks are worth taking to ensure (or at least increase the likelihood of) survival, when the risks themselves make it more likely that neither side will survive...

...It should come as no surprise that the Government's response to the EMP problem has focused primarily on the military aspects...

...What difference will it make, after all, that the President of the United States is unable to communicate with Strategic Air Command headquarters in Omaha while scores of millions of us are dying...

...We wondered," said Claud L. Beckham, who worked on the ABM, "whether we were going to knock out our own weapons system...

...In a nuclear exchange of 10,000 megatons, they concluded, ozone depletion could reach 70 per cent in the Northern Hemisphere and 40 per cent in the Southern Hemisphere...

...Generating electromagnetic pulse is one of the primary effects of a nuclear explosion, but America's best scientific minds were all but oblivious to the danger for almost a quarter of a century after the first atomic blast...

...Had today's solid-state circuitry been in widespread use at the time, the consequences of the blast would have been much more serious...

...But there are other considerations: The significance of the EMP phenomenon lies not only in the problems it poses directly, but in its reminder to us that the nuclear age confronts us with uncertainties of a magnitude we have never experienced before...

...No conceivable technological miscalculation could have spelled the end of a nation, or of a species, or of a planet...

...In Hawaii, 800 miles from the test site, some extraordinary phenomena were observed one second after the bomb went off: Fuses blew, power lines went dead, 300 streetlights were extinguished, burglar alarms were set off...

...interceptors might destroy incoming Soviet missiles, they would simultaneously release enough EMP to put the United States out of business, at least temporarily...

...Scientists saw little reason for concern about EMP...

...Suddenly, EMP posed a critical danger to the civilian economy as well as the military machine...

...they by no means demonstrate that ozone depletion is impossible, and even slight depletion could cause an increase in the incidence of skin cancer...

...In a summary of the new findings, however, the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment cautioned that while "these changes cast doubt on the likelihood of a serious ozone depletion as a consequence of nuclear war...

...The tendency since 1945 (when the U.S...

...When we contemplate the horror of nuclear holocaust, the danger of EMP disruption seems trivial and irrelevant...

...economy...

...It is simply impossible to calculate the immediate and long-range consequences of nuclear war...

...Even in 1945, Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson understood that the atom was not merely another tool that puts us in harm's way— like fire or bullets or poison gas...

...The governments of the United States and the Soviet Union have subjected humanity to risks that are not only unreasonable but unfathomable...

...What is surprising is how little we know...

...In a recent article for The New Republic, the imperturbable Charles Krauthammer airily dismissed the apocalyptic alarm of those who believe the nuclear arms race could culminate in the end of civilization on this planet...

...The devastation wrought by these devices was widely known, and so was the danger of the deadly radiation they released...

...It is the failure to recognize that revolutionary change that makes the governments of the superpowers the most irresponsible in history...

...Steps have been taken to "harden" components of the command and control system, including one command aircraft and some telephone lines (by substituting glass fiber for metallic wires), so that they will be immune to disruption by electromagnetic pulse...

...In addition to the consequences of EMP and the possible threat to the ozone shield, there are vast areas of ignorance about the potential effects of nuclear war on the planet's ecosystems, on the gene pool of humans and other species, on the very habit ability of the Earth...

...Yes, but no more than other civilizations, since all are susceptible to destruction...

...Early in 1976, Congress ended the Safeguard program...

...What is so instructive about EMP is that it totally confounds official plans for "limited" or "protracted" nuclear war, which depend on the maintenance of foolproof communications...

...How many other dangers of that sort exist, undetected and undetectable until the ultimate disaster is at hand...

...EMP belongs to an entirely new class of dangers that can never be fully anticipated, tested, or even known...

...As if matters weren't bad enough, each superpower is steadily raising the level of risk...

...Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, while insisting that "major improvements have been made" in coping with the EMP problem, concedes that "it would be naive to say that economical and implementable solutions are at hand...

...But when solid-state integrated circuitry came into common use in the 1970s, it turned out to be a million times more vulnerable to EMP than vacuum tubes had been...

...Billions of dollars have already been sunk into such efforts, and billions more are sure to follow...

...This is an area where research continues, and further changes should not be surprising...

...military underestimated by a factor of ten the number of casualties that would be claimed by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima) has been to minimize the scope of the damage that could be inflicted...

...It posed no direct threat to human life, and in the age of the vacuum tube, Sidney Lens is the senior editor of The Pro-gressive...

...nuclear weapons were detonated—two-thirds of them above ground...

...even the threat to power grids and communications networks was less than catastrophic...

...By then, it was clear that a single Soviet weapon could disable the entire U.S...

...Neither the Government nor the media understood the full significance of the incident—the press referred to it as a nuclear "shock wave"— but we know today that the disruption was caused by a surge of electromagnetic energy of up to 50,000 volts per meter, traveling at the speed of light...

...When the $5.7 billion Safeguard antibal-listic missile (ABM) system was developed in 1969, the Pentagon's experts realized that while nuclear-tipped U.S...