Amerikai Magyar Szó, 1961. július-december (10. évfolyam, 28-52. szám)

1961-11-23 / 47. szám

AMERIKAI MAGYAR SZÓ

Thursday, Nov. 23, 1961

only speak In concrete terms of the nature of nuclear siege and of the post-attack world.

LET US say you live or work in a major city, a likely target for a retaliatory strike following some punitive strike of our own. In that case, the hopeful 15 to 25 minutes’ warning time (this is optional: a few minutes, according to Representative Holifield, is closer to the truth for most cities) might as well be used for prayer. Rush hour in New York is longer than that and calls only a small percentage of the population underground, but it is a crush. Imagine those subways when the warning comes. Imagine trying to close the fire door to keep the oxygen from being sucked out in the fire storm ( as it'was from the Hamburg bomb “Shelters in World War II). But then imagine what good it does to get inside anyway when a 10-megaton bomb will exterminate from blast effect alone all but the most deeply sheltered things within a radius of five miles of ground zero, and produce a crater 250 feet deep and a half-mile wide; when a 15-megaton bomb, in the 1954 Marshall Island tests, vaporized an island 12 miles long and

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left in its place a hole in the ocean floor a mile long and 175 feet across; when a 20-megaton bomb dropped on Cambridge City Hall would totally destroy even the most heavily reinforced concrete sti'uctureí and deep blast shelters in Cambridge, all of downtown Boston, Brookline, Somerville and large parts of Newton, Watertown, and Charlestown as far as the Navy Yard (4-mile radius), and leave a 300 foot- deep crater extending from just beyond Harvard’s Freshmen Union to within two blocks of MIT, encompassing the entire Central Square business district and surrounding neigborhood (diameter 1 mile). This same bomb would reach out another two miles in all directions (to 6 miles) to destroy all brick buildings and any basement shelters under them.

The following is all predicated on the use of a 20-megaton bomb, although recent developments indicate that even iarger ones will be us^d.

Lung injury in the 6-mi!e area from sheer mast, concussion alone would lead to total casualties. Out to a radius of 10 miles, all frame buildings would be totally destroyed, and any shelters under them in grave danger. Between 8 to 10 miles out of the center, deep blast shelters would help, but basement fallout shelters would be of no use. Out to 15 miles, much damage will be done by flying objécts, including, according to tests, flying, human bodies thrown through the air by the initial blast.

Blast represents about a third of a nuclear bomb’s energy. Another third is radioactivity released in two forms — instantaneous, fatal radiation, intense enough to penetrate more than two feet of concrete or earth, extending out to a radius of about 214 miles; and the mushroom cloud of radioactive debris. This goes in part into the stratosphere to be equally distributed over the earth after decaying somewhat;

SOURCES

Statements in this article about attack conditions are drawn from Harrison Brown and James Real, Community of Fear; a Report to the Kansas Council of Churches by its Special Committee on Civil Defense; and an analysis by Professor Gordon S. Christiansen of the Chemistry Department of Connecticut College dealing in detail with three possible levels of attack as they would affect New London, Conn., and given to a meeting of community leaders there.

Christiansen's calculations on fallout, blast and fire are based on data given in the AEC report on fallout and other effects of the “Bravo” tests at Bikini in 1954; the AEC report on the Hiroshima, bombing: the estimates of damage from a “medium" attack published in 1959 by the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy; the report of the 1960 White House Conference on Fallout Protection, especially the data given by Me Cone and Leo Hough of the OCDM; and analyses of same by private scientists.

•—Roger Hagan

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find in part into “local” fallout, which is distributed in two patterns. The major one is elliptical, about 250 miles by 50 miles, following the prevailing winds. The second is circular, with a 25-mile radius.

Now, within this 25-mile area, large particles would begin to rain down almost immediately after detonation. In an hour, the layer of wildly radioactive dust would be deep, and the level of radioactivity would be something on the order of twentythousand roentgens per hour. — (A dose of 300 to 500 roentgens has a 50 per cent probability of being fatal; 700—900 roentgens is alwways fatal.) Thus anyone in the 25-mile radius would receive a surely fatal dose in two minutes of exposure. In the elliptical pattern, in an area receiving fallout in from 1 to 2 hours from detonation time (considering the amount of fallout and rate of decay), the fatal exposure would be 10 to 20 minutes.

After 7 hours, the level at the fringes of the 25- mile circle would have decayed to 2,000 roentgens per hour (nearer the center it would be much hotter); after 2 days, about 200/hr.; 2 weeks, 20/hr.; in four months, 2/hr. This gives some idea of how the decay works.

An auto or the first floor of a home would cut the exposure a person in it would receive by half. A basement would cut it by a factor of from 10 to 100. A good fallout shelter would decrease exposure by up to a thousand. However, harmful effects of radiation arc cumulative although not simply additive (over a period of time a greater dose is more tolerable than all at once).

NOW SUPPOSE you do not live or work in a city, but 25 miles out of ground zero—say (using Cambridge City Hall) near the New Hampshire border, or in the town of Harvard. You hear the explosion down Boston way. Let us hope you do not see the flash or the ensuing fireball, for an uncontrollable reflex

would have caused you to look towards it; you would have had an impression of something many times brighter than the noon sun—and then you would have- been permanently blinded, even at distances of 40 miles from the explosion (i. e., in Worcester or in Manchester, N.H.). In that condition, you, and people all around you. would be utterly helpless, un- aole to find your way to shelter and blocking roads with your vehicles.

But suppose you do not -see the flash, only hear the blast. You come outside to see what it was and stay long enough to be exposed to fallout for 30 seconds. You would have received about 150 roentgens. If you then go outside and take another 30 seconds looking for your portable radio or your children, you pick up another 75 roentgens. If you now go immediately to a near-perfcct. self-contained deep blast shelter and stay there from then on, you would be in great danger of dying from radiological exposure, having received 225 roentgens in the first minute. (They are not your first, either, if you have had X-rays.) If you stay in the shelter constantly for the next 6 months (assuming you have that much supply of uncontaminated air and food), you receive about 22 more roentgens. Only about 2.5 r. would come after the first two weeks, but this of course does not mean that you can emerge in two weeks. The 2.5 r. is what arrives through the shelter, assuming a protection factor of 4,000. If you go to a fair basement fallout shelter with a protection factor of 250, you wrould have received 600 roentgens at the end of 6 months. (The best basement shelter recommended by the OCDM, an expensive affair, has a protection factor of about 1,000.)

Unless you had the radio on when the w’arning came (will the announcement be made if there is any doubt?), and you were within fifteen or 25 minutes (on clogged roads or walking) of a fall- cut shelter to which you have certain access (viz., not your business associte^s or your neighbor’s) in the non-target area, you would probably have an experience like the above (to speak only of radiological experience). All this applies only to exposure; ingestion of any, even the tiniest particle, of fallout, even months after its original formation, will almost certainly add the fatal increment to the cumulative total of unavoidable damage, for it radiates constantly in the tissue and there is no protection factor of clothing; nor can it be gotten rid of.

If the Cambridge City Hall bomb is not the only one dropped on the United States in the attack, but only part of a large strike on many Eastern cities,

the fallout level rises alarmingly, and the fallout patterns cover most of the Northeastern states. In such a situation, a person could get no more than a harmless dose if he stayed in an excellent shelter, from detonation moment on, for 6 months; but he obviously would starve or die of disease, and no help would come from other people staying likewise. He might be willing to leave for one hour after two weeks, then for one hour each week for six months. (What sustenance could be found in the radius of a half-hour’s walk in a devastated area—and radiation in heavy doses such as those of the first weeks also kills most vegetation—is not clear, and that help would come in from any place that didn’t need it itself, is doubtful.) At that, he would receive about 150 r. in 6 months’ time—75 of them coming through the shelter, the rest on his trips out. This much would.be devastating to a child, but an adult might be willing to risk it for his family, provided he forego future children and accept mfld damage. •

DURING the second year after an attack on 71 U.S. metropolitan areas and some military targets with a (very conservative) total of 550 megatons (1959 Holifield Committee guess), the average level of fallout radioactivity in New England would be about 0.7 r. per hour, a level that still denies human occupancy. A few months out in this would be very risky, and certainly sickening. Even in the fifth year, a person out for a year would receive 800 r. which because not received all at onee, would rarely be fatal but would cause some sickness. (It should be emphasized that persons suffering even mild radiation effects are very susceptible to disease, their resistance being destroyed.)

The radiation picture is complicated by the likelihood that repeat salvos at intervals of a few weeks will be programed on invulnerable-type weapons (roving subs, etc.) by any enemy wishing to be threatening and learning that we are ready for a few weeks undergoimd.

I have not mentioned the last third of the energy produced by the nuclear bomb, and must do so briefly. The> heat of the bomb comes in two pulses, one coming immediately and lasting millionths of a second, but so hot it vaporizes all matter near it. The second comes from the fireball, reaching a peak a few seconds later and lasting half a minute or more. Let us return to our Boston area man in the far town—Beverly, or Andover, or Lowell, or Brockton— about 25 miles away, and anyone closer in. If he saw the flash, but shielded his eyes, his clothes would have caught on fire, h.is exposed flesh charred, his frame house burst into flames (thus shutting of the basement shelter), his lawn, his shrubs and his trees have caught fire, and his asphalt driveway would melt (as would the roads out of town i.

ABOUT 30 miles from center marks the edge of the next phenomenon, the fire storm. All wooded areas and towns in e circle from New Hampshire to near Worcester to two-third of the way to Providence and nearly to Plymouth would form one huge fire, swept toward the center by 200-mile-an- hour wind. This fire would be many times greater than any forest fire, and would cease only with the exhaustion of all combustible material. The light rainfall accompanying it would be ineffective in controlling it and would merely bring down noxious products, like fallout and the hundred thousand tons of nitric acid formed in the bla t. This firestorm would probably consume the oxygen that anyone in a deep shelter might need.

I cut short this discussion, largely ignoring the

problems of survival in the post-attack period, such as reclaiming arable land from lingering radioactivity (e.g., by growing 40 inedible crops on it, which takes 40 years in Now England). Obviously there would be political, social and economic chaos, with distribution and law-enforcement and public-health systems gone. Food and water supplies would be rendered useless if net vaporized; the denuded land would erode and W'ash fallout down to double and triple concentration in low (farm) areas. With water and sewage systems destroyed, disease would spread. And the first people on the scene would not be the Red Cross but, more likely, roving bands of crazed, short lived humans marauding shelters for food or help.

One often hears hopeful noises about reducing these affects by combining pas ive with active defense—active defense being the anti-missile missile. It is not easy to get unequivocal statements about the prospects for the anti-missile missile, but according to a scientist working on it for one of t.he missile-