Aucbvax.1428
fa.arms-d
utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!CAULKINS@USC-ECL
Wed May 27 08:20:17 1981
Tues PM;Weapons Crisis Week at Stanford
This is a brief account of my impressions of the first
evening:
Kosta Tsipis (MIT) spoke first. He did not talk down to us ! He gave
a brilliantly lucid description of how nuclear weapons work, including
the binding energy curve and a modest amount of mathematics.
He went on to discuss gross effects; thermal radiation, blast,
and fallout. All of this can be dug out of "The Effects of Nuclear
Weapons" but he made it quite graphic.
Two things were novel for me:
1) Urban firestorms will deplete the oxygen; blast shelters in
the firestorm area won't work unless they have 10s of hours or days
worth of bottled oxygen.
2) Ozone layer depletion
Each megaton detonated produces 10**32 molecules of oxides
of nitrogen. The fireballs carry these up to the ozone layer.
If 50% of the weapons of the US and USSR are detonated the ozone layer
in the northern hemisphere will be depleted by 80%; in the southern
hemisphere by 30-40%. The ozone layer will take 5 years to return
to normal.
20% depletion will increase solar UV to a point that will blind
diurnal animals (those that
sleep at night and move by day).
Goodbye birds, hello rats and cockroaches. A massive collapse
of vision dependent higher life form ecosystems.
Tsipis isdoing some experiments to confirm this effect.
Herb Abrams (director of Radiology at Harvard Med School) spoke
second.
He talked about the negative synergism of the post-attack environment.
Some high (low ?) points:
What do you do with 150 million corpses ? Insects can survive 1,000 REM;
rats almost as much. There will be a population explosion of
corpse-eating 'vermin'. Insect vectored disease willincrease rapidly
This will be made worse by the absence of birds (see above).
Medical capability deal with all this will be down to less than 20%
of pre-attack levels. Patient/doctor ratios will go from 4/1 to 95/1.
Present populations have low natural immunity to diptheria, whooping
cough and other diseases; these are likely to be epidemic and
fatal to many. This is especially true because of radiation
damaged immune systems.
Food supplies will not be available; there is a negative correlation
between areas of population density and food production. The
transportation infrastructure will be severely damaged; in particular
the availability ofliquid fuels is very problematic.
All in all, not a very pleasant evening. HOW DO WE SOLVE THIS
PROBLEM ?
Dave C
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