Rx for Earth

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Preventing nuclear war is the most important ecological, political, and moral issue of our time.

The facts are these. One: Nuclear war would be the most devastating holocaust the world has ever known. It's even possible that an atomic Armageddon would eliminate life on this planet. Two: The chances for nuclear warwhether accidental or deliberate-are currently increasing because the two superpowers are starting to move from a deterrence capability to a first-strike stance . . . that is, from weapons that are most effective as defensive guardians of one's own nation to those that, by design, would be most-or, in some cases, only-effective if used to initiate a global war.
On the other hand, although all of us often feel overwhelmed and powerless in the face of this massive threat, only all of us can deter it. So we've provided an analysis of what individuals can do to help prevent a nuclear war.
We will begin at the end-by discussing the atomic holocaust itself. Ignoring the possible consequences of such a conflict-just because they aren't pleasurable to think about-is a sure way to increase the chances that we will have to face them.

Part I: The Consequences of Nuclear War

Nearly all the nuclear weapons in strategic arsenals are fission-fusion-fission devices, capable of vastly greater explosive power than either of the two weapons that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A fissionable plutonium device fuses deuterium and tritium (these isotopes of hydrogen give such a weapon the name hydrogen bomb), which in turn causes a shell of uranium to fission. With this methodology, weapons with power equal to that of more than 20,000,000 tons (20 megatons) of TNT have been exploded. For comparison, the first fission explosion at Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, yielded about 20,000 tons (20 kilotons) of TNT equivalent. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were about 13 and 22 kilotons, respectively.

Most of the strategic weapons poised for use by the two superpowers are not the tremendously powerful multimegaton devices, though. The arsenals consist largely of bombs that would yield between 200 kilotons and one megaton in explosive potential, though a few of the antiquated very large bombs are still deployed. Improved accuracy has made the huge weapons generally unnecessary for striking protected targets, and a blanket attack with several small weapons is expected to be more effective against urban or industrial areas than a single very large bomb would be. In fact, eight 40-kiloton bombs, equal to 320,000 tons of TNT, would wipe out as much area as would a single 1-megaton weapon that's the equivalent of 1,000,000 tons.

WAR

To estimate what the effects of an all-out nuclear war might be, some assumptions must be made about how and when it would take place: how many weapons, what targets, whether the warheads burst in the air or on the ground, what wind patterns prevail, what time of day, etc. In The Aftermath: The Human and Ecological Consequences of Nuclear War, the Ambio Advisory Group of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences describes one possible scenario. The attack takes place at 11:00 AM New York time (6:00 PM Moscow time) on a weekday in June and involves the use of about half of the available arsenals: 14,747 warheads of about 5,742 megatons. Ground bursts are used for 4,970 warheads (1,941 megatons) targeted at cities in the Northern Hemisphere, 3,136 bombs (701 megatons) are detonated in the air over industrial and energy targets in both hemispheres, 6,620 weapons totaling 2,960 megatons are exploded on the ground at military targets (including civilian airports that can handle jets), and 21 warheads of 140 megatons are used to close maritime straits.

All cities of greater than 100,000 population in the Northern Hemisphere and greater than 500,000 in the Southern Hemisphere are targets, and the scientists estimate that more than half of those urban residents-in the neighborhood of 750,000,000 peoplewould die from the immediate blast, thermal, and radiation effects, and 340,000,000 would be injured. This coincides with the estimates of other scientific teams that in a war involving about half of the available strategic warheads, between 750,000,000 and 1,250,000,000 people will die in short order.

And what of those who survive the immediate effects of the war? Clouds of radioactive dust will spread downwind from the locations of ground bursts-notably the sites of missile silos. In the U.S., many of the roughly 100,000,000 people who survive the initial attack will be killed by the radioactivity within four days of the conflagration. At least 600 rems will fall on most of North and South Dakota, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska; on much of Delaware, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Montana, New York, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming; and on parts of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Tennessee, Texas, and Vermont . . . from an attack just on U.S. strategic missile silos. This amount of radiation will kill more than half of those exposed. Hot spots, where the fallout will quickly be lethal to most of those exposed, will occur from unpredictable events such as rainstorms. Those affected will perish from burns to the skin or from drinking contaminated water.

After the initial week, the number of new casualties from fallout will drop considerably, but the nuclear debris will continue to keep the land in the Northern Hemisphere blanketed in radiation for centuries. In fact, the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere could receive an average dose of 50 rads: Most of the cropland in the Midwest and across the middle- and northeastern U.S. will be too radioactive to allow farming. According to Ambio, if all North Americans stay indoors in the weeks after the attack, 17,000,000 are still likely to die from acute radiation exposure . . . most of them in the U.S. Three percent of the survivors will become sterile, another 1 °7o will die of cancer within 20 years, and the descendants of another 1% will suffer genetic defects within two generations. Across the Atlantic, the entirety of Europe will be so contaminated as to require complete evacuation-an option that would be impossible after nuclear war.

Radiation will not take the majority of lives after a nuclear war, though. Tens of millions of people in the U.S. alone will be injured, many of them with severe burns. Most hospitals and nearly all burn centers are located in urban areas, and it is estimated that 70% of the facilities will be destroyed and their doctors killed. In any event, power won't be available to operate any sophisticated medical equipment that survives the attack. Disease and infection are likely to become rampant: Some estimate that as many as 45,000,000 of the survivors of the attack on the U.S. will die within the first year from cholera, malaria, plague, shigellosis, typhoid fever, yellow fever, tuberculosis, etc.