posted August 12, 2011 12:18 AM            

By Russell Seitz

"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,
higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other
matters where the stakes are not as great."

---Carl Sagan, Foreign Affairs,
Winter 1983 -84

The end of the world isn't what it used to be. "Nuclear Winter," the
theory launched three years ago this week that predicted a nuclear exchange
as small as 100 megatons ("a pure tactical war, in Europe, say" in Carl
Sagan's phrase), in addition to its lethal primary effects, would fill the
sky with smoke and dust, ushering in life-extinguishing sub-zero darkness,
has been laid to rest in the semantic potter's field alongside the "Energy
Crisis" and the "Population Bomb." Cause of death: notorious lack of
scientific integrity.
The Nuclear Winter conjecture has unraveled under scrutiny. Yet not
so long ago, policy analysts took it so seriously that there is reason to
examine how the powerful synergy of environmental concern and the politics
of disarmament drove some scientists to forge an unholy alliance with
Madison Avenue. Mere software has been advertised as hard scientific fact.
How did this polarization arise?
In 1982, a question arose within the inner circle of disarmament
activists: Could the moral force of Jonathan Schell's eloquent call to lay
down arms, "The Fate of the Earth," be transformed into a scientific
imperative? Peace-movement strategists wanted something new to dramatize
nuclear war's horrors. As Ralph K. White put it in his book "The Fearful
Warriors": "Horror is needed. The peace movement cannot do without it."
What they got was surreal -- a secular apocalypse.
A 1982 special issue of the Swedish environmental science journal
Ambio considered the environmental consequences of a nuclear war. This
special issue did little to evoke a mass response of the sort needed to
change the course of strategic doctrine. But one article contained the
seed of what would become Nuclear Winter.
Mr. Sagan seized upon an article by Messrs. Paul Crutzen and Steven
Birks that raised the question of a "Twilight at Noon" if the fires ignited
by nuclear holocaust were to convert much of the fuel in both woodlands and
cities into enough soot to enshroud the globe. In the hands of others
their concerns would be transformed into an exhortation.
The chilling climatic impact of this soot can be modeled with existing
software. The paper that resulted came to be known as TTAPS, after the
initials of its authors beginning with Richard Turco and ending with Carl
Sagan.
Audubon Society president Russell Peterson, whose wife was editor of
Ambio, sent the issue to Robert Scrivner of the Rockefeller Family Fund.
Mr. Scrivner convened an ad hoc consortium of foundations and scientific
groups with a bent for disarmament. Cornell astrophysicist and media
personality Carl Sagan assembled a scientific advisory board that drew
heavily from such organizations as the Union of Concerned Scientists,
Physicians for Social Responsibility, the Federation of American Scientists
and the Natural Resources Defense Council. Two-dozen foundations and more
than 100 scientists were recruited.

A BONE-DRY BILLIARD BALL

Nuclear Winter never existed outside of a computer, except as a
painting commissioned by a PR firm. Instead of an earth with continents
and oceans, the TTAPS model postulated a featureless, bone-dry billiard
ball. Instead of nights and days, it postulated 24-hour sunlight at one-
third strength. Instead of realistic smoke emissions, a 10-mile-thick soot
cloud magically materialized, creating an alien sky as black as the ink you
are reading. The model dealt with such complications as geography, winds,
sunrise, sunset and patchy clouds in a stunningly elegant manner -- they
were ignored. When later computer models incorporated these elements, the
flat black sky of TTAPS fell apart into a pale and broken shadow that
traveled less far and dissipated more quickly.
The TTAPS model entailed a long series of conjectures: if this much
smoke goes up, if it is this dense, if it moves like this, and so on. The
improbability of a string of 40 such coin tosses coming up heads approaches
that of a pat royal flush. Yet it was represented as a "sophisticated one-
dimensional model" -- a usage that is oxymoronic, unless applied to Twiggy.
To the limitations of the software were added those of the data. It
was an unknown and very complex topic, hard data was scant, so guesstimates
prevailed. Not only were these educated guesses rampant throughout the
process, but it was deemed prudent, given the gravity of the subject, to
lean toward the worst-case end of the spectrum for dozens of the numbers
involved. Political considerations subliminally skewed the model away from
natural history, while seeming to make the expression "nuclear freeze" a
part of it.
"The question of peer review is essential. That is why we have
delayed so long in the publication of these dire results," said Carl Sagan
in late 1983. But instead of going through the ordinary peer-review
process, the TTAPS study had been conveyed by Mr. Sagan and his colleagues
to a chosen few at a closed meeting in April 1983. Despite Mr. Sagan's
claim of responsible delay, before this peculiar review process had even
begun, an $80,000 retainer was paid to Porter-Novelli Associates, a
Washington, D.C., public-relations firm. More money was spent in the 1984
fiscal year on video and advertising than on doing the science.
The meeting did not go smoothly; most participants I interviewed did
not describe the reception accorded the Nuclear Winter theory as cordial or
consensual. The proceedings were tape recorded, but Mr. Sagan has
repeatedly refused to release the meeting's transcript. (The organizers
have said it was closed to the press to avoid sensationalism and premature
disclosure.) According to Dr. Kosta Tsipis of MIT, even a Soviet scientist
at the meeting said, "You guys are fools. You can't use mathematical
models like these to model perturbed states of the atmosphere. You're
playing with toys."
Having premiered on Oct. 30, 1983, as an article by Mr. Sagan in the
Sunday supplement Parade, the TTAPS results finally appeared in Science
magazine (Dec. 23, 1983). This is the very apex of scholarly publication,
customarily reserved for a review article expounding a mature addition to
an existing scientific disipline -- one that has withstood the testing of
its data and hypotheses by reproducible experiments recorded in the peer-
reviewed literature. Yet what became of the many complex and uncertain
variables necessary to operate the Nuclear Winter model? They were not set
forth in the text -- 136 pages of data were instead reduced to a reference
that said, simply, "In preparation." The critical details were missing.
They have languished in unpublished obscurity ever since.
The readers of Science were still bewildered when, just one week
later, another article by Mr. Sagan -- "Nuclear War and Climatic
Catastrophe" -- appeared in Foreign Affairs. Mr. Sagan argued that,
because of the TTAPS results, "What is urgently required is a coherent,
mutually agreed upon, long-term policy for dramatic reductions in nuclear
armaments..."
In hastening to maximize the impact, Mr. Sagan made mistakes. While
he cited the following passage as coming from a companion piece in Science
that he had co-authored, it did not actually appear in the published
version of that article: "IN ALMOST ANY REALISTIC CASE involving nuclear
exchanges between the superpowers, global environmental changes sufficient
to cause an extinction event equal to or more severe than that of the close
of the Cretaceous when the dinosaurs and many other species died out are
likely. (Emphasis added)." The ominous rhetoric italicized in this
passage puts even the 100 megaton scenario of TTAPS on a par with the 100
million megaton blast of an asteroid striking the Earth. This astronomical
mega-hype failed to pass peer review and never appeared in Science. Yet,
having appeared in Foreign Affairs, it has been repeatedly cited in the
literature of strategic doctrine as evidence.
Rather than "higher standards of evidence," Mr. Sagan merely provided
testimonials. He had sent return-mail questionnaires to the nearly 100
participants at the April meeting, and edited the replies down to his
favorite two-dozen quotations. What became of the hard copy of the less
enthusiastic reports remains a mystery, but it is evident from subsequent
comments by their authors that TTAPS received less than the unanimous
endorsement of "a large number of scientists." Prof. Victor Weisskopf of
MIT, sized up the matter in early 1984: "Ah! Nuclear Winter! The science
is terrible, but, perhaps the psychology is good."
Many scientists were reluctant to speak out, perhaps for fear of being
denounced as reactionaries or closet Strangeloves. For example, physicist
Freeman Dyson of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton was
privately critical in early 1984. As he put it, "It's (TTAPS) an
absolutely atrocious piece of science, but I quite despair of setting the
public record straight....Who wants to be accused of being in favor of
nuclear war?"
Most of the intellectual tools necessary to demolish TTAPS's bleak
vision were already around then, but not the will to use them. From
respected scientists one heard this: "You know, I really don't think these
guys know what they're talking about" (Nobel laureate physicist Richard
Feynman); "They stacked the deck" (Prof. Michael McElroy, Harvard); and,
after a journalist's caution against four-letter words, "'Humbug' is six
[letters]" (Prof. Jonathan Katz, Washington University).
In 1985, a series of unheralded and completely unpublicized studies
started to appear in learned journals -- studies that, piece by piece,
started to fill in the blanks in the climate-modeling process that had
previously ben patched over with "educated" guesses.
The result was straightforward: As the science progressed and more
authentic sophistication was achieved in newer and more elegant models, the
postulated effects headed downhill. By 1986, these worst-case effects had
melted down from a year of arctic darkness to warmer temperatures than the
cool months in Palm Beach! A new paradigm of broken clouds and cool spots
had emerged. The once global hard frost had retreated back to the northern
tundra. Mr. Sagan's elaborate conjecture had fallen prey to Murphy's
lesser known Second Law: If everything MUST go wrong, don't bet on it.
By June 1986 it was over: In the Summer 1986 Foreign Affairs,
National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) scientists Starley Thompson
and Stephen Schneider declared, "...on scientific grounds the global
apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be
relegated to a vanishingly low level of probability."

Yet the activist wing of the international scientific estabishment had
already announced the results of the first generations of interdisciplinary
ecological and climatological studies based on Nuclear Winter. Journalists
paid more attention to the press releases than the substance of these
already obsolescent efforts at ecological modeling, and proceeded to inform
the public that things were looking worse than ever. Bold headlines
carried casualty estimates that ran into the proverbial "billions and
billions."

This process culminated in the reception given the 1985 report of the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS). Stressing the uncertainties that
plagued the calculations then and now, it scrupulously excluded the
expression "Nuclear Winter" from its 193 pages of sober text, but the
report's press release was prefaced "Nuclear Winter...'Clear Possibility.'"
Mr. Sagan construed the reports to constitute an endorsement of the theory.
But in February 1986, NCAR's Dr. Schneider quietly informed a
gathering at the NASA-Ames Laboratory that Nuclear Winter had succumbed to
scientific progress and that, "in a severe" 6,500-megaton strategic
exchange, "The Day After" might witness July temperatures upwards of 50-
plus degrees Fahrenheit in mid-America. The depths of Nuclear Winter could
no longer easily be distinguished from the coolest days of summer.
As the truth slowly emerged, private skepticism turned often to public
outrage, and not just among the "hawks." Prof. George Rathjens of MIT,
chairman of the Council for a Livable World, offered this judgement:
Nuclear Winter is the worst example of the misrepresentation of science to
the public in my memory."

THE POLITICS OF THE MATTER

On Jan. 23, 1986, the leading British scientific journal Nature
pronounced on the political erosion ofthe objectivitiy vital to the
scientific endeavor: "Nowhere is this more evident than in the recent
literature on 'Nuclear Winter,' research which has become notorious for its
lack of scientific integrity."
But it is by no means solely within the halls of science that
responsibility lies or where redress and the prevention of a recurrence
must be sought. Policy analysts have shown themselves to be the lawful
prety of software salesmen. They seem to be chronically incapable of
distinguishing where science leaves off and the polemical abuse of global-
systems modeling begins. The results of this confusion can be serious
indeed. Doesn't anybody remember the last example of the "Garbage In,
Garbage Out" phenomenon -- the "Energy Crisis"? That crisis also began as
a curve plotted by a computer. But it ended as "The Oil Glut." Factoids,
scientific or economic, have a strange life of their own; woe to the polity
that ignores the interaction of science, myth and the popular imagination
in the age of the electronic media.
To historians of science, the Nuclear Winter episode may seem a
bizarre comedy of manners; having known sin at Hiroshima, physics was bound
to run into advertising sooner or later. But what about the politics of
this issue? Does all this matter? Mr. Sagan evidently thinks it does.
His homiletic overkill has been relentless. An animated version of his
obsolete apocalypse has been added to his updated documentary "Cosmos -- A
Special Edition." This fall, prime-time audiences will watch in horror as
the airbrushed edge of nuclear darknes overspreads planet Earth. Marshall
McLuhan was right on the mark -- with television's advent, advertising has
become more important than products.
What is being advertised is not science but a pernicious fantasy that
strikes at the very foundation of crisis management, one that attempts to
the transform the Alliance doctrine of flexible response into a dangerous
vision. For despite its scientific demise, the specter of Nuclear Winter
is haunting Europe, Soviet propagandists have seized upon Nuclear Winter in
their efforts to debilitate the political will of the Alliance. What more
destabilizing fantasy than the equation of theater deterrence with a global
Gotterdammerung could they dream of? What could be more dangerous than to
invite the Soviets that the Alliance is self-deterred -- and thus at the
mercy of those who possess so ominous an advantage in conventional forces?
The Roman historian Livy observed that "where there is less fear,
there is generally less danger." Until those who have put activism before
objectivity come to apprehend this, nuclear illusions, some spontaneous and
some carefully fostered, will continue to haunt the myth-loving animal that
is man.

__________________

posted August 12, 2011 12:24 AM            

The recent winter solstice witnessed a 'Carl Sagan Blog-a-thon' .
So in celebration of Al Gore's pal, the late author of The Cold And The Dark there follows The Wall Street Journal's warmly cautionary Cold War reminder of how a campaign for the Nobel Peace prize on the Nuclear Freeze ticket devolved into a joke played at the expense of climate modeling's street cred on the eve of the global warming debate :The Melting of 'Nuclear Winter'
All that remains of Sagan's Big Chill are curves such as this , but history is full of prophets of doom who fail to deliver, not all are without honor in their own land. The 1983 'Nuclear Winter " papers in Science were so politicized that even the eminently liberal President of The Council for a Liveable World called "The worst example ofthe misrepesentation of science to the public in my memory." Among the authors was Stanford President Donald Kennedy. Today he edits Science , the nation's major arbiter of climate science--and policy.

Below, a case illustrating the mid-range of the ~.7 to ~1.6 degree C maximum cooling the 2006 studies suggest is superimposed in color on the Blackly Apocalyptic predictions published in Science Vol. 222, 1983 . They're worth comparing, because the range of soot concentrations in the new models overlaps with cases assumed to have dire climatic consequences in the widely publicized 1983 scenarios --

"Apocalyptic predictions require, to be taken seriously,higher standards of evidence than do assertions on other matters where the stakes are not as great." wrote Sagan in Foreign Affairs , Winter 1983 -84. But that "evidence" was never forthcoming.'Nuclear Winter' never existed outside of a computer except as air-brushed animation commissioned by the a PR firm - Porter Novelli Inc. Yet Sagan predicted "the extinction of the human species " as temperatures plummeted 35 degrees C and the world froze in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. Last year, Sagan's cohort tried to reanimate the ghost in a machine anti-nuclear activists invoked in the depths of the Cold War, by re-running equally arbitrary scenarios on a modern interactive Global Circulation Model. But the Cold War is history in more ways than one. It is a credit to post-modern computer climate simulations that they do not reproduce the apocalyptic results of what Sagan oxymoronically termed "a sophisticated one dimensional model."

The subzero 'baseline case' has melted down into a tepid 1.3 degrees of average cooling- grey skies do not a Ragnarok make . What remains is just not the stuff that End of the World myths are made of.

It is hard to exaggerate how seriously " nuclear winter "was once taken by policy analysts who ought to have known better. Many were taken aback by the sheer force of Sagan's rhetoric
Remarkably, Science's news coverage of the new results fails to graphically compare them with the old ones Editor Kennedy and other recent executives of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, once proudly co-authored and helped to publicize.

You can't say they didn't try to reproduce this Cold War icon. Once again, soot from imaginary software materializes in midair by the megaton , flying higher than Mount Everest . This is not physics, but a crude exercise in ' garbage in, gospel out' parameter forcing designed to maximize and extend the cooling an aeosol can generate, by sparing it from realistic attrition by rainout in the lower atmosphere. Despite decades of progress in modeling atmospheric chemistry , there is none in this computer simulation, and ignoring photochemistry further extends its impact. Fortunately , the history of science is as hard to erase as it is easy to ignore. Their past mastery of semantic agression cannot spare the authors of "Nuclear Winter Lite " direct comparison of their new results and their old.

Dark smoke clouds in the lower atmosphere don't last long enough to spread across the globe. Cloud droplets and rainfall remove them. rapidly washing them out of the sky in a matter of days to weeks- not long enough to sustain a global pall. Real world weather brings down particles much as soot is scrubbed out of power plant smoke by the water sprays in smoke stack scrubbers Robock acknowledges this- not even a single degree of cooling results when soot is released at lower elevations in he models . The workaround is to inject the imaginary aerosol at truly Himalayan elevations - pressure altitudes of 300 millibar and higher , where the computer model's vertical transport function modules pass it off to their even higher neighbors in the stratosphere , where it does not rain and particles linger..

The new studies like the old suffer from the disconnect between a desire to paint the sky black and the vicissitudes of natural history. As with many exercise in worst case models both at invoke rare phenomena as commonplace, claiming it prudent to assume the worst.

But the real world is subject to Murphy's lesser known second law- if everything must go wrong, don't bet on it. In 2006 as in 1983 firestorms and forest fires that send smoke into the stratosphere rise to alien prominence in the modelers re-imagined world , but in the real one remains a very different place, where though every month sees forest fires burning areas the size of cities - 2,500 hectares or larger , stratospheric smoke injections arise but once in a blue moon. So how come these neo-nuclear winter models feature so much smoke so far aloft for so long?

The answer is simple- the modelers intervened. Turning off vertical transport algorithms may make Al Gore happy- he has bet on reviving the credibility Sagan's ersatz apocalypse , but there is no denying that in some of these scenarios human desire, not physical forces accounts for the vertical hoisting of millions of tons of mass ten vertical kilometers into the sky.to the level at which the models take over , with results at once predictable --and arbitrary. This is not physics, it is computer gamesmanship carried over to a new generation of X-Box.

posted August 12, 2011 12:33 AM            

[These remarks were originally presented to a group of emergency plan-
ners meeting at the Arizona Division of Emergency Services, in Novem-
ber 1987. They are intended as a second look at some of the asser-
tions that have been made about the effects of nuclear weapons.
Mr Zutell, who speaks here for himself, not for official Arizona
policy, very kindly made his lecture available to Fort Freedom's War
Room.)

"NUCLEAR WINTER IS A FACT"
(Dr. Carl Sagan, Scientific American, Jan. 1985)
When Dr. Carl Sagan and his associates, Drs. Turco, Toon, Ackermann
and Pollack announced their nuclear winter theory to the world in the
fall of 1983, they received such an incredible amount of publicity for
such an extended period of time that they managed to convince many
people that in the event of a nuclear war, nuclear winter would be a
reality. Unfortunately, those who disputed the nuclear winter theory
have received very little publicity. Without going into great detail,
let's look at just a few of the more glaring discrepancies in the
theory. It is based on their assumption that a large quantity of
smoke will be emitted into the atmosphere by burning cities and
forests. Sagan and associates estimate that following a nuclear ex-
change, approximately 225 million tons of smoke particles, generated
by a baseline 5000 megaton exchange, will be injected into the tropo-
sphere and, over a period of two weeks, will be evenly distributed
around the globe in the northern hemisphere. During the following
weeks and months, this smoke will cause a temperature increase at the
tropopause as it absorbs the radiant energy of the sun and conse-
quently blocks that energy from reaching the surface of the earth.
Surface temperatures on the continents in the northern hemisphere,
between latitudes 30 degrees north and 70 degrees north, might drop as
low as -30 degrees Celsius. The theory does not however, consider the
highly relevant question of how much smoke will actually remain aloft
after two weeks. Normal meteorological processes, rain, snow,
temperature differentials between land masses and the oceans, etc.,
are not factored into the nuclear winter theory by Sagan et al. Stu-
dies of the discharge rates of manmade and natural smoke and observa-
tions of the average amounts of smoke found in the atmosphere, done
prior to and since the promulgation of the nuclear winter theory, have
shown that smoke particles have an average residence time of one week
or less. And, the average residence time of water vapor in the atmo-
sphere is little longer than a week. The amount of atmospheric water
vapor in tons, in the northern latitudes exceeds the 225 million tons
of smoke postulated by Sagan and his associates by a factor of at
least ten thousand. It is therefore fairly obvious that in seven to
ten days, which is before the theoretical initiation of the widespread
cooling effect, an amount of water far greater than the weight of
smoke generated by the nuclear exchange, will rain out of the atmo-
sphere and in doing so, will have an obviously significant cleansing
effect. Couple this with the commonly demonstrated fact that smoke
and dust particles injected into the atmosphere spontaneously create
rain conditions, by themselves being the locus around which water
molecules coalesce until they form rain droplets. This phenomena is
frequently demonstrated over forest fires in the form of capping
clouds which develop over columns of smoke. The clouds consist of
smoke particles and water vapor, generated by the fire, that combine
with water molecules already in the atmosphere. The resultant water
droplets in turn capture more particles as they ascend from the fire.
Even before they are large enough to form rain, their increasing size
reduces dramatically, the number of smoke and dust particles in the
size range that is most effective in absorbing and scattering sun-
light. Historical records describe a black rain that fell within a
few hours after the explosion of the nuclear weapon over Hiroshima.
That rain was the first manifestation of the atmosphere cleansing
itself after the sudden injection of an abnormal amount of smoke and
dust particles.
To enumerate some other problems with the nuclear winter mechanism:
1. The cooling mechanism as Sagan and associates describe it, could
only operate over land masses. Ocean surface water is continually
supplied with heat from below. Even if sunlight were blocked for many
months, the temperature at the ocean surface would remain virtually
unchanged. Consequently, weather patterns would continue, with warm
moisture laden air from the oceans sweeping over the land masses and
as it cools, rain clouds would form and even more of the sun blocking
smoke and dust particles would be washed out of the atmosphere. 2.
Sagan et al indicated that at the very least, 100 million tons of
smoke particles would have to be injected into the atmosphere if the
nuclear winter mechanism were to be triggered. They also indicated
that cities are the primary source of that smoke. They therefore
proposed a nuclear war scenario in which cities are the primary tar-
gets. Since the mid 1960s, the primary targets for both U.S. and
Soviet nuclear missiles and nuclear bombs have not been population
centers or cities. They have been the other guy's nuclear missile
launch sites, nuclear bomber bases and other military targets. If
those can be eliminated, the cities will be held hostage. The current
list of ten target classes ascribed to Soviet planners by DOD and
FEMA, does not specifically contain any population centers. The list
does of course include target classes that in many instances will be
located in or adjacent to metropolitan areas. But, even in those
instances, the nuclear weapons employed will not be the huge multi-
megaton area destruction bombs of the late 1950s and early 1960s.
ICBM systems and MIRVs are now so accurate that a target may be pin-
pointed even within a metropolitan area, by a relatively small weapon.
This is not in any way to say that the effects will not be catastro-
phic. It is to say though that the city wide firestorms necessary for
the onset of nuclear winter as described by Sagan and associates, are
less than predictable. In fact, they are improbable.

Another doomsday prediction is that a nuclear conflict will cause:

DESTRUCTION OF THE OZONE LAYER
Some research over the past 30 years has indicated that the detonation
of a large number of nuclear warheads may damage or even destroy the
ozone layer in the upper atmosphere that helps to shield the earth's
surface from the ultraviolet radiation of the sun. The research indi-
cated that enough additional UV may reach the earth's surface to cause
a noticeable increase in skin cancers, cataracts and severe sunburn
cases. It may also have a negative effect on some forms of plant life
and on agriculture in general. Although these effects were identified
as hypotheses some groups have for their own purposes, interpreted
the research as meaning that the ozone layer will definitely be de-
stroyed by a nuclear exchange and anyone not killed by the direct
effects of the nuclear weapons will soon be blinded by the UV and
subsequently be turned into a crispy critter. There are two problems
with those claims. First, it is quite easy to protect yourself
against UV. Just do exactly what is normally done even now, on a hot
sunny day. Wear sunglasses to protect your eyes and wear a thin layer
of clothing to block the UV from your skin. Secondly, The original
research that indicated that there might be damage to the ozone layer
after a nuclear exchange, was based on the use of multi-megaton wea-
pons, because only those very large bombs are capable of injecting
into the upper atmosphere (more specifically the tropopause where most
of the ozone layer resides) the NO and NO2 that depletes the ozone
layer by reacting with the ozone to form oxygen molecules. It has
been calculated that the explosion of a large number of multi-megaton
warheads could conceivably deplete the ozone layer by as much as 30 to
40 percent for a period of a year or two. Since the ozone is con-
stantly regenerating itself, it would recover to nearly normal den-
sity and thickness within a few years. Significantly, smaller kiloton
range bombs simply are not capable of throwing the nitrogen oxide
materials high enough to damage the ozone layer. The trend for many
years in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. has been to substitute small eco-
nomical weapons for the older inefficient multi-megaton range weapons,
as missile systems become more accurate. Presently there are very few
of the large warheads left in the U.S. arsenal and those in the Soviet
arsenal are being reduced. Consequently, the nuclear threat to the
ozone layer, which has never been proven, has virtually been elimi-
nated by the shift to small warheads. It should also be mentioned
that in the middle latitudes, observed natural variations in the ozone
layer are comparable to the predicted effects of a large number of
multi-megaton bombs. For example, the thickness of the ozone layer
over Miami in the summer is about 20% less than that over Seattle.

"THERE ARE ENOUGH NUCLEAR WARHEADS IN THE U.S. AND U.S.S.R. TO KILL
EVERY MEN WOMAN AND CHILD IN BOTH COUNTRIES TEN TIMES OVER"

This is an example of a malady known as the --

OVERKILL SYNDROME

The defenders of this simple faith tend to explain it with equally
simple math -- a 12.5 kiloton blast at Hiroshima killed approximately
70,000 people, which is a casualty rate of 5600 per kiloton. A nu-
clear war today could result in some 10,000 megatons of force being
released. That is equal to ten million kilotons. Ten million times
5600 equals 56 billion casualties, more than enough to take care of
the slightly more than 6 billion inhabitants of the earth today.
Referring back to our earlier discussion of nuclear winter, it is a
fact that most nuclear weapons are targeted against other nuclear
weapons and against military installations. While these are excellent
counterforce military targets, they are poor population targets, ex-
cept in those instances where military installations are in or closely
adjacent to population centers. The OVERKILL theory presupposes that
every man, woman and child on earth will be within the lethal range of
a nuclear explosion. Given the size of this planet and the distribu-
tion of people throughout the hemispheres, not to mention the many
factors that act to attenuate the effects of nuclear weapons, the
OVERKILL contention is a gross, even criminal simplification and mis-
statement because it implies that there is no defense against nuclear
weapons. This in turn leads to the incorrect and fatalistic assump-
tion that any attempt at establishing a civil defense system is fu-
tile, a waste of time and effort since we're all going to die anyway.
The Soviets, through their increasingly sophisticated civil defense
program, are sending a very clear signal that they at least, do not
believe in the OVERKILL theory. They, in fact, believe that a nuclear
war is not only survivable but also winnable.
One of the main reasons for the proliferation of the belief that a
nuclear war cannot be survived is that people who are well known to
the public and rightfully respected for their in one area of endeavor,
sometimes get involved in other areas about which they know very
little. A Perfect example of that condition came out of the Cuban
missile crisis of October, 1962. Robert Kennedy wrote a book in which
he referred to the crisis as --
"A CONFRONTATION BETWEEN THE TWO GIANT ATOMIC NATIONS, THE U.S. AND
THE U.S.S.R., WHICH BROUGHT THE WORLD TO THE ABYSS OF NUCLEAR
DESTRUCTION AND THE END OF MANKIND."
At that time, the U.S. had fewer than 5000 nuclear warheads and the
Soviets less than 500. Today, there are an estimated 50,000 nuclear
warheads in the arsenals of the five major nuclear powers. And, al-
though a nuclear exchange would be an absolutely cataclysmic event, no
one who is knowledgeable of weapons effects claims that the end of
mankind is at hand.

posted August 12, 2011 12:40 AM            

A man who ceases to believe in God does not believe in nothing; he believes in anything.
- G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
The apocalyptic vision of global warming serves a deep need of the environmentalist credo, the dominant pseudo-religious tendency of our age in the prosperous West.

For good or ill, human beings are constructed to believe, and faith has its demands.. Along with the concrete elements that demand belief (that fire burns and that it’s not wise to walk off cliffs, for example) there exists an apparent necessity for a belief in “the rock higher than I” – a belief in a superior entity that can inspire awe and gratitude, that can be turned to in hard times, that can act as witness to injustice and dispenser of mercy.
Despite the claims of our current crop of militant atheists such as Dawkins and Harris, this is not simply brain-dead foolishness. Religious belief is hard-wired into human beings, by what means and for what purposes we don’t yet understand. (A much wiser atheist, the biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature that he intended to demonstrate that religious belief played an evolutionary role and could thus be explained by Darwinism. That was thirty years ago – if he ever succeeded, I haven’t heard about it.)
When religious belief is subverted, it does not, as Chesterton implied, simply vanish. It is almost immediately replaced by another set of beliefs on a similar level of abstraction and serving the same purpose. Sometimes it’s an import, such as Buddhism or TM. Sometimes it’s a creed deliberately created to serve a political agenda, as we see in Nazism and Communism. Sometimes it’s the goofy SoCal syncretism currently expressed in Wicca and Neopaganism. (“If people seriously want to be pagans,” the late Joe Myers, a Christian brother of my acquaintance once said. “They’d become Roman Catholics.”) And sometimes they’re a combination, a weird melange of ideas picked up from various sources that (and usually not coincidentally) also serve a political purpose. Which brings us to environmentalism.

That environmentalism is in fact a pseudo-religion goes without saying. Like all such, it possesses every element of contemporary legitimate belief. It has a deity, in this case the goddess Gaia, the personification of the living Earth, (first envisioned by James Lovelock, whom we can slot in as high priest). It has its holy books, most changing with the seasons, and most, as is true of the Bible with many convinced Christians, utterly unread. It has its saints, its prophets, its commandments, religious rituals (be sure to recycle that bottle), a large gallery of sins, mortal and otherwise, and an even larger horde of devils. (Let me pause here to sharpen a horn.)
Another item that a pseudo-religion must have is an apocalypse – and that’s what global warming is all about.
In fact, the apocalyptic is the major fulcrum of environmentalism, the axis around which everything else turns. It’s environmentalism’s major element of concern, its chief attraction, and the center of discussion and speculation, in much the same way that some Protestant variants of Christianity are obsessed above all with sin. So crucial is the apocalypse to environmentalism that there has been a whole string of them, one after the other, covering every last aspect of the natural world. If one don’t git ya, the next one will.

Green emphasis on the apocalyptic appeared early, accompanying the introduction of mass environmental awareness itself. Silent Spring, published in 1962, represents the first environmentalist scripture — nothing other than a modern book of Revelations. Rachel Carson, a popular nature writer, was dying of cancer while writing the book, and Silent Spring became an outlet for her rage and grief. Carson predicted the imminent coming of a stricken world, a world poisoned by the synthetic products of the chemical industry, in which no birds sang and human children would not be immune. The early 60s were marked by fears of the consequences of atmospheric nuclear tests, and the suggestion that chemicals were just as deadly found a willing audience.
Pollution – a word that itself bears many religious connotations — became a byword of the era. That fact that the phenomenon encompassed virtually every aspect of technical civilization including car exhausts, household plastics, and power generation, guaranteed it a good long run. Truly grotesque stories, ranging from dioxins eating sneakers from children’s feet to hushed-up epidemics of cancer, made the rounds. None were anything more than grist for Snopes.com, and the promised chemical doomsday never arrived. But Carson’s work set the pattern for all the environmental apocalypses to come.
The next example was overpopulation, its prophet the notorious Paul Ehrlich. His set of tablets was titled The Population Bomb and if anything, it was even more popular than Silent Spring. Ehrlich’s thesis was that relentlessly burgeoning population would overstress the earth’s “carrying capacity”, use up all available resources, and lead to the collapse of civilization before the 20th century was out. The argument seemed irrefutable to those not familiar with the uncertainties surrounding demography (Thomas Malthus had made similar series of predictions early in the 19th century).
Countless offshoots of Ehrlich’s book appeared, and overpopulation became one of the standard ideas of the late 60s, embraced by the counterculture, policymakers, academics, and the media. Even today, an era in which deflating national populations are the problem, it’s by no means unusual to come across people still living in Ehrlich’s nightmare world, much the same as the Amish or Mennonites have preserved their far more pleasant way of life into modern times. Ehrlich became quite wealthy, and the master of his own foundation devoted to the study of the “overpopulation threat”. To this day, he contends that his thesis is correct. The whole episode is begging for a detailed historical study.
A variant combining aspects of both theories had a brief run in the early to mid 70s: the doctrine of universal famine. Pollution would poison croplands and stunt agricultural production, and overpopulation would do the rest. The problem here was the fact that proponents insisted that doom was imminent, with famine appearing as early as 1975 or 1980 at the latest. The experience taught the Greens to be a little more vague with dates.
The early 1980s saw a reprise of earlier fears of nuclear destruction (a workable definition of an “advanced civilization” could well read “one in which there is sufficient leisure time for large numbers of people to worry about doomsday”). The nuclear freeze campaign, largely engineered by the KGB, took up much of the public attention devoted to environmental crises. But even this effort was given an environmental gloss when scientific impresario Carl Sagan put together a road show of “mainstream scientists” to promote the concept of a “nuclear winter“.
The firestorms generated by a nuclear strike would generate smoke so thick as to block out the sun across much of the northern hemisphere, causing a collapse of the terrestrial ecology. Nuclear winter never quite caught on outside of certain elite circles, in part due to flaws in the theory. Sagan’s specialty was exobiology, the study of possible extraterrestrial life-forms, and it developed that the climate model he’d used was based on the atmosphere of Mars, a planet locked in an ice age for the past billion years. Nuclear winter faded with the nuclear freeze movement. All the same, just before his death Sagan made it known that he’d willingly accept a Nobel for his role in preventing World War III.

Ozone depletion, the next environmentalist flurry, was a little too esoteric to generate the uncritical devotion accorded to pollution and overpopulation. It involved arcane chemical reactions, took place in the stratosphere, and seemed to be confined to Antarctica. (Although the northern hemisphere was home to the bulk of the offending chlorofluorocarbons, the Arctic didn’t seem to have the same problem.) But ozone depletion did serve a useful Green purpose in drawing public attention to the atmosphere, and confusing people as to exactly what the problem was all about. (I would guess that something like two-thirds of the people in this country believe that ozone depletion and global warming are part of the same phenomenon.)
But in fact, global warming has actually adapted elements of all previous environmental crazes. It holds that carbon dioxide (a naturally-occurring compound that comprises a large portion of the atmosphere) is a form of pollution, the same as Carson’s detested synthetic chemicals. Like that involving overpopulation, the threatened catastrophe is universal, and implicated in everyday practices and institutions. As with the universal famine, the effects are concrete and horrifying, though the dates have been left vague – ‘in the coming century’, rather than in a year or two. As with the nuclear freeze, the human villains are easily identified, their actions, which place all human life in jeopardy, beyond redemption. As with ozone depletion, mainstream scientists have a remedy – even if it’s unproven and unnecessary.
The lessons of previous environmental panics have been carefully applied to global warming No other environmentalist program has been prepared with such detail, purpose, and conviction. A skilled cadre of scientists, activists, and publicists exist who have devoted entire careers to nothing else. A vast literature has appeared analyzing not climate as a whole, not the interactions of the entire system, but solely and uniquely global warming. In many ways, warming has become both more and less than an ideology: it has become an industry, one that with such financial elements as carbon offsets can easily support itself.
The global warming program has been in play for a quarter of a century. It has been quite successful, convincing a small majority of the population that such warming is in fact occurring and is caused by manmade emissions. It is not a fad of the decade like overpopulation or nuclear winter. Nothing, not scientific evidence, not common sense, not the fact that much of the United States is basking in subfreezing temperatures as I write this, will be allowed to overturn it. The environmentalist movement has staked everything on this program. Not for the sake of science; most of the science is wrong or fabricated. (This week’s IPCC report marks no change in this regard.) Not for humanity; they have never cared for humanity. Not to alter the climate itself; no such program has been suggested, and in any case the earth’s climate, an unstable planet-wide chaotic system, will go its own way no matter what we do. But for one reason: to make environmentalism a basic element of millennial society.
And that’s where the danger arises. The problem with this type of pseudo-religion is that they’re essentially heresies, and like most heresies far more bloodyminded than the parent religions that they otherwise mirror. This is obvious when we examine Nazism and communism. The same strain in environmentalism may be hidden, but it’s there. This creed has killed massive numbers and forthrightly contemplated death on an even larger scale.
The banning of DDT in 1971 resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people in the developing world, most of them children, from insect-borne diseases such as malaria. (This despite the fact that the use of DDT to fumigate homes could have no serious effect on the environment.) Yet no environmental group has ever made note of the fact, and all oppose the reintroduction of DDT for any purpose. The DDT ban places Rachel Carson in an exclusive circle shared only by Karl Marx as a writer whose work alone caused vast amounts of human misery. (Adolf Hitler was, of course, more man of action than writer. It’s doubtful that Mein Kampf in and of itself could have triggered the same upheavals as Hitler’s actions.)
Death on a scale beyond even Mao was something openly contemplated in respectable circles of the cult. One byproduct of the universal famine panic was a concept called “triage”. Adapted from the emergency medical technique in which the dying are put to one side while the less injured receive priority treatment, triage advocates suggested that certain “failed” nations be completely isolated from the rest of the world to bring about a “die-off” of their “excess” population, a process that would have resulted in the deaths of hundreds of millions. This was not a crackpot notion; it was presented as a serious policy issue and discussed as such in outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. The particular “failed” nation always suggested by these people was India, one of our epoch’s economic powerhouses.
For a third example of bloodymindedness we need only mention the environmentalist and animal rights “direct-action” groups that have utilized terrorism, sabotage, arson, assault, everything short of murder in their campaigns against offending companies and even innocent third parties.

posted August 12, 2011 11:06 AM              

but far worse than the proposition of darkness and cold created by lack of sunshine is the prospect of EVERYTHING you eat, drink or touch being contaminated beyond human tolerance. think japan, where large amounts of meat and veg, tapwater, etc have been judged unfit for human or animal consumption.

a hardy few might survive and thrive, but "winter" or not, nukes are NOT GOOD FOR PEOPLE!

posted August 12, 2011 11:30 AM            

Rutgers University Study 2006 (Revised 2007): http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~gera/nwinter/nw6accepted.pdf

posted August 12, 2011 02:20 PM            

While working with hundreds of Americans building expedient shelters and life-support equipment, I have found that many people at first see no sense in talking about details of survival skills. Those who hold exaggerated beliefs about the dangers from nuclear weapons must first be convinced that nuclear war would not inevitably be the end of them and everything worthwhile. Only after they have begun to question the truth of these myths do they become interested, under normal peacetime conditions, in acquiring nuclear war survival skills. Therefore, before giving detailed instructions for making and using survival equipment, we will examine the most harmful of the myths about nuclear war dangers, along with some of the grim facts.

° Myth: Fallout radiation from a nuclear war would poison the air and all parts of the environment. It would kill everyone. (This is the demoralizing message of On the Beach and many similar pseudoscientific books and articles.)

° Facts: When a nuclear weapon explodes near enough to the ground for its fireball to touch the ground, it forms a crater. (See Fig. 1.1.)

Fig. 1.1. A surface burst. In a surface or near-surface burst, the fireball touches the ground and blasts a crater. ORNL-DWG 786264

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Many thousands of tons of earth from the crater of a large explosion are pulverized into trillions of particles. These particles are contaminated by radioactive atoms produced by the nuclear explosion. Thousands of tons of the particles are carried up into a mushroom-shaped cloud, miles above the earth. These radioactive particles then fall out of the mushroom cloud, or out of the dispersing cloud of particles blown by the winds thus becoming fallout.

Each contaminated particle continuously gives off invisible radiation, much like a tiny X-ray machine while in the mushroom cloud, while descending, and after having fallen to earth. The descending radioactive particles are carried by the winds like the sand and dust particles of a miles-thick sandstorm cloud except that they usually are blown at lower speeds and in many areas the particles are so far apart that no cloud is seen. The largest, heaviest fallout particles reach the ground first, in locations close to the explosion. Many smaller particles are carried by the winds for tens to thousands of miles before falling to earth. At any one place where fallout from a single explosion is being deposited on the ground in concentrations high enough to require the use of shelters, deposition will be completed within a few hours.

The smallest fallout particles those tiny enough to be inhaled into a person's lungs are invisible to the naked eye. These tiny particles would fall so slowly from the four-mile or greater heights to which they would be injected by currently deployed Soviet warheads that most would remain airborne for weeks to years before reaching the ground. By that time their extremely wide dispersal and radioactive decay would make them much less dangerous. Only where such tiny particles are promptly brought to earth by rain- outs or snow-outs in scattered "hot spots," and later dried and blown about by the winds, would these invisible particles constitute a long-term and relatively minor post-attack danger.

The air in properly designed fallout shelters, even those without air filters, is free of radioactive particles and safe to breathe except in a few' rare environments as will be explained later.

Fortunately for all living things, the danger from fallout radiation lessens with time. The radioactive decay, as this lessening is called, is rapid at first, then gets slower and slower. The dose rate (the amount of radiation received per hour) decreases accordingly. Figure 1.2 illustrates the rapidity of the decay of radiation from fallout during the first two days after the nuclear explosion that produced it. R stands for roentgen, a measurement unit often used to measure exposure to gamma rays and X rays. Fallout meters called dosimeters measure the dose received by recording the number of R. Fallout meters called survey meters, or dose-rate meters, measure the dose rate by recording the number of R being received per hour at the time of measurement. Notice that it takes about seven times as long for the dose rate to decay from 1000 roentgens per hour (1000 R/hr) to 10 R/hr (48 hours) as to decay from 1000 R/hr to 100 R/hr (7 hours). (Only in high-fallout areas would the dose rate 1 hour after the explosion be as high as 1000 roentgens per hour.)

Fig. 1.2. Decay of the dose rate of radiation from fallout, from the time of the explosion, not from the time of fallout deposition. ORNL.DWG 78-265

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If the dose rate 1 hour after an explosion is 1000 R/hr, it would take about 2 weeks for the dose rate to be reduced to 1 R/hr solely as a result of radioactive decay. Weathering effects will reduce the dose rate further,' for example, rain can wash fallout particles from plants and houses to lower positions on or closer to the ground. Surrounding objects would reduce the radiation dose from these low-lying particles.

Figure 1.2 also illustrates the fact that at a typical location where a given amount of fallout from an explosion is deposited later than 1 hour after the explosion, the highest dose rate and the total dose received at that location are less than at a location where the same amount of fallout is deposited 1 hour after the explosion. The longer fallout particles have been airborne before reaching the ground, the less dangerous is their radiation.

Within two weeks after an attack the occupants of most shelters could safely stop using them, or could work outside the shelters for an increasing number of hours each day. Exceptions would be in areas of extremely heavy fallout such as might occur downwind from important targets attacked with many weapons, especially missile sites and very large cities. To know when to come out safely, occupants either would need a reliable fallout meter to measure the changing radiation dangers, or must receive information based on measurements made nearby with a reliable instrument.

The radiation dose that will kill a person varies considerably with different people. A dose of 450 R resulting from exposure of the whole body to fallout radiation is often said to be the dose that will kill about half the persons receiving it, although most studies indicate that it would take somewhat less.1 (Note: A number written after a statement refers the reader to a source listed in the Selected References that follow Appendix D.) Almost all persons confined to expedient shelters after a nuclear attack would be under stress and without clean surroundings or antibiotics to fight infections. Many also would lack adequate water and food. Under these unprecedented conditions, perhaps half the persons who received a whole-body dose of 350 R within a few days would die.2

Fortunately, the human body can repair most radiation damage if the daily radiation doses are not too large. As will be explained in Appendix B, a person who is healthy and has not been exposed in the past two weeks to a total radiation dose of more than 100 R can receive a dose of 6 R each day for at least two months without being incapacitated.

Only a very small fraction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki citizens who survived radiation doses some of which were nearly fatal have suffered serious delayed effects. The reader should realize that to do essential work after a massive nuclear attack, many survivors must be willing to receive much larger radiation doses than are normally permissible. Otherwise, too many workers would stay inside shelter too much of the time, and work that would be vital to national recovery could not be done. For example, if the great majority of truckers were so fearful of receiving even non-incapacitating radiation doses that they would refuse to transport food, additional millions would die from starvation alone.

° Myth: Fallout radiation penetrates everything; there is no escaping its deadly effects.

° Facts: Some gamma radiation from fallout will penetrate the shielding materials of even an excellent shelter and reach its occupants. However, the radiation dose that the occupants of an excellent shelter would receive while inside this shelter can be reduced to a dose smaller than the average American receives during his lifetime from X rays and other radiation exposures normal in America today. The design features of such a shelter include the use of a sufficient thickness of earth or other heavy shielding material. Gamma rays are like X rays, but more penetrating. Figure 1.3 shows how rapidly gamma rays are reduced in number (but not in their ability to penetrate) by layers of packed earth. Each of the layers shown is one halving-thickness of packed earth- about 3.6 inches (9 centimeters).3 A halving- thickness is the thickness of a material which reduces by half the dose of radiation that passes through it.

The actual paths of gamma rays passing through shielding materials are much more complicated, due to scattering, etc., than are the straight-line paths shown in Fig. 1.3. But when averaged out, the effectiveness of a halving-thickness of any material is approximately as shown. The denser a substance, the better it serves for shielding material. Thus, a halving-thickness of concrete is only about 2.4 inches (6.1 cm).

Book Page: 14

Fig. 1.3. Illustration of shielding against fallout radiation. Note the increasingly large improvements in the attenuation (reduction) factors that are attained as each additional halving-thickness of packed earth is added. ORNL-DWG 78-18834

If additional halving-thicknesses of packed earth shielding are successively added to the five thicknesses shown in Fig. 1.3, the protection factor (PF) is successively increased from 32 to 64, to 128, to 256, to 512, to 1024, and so on.

° Myth: A heavy nuclear attack would set practically everything on fire, causing "firestorms" in cities that would exhaust the oxygen in the air. All shelter occupants would be killed by the intense heat.

° Facts: On aclear day, thermal pulses (heat radiation that travels at the speed of light) from an air burst can set fire to easily ignitable materials (such as window curtains, upholstery, dry newspaper, and dry grass) over about as large an area as is damaged by the blast. It can cause second-degree skin burns to exposed people who are as far as ten miles from a one-megaton (1 MT) explosion. (See Fig. 1.4.) (A 1-MT nuclear explosion is one that produces the same amount of energy as does one million tons of TNT.) If the weather is very clear and dry, the area of fire danger could be considerably larger. On a cloudy or smoggy day, however, particles in the air would absorb and scatter much of the heat radiation, and the area endangered by heat radiation from the fireball would be less than the area of severe blast damage.

Book Page: 15

Fig. 1.4. An air burst. Thefireball does not touch the ground. No crater. An air burst produces only extremely small radioactive particles-so small that they are airborne for days to years unless brought to earth by rain or snow. Wet deposition of fallout from both surface and air bursts can result in '"hot spots" at, close to, or far from ground zero. However, such '"hot spots" from air bursts are much less dangerous than the fallout produced by the surface or near-surface bursting of the same weapons.

The main dangers from an air burst are the blast effects, the thermal pulses of intense light and heat radiation, and the very penetrating initial nuclear radiation from the fireball. ORNL.DWG 78.6267

"Firestorms" could occur only when the concentration of combustible structures is very high, as in the very dense centers of a few old American cities. At rural and suburban building densities, most people in earth- covered fallout shelters would not have their lives endangered by fires.

° Myth: In theworst-hit parts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where all buildings were demolished, everyone was killed by blast, radiation, or fire.

° Facts: InNagasaki, some people survived uninjured who were far inside tunnel shelters built for conventional air raids and located as close as one-third mile from ground zero (the point directly below the explosion). This was true even though these long, large shelters lacked blast doors and were deep inside the zone within which all buildings were destroyed. (People far inside long, large, open shelters are better protected than are those inside small, open shelters.)

Fig. 1.5. Undamaged earth-covered family shelter in Nagasaki.

Many earth-covered family shelters were essentially undamaged in areas where blast and fire destroyed all buildings. Figure 1.5 shows a typical earth covered, backyard family shelter with a crude wooden frame. This shelter was essentially undamaged, although less than 100 yards from ground zero at Nagasaki.4 The calculated maximum overpressure (pressure above the normal air pressure) was about 65 pounds per square inch (65 psi). Persons inside so small a shelter without a blast doorwould have been killed by blast pressure at this distance from the explosion. However, in a recent blast test,5 an earth-covered, expedient Small-Pole Shelter equipped with blast doors was undamaged at 53 psi. The pressure rise inside was slight not even enough to have damaged occupants' eardrums. If poles are available, field tests have indicated that many families can build such shelters in a few days.

The great life-saving potential of blast-protective shelters has been proven in war and confirmed by blast tests and calculations. For example, the area in which the air bursting of a 1-megaton weapon would wreck a 50-psi shelter with blast doors in about 2.7 square miles. Within this roughly circular area, practically all them occupants of wrecked shelters would be killed by blast, carbon monoxide from fires, or radiation. The same blast effects would kill most people who were using basements affording 5 psi protection, over an area of about 58 square miles.6

° Myth: Because some modern H-bombs are over 1000 times as powerful as the A-bomb that destroyed most of Hiroshima, these H-bombs are 1000 times as deadly and destructive.

° Facts: A nuclear weapon 1000 times as powerful as the one that blasted Hiroshima, if exploded under comparable conditions, produces equally serious blast damage to wood-frame houses over an area up to about 130 times as large, not 1000 times as large.

Book Page: 16

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For example, air bursting a 20-kiloton weapon at the optimum height to destroy most buildings will destroy or severely damage houses out to about 1.42 miles from ground zero.6 The circular area of at least severe blast damage will be about 6.33 square miles. (The explosion of a 20 kiloton weapon releases the same amount of energy as 20 thousand tons of TNT.) One thousand 20-kiloton weapons thus air burst, well separated to avoid overlap of their blast areas, would destroy or severely damage houses over areas totaling approximately 6,330 square miles. In contrast, similar air bursting of one 20- megaton weapon (equivalent in explosive power to 20 million tons of TNT) would destroy or severely damage the great majority of houses out to a distance of 16 miles from ground zero.6 The area of destruction would be about 800 square miles - not 6,330 square miles.

Today few if any of Russia's huge intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are armed with a 20-megaton warhead. Now a huge Russian ICBM, the SS-18, typically carries 10 warheads, each having a yield of 500 kilotons, each programmed to hit a separate target. See Jane's Weapon Systems, 1987-88.

° Myth: A Russian nuclear attack on the United States would completely destroy all American cities.

° Facts: As long as Soviet leaders are rational they will continue to give first priority to knocking out our weapons and other military assets that can damage Russia and kill Russians. To explode enough nuclear weapons of any size to completely destroy American cities would be an irrational waste of warheads. The Soviets can make much better use of most of the warheads that would be required to completely destroy American cities; the majority of those warheads probably already are targeted to knock out our retaliatory missiles by being surface burst or near-surface burst on their hardened silos, located far from most cities and densely populated areas.

Unfortunately, many militarily significant targets - including naval vessels in port and port facilities, bombers and fighters on the ground, air base and airport facilities that can be used by bombers, Army installations, and key defense factories - are in or close to American cities. In the event of an all-out Soviet attack, most of these '"soft" targets would be destroyed by air bursts. Air bursting (see Fig. 1.4) a given weapon subjects about twice as large an area to blast effects severe enough to destroy "soft" targets as does surface bursting (see Fig. 1.1) the same weapon. Fortunately for Americans living outside blast and fire areas, air bursts produce only very tiny particles. Most of these extremely small radioactive particles remain airborne for so long that their radioactive decay and wide dispersal before reaching the ground make them much less life- endangering than the promptly deposited larger fallout particles from surface and near-surface bursts. However, if you are a survival minded American you should prepare to survive heavy fallout wherever you are. Unpredictable winds may bring fallout from unexpected directions. Or your area may be in a "hot spot" of life-endangering fallout caused by a rain-out or snow-out of both small and tiny particles from distant explosions. Or the enemy may use surface or near-surface bursts in your part of the country to crater long runways or otherwise disrupt U.S. retaliatory actions by producing heavy local fallout.

Today few if any of Russia's largest intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) are armed with a 20-megaton warhead. A huge Russian ICBM, the SS-18, typically carries 10 warheads each having a yield of 500 kilotons, each programmed to hit a separate target. See "Jane's Weapon Systems. 1987-1988." However, in March 1990 CIA Director William Webster told the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee that ".... The USSR's strategic modernization program continues unabated," and that the SS-18 Mod 5 can carry 14 to 20 nuclear warheads. The warheads are generally assumed to be smaller than those of the older SS-18s.

° Myth: So much food and water will be poisoned by fallout that people will starve and die even in fallout areas where there is enough food and water.

° Facts: If the falloutparticles do not become mixed with the parts of food that are eaten, no harm is done. Food and water in dust-tight containers are not contaminated by fallout radiation. Peeling fruits and vegetables removes essentially all fallout, as does removing the uppermost several inches of stored grain onto which fallout particles have fallen. Water from many sources -- such as deep wells and covered reservoirs, tanks, and containers -- would not be contaminated. Even water containing dissolved radioactive elements and compounds can be made safe for drinking by simply filtering it through earth, as described later in this book.

° Myth: Most of the unborn children and grandchildren of people who have been exposed to radiation from nuclear explosions will be genetically damaged will be malformed, delayed victims of nuclear war.

° Facts: The authoritative study by the National Academy of Sciences, A Thirty Year Study of the Survivors qf Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was published in 1977. It concludes that the incidence of abnormalities is no higher among children later conceived by parents who were exposed to radiation during the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki than is the incidence of abnormalities among Japanese children born to un-exposed parents.

This is not to say that there would be no genetic damage, nor that some fetuses subjected to large radiation doses would not be damaged. But the overwhelming evidence does show that the exaggerated fears of radiation damage to future generations are not supported by scientific findings.

° Myth: Overkill would result if all the U.S. and U.S.S.R, nuclear weapons were used meaning not only that the two superpowers have more than enough weapons to kill all of each other's people, but also that they have enough weapons to exterminate the human race.

Book Page: 17

° Facts: Statements that the U.S. and the Soviet Union have the power to kill the world's population several times over are based on misleading calculations. One such calculation is to multiply the deaths produced per kiloton exploded over Hiroshima or Nagasaki by an estimate of the number of kilotons in either side's arsenal. (A kiloton explosion is one that produces the same amount of energy as does 1000 tons of TNT.) The unstated assumption is that somehow the world's population could be gathered into circular crowds, each a few miles in diameter with a population density equal to downtown Hiroshima or Nagasaki, and then a small (Hiroshima-sized) weapon would be exploded over the center of each crowd. Other misleading calculations are based on exaggerations of the dangers from long-lasting radiation and other harmful effects of a nuclear war.

° Myth: Blindness and a disastrous increase of cancers would be the fate of survivors of a nuclear war, because the nuclear explosions would destroy so much of the protective ozone in the stratosphere that far too much ultraviolet light would reach the earth's surface. Even birds and insects would be blinded. People could not work outdoors in daytime for years without dark glasses, and would have to wear protective clothing to prevent incapacitating sunburn. Plants would be badly injured and food production greatly reduced.

° Facts: Large nuclear explosions do inject huge amounts of nitrogen oxides (gasses that destroy ozone) into the stratosphere. However, the percent of the stratospheric ozone destroyed by a given amount of nitrogen oxides has been greatly overestimated in almost all theoretical calculations and models. For example, the Soviet and U.S. atmospheric nuclear test explosions of large weapons in 1952-1962 were calculated by Foley and Ruderman to result in a reduction of more than 10 percent in total ozone. (See M. H. Foley and M. A. Ruderman, 'Stratospheric NO from Past Nuclear Explosions", Journal of Geophysics, Res. 78, 4441-4450.) Yet observations that they cited showed no reductions in ozone. Nor did ultraviolet increase. Other theoreticians calculated sizable reductions in total ozone, but interpreted the observational data to indicate either no reduction, or much smaller reductions than their calculated ones.

A realistic simplified estimate of the increased ultraviolet light dangers to American survivors of a large nuclear war equates these hazards to moving from San Francisco to sea level at the equator, where the sea level incidence of skin cancers (seldom fatal) is highest- about 10 times higher than the incidence at San Francisco. Many additional thousands of American survivors might get skin cancer, but little or no increase in skin cancers might result if in the post-attack world deliberate sun tanning and going around hatless went out of fashion. Furthermore, almost all of today's warheads are smaller than those exploded in the large- weapons tests mentioned above; most would inject much smaller amounts of ozone-destroying gasses, or no gasses, into the stratosphere, where ozone deficiencies may persist for years. And nuclear weapons smaller than 500 kilotons result in increases (due to smog reactions) in upper tropospheric ozone. In a nuclear war, these increases would partially compensate for the upper-level tropospheric decreases-as explained by Julius S. Chang and Donald J. Wuebbles of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

° Myth: Unsurvivable "nuclear winter" surely will follow a nuclear war. The world will be frozen if only 100 megatons (less than one percent of all nuclear weapons) are used to ignite cities. World-enveloping smoke from fires and the dust from surface bursts will prevent almost all sunlight and solar heat from reaching the earth's surface. Universal darkness for weeks! Sub-zero temperatures, even in summertime! Frozen crops, even in the jungles of South America! Worldwide famine! Whole species of animals and plants exterminated! The survival of mankind in doubt!

° Facts: Unsurvivable "nuclear winter" is a discredited theory that, since its conception in 1982, has been used to frighten additional millions into believing that trying to survive a nuclear war is a waste of effort and resources, and that only by ridding the world of almost all nuclear weapons do we have a chance of surviving.

Non-propagandizing scientists recently havecalculated that the climatic and other environmental effects of even an all-out nuclear war would be much less severe than the catastrophic effects repeatedly publicized by popular astronomer Carl Sagan and his fellow activist scientists, and by all the involved Soviet scientists. Conclusions reached from these recent, realistic calculations are summarized in an article, "Nuclear Winter Reappraised", featured in the 1986 summer issue of Foreign Affairs, the prestigious quarterly of the Council on Foreign Relations. The authors, Starley L. Thompson and Stephen H. Schneider, are atmospheric scientists with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. They showed " that on scientific grounds the global apocalyptic conclusions of the initial nuclear winter hypothesis can now be relegated to a vanishing low level of probability."

Book Page: 18

Their models indicate that in July (when the greatest temperature reductions would result) the average temperature in the United States would be reduced for a few days from about 70 degrees Fahrenheit to approximately 50 degrees. (In contrast, under the same conditions Carl Sagan, his associates, and the Russian scientists predicted a resulting average temperature of about 10 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, lasting for many weeks!)

Persons who want to learn more about possible post-attack climatic effects also should read the Fall 1986 issue of Foreign Affairs. This issue contains a long letter from Thompson and Schneider which further demolishes the theory of catastrophic "nuclear winter." Continuing studies indicate there will be even smaller reductions in temperature than those calculated by Thompson and Schneider.

Soviet propagandists promptly exploited belief in unsurvivable "nuclear winter" to increase fear of nuclear weapons and war, and to demoralize their enemies. Because raging city firestorms are needed to inject huge amounts of smoke into the stratosphere and thus, according to one discredited theory, prevent almost all solar heat from reaching the ground, the Soviets changed their descriptions of how a modern city will burn if blasted by a nuclear explosion.

Figure 1.6 pictures how Russian scientists and civil defense officials realistically described - before the invention of "nuclear winter" - the burning of a city hit by a nuclear weapon. Buildings in the blasted area for miles around ground zero will be reduced to scattered rubble - mostly of concrete, steel, and other nonflammable materials - that will not burn in blazing fires. Thus in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory translation (ORNL-TR-2793) of Civil Defense. Second Edition (500,000 copies), Moscow, 1970, by Egorov, Shlyakhov, and Alabin, we read: "Fires do not occur in zones of complete destruction . . . that are characterized by an overpressure exceeding 0.5 kg/cm2 [- 7 psi]., because rubble is scattered and covers the burning structures. As a result the rubble only smolders, and fires as such do not occur."

Fig. 1.6. Drawing with Caption in a Russian Civil Defense Training Film Strip. The blazing fires ignited by a surface burst are shown in standing buildings outside the miles-wide "zone of complete destruction," where the blast-hurled "rubble only smolders."

Translation: [Radioactive] contamination occurs in the area of the explosion and also along the trajectory of the cloud which forms a radioactive track.

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Firestorms destroyed the centers of Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. The old-fashioned buildings of those cities contained large amounts of flammable materials, were ignited by many thousands of small incendiaries, and burned quickly as standing structures well supplied with air. No firestorm has ever injected smoke into the stratosphere, or caused appreciable cooling below its smoke cloud.

The theory that smoke from burning cities and forests and dust from nuclear explosions would cause worldwide freezing temperatures was conceived in 1982 by the German atmospheric chemist and environmentalist Paul Crutzen, and continues to be promoted by a worldwide propaganda campaign. This well funded campaign began in 1983 with televised scientific-political meetings in Cambridge and Washington featuring American and Russian scientists. A barrage of newspaper and magazine articles followed, including a scaremongering article by Carl Sagan in the October 30, 1983 issue of Parade, the Sunday tabloid read by millions. The most influential article was featured in the December 23,1983 issue of Science (the weekly magazine of the American Association for the Advancement of Science): "Nuclear winter, global consequences of multiple nuclear explosions," by five scientists, R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and C. Sagan. Significantly, these activists listed their names to spell TTAPS, pronounced "taps," the bugle call proclaiming "lights out" or the end of a military funeral.

Until 1985, non-propagandizing scientists did not begin to effectively refute the numerous errors, unrealistic assumptions, and computer modeling weakness' of the TTAPS and related "nuclear winter" hypotheses. A principal reason is that government organizations, private corporations, and most scientists generally avoid getting involved in political controversies, or making statements likely to enable antinuclear activists to accuse them of minimizing nuclear war dangers, thus undermining hopes for peace. Stephen Schneider has been called a fascist by some disarmament supporters for having written "Nuclear Winter Reappraised," according to the Rocky Mountain News of July 6, 1986. Three days later, this paper, that until recently featured accounts of unsurvivable "nuclear winter," criticized Carl Sagan and defended Thompson and Schneider in its lead editorial, "In Study of Nuclear Winter, Let Scientists Be Scientists." In a free country, truth will out - although sometimes too late to effectively counter fast-hittingpropaganda.

Effective refutation of "nuclear winter" also was delayed by the prestige of politicians and of politically motivated scientists and scientific organizations endorsing the TTAPS forecast of worldwide doom. Furthermore, the weakness' in the TTAPS hypothesis could not be effectively explored until adequate Government funding was made available to cover costs of lengthy, expensive studies, including improved computer modeling of interrelated, poorly understood meteorological phenomena.

Serious climatic effects from a Soviet-U.S. nuclear war cannot be completely ruled out. However, possible deaths from uncertain climatic effects are a small danger compared to the incalculable millions in many countries likely to die from starvation caused by disastrous shortages of essentials of modern agriculture sure to result from a Soviet-American nuclear war, and by the cessation of most international food shipments.

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Copyright 2004 Nuclear War Survival Skills - Authorized by Cresson Kearny - Digitized by Arnold Jagt

posted August 12, 2011 08:07 PM              

yet MOST of what the climate alarmists are aiming for is cleaning up our act. pollution free cars would be a huge start. and just today i heard again the story of the town in pennsylvania that has had a fire underground (coal mine!) for years now...can't be put out apparently, and would not have been started without human help...

the use of nukes is not justifiable in terms of the damage they can do to the environment, forgettabout nuclear winter, think decimation of your surroundings and sustenance. and nuclear energy plants are just as dangerous as bombs. oil is dirty and costly in every way including human lives, yet the anti-alarmists stick up for oil consumption like their lives depended on it.

today it is possible to get on solar power in your home for no money down and lower bills than your current provider can give you, getting you off the grid and independent of the government and power cos.

posted August 13, 2011 01:38 AM            

everything was here for free, for ALL...

we will pay a price, and our entire consciousness together is creating our own karma...

we need to re-Create, all together..what should be..

Heaven on Earth. ...

we have only ourSelves to blame, for the chaos that is TODAY, for it is yesterday,
and tomorrow...

M O M

Mind Over Matter

if only we used 100% of our BRAIN

well, that was the GOOD OLD Days...

everything we think, do, and say, has an effect on ALL..

we knew this, but we have forgotten... .

just like we forgot Mother God..
And put Father above her
instead of beside her
equal

I'm ranting, and I know alot of you find it annoying, my apologies...

Everyday, I wake up, and thank Mother and Father, for ALL, then to all Of you..I send Love, Healing, and Wishes, for ALL to find their Truth, and Mastership...

I wish this with all my Heart!