MEDICAL CONSEQUENCES OF NUCLEAR WAR

If launched from Russia, nuclear weapons would explode over American cities thirty minutes after takeoff. (China’s twenty missiles are liquid-fueled, not solid-fueled. They take many hours to fuel and could not be used in a surprise attack, but they would produce similar damage if launched. Other nuclear-armed nations, such as India and Pakistan, do not have the missile technology to attack the U.S.) It is assumed that most cities with a population over 100,000 people are targeted by Russia. During these thirty minutes, the U.S. early-warning infrared satellite detectors signal the attack to the strategic air command in Colorado. They in turn notify the president, who has approximately three minutes to decide whether or not to launch a counterattack. In the counterforce scenario the U.S. government currently embraces, he does launch, the missiles pass mid-space, and the whole operation is over within one hour.

Landing at 20 times the speed of sound, nuclear weapons explode over cities, with heat equal to that inside the center of the sun. There is practically no warning, except the emergency broadcast system on radio or TV, which gives the public only minutes to reach the nearest fallout shelter, assuming there is one. There is no time to collect children or immediate family members.

The bomb, or bombs—because most major cities will be hit with more than one explosion—will gouge out craters 200 feet deep and 1000 feet in diameter if they explode at ground level. Most, however, are programmed to produce an air burst, which increases the diameter of destruction, but creates a shallower crater. Half a mile from the epicenter all buildings will be destroyed, and at 1.7 miles only reinforced concrete buildings will remain.

At 2.7 miles bare skeletons of buildings still stand, single-family residences have disappeared, 50 percent are dead and 40 percent severely injured.¹ Bricks and mortar are converted to missiles traveling at hundreds of miles an hour. Bodies have been sucked out of buildings and converted to missiles themselves, flying through the air at 100 miles per hour. Severe overpressures (pressure many times greater than normal atmospheric pressure) have popcorned windows, producing millions of shards of flying glass, causing decapitations and shocking lacerations. Overpressures have also entered the nose, mouth, and ears, inducing rupture of lungs and rupture of the tympanic membranes or eardrums.

Most people will suffer severe burns. In Hiroshima, which was devastated by a very small bomb—13 kilotons compared to the current 1000 kilotons—a child actually disappeared, vaporized, leaving his shadow on the concrete pavement behind him. A mother was running, holding her baby, and both she and the baby were converted to a charcoal statue. The heat will be so intense that dry objects—furniture, clothes, and dry wood—will spontaneously ignite. Humans will become walking, flaming torches.

Forty or fifty miles from the explosion people will instantly be blinded from retinal burns if they glance at the flash. Huge firestorms will engulf thousands of square miles, fanned by winds from the explosion that transiently exceed 1000 miles per hour. People in fallout shelters will be asphyxiated as fire sucks oxygen from the shelters. (This happened in Hamburg after the Allied bombing in WWII when temperatures within the shelters, caused by conventional bombs, reached 1472 degrees Fahrenheit.)²

FALLOUT

Most of the city and its people will be converted to radioactive dust shot up in the mushroom cloud. The area of lethal fallout from this cloud will depend upon the prevailing wind and weather conditions; it could cover thousands of square miles. Doses of 5000 rads (a rad is a measure of radiation dose) or more experienced by people close to the explosion—if they are still alive—will produce acute encephalopathic syndrome. The cells of the brain will become so damaged that they would swell. Because the brain is enclosed in a fixed bony space, there is no room for swelling, so the pressure inside the skull rises, inducing symptoms of excitability, acute nausea, vomiting, diarrhea, severe headache, and seizures, followed by coma and death within twenty-four hours.

A lower dose of 1000 rads causes death from gastrointestinal symptoms. The lining cells of the gut die, as do the cells in the bone marrow that fight infection and that cause blood clotting. Mouth ulcers, loss of appetite, severe colicky abdominal pain, nausea, vomiting, and bloody diarrhea occur within seven to fourteen days. Death follows severe fluid loss, infection, hemorrhage, and starvation.

At 450 rads, 50 percent of the population dies. Hair drops out, vomiting and bloody diarrhea occurs, accompanied by bleeding under the skin and from the gums. Death occurs from internal hemorrhage, generalized septicemia, and infection. Severe trauma and injuries exacerbate the fallout symptoms, so patients die more readily from lower doses of radiation. Infants, children, and old people are more sensitive to radiation than healthy adults. Within bombed areas, fatalities will occur from a combination of trauma, burns, radiation sickness, and starvation. There will be virtually no medical care, even for the relief of pain, because most physicians work within targeted areas.

NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS

The United States owns 103 nuclear power plants, plus many other dangerous radioactive facilities related to past activities of the cold war. A 1000-kiloton bomb (1 megaton) landing on a standard 1000-megawatt reactor and its cooling pools, which contain intensely radioactive spent nuclear fuel, would permanently contaminate an area the size of western Germany.³ The International Atomic Energy Agency now considers these facilities to be attractive terrorist targets, post-September 11, 2001.

DISEASE

Millions of decaying bodies—human and animal alike—will rot, infected with viruses and bacteria that will mutate in the radioactive environment to become more lethal. Trillions of insects, naturally resistant to radiation—flies, fleas, cockroaches, and lice—will transmit disease from the dead to the living, to people whose immune mechanisms have been severely compromised by the high levels of background radiation. Rodents will multiply by the millions among the corpses and shattered sewerage systems. Epidemics of diseases now controlled by immunization and good hygiene will reappear: such as measles, polio, typhoid, cholera, whooping cough, diphtheria, smallpox, plague, tuberculosis, meningitis, malaria, and hepatitis.

Anyone who makes it to a fallout shelter and is not asphyxiated in it, will need to stay there for at least six months until the radiation decays sufficiently so outside survival is possible. It has been postulated that perhaps older people should be sent outside to scavenge for food because they will not live long enough to develop malignancies from the fallout (cancer and leukemia have long incubation periods ranging from five to sixty years). But any food that manages to grow will be toxic because plants concentrate radioactive elements.⁴

NUCLEAR WINTER

Finally, we must examine the systemic global effects of a nuclear war. Firestorms will consume oil wells, chemical facilities, cities, and forests, covering the earth with a blanket of thick, black, radioactive smoke, reducing sunlight to 17 percent of normal. One year or more will be required for light and temperature to return to normal—perhaps supranormal values, as sunlight would return to more than its usual intensity, enhanced in the ultraviolet spectrum by depletion of the stratospheric ozone layer. Subfreezing temperatures could destroy the biological support system for civilization, resulting in massive starvation, thirst, and hypothermia.⁵

To quote a 1985 SCOPE document published by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, “the total loss of human agricultural and societal support systems would result in the loss of almost all humans on Earth, essentially equally among combatant and noncombatant countries alike . . . this vulnerability is an aspect not currently a part of the understanding of nuclear war; not only are the major combatant countries in danger, but virtually the entire human population is being held hostage to the large-scale use of nuclear weapons. . . .”

The proposed START III treaty between Russia and America, even if it were implemented, would still allow 3000 to 5000 hydrogen bombs to be maintained on alert.⁶ The threshold for nuclear winter? One thousand 100-kiloton bombs blowing up 100 cities⁷—a distinct possibility given current capabilities and targeting plans.

ACCIDENTAL NUCLEAR WAR

On January 25, 1995, military technicians at radar stations in northern Russia detected signals from an American missile that had just been launched off the coast of Norway carrying a U.S. scientific probe. Although the Russians had been previously notified of this launch, the alert had been forgotten or ignored. Aware that U.S. submarines could launch a missile containing eight deadly hydrogen bombs fifteen minutes from Moscow, Russian officials assumed that America had initiated a nuclear war. For the first time in history, the Russian computer containing nuclear launch codes was opened.

President Boris Yeltsin, sitting at that computer being advised on how to launch a nuclear war by his military officers, had only a three-minute interval to make a decision. At the last moment, the U.S. missile veered off course. He realized that Russia was not under attack.⁸

If Russia had launched its missiles, the U.S. early-warning satellites would immediately have detected them, and radioed back to Cheyenne Mountain. This would have led to the notification of the president, who also would have had three minutes to make his launch decision, and America’s missiles would then have been fired from their silos. We were thus within minutes of global annihilation that day.

Today, Russia’s early-warning and nuclear command systems are deteriorating. Russia’s early-warning system fails to operate up to seven hours a day because only one-third of its radars are functional, and two of the nine global geographical areas covered by its missile-warning satellites are not under surveillance for missile detection.⁹ To make matters worse, the equipment controlling nuclear weapons malfunctions frequently, and critical electronic devices and computers sometimes switch to combat mode for no apparent reason. According to the CIA, seven times during the fall of 1996 operations at some Russian nuclear weapons facilities were severely disrupted when robbers tried to “mine” critical communications cables for their copper!¹⁰ This vulnerable Russian system could easily be stressed by an internal or international political crisis, when the danger of accidental or indeed intentional nuclear war would become very real.

And the U.S. itself is not invulnerable to error. In August 1999, for example, when the National Imagery and Mapping Agency was installing a new computer system to deal with potential Y2K problems, this operation triggered a computer malfunction which rendered the agency “blind” for days; it took more than eight months for the defect to be fully repaired. As the New York Times reported, part of America’s nuclear early-warning system was rendered incompetent for almost a year.¹¹ (At that time I was sitting at a meeting in the west wing of the White House discussing potentially dangerous Y2K nuclear weapons glitches. Several Pentagon officials blithely reassured me that everything would function normally during the roll-over. But in fact, their intelligence system had already been disabled.)

Such a situation has the potential for catastrophe. If America cannot observe what the Russians are doing with their nuclear weapons—or vice versa—especially during a serious international crisis they are likely to err on the side of “caution,” which could mean that something as benign as the launch of a weather satellite could actually trigger annihilation of the planet. This situation became even more significant after the September 11 attack.