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Aucbvax.1367 fa.arms-d utzoo!duke!mhtsa!ucbvax!REM@MIT-MC Tue May 19 17:55:18 1981 Effects of nuclear weapons and war If you recall, a month or so I did a DIALOG search in the NTIS database for articles with EFFECT...NUCLEAR...WAR/WEAPON... in their titles. This was in response to claims by people in ARMS-D or other mailing lists (POLY-SCI?) that three articles like that existed. Two of the cited articles appeared: "The effects of nuclear war" by OTA (Office of Technology Assessment) 76-600080 (what turned up in my search was 79 not 76) "The effects of nuclear weapons" The other one "World wide effects of large scale nuclear war" didn't turn up but something similar did turn up: "Long-term worldwide effects of multiple nuclear-weapons detonations". Whoever suggested the original title, is this what you really meant? Or are we talking about two different articles, yours not being in the NTIS database (or I would have found it)?

Anyway, to keep you all up to date, I ordered 9 (nine) of the articles on microfiche and have received 6 (six) of them to date. Now I have the depressing burden of looking at all that gloomy stuff in the microfiche readers at my favorite libraries. (Like a 1 megaton weapon will wipe out all of downtown Detroit and kill 50% out a ways, and a 25 megaton weapon will anihilate everything in Detroit and some suburbs and kill 50% in a wide area around there.) One curious fact is that direct blast and thermal radiation is the main immediate effect. In a megaton or larger bomb, gamma radiation is killing only in a tiny area that is well inside the area totally destroyed by blast, so you don't have to worry about gamma radiation, if you're close enough to be bothered by it you're already in the area where 12 psi change in pressure has crushed even reinforced steel-concrete buildings and 180 mph winds have machine-gunned all people with random debris and thus surely killed you.

----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org> of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/

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