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Aucbvax.1428 fa.arms-d utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!CAULKINS@USC-ECL Wed May 27 08:20:17 1981 Tues PM;Weapons Crisis Week at Stanford This is a brief account of my impressions of the first evening:

Kosta Tsipis (MIT) spoke first. He did not talk down to us ! He gave a brilliantly lucid description of how nuclear weapons work, including the binding energy curve and a modest amount of mathematics. He went on to discuss gross effects; thermal radiation, blast, and fallout. All of this can be dug out of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" but he made it quite graphic.

Two things were novel for me:

1) Urban firestorms will deplete the oxygen; blast shelters in the firestorm area won't work unless they have 10s of hours or days worth of bottled oxygen.

2) Ozone layer depletion Each megaton detonated produces 10**32 molecules of oxides of nitrogen. The fireballs carry these up to the ozone layer.

If 50% of the weapons of the US and USSR are detonated the ozone layer in the northern hemisphere will be depleted by 80%; in the southern hemisphere by 30-40%. The ozone layer will take 5 years to return to normal.

20% depletion will increase solar UV to a point that will blind diurnal animals (those that sleep at night and move by day).

Goodbye birds, hello rats and cockroaches. A massive collapse of vision dependent higher life form ecosystems.

Tsipis isdoing some experiments to confirm this effect.

Herb Abrams (director of Radiology at Harvard Med School) spoke second.

He talked about the negative synergism of the post-attack environment.

Some high (low ?) points:

What do you do with 150 million corpses ? Insects can survive 1,000 REM; rats almost as much. There will be a population explosion of corpse-eating 'vermin'. Insect vectored disease willincrease rapidly This will be made worse by the absence of birds (see above).

Medical capability deal with all this will be down to less than 20% of pre-attack levels. Patient/doctor ratios will go from 4/1 to 95/1. Present populations have low natural immunity to diptheria, whooping cough and other diseases; these are likely to be epidemic and fatal to many. This is especially true because of radiation damaged immune systems.

Food supplies will not be available; there is a negative correlation between areas of population density and food production. The transportation infrastructure will be severely damaged; in particular the availability ofliquid fuels is very problematic.

All in all, not a very pleasant evening. HOW DO WE SOLVE THIS PROBLEM ?

Dave C -------

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