Op-ed: The illogic of civil defence

M V Ramana

Radioactive fallout is by no means the only effect of a nuclear weapon. The instantaneous consequences of a nuclear explosion — the prompt gamma rays and neutrons, the heat and light, and the shock wave — could be much more devastating

Civil defence – those are the new buzzwords among those who seem to think that India and Pakistan can fight a nuclear war and survive. The Hindustan Times, for example, reports that Delhi’s Civil Defence mechanism has been reorganized to meet “any kind of calamity” and a possible nuclear attack has also been kept in mind. Similarly Dr. A. K. Walia, New Delhi’s health minister, was quoted as saying that the capital city was ready for all levels of attack, including bioterrorism and nuclear strike.
In the case of Pakistan too, people have recommended upgrading civil defence. For example, writing in the Defence Journal Air Marshal (Retd.) Ayaz Ahmad Khan has suggested: “Defence against nuclear attack will require... updated NBC civil defence measures.”

The most concrete form of the idea is the claim by Indian Defence Research and Development Organization that it has developed an integrated field shelter to protect personnel from nuclear, biological and chemical agents in a nuclear war scenario. The shelter is said to be capable of accommodating 30 people and of giving protection for 96 hours.

The basic assumption underlying this suggestion is that the primary harm to individuals in the vicinity of a nuclear attack comes from radioactive fallout. If the shelter were designed to block out all or most of the radioactive fallout and the radiation emitted by them, then, clearly, staying inside would lower the dosage that survivors would receive. However, after 96 hours, i.e., four days, they would have to emerge into the outside world. What happens then?

Fallout from a nuclear explosion comprises of different radioactive materials, each of them decaying with its own characteristic half-life. The sum total of all these radioactive components of fallout decays is roughly as follows: following every sevenfold increase in time after the nuclear explosion, the radioactive dose rate decreases by a factor of ten. Mathematically speaking, the dose rate decreases as the 1.2-th power of time (measured in hours). Thus the radioactive dose rate after 96 hours is about 0.4% of the original dose rate.

This is small, but not zero. And since even low levels of radiation exposure increases risk of cancer, many of those emerging from these fallout shelters could develop fatal cancers. People up to about 5 kilometres downwind of the point of a ground level explosion of a 15 kilotonne nuclear explosion (approximately the yield of the bomb that the US dropped over Hiroshima) who disappear promptly into these shelters, emerge after 96 hours and are evacuated over the next few hours, would have a 1 % increased risk of fatal cancers.

However, radioactive fallout is by no means the only effect of a nuclear weapon. The instantaneous consequences of a nuclear explosion – the prompt gamma rays and neutrons, the heat and light, and the shock wave – could be much more devastating. Given the proximity of India and Pakistan, people in the two countries who are close to ground zero would simply not have the time to hide in these shelters.

Even if some were lucky enough to escape being seriously hurt by any of these mechanisms, and manage to go into these shelters, there would still be the massive firestorms that would result from the coalescing of the multiple little fires that would be started by the initial burst of heat and light. Many of the casualties – 60% according to one estimate – at Hiroshima were a consequence of such a firestorm that covered a roughly circular area with a radius of about two kilometers.

Our understanding of the physical conditions that would prevail come from the fire storms that developed in Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo following incendiary attacks by the allied forces during the Second World War. Temperatures of several hundred degrees were reached. People hiding in basement shelters were overcome by asphyxiation and often burnt.
In spite of the fact that Hamburg was not subjected to blast or radiation effects, the area destroyed during the attack was about 12 square kilometers (about the same area as Hiroshima). The death toll was estimated to be between 50,000 and 60,000. Likewise, the firestorm in Tokyo is believed to have killed nearly 84,000 people. With increased urbanization, as in South Asia, the effects of such firestorms could be more severe.

Despite these physical realities and wartime experiences, plans for civil defense to protect against a nuclear war were originally hatched by the US and the Soviet Union during the Cold War – the inspiration for much of Indian and Pakistani thinking about nuclear weapons. Among those who promulgated the notion of such civil defense was Herman Kahn, who felt that the US had to plan to prevail in an all-out thermonuclear war and this depends “as much on air defence and civil defence as air offence”.
Partly in response to such ideas, the US spent, according to Atomic Audit, the landmark study by the Brookings Institute, US$19.5 billion dollars on civil defence and building highways to evacuate people from cities upon warning of nuclear attack. Magazines like Popular Mechanics published blueprints for a basic backyard shelter. Documentary films propagating the idea were made and distributed. Heated debates arose about the morality of turning away or even shooting neighbours who tried to gain access to fallout shelters.

It was a statement by Thomas Jones, a Pentagon official during the tenure of Ronald Reagan, which exposed the extreme ridiculousness of civil defense as a means of national survival. In a newspaper interview, Jones stated that all one needed to do to survive a nuclear war was to dig a hole, cover it with a couple of doors and then throw three feet of dirt on top.

Albert Einstein’s statement about nuclear weapons at the dawn of the atomic age still holds true: There is no secret, and there is no defense. Espousing such notions only distracts from the fact that one cannot have nuclear war and survival. The only sure defense is nuclear disarmament.

M V Ramana is a physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security. He is the author of “Bombing Bombay? Effects of Nuclear Weapons and a Case Study of a Hypothetical Explosion” (Cambridge, USA: International Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, 1999). Some of
his writings can be found at http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nuclear.html

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