James Byrne writes:

> On 5 Apr 2001, at 14:46, Barbara Burnett wrote:
>
>  > Time addresses the issue of global warming and its
>  > consequences in a special report in their latest issue:
>
>  And "Time" does their usual spectacularly mundane
>  regurgitation of commonly held beliefs, inferences based on
>  evidence that ignores other long term influences, discounts
>  the statistical reliability of the limited amounts of data; while at
>  the same time providing a sufficiently apocalyptic tone as to
>  convince a superficial reader that this is all quite serious and
>  immediate. More importantly, reading that article one is
>  immediately impressed with the facts that a.) we are so
>  powerful a force that we did this; and b.) we can stop it if we
>  choose.  We are the greatest!  Good marketing, poor science.

*snip*

>  The hubris that professional doom-sayers display is really
>  quite startling.  Three years ago it was software programs
>  (that didn't even exist in 1970) that were going to cause the
>  end of civilization. Why?  Because economy had dictated that
>  the first two digits of the year (in the Christian calendar mind
>  you, not the Buddhist, Islam, or Shinto) were not saved or
>  accounted for in computer software written at that time.
>
>  In the 1980's it was 'nuclear winter'.
>
>  In the 1970's we were a.) about to run out of fuel within 20
>  years, b.) suffer catastrophic starvation and disease because
>  of the inability of the planet to provide enough food for the
>  world's population. c.) suffer world-wide economic collapse. d.)
>  all of the above.
>
>  In the 1950's and 1960's it was the "bomb" that was going to
>  destroy civilization.  How long did the world sit at "one minute
>  to midnight"? In the 1930's it was the airplane and poison gas
>  that was going to destroy the world ("The Shape of Things to
>  Come").

While Jim's basic complaint has a great deal of validity, it obtains that
validity only because of human nature.

People, either singly or as a group, in the absence of any real threat, will
always invent something to worry about: flesh-eating bacteria, alar on
apples, killer bees, black helicopters, internet credit card theft, etc., but
this very human tendency that borders on neuroticism and paranoia should
never be allowed to obscure those circumstances that are truly of enormous
potential threat. The significant threats don't simply go away by lumping
them in with all of the nonsense and dismissing them en masse.

The only reason that "The Shape of Things to Come" didn't come true is that
we walked our way through an unbelievably tiny eye of a needle and prevented
it, but only with the extraordinary grace of God, by the very reasoned and
temperate thoughts of men of good will, and with an enormous dose of good
luck. Otherwise, most of the governments and general staffs of every
developed nation in the Northern Hemisphere were scared shitless for four
decades running.

Could we have eliminated humanity from the surface of the earth? I truly
don't know. We never ran the experiment. Although it was not my direct
function when I was at Nuclear Weapons Effects Lab at White Sands Missile
Range to calculate those probabilities, that question was tangetially
ancillary to my assignment, which was to test and evaluate the survivability
of various Army weapons systems when exposed to the range of threats
presented by everything from a limited nuclear exchange to a full nuclear war.

My best guess remains: we could have done it easily. Indeed, the only
question was, how far back would we push evolution? I came to believe that no
vertebrate terrestrial life (amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals) would
survive a full nuclear exchange if we and the Soviets were able to deliver
only the throwweight that was standing by for first launch.

At the height of the Cold War (the late 1960's to the early 1980's), we (the
Soviets and us) had 10,000 to 30,000 independent re-entry vehicles, each with
slightly less than a one megaton-average weapon, targeted at each other.

If you've seen the movie, "Terminator 2", the scene of the nuclear weapons
explosion in Los Angeles is the most faithful I've seen of any movie-based
weapons simulation (with the exception of people disintegrating slowly over a
second or so). Most people assume that nuclear weapons are like those used on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but those were very primitive devices of only 8,000
to 22,000 tons of TNT equivalent. That size device is now are now used as the
igniters for the thermonuclear weapons that were placed on the IRVs of the
modern Cold War, with yields ranging from 750,000 to 3,000,000 tons TNT
equivalent per weapon, although some few weapons were larger and some were
smaller.

Look at the "Terminator 2" weapons simulation again, and carefully look at
the level of destruction. And then realize that that was only one weapon, and
that there were likely to be 30,000 more just like it landing every few
seconds for a period of a few tens of minutes everywhere in the United
States, Europe or the Soviet Union, with perhaps 15, 30 or 100 more landing
on various areas of Los Angeles alone, staggered only so to prevent
"fratricide" of the incoming weapons themselves by the currently exploding
devices.

The weapons buildup became so excessive that both sides long ago ran out of
targets -- and every major target was duplicated dozens of times. If we count
only the billion people who were directly in the targeted areas, the likely
throw in a full nuclear exchange would have resulted in the equivalent of 10
to 30 tons of TNT for every women, man and child:

   10,000 to 30,000 weapons x 1,000,000 tons TNT equiv. / 1 billion people =
                       10 to 30 tons of TNT equiv. per capita.

Timothy McVeigh used an ANFO (ammonium nitrate/fuel oil) bomb to cause his
havoc in Oklahoma City, and we too used ANFO stacks of very much larger sizes
to create simulated nuclear blasts at WSMR, but only for blast effects.
McVeigh's bomb was probably in the 5 to 10 ton equiv. range, but even if it
were 30 tons, the amount allocated to every person in the target zones, it
still doesn't begin to represent the destructive power of a nuclear weapon.
An ANFO bomb produces a very cold explosion compared to a nuclear weapon. In
contrast, for a few hundreds of milliseconds, a thermonuclear weapon places a
miniature Sun on the surface of the planet, produces an enormously sharper
blast pulse, and irradiates everything within line of sight with lethal doses
of gamma rays (exceptionally hard x-rays) and a very dense flux of
"non-thermal" neutrons.

To imagine the consequences of an all-out nuclear war, imagine that you bring
a McVeigh-size weapon into your house, which by itself killed nearly 200
people, and then bring in another one for your wife, and one more for each of
your children, understanding full well that it's an equivalent weapon only in
its blast effects, with that being a very weak equivalency. And then have
every one of your neighbors, everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere do the
same, and then have every weapon set off nearly simultaneously within a very
short time window.

It was clear that we were going to set the Northern Hemisphere on fire with a
massively radioactive fire that would perhaps be so intense that the northern
atmosphere's oxygen partial pressure would be, for a short time, completely
consumed. The only question that remained in any of our minds was: Would
anyone survive in the Southern Hemisphere?

That was the question I or anyone else can't answer with certainty. But my
best guess was that no one would.

My officemate during the majority of my time in the Test & Analysis Division
of Nuclear Weapons Effects Lab at WSMR was Darrell Collier. Darrell had just
finished his Ph.D. in plasma physics when he moved in and sat down next to
me. Darrell was the only thing that made going to work tolerable, even though
Darrell inherently disagreed with everything I said, even if was just "Good
morning," but he often paid for those disagreements with steak dinners.

Darrell also disagreed with my general conclusions that no one on the planet
was going to survive a full throw exchange; he, like Jim, thought that it was
hubris on my part. But there was no given day that you could sit down and
calculate that probability. Rather, your conclusion was growing integration
over a period of years of every attribute of a nuclear holocaust that made
you come to one conclusion or another.

In part, because of these differences, Darrell stayed with the program and is
now the Chief Scientist for the Army's Space and Missile Defence Command
(see: http://www.smdc.army.mil/ld-bio.html ), and he remains one of the most
enjoyable people I've ever known or worked with, but I suspect that we still
disagree on this most basic of conclusions. We haven't talked about it in
years. Thankfully however, it's becoming more and more of an irrelevancy
every day.


>  Does anyone besides me see a pattern here?
>
>  This planet, and life upon it, will go on, and on, and on, until
>  the sun begins to transition to the next sequence.  It will come
>  to be covered in ice at some times, and be completely bare at
>  others.  Seas will rise and fall. Human populations will rise,
>  and rise, and crash, and rise, and rise. Based on the little
>  evidence that we have, some form of homo-x will last for
>  another 5-10 million years no matter what we do; unless some
>  celestial accident intervenes.  The idea that we have the
>  capacity to significantly intervene in this process is laughable.

If anything, "laughable" is not the word I would use. We had more than
sufficient power to change the course of not only civilization but also the
course of evolution on this planet.

We just never elected to use it.

At least so far.

Wirt Atmar

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