Wirt "I told you a million times not to exaggerate" Atmar tells us a few
tall tales.
"...although we came close in the 1960's and 1970's, a time when we gave
serious thought to killing five billion people in a matter of days..."
Killing five billion people in the 1960s or 1970s would have been impossible
considering the total population of the planet at that time was 3 billion in
the 60s and 3.7 billion in the 70s.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762181.html

Whilst being present at the site of a detonating thermo-nuclear weapon will
ruin your whole day and weekend besides, Wirt was alluding to the theory the
radiation fallout would kill every single human being on the planet, twice
over.  That is yet another exaggeration from our good friend Wirt who seems
full of them these days.

I remember those days living in the nuclear shadow.  Some of you will say,
but Denys, you lived in Canada at that time.  True enough. And in North
America, we keep thinking of the long distances between cities in Canada and
the US, however, Montreal is 60 miles from Plattsburgh AFB (Closed in 1995),
as the crow flies.  Plattsburgh was home of SAC's 380th Bomb Wing equipped
with B-52s and later FB-111As.  About 60 miles due north of Montreal was the
anti-aircraft missile complex at La Macaza, Quebec and the home of the RCAF
447 SAM Squadron equipped with nuclear-tipped Boeing BOMARC missiles.  This
complex was one of two built as part of NORAD (the other was in North Bay,
Ontario, home to the 446 SAM squadron). The Boeing BOMARC (BOeing Michigan
Air Research) missile was powered by two Marquardt ramjet engines, and was
designed to fly at Mach 2.8 and intercept packs of incoming (presumably
Soviet) bombers and detonate its nuclear warhead, taking the pack of bombers
with it.  Plattsburgh AFB and CFB La Macaza, two magnets for Soviet ICBMs
were about 130 miles apart, with Montreal right in the middle.  With the
1960 CEP of Soviet ICBMs being what it was, you figure out the chances of
one or more ICBM impacting the city.  The best way to survive a nuclear
attack is to be somewhere else.  This would not have worked well in
Montreal.

At any rate, Neville Shutte notwithstanding, the danger from nuclear fallout
is highly exaggerated.  Yes, nuclear weapons can kill a huge number of
people and cause tremendous damage however outside the immediate blast area,
the supposed lethal effects of the weapon come from radiation fallout and
perhaps nuclear winter.  But the World Wide Web is a phenomenal invention
allowing someone with google.com and a modicum of intelligence to read
opinions and articles, which are not censored by the traditional news media.
I found this interesting paper, whilst searching for another one that I know
about.

http://cnts.wpi.edu/RSH/Docs/Presentations/RadnTruth.rtf

Back to Wirt's post.  The most important thing is that it did NOT happen.
We came close during the Cuban missile crisis and we came close again in
1995, but that was just for a few hours or days.  Can it happen in the
future?  Possibly, though the treaty just signed by Bush and Putin
diminishes tremendously the likelihood of a global thermo-nuclear exchange.
What has me really worried currently is the very real possibility of a
nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India.

Denys

-----Original Message-----
From: HP-3000 Systems Discussion [mailto:[log in to unmask]]On Behalf Of
Wirt Atmar
Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2002 1:06 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Memorial Day

Today was Memorial Day in the United States, a day that now primarily
emphasizes the heroism of the American soldiers during World War II. In that
war, 405,399 American military were killed, a terrible number.

However, there are other, far worse numbers worth considering as well. An
estimated 100 million men, women and children died during the 2,139 days of
World War II, if the counting is to begin on September 1, 1939, the date of
Hilter's invasion of Poland, and to end on September 2, 1945, with the
Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard the USS Missouri. When those two
numbers are divided into one another, the result is that 45,599 people were
methodically killed day after day, for every day of the war, for six years
running.

There's never been another period in human history that could match this
level of murderous barbarity, although we came close in the 1960's and
1970's, a time when we gave serious thought to killing five billion people
in
a matter of days.

It's possible to argue with some real force of logic that technology frees
us
to exploit the deepest evils of our nature and because of that, we are far
less civilized than we believe ourselves to be. Nonetheless, I remain an
optimist, and I deeply believe that what we are doing now with these
computers is making us all more human and humane, and in the consequence,
making us all safer.

Wirt Atmar

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