I wrote earlier:

> 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.

As long as I'm rambling on about the nuclear war we never engaged in, let me 
emphasize again the statement that we put ourselves into a position where the 
general staffs of all of the major military nations "were scared shitless." 
That's not an exaggeration. The problem is that I can only weakly convey a 
sense of that fear. The general staffs were the people who knew better than 
anyone else what we were on the verge of doing.

I worked on a variety of nuclear weapons systems during my tenure at Missile 
Flight Safety and Nuclear Weapons Effects Lab at White Sands. One of those 
systems was FADAC (field artillery digital automatic computer). In 1969, at 
the time of my analyses of that system, EMP (electromagnetic pulse) became 
the threat du jour, unexpectedly coming out of nowhere. Prior to 1969, EMP 
was almost unknown, or at least unconsidered a serious menace. As a result, 
EMP simulation facilities were hurriedly built simultaneously in a number of 
places (Ft. Huachucha, Arizona, Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, and by Ft. 
Belvoir, VA). The Ft. Belvoir facility was the first to come on line, and my 
project, FADAC, was the first full-scale test of a weapons system -- and as a 
consequence, the first Army weapons system to prove itself vulnerable to EMP. 
I have a few photographs of those field tests at:

     http://aics-research.com/fadac.html

I was asked at the time not to take any pictures of the EMP generator, so it 
doesn't appear in the photos. Nonetheless, you can see the computer. Albeit 
tiny by today's standards, it is a modern computer in every regard, although 
all of the flip-flops were made from discrete, individual transistors and the 
disc memory held only 8Kbytes. 

Although every aspect of the failures we generated in those tests was 
eventually analyzed in great detail, including taking electron micrographs of 
the failed transistors themselves, I came to understand the nature of the 
induced failures before we ever left the field in Virginia, using nothing 
more than a voltmeter. The primary mode of failure was externally induced 
current surges into the base-emitter regions of the affected transistors.

Because FADAC was the first Army system to fail, I went to the Pentagon twice 
in the fall of 1969 and gave lectures on the failure mechanisms to the 
Command Staff of Army Materiel Command, the command headquarters organization 
of TECOM (Test and Evaluation Command), which in turn was the command 
organization of NWEL, WSMR, for whom I worked. 

I worked at NWEL for precisely the same reasons that Bill Clinton was in 
England at the time: to avoid the draft and the Vietnam War. Nor was I the 
only one. Half of the world's scientists were working in nuclear weapons 
development in 1969. Moreover, it was a time when the military was constantly 
being villified, portrayed as pigs, brutes who were determined to destroy the 
world. College computer rooms were being bombed, US cities were held hostage 
to riots, and 300,000 people camped out on the Ellipse across from the White 
House to protest the war in Vietnam.

Because of the importance of the subject, I spoke directly to a room full of 
generals, as I had done on two previous occasions. It was common at that time 
for young physicists to talk directly to older generals. What consistently 
surprised me was the intelligence and humanity of the people with whom I was 
speaking, as well as the level of fear that was evident in their questions. 
Quite commonly they would clear the room of their colonels and ask very 
candid questions of the civilian kid that was there with them. Although the 
questions were technical, every question was essentially: "How in the hell 
did we get in this mess?" "And what are we going to do to get ourselves out 
of it?"
  
It's this little bit of preface that's necessary to fully understand this 
short blurb:

"In December 1996, 63 generals and admirals from 17 nations, including 
General Horner, General Lee Butler (director of the US Strategic Command from 
1991 to 1994, responsible for the entire US strategic nuclear arsenal), and 
US General Andrew J. Goodpaster (former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO 
forces in Europe), issued an unequivocal call for nuclear abolition: "We have 
been presented with a challenge of the highest possible historic importance: 
the creation of a nuclear weapons–free world. The end of the Cold War makes 
it possible. The dangers of proliferation, terrorism, and a new nuclear arms 
race render it necessary."

If you have the time, read two statements by General Lee Butler that are on 
the web. Gen. Butler was at one time Commander of the Strategic Air Command, 
and then later Commander of the US Air Force. In both instances, he was 
responsible for the use and release of all US strategic nuclear weapons. The 
pages of interest are:

     http://www.warpeace.org/Current/butler.html
     http://www.ucsusa.org/arms/butler.html

Robert McNamara, Defense Secretary during the Kennedy Administration, has 
also recently said:

"It is incredible to think that nuclear weapons could be retained 
indefinitely without their use resulting in the destruction of nations. I 
drew the conclusions from the Cuban missile crisis that the combination of 
human fallibility and nuclear weapons would lead to their use. The crisis was 
the best-managed crisis in 40 years but that was not why we escaped nuclear 
war, we escaped it because we were lucky. There is always a risk of nuclear 
attack due to misinformation, misjudgment, miscalculation. ... Fallibility 
will absolutely guarantee the use of nuclear weapons over time. Whatever the 
reason we had for having them in the past we don't have that reason today." 

It is my impression that the older this group of people get, and the more in 
power they were, and the more responsible they were, the more astounded that 
we were able to walk our way through this period of 40 years of near 
insanity. Because of what I was doing, I perfectly well understood what was 
going on, and at the time, I didn't think that I -- and the rest of humanity 
-- was going to live out a normal lifespan.

The German Medical Society calculated a few years ago that four billion 
people (essentially everyone) would die in the Northern Hemisphere, with 
perhaps 99.5% mortality in the first two days. Further it was calculated by 
several groups that it would only take 20 Hiroshima-sized weapons to 
completely economically cripple and destabilize the United States, if those 
20 weapons destroyed the downtown areas of the US's 20 largest cities. But, 
given that ten thousand megatons, not merely 400 kilotons, were targetted on 
the United States, and if that weapons delivery was scheduled over a 48 hour 
period, the US would suffer the equivalency of 6 Hiroshimas per second, thus 
guaranteeing the economic destruction of the US in the first 3.5 seconds. The 
next 47 hours, 59 minutes and 56.5 seconds of bombardment would only serve to 
be overkill.

One of things that always amazed -- and gratified -- me at the time was that 
there was always an option in every analyzed scenario the question: "What 
should the US do given a full-scale Soviet nuclear attack?", with one of the 
answers being: "Nothing."

It was the only way that I could ever see humanity surviving. A full-scale 
attack by either side, even without the other responding, would likely doom 
every single person in the Northern Hemisphere.

Wirt Atmar

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