The casualties of a limited’ nuclear war

Press, 2 September 1980, Page 20

The casualties of a limited’ nuclear war

\ By

I. F. STONE,

Washington columnist

Just what does happen to civilian bystanders if the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. engage in one of those tit-for-tat limited nuclear exchanges? This is a key .question for the'U.S. .Senate Foreign Relations Committee to answer. Senator Church, its Democratic chairman, and Senator Javits,’ its ranking Republican, have' asked the Secretary of Defence, Mr Harold Brown, and the Secretary of State, Mr, Edmund Muskie, to appear before the committee “as soon as possible” for an inquiry into President Carter’s new limited nuclear war directive. The stock; answer of the limited war advocates to ' this question is “not much.” This was the ' Pentagon’s first answer the last time the Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on the subject in 1974, after President Nixon first: proposed such "targeting” preparations. The spokesman then was the. Secretary of Defence, Mr James R. Schlesinger, and the committee’s sceptical chairman was Senator- Muskie. A look at those earlier hearings should put the Senate, and the United States on guard against the Pentagon’s disarming salesmanship. The further the Senate Committee probed, the less antiseptic and . “surgical”, limited war- looked. Mr Schlesinger’s' initial presentation spoke reassuringly of. “relatively few civilian casualties". Asked to be more specific, he suggested

“15,000; 20,000; 25,000." The committee pressed for a more detailed study. The Secretary came. back six months later. This time he placed U.S. fatalities at 800,000. He added that total casualties, including those with radiation sickness, would add up to about 1,500,000. These figures were for a nuclear exchange limited to intercontinental ballistic missile bases. The estimates were submitted to examination by a panel of nuclear experts (in eluding. Mr Harold Brown, then head of Cal Tech). Their criticisms forced, the Pentagon to ’come up in 1975 with a new figure. This time it was said the total U.S. casualties would be between 3.2 and 22.7 million, depending on whether the unpredictable winds carried the radioactive clouds over sparsely populated or urban areas within a 1000 mile radius. For purposes of comparison, let us look at a few figures. Total American dead and wounded in World War II were 1,076,245. The total for all wars since 1776 adds up to only about 2,500,000. The top Pentagon estimate for this one limited nuclear strike would produce more casualties than all America’s wars of the last. 200 years. Imagine the hospitals — the surviving ones — trying to handle so massive and .sudden an inflow of casualties. , 'No- estimates were supplied, at least in public hearings, of what a similar strike would do in the So-

viet Union. It lost more people than any other country in World War 11. Yet its total battle dead and wounded, in four years of total war, -was still two million less than that top estimate of 22.7 million U.S. casualties in this one limited strike on ICBM bases. The thermonuclear weapon Is of hellishly unprecedented dimensions. Now you can see why Mr Paul Wanike, who was Pres- ‘ ident Carter’s chief arms negotiator, called President Carter’s new limited war doctrine "apocalyptic nonsense." One of the reasons why the Pentagon was forced to revise its-estimates of. casualties so dramatically is that the panel of nuclear experts convened at the request of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee found in the earlier Pentagon forecasts certain hidden assumptions that were sedative but unrealistic. The most important of these unwarranted assumptions was that urban populations within a 1000-mile radius of any ICBM base would be protected from fall-out by shelters stocked with enough food and wafer for 30 days, no less. No such system of shelters was then or is now available. When this assumption was taken out of the computers, the estimates of casualties from radioactivity rose sharply.? ' No Senator, and no lay observers, could . have spotted such flaws in the

Pentagon presentation. The Senate would do well to mobilise a similar panel of nuclear experts to help it study the military estimates which will be forthcoming this time. Weapons accuracy has improved since 1974, and faith in civil defence has diminished. The same “limited” scenario! played ■"out this time would produce even more horrifying casualty figures than it did last time. The nuclear hawks are al-

ready demanding a fall-out shelter programme and revival of the anti-ballistic missile as inescapable corollaries of a limited war doctrine. The latter would nullify the anti-ballistic missile treaty, one of the post-war era’s few faltering steps towards sanity, and the former would be seen as preparation for a first-strike strategy. • ■ ’: . : ’ ■ There is little reason to believe that people could be evacuated in time, even if

30-day fall-out shelters were available, and even less to think that such shelters would do much good in the holocaust of an all-outs huclear exchange. v But President -Carters directive No. 1 ,59 may; drive, the U.S. towards a costly, futile and destabilising shelter programme. Billions needed to rebuild cities may go for more and bigger ratholes in which to cower.. — Copyright, Observer News Service.