Horror of nuclear war — ‘living would envy the dead’

Press, 13 November 1981, Page 13

Horror of nuclear war — ‘living would envy the dead’

From

KEN COATES

in London

, The horrors of nuclear war are unspeakable, say three lecturers in peace studies at Bradford University, in England. In a sober, factual, and horrifying assessment of the threat and effects of nuclear conflict, just published, they say that few dare to imagine the existence of survivors.

These would be men, women, and children, including remnants perhaps of their own families, starving, maimed, stricken with grief, tortured by the effects of terminal radiation sickness, scavenging in competition with rats for scraps of contaminated food, deprived of all services; without medicine. shelter, or warmth. “These poor . creatures would indeed envy the dead.” This report, “As Lambs to the Slaughter,” coincides with a resurgence in Britain and Europe of the movement against nuclear arms. An estimated 250.Q00 people recently jammed the streets of central London, the biggest march the capital has ever seen. There have been similar demonstrations against deployment of nuclear missiles in Rome, Paris, and Brussels — and in Potsdam, East Germany. Once unthinkable, the idea of nuclear war has today become almost respectable. A brief report stating that 17 British Government Ministers would have access to underground shelters in the event of a nuclear attack was published in the national press last week, but caused not a ripple. The report added that the 17 would act as “sub-regional commissioners” located in various parts of the country to help run the nation in the aftermath of a nuclear war. No attempt was made to describe the devastation even if an attack against Britain was limited to 200 megatons. And this, according to the peace researchers, could mean a country with its population of 50 million reduced to 20 million, 12 million - or even five million people. No mention was made

either of the network of 26 underground bunkers built in Britain in the last 20 years; nor of civil defence plans to transfer power from civil to military commanders during and well after a future war. On 8.8. C. Television, giving the recent Bronowski Memorial Lecture, a young psychologist, Dr Nicholas Humphrey, of Cambridge, painted a fascinating picture of populations behaving as if they have been “hexed by the Bomb — put under a spell.” In spite of all talk about a deterrent strategy, opinion polls in the past year show that nearly half the adult population in Britain expects nuclear war within its lifetime. And in spite of all the talk about civil defence, fewer than one in 10 believe they and their families would survive. Not since the plagues and famines of the Middle Ages, says Dr Humphrey, can so many people have had such a pessimistic view of the future. There have been warnings: Lord Mountbatten, speaking in Strasbourg, a few weeks before he was assassinated, said: “The world now stands on the brink of the final abyss.” On the front cover of the “Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,” the Doomsday Clock, set at 10 minutes to midnight some years ago, was advanced by six minutes last January — four minutes to go.

“It is as though we have become passive, fascinated spectators of the slowly unfolding nuclear tragedy,” Dr Humphrey notes. He points to dread precedents in history, when human beings, whose love of life was no less than our own. went almost without protest to destruction — “like the victims of hypnotism, like men in a dream, like lemmings heading for the sea.” He cites the European Jews in the last war, and the way so many millions patiently took the trains to the extermination camps. Apathy towards nuclear war, he says, can be partly explained by the fact that modern nuclear weapons are not comprehensible. People react not to giant dangers or tragedies, but to the plight of single human beings. In a week when 3000 were killed in an earthquake in Iran, a little boy fell down a well in Italy and the whole world grieved. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima killed 140,000 people; the uranium it contained could have been packed into the size of a cricket ball. But still the mind cannot grasp the death and destruction caused. In a third world war, the equivalent of 5000 Hiroshima bombs would land on Eng-

land. Then there is the “Strangelove syndrome,” according to Dr Humphrey, with its latent feelings of admiration, almost of appetite. for the Bomb and the final solution it provides. As evidence that there are people who see nuclear holocaust as a period of renewal, take the magazine of Britain's thriving nuclear shelter industry, the "Protect and Survive Monthly.” It states: “The frontier spirit is, we will find, still alive and well, and living somewhere in England in 10 years time. “The survivors of the next world war will be leading heroically self-sufficient lives off the thin of the land, smiling and whistling and shooting their way out of all difficulties. “The guns are primarily for use against packs of marauding animals, though sadly they may also be needed against our fellow human beings.” Dr Humphrey argues that the Bomb is not an uncontrollable automaton. People’s control lies in the force of public argument and public anger. He recalls it was public opinion in Britain which forced the ending of the slave trade; and it was protests by American people against a cruel and pointless

war that eventually led to the American withdrawal from Vietnam. There is remarkably little debate in Britain as yet on the effects of nuclear attack — and what there is has changed markedly since the days of Hiroshima. The first nuclear bombs were 1000 times more powerful than large conventional bombs. The first thermonuclear bombs were 1000 times more powerful than the first nuclear bombs. There was, therefore, a million-fold increase in the destructive power of these weapons in a decade. A single thermo-nuclear weapon could now be made that would exceed in explosive power all the explosives used by all combatants during the Second World War. According to the authors of “As Lambs to the Slaughter,” initial radiation from 1megaton bomb, bursting on the ground, would be sufficient to kill 50 per cent of people exposed up to IVz miles away. The massive blast and heat would char the skin of exposed people out to five miles. The Home Office estimates that on a clear day there would be a “main fire zone” from l¥z miles to 5 miles out. An American official report states that just one bomb dropped on Detroit would kill 220,000 and injure 420,000. These figures do not

include casualties from radio-active fallout. In Britain, the historian, E. P. Thompson, has emerged as a vocal and articulate leader of the anti-nuclear movement. He is a colourful figure, with a shock of white hair. He is warm and human, from a working-class background, and speaks the language of the ordinary person. An ex-serviceman, Thompson avows he is not a pacifist, and believes a country has to defend itself. But with Britain’s commitment to the $l2 billion Trident missile system, the country inevitably becomes a target in conflict between the superpowers — the Soviet Union and the United States with an American finger at Britain's nuclear trigger.