N-plain angers California

Press, 14 April 1982, Page 14

N-plain angers California

By

JOHN HUTCHISON

The United States Government’s plan to move 19 million Californians from urban areas before an expected nuclear attack has been condemned at a Californian state legislative hearing as “insane” and “obscene.” Federal officials appearing before a legislative committee at the state capital in Sacramento met with bristling resistance from officials who believe that the evacuation blueprint is wildly unrealistic, promotes the notion that it is possible to conduct and survive nuclear strikes, and, if done before a nuclear outbreak, would trigger the Soviet Union to attack first. An official of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is charged with organising civil defence, testified that it was assumed there would be from four to six days warning of nuclear attack on the United States. During that period whole urban populations would be moved to the countryside —

five million in the San Francisco area alone. A state senator pounced bn him in anger: "I can’t believe it! Have you gone insane? I’m not only appalled, I’m saddened and I’m outraged. You’ve never been in these rural areas if you think 19 million can live there.” One of his, colleagues was equally blistering: “What you are saying strikes me as an attempt to brainwash the American people into believing that a nuclear attack, a nuclear war, is somehow survivable, acceptable, and can be a part of our living experience. I consider this to be obscene. It’s like a horror film.” The chief of Californian’s health services told the hearing committee that her department would not co-oper-ate with any plap “which creates the illusion that the public health community can offer assurance of health protection in the event of a malevolent detonation of nuclear weapons.” Others at \ the hearing expressed simi» lar indignation.

Only a few days earlier, the board of supervisors (governing body) of a county adjoining San Francisco voted formally and unanimously to withhold co-opera-tion from the evacuation plan. In the same week, a standing-room-only crowd of 2000 in the Episcopal Cathedral in San Francisco heard Dr Helen Caldicott, of the Harvard Medical School, denounce the idea that any side could win or survive a nuclear war. She has become a leader in the rapidly growing American movement of physicians demanding total world-wide abolition of nuclear weapons. A 20-megatqn bomb on San Francisco would make a crater, 244 metres deep and 1207 metres wide, killing every human being in a radius of 42km, she told the audience. The rising concern about the nuclear menace was heightened dramatically when the Catholic Archbishop of. San Francisco made a vehement denunciation of nuclear warfare and

urged Catholic hospitals and doctors to refuse to co-oper-ate in a Government plan to designate civilian hospital beds for military casualties of nuclear war abroad. Several hospitals, not all of them Catholic have acted accordingly in San Francisco. On the Californian ballot this year will be an initiative

measure which, if adopted, ’ will express the state’s official disapproval of more nuclear armament. The measure stands a good , chance of adoption. Although it can have no substantive . effect, its passage in California, the most populous state . of the union, would send an emphatic signal to Washington.