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- Some Perspectives
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Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War - - - Some Perspectives
by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
October, 1996 [Etext #684]
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WORLDWIDE EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WAR - - - SOME PERSPECTIVES
U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1975.
CONTENTS
Foreword
Introduction
The Mechanics of Nuclear Explosions
Radioactive Fallout
A. Local Fallout
B. Worldwide Effects of Fallout
Alterations of the Global Environment
A. High Altitude Dust
B. Ozone
Some Conclusions
Note 1: Nuclear Weapons Yield
Note 2: Nuclear Weapons Design
Note 3: Radioactivity
Note 4: Nuclear Half-Life
Note 5: Oxygen, Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation
FOREWORD
Much research has been devoted to the effects of nuclear weapons. But
studies have been concerned for the most part with those immediate
consequences which would be suffered by a country that was the direct
target of nuclear attack. Relatively few studies have examined the
worldwide, long term effects.
Realistic and responsible arms control policy calls for our knowing more
about these wider effects and for making this knowledge available to the
public. To learn more about them, the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
(ACDA) has initiated a number of projects, including a National Academy of
Sciences study, requested in April 1974. The Academy's study, Long-Term
Worldwide Effects of Multiple Nuclear Weapons Detonations, a highly
technical document of more than 200 pages, is now available. The present
brief publication seeks to include its essential findings, along with the
results of related studies of this Agency, and to provide as well the basic
background facts necessary for informed perspectives on the issue.
New discoveries have been made, yet much uncertainty inevitably persists.
Our knowledge of nuclear warfare rests largely on theory and hypothesis,
fortunately untested by the usual processes of trial and error; the
paramount goal of statesmanship is that we should never learn from the
experience of nuclear war.
The uncertainties that remain are of such magnitude that of themselves they
must serve as a further deterrent to the use of nuclear weapons. At the
same time, knowledge, even fragmentary knowledge, of the broader effects of
nuclear weapons underlines the extreme difficulty that strategic planners
of any nation would face in attempting to predict the results of a nuclear
war. Uncertainty is one of the major conclusions in our studies, as the
haphazard and unpredicted derivation of many of our discoveries emphasizes.
Moreover, it now appears that a massive attack with many large-scale
nuclear detonations could cause such widespread and long-lasting
environmental damage that the aggressor country might suffer serious
physiological, economic, and environmental effects even without a nuclear
response by the country attacked.
An effort has been made to present this paper in language that does not
require a scientific background on the part of the reader. Nevertheless it
must deal in schematized processes, abstractions, and statistical
generalizations. Hence one supremely important perspective must be largely
supplied by the reader: the human perspective--the meaning of these
physical effects for individual human beings and for the fabric of
civilized life.
Fred C. Ikle
Director
U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency
INTRODUCTION
It has now been two decades since the introduction of thermonuclear fusion
weapons into the military inventories of the great powers, and more than a
decade since the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union ceased
to test nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Today our understanding of the
technology of thermonuclear weapons seems highly advanced, but our
knowledge of the physical and biological consequences of nuclear war is
continuously evolving.
Only recently, new light was shed on the subject in a study which the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency had asked the National Academy of Sciences
to undertake. Previous studies had tended to focus very largely on
radioactive fallout from a nuclear war; an important aspect of this new
study was its inquiry into all possible consequences, including the effects
of large-scale nuclear detonations on the ozone layer which helps protect
life on earth from the sun's ultraviolet radiations. Assuming a total
detonation of 10,000 megatons--a large-scale but less than total nuclear
"exchange," as one would say in the dehumanizing jargon of the
strategists--it was concluded that as much as 30-70 percent of the ozone
might be eliminated from the northern hemisphere (where a nuclear war would
presumably take place) and as much as 20-40 percent from the southern
hemisphere. Recovery would probably take about 3-10 years, but the
Academy's study notes that long term global changes cannot be completely
ruled out.
The reduced ozone concentrations would have a number of consequences
outside the areas in which the detonations occurred. The Academy study
notes, for example, that the resultant increase in ultraviolet would cause
"prompt incapacitating cases of sunburn in the temperate zones and snow
blindness in northern countries . . "
Strange though it might seem, the increased ultraviolet radiation could
also be accompanied by a drop in the average temperature. The size of the
change is open to question, but the largest changes would probably occur at
the higher latitudes, where crop production and ecological balances are
sensitively dependent on the number of frost-free days and other factors
related to average temperature. The Academy's study concluded that ozone
changes due to nuclear war might decrease global surface temperatures by
only negligible amounts or by as much as a few degrees. To calibrate the
significance of this, the study mentioned that a cooling of even 1 degree
centigrade would eliminate commercial wheat growing in Canada.
Thus, the possibility of a serious increase in ultraviolet radiation has
been added to widespread radioactive fallout as a fearsome consequence of
the large-scale use of nuclear weapons. And it is likely that we must
reckon with still other complex and subtle processes, global in scope,
which could seriously threaten the health of distant populations in the
event of an all-out nuclear war.
Up to now, many of the important discoveries about nuclear weapon effects
have been made not through deliberate scientific inquiry but by accident.
And as the following historical examples show, there has been a series of
surprises.
"Castle/Bravo" was the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United
States. Before it was set off at Bikini on February 28, 1954, it was
expected to explode with an energy equivalent of about 8 million tons of
TNT. Actually, it produced almost twice that explosive power--equivalent
to 15 million tons of TNT.
If the power of the bomb was unexpected, so were the after-effects. About
6 hours after the explosion, a fine, sandy ash began to sprinkle the
Japanese fishing vessel Lucky Dragon, some 90 miles downwind of the burst
point, and Rongelap Atoll, 100 miles downwind. Though 40 to 50 miles away
from the proscribed test area, the vessel's crew and the islanders received