From: utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!C70:arms-d Newsgroups: fa.arms-d Title: Arms-Discussion Digest V0 #139 Article-I.D.: ucb.1487 Posted: Fri Jul 9 23:05:56 1982 Received: Sun Jul 11 03:34:48 1982 >From HGA@MIT-MC Fri Jul 9 22:57:30 1982 Arms-Discussion Digest Volume 0 : Issue 139 Today's Topics: Comments on Access to Energy piece No democracy here! Nuclear and conventional weapons Studying peace: disarmies Access to Energy ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: 7 July 1982 17:11-EDT From: Herb Lin(5) Claim: There has never been a war as terrible as the next one. [from Access to Energy] So nuclear war isn't much different than previous wars? It is worse in the same way that WWII was worse than WWI? If this really the claim being made, then someone doesn't understand the orders of magnitude involved. The kill rate in a nuclear war would increase by a factor of a hundred or a thousand. That kind of increase is utterly unprecedented; previous wars involved kill rate changes of at most 10. [LIN@Washington] [From Jim McGrath@SU-Score] Alas, while I agreed with many of your comments on "Sober Facts," here the numbers simply do not fit. To pick round numbers, in WWI we had a total of 10 million killed; in WWII 50 million. Thus a rough increase of fivefold. WWIII could involve 250 million deaths (ie strikes by both major powers which are not absolutely effective). Actually, we should allow for 500 million deaths (that factor of ten you spoke of for PAST wars). If you just wait long enough, you can drive the total death rate as high as you want. My original message concerned kill RATES rather than total deaths. While WWII may involve 5 to 10 times the total NUMBER dead (depending on how you count WWII dead - my own guess is closer to 25 M), the significant parameter is how fast it might be done. I can conceive of WWII being over in a matter of DAYS, not years. The reason for focusing on kill rate rather than kill number (once you get into the domain of megadeaths) is that rate is the parameter that determines the time scale over which people react to things and make decisions. ------- From: Jim McGrath Being an avid "fan" of the desert down south, lets look at the numbers using an area of 3000 square miles for LA (as noted in the clarification in the July 82 ACCESS TO ENERGY), the formula for overpressure Herb Lin gave, and two "targets" - 5 PSI and 10 PSI - as the effective radius of destruction. For 10 PSI we have an effective radius of slightly under 10 kilofeet, which gives about 10 square miles per one megaton bomb max. That is a min of 300 bombs before circle fitting, and thus I can see the number going up to the 438 ACCESS TO ENERGY mentioned. This is far from the "very few one megaton bombs" you mentioned Herb! For 5 PSI we have an effective radius of slightly over 13 kilofeet, which gives about 20 square miles per one megaton bomb max. That is a min of 150 bombs before circle fitting - still a substantial number. Jim: my number for "very few" was based on the 463 mi^2. Increasing the area by 10X of course increases "very few" to a much larger number. From: Jim McGrath From: CAULKINS at USC-ECL The "Access to Energy" clarification of "SOBER FACTS ..." doesn't help much; according to the 1977 edition of "The Effects of Nuclear Weapons" the 5 PSI radius for a 1 megaton bomb is 4.3 Mi.; the area of such a circle is 58 square miles. The 3000 Mi**2 for greater L.A. divided by 58 is 52 bombs, order-of-magnitude smaller than the 438 claimed by Access to Energy. Even with a generous allowance for circle packing, they're way off. Why the difference between this figure (52 bombs) and the ones I just derrived using Herb Lin's formula? Are different assumptions involved? If so, they should be stated if people have them handy. At this point, I am totally confused. There are two authoritative sources which appear to be in conflict. My formula P = 3300 (W/r^3) + 192 (W/r^3)^.5 is taken from Brode's review of the effects of nuclear weapons in the Annals of Nuclear Science. "Effects of Nuclear Weapons" is also supposed to be an authoritative source. I have no idea where these two different sources get their information; if they do not agree, what's going on? Does anyone "out there" really know what's going on? Finally, I have to admit that I feel that there is a certain unreality about this argument - it doesn't even mention thermal effects, which are well known as a more deadly effect of nuclear explosions. If Los Angeles were devoid of people, and we had a bomb that had blast effects alone, then maybe it would be important to know how to pound L.A. into rubble. But it isn't, and we don't, so why is this discussion relevant? (Yes, I know I got involved too... shame on me as well.) ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jul 1982 14:12:31-EDT From: zrm at mit-ccc Subject: No democracy here! In the last arms-d Will Doherty made the standard gaffe in claiming that our political system is not a democracy: it isn't, and never was intended to be one. We have a republic in which elected officials represent us (more or less). What I think Mr. Doherty means is that he thinks this representation is fatally flawed. While there may soon be available the communications infrastructure nessary to implement real democracy in this country, I don't think that a desire for such a democracy is what motivates Mr. Doherty. Instead, he is using the imperfection of the present system to justify circumventing the system to suit his goals, namely disamament whether or not it might mean the end of our republic. This is the sort of circularity that typifies arguments, both of the far right and extreme left, that find themselves against certain completely objective walls. In the case of disarmament, the likelihood of Soviet tyranny spreading to rest of the world creates an insurmountable obstacle to such a course for our country. In order to go on arguing their case, disarmament proponents declare that the very ideals we wish to defend have no value and so do not require defense. On the other hand, Laura Creighton's explaination of why our society is motivated to defend itself was one of the most clear headed I have seen on this list. Defense is not desirable and is not a goal in and of itself, but, currently, it seems that deterring argessors through the treat of response in kind is our only choice -- if, of course, we percieve that there is something here worth defending. Cheers, Zig ------------------------------ Date: 8 July 1982 19:44-EDT From: Zigurd R. Mednieks Subject: Nuclear and conventional weapons The present charade that goes on where we must threaten nuclear retaliation for the invasion of Western Europe using conventional weapons bothers me rather a great deal. The assumption that we must have a large standing force in order to foil such an invasion without the use of nuclear weapons is one I take exception to, on the basis that it is firepower and not manpower that wins wars. Would anyone with a greater knowlege than mine about military history comment on the suggestion that we stockpile conventional armaments in Europe, hopefully with a large fraction of these armaments being aimed toward the detruction of large numbers of tanks (assault-breaker and the like) and toward the maintainance of air superiority (light anti-aircraft weapons to keep Warsaw Pact air power away from our ground forces and anti-radar weapons to deny them their air defense). In addition, the capability to raise a large infantry quickly might be desirable. Basically, my thesis is that the developement and deployment of conventional weapons should go ahead full blast, but that the draft won't be needed and that things like a cut in the size of the officer corps would be not only doable, but desirable. Although this scheme would decrease the long term cost of defending Europe it would not let us dismantle our nuclear arsenal. Weapons depots in Europe would be tempting targets for nuclear "surgical strikes". Only the threat of reverting to a tactical nuclear defense of Europe would deter such strikes. Comments Please! Cheers, Zig ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jul 1982 16:57:47-PDT From: jef at LBL-UNIX (Jef Poskanzer [rtsg]) Subject: Studying peace: disarmies. The Summer 1982 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly has a very interesting article called "Force Without Firepower: A Doctrine of Unarmed Military Service", by Gene Keyes. It is about non-violent armies, and is chock-full of hard facts and figures and historical examples. It discusses ten possible missions for unarmed forces: 1) Rescue action: the employment of military capability for saving lives and setting up disaster relief in times of natural or man-made catastrophe; generally in environments or conditions not manageable by local or civilian resources. Examples: the Aerospace Rescue and Recovery Service, and sometimes the Military Airlift Command. 2) Civic action: the use of military forces, especially in less-developed areas, for social service projects such as local construction, farming, public health, transportation, education, communication, conservation, community development, and the like. Examples: Peace Corp, VISTA, CCC, Seabees, Corp of Engineers. 3) Colossal action: the employment of military capability, especially logistic, in constructive social enterprises of enormous magnitude, possibly requiring ships in the thousands, aircraft in the tens of thousands, personnel in the hundreds of millions, and dollare in the hunderds of billions per year. Examples: re-foresting the Sahara, building an L5 colony. 4) Friendly persuasion: the use or display of non-violent military force during normal or crisis periods for such purposes as goodwill, deterrence, show of strength, propaganda, hostage deployment, and political, psychological or economic warfare; by means such as goodwill visits, public and joint maneuvers, and the delivery of messages, food, equipment, giftf, or hostages, whether requested or not. Examples: leaflet bombing, loudspeaker planes, foreign tours by the Blue Angels, the Brazilian Indian Protection Service (before 1948). 5) Guerrila action: aggressive and unconventional initiatives by irregular but diciplined unarmed forces waging a revolutionary and/or defensive struggle against a more powerful opponent. Examples: Greenpeace, Gandhi's 30-year campaign to free India. 6) Police action: the use of unarmed military units for law enforcement, peace observation, and peacekeeping duties, in situations beyond the control of local authority. Examples: the London police, the Guardian Angels. The police segment of the UN peacekeeping force in Cyprus was unarmed. 7) Buffer action: the deployment of unarmed military force between belligerents before, during, or after active hostilities. Examples: Cyprus again, the 1962 civil war in Algeria, the 1968 seige at Tsinghua University in China. 8) Defense: The assignment of unarmed maneuver elements to close with and resist invasion troops to the death without killing them; and the assignment of other unarmed land, sea, air, and civilian forces to active duty in accordance with national strategy for guarding political, cultural, and territorial integrity, public security, and civil liberty. Examples: the Swedish threat to dismantle their railroads when the British and French were planning to invade in 1940; the Czechoslovakian civilian resistance in 1968. 9) Expeditionaty action: an unarmed military mission across national boundaries with a comparatively limited objective or duration; may involve extraterritorial rather than home-soil defense action, or defense of another nation on its own territory, or temporary intervention in restraint of flagrant injustice, oppression, invasion, or genocide. No examples. 10) Invasion: an unarmed military campaign across national boundaries, with a comparatively long-range objective or duration, in restraint of flagrant injustice, oppression, invasion, or genocide. And amazingly enough, there is an example: in 1975, King Hassan II of Morocco staged a mass non-violent invasion of Spanish Sahara. - - - - - - - - - - As I hope you can see by these excerpts, these ideas are non-violent but definitely NOT pacifistic. That may be good or bad, but it is certainly interesting. I recommend this article highly. --- Jef ------------------------------ Date: 8 Jul 1982 17:25:44-PDT From: rabbit!wolit at Berkeley Subj: More on Israel in Lebanon The Shrike anti-radiation missiles, F-15s, F-16s, and E-2C radar planes are all made in the U.S. So are most of the tanks, artillery, and other munitions used by Israel. The only significant Israeli-manufactured hardware used against the Syrians in the Bekaar valley were the small (~4m wingspan) RPVs (remotely-piloted vehicles) that provided both television imagery and information on SAM radar. Note that these RPVs are not themselves high-technology items -- they resemble large radio-controlled model planes more than anything else -- but the command/control/communication system in which they operated was. Just as the 1967 Mideast war demonstrated the absolute necessity for control of the air, and the 1973 war showed the vulnerability of conventional armor to modern "smart" weapons, the lastest fighting highlights the crucial role played by C-3 on the electronic battlefield. ------------------------------ Date: 8 July 1982 22:44-EDT From: Gene Salamin Subject: Access to Energy The article quoted the number of bombs required "to destroy L. A." without specifying exactly what was meant by destruction. In the July 1982 "clarification", Beckmann cites as a reference "Shall America be Defended?", by Gen. Graham, Arlington House, 1979, p. 112. ------------------------------ End of Arms-D Digest ********************