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From: orb@whuxl.UUCP (SEVENER)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Politics, morals and nukes
Message-ID: <291@whuxl.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 17-Oct-84 12:53:13 EDT
Article-I.D.: whuxl.291
Posted: Wed Oct 17 12:53:13 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 19-Oct-84 05:47:39 EDT
References: <394@wucs.UUCP> <90@whuxk.UUCP> <2730@ucbcad.UUCP> <284@whuxl.UUCP> <2522@ucbvax.ARPA>
Organization: Bell Labs
Lines: 48

> Ok Tim, I have just about had it.  All this talk that a nuclear war
> would not leave survivors is pure BS!  You talk about Reagan stating
> thatover 50% of Soviet population would survive and you say this
> is ludicrous.  You are dead wrong.
> 					Milo

Unfortunately you are *dead* wrong. Here is description of the effects
of the Hiroshima bomb of "only" 13 kilotons, earlier replies have said
that our submarine launched warheads at "only" 40 kilotons, would hardly
dent Soviet society or cities: (from "Fate of the Earth" by Schell):
*************************************************************************
"It is no exaggeration," the authors of "Hiroshima and Nagasaki" tell us,
"to say that the whole city was ruined instantaneously." In that instant,
tens of thousands of people were burned, blasted, and crushed to death.
Other tens of thousands suffered injuries of every description or were
doomed to die of radiation sickness.  The center of the city was flattened,
and every part of the city was damaged. The trunks of bamboo trees as far
away as five miles from ground zero--were charred.  Almost half the trees
within a mile and a quarter were knocked down.  Windows nearly seventeen
miles away were broken.  Half an hour after the blast, fires set by the
thermal pulse and by the collapse of the buildings began to coalesce into
a firestorm, which lasted for six hours.  Starting about 9AM and lasting
until late afternoon, a "black rain" generated by the bomb( otherwise
the day was fair) fell on the western portions of the city, carrying 
radioactive fallout from the blast to the ground.  For four hours at midday,
a violent whirlwind, born of the strange meteorological conditions produced
by the explosion, further devastated the city.  The number of people
who were killed outright or who died of their injuries over the next three
months is estimated to be one hundred and thirty thousand.  Sixty-eight
percent of the buildings in the city were either completely destroyed or
damaged beyond repair, and the center of the city was turned into a flat,
rubble-strewn plain dotted with the ruins of a few of the sturdier buildings.
...Those within a mile and a quarter of ground zero had also been subjected
to intense nuclear radiation, often in lethal doses.
***************************************************************************
The world now has one million, six hundred thousand times this
destructive power.  Can we survive its use? Who will come to aid the cities
destroyed as they aided Hiroshima's victims when all cities to the level
of 15,000 people are destroyed? What will happen to those cities which
very likely will have their nuclear power plants bombed and spewing forth
plutonium and other deadly radioactive isotopes?
Face the facts, we CAN blow up the world.
What do we do about it? Continue to produce nuclear arms until we have
one BILLION times the destructive
power of Hiroshima? Extend nuclear conflict into space?  
continue to make the nuclear fuse shorter and shorter, until machines are
the only thing quick enough to spark a quick nuclear retaliation?
Think about it ........tim sevener whuxl!orb