Daily Archives: April 16, 2011

C Rulon: Is a Nuclear War Inevitable?

By Charles L. Rulon
Emeritus, Life & Health Sciences
Long Beach City College

Throughout recorded history humans have used war as the ultimate arbiter for acquiring, defending and expanding—some 14,000 major and mi­nor wars; over one bil­lion people killed.

“War is one of the constants of history and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,411 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.”

—Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)

But 65 years ago a quantum jump in warfare took place—the atomic bomb. Soon the nuclear genie was out of the bottle. More and more countries were eventually able to build or acquire nuclear weapons. North Korea and Pakistan. Soon Iran? There is even a nuclear black market that attracts terrorist groups. Yet, a full-scale nuclear war would destroy civilization and threaten life itself. Even a “limited” nuclear war could escalate into a full-scale one, as could a conventional war among the superpowers. At some point, if civilization is to flourish, loyalty to 200 individual nation-states must be enlarged to include a new over-rid­ing loyalty to humanity as a whole. But, can we do this? Does our brain carry within it the potential to peacefully resolve fundamental conflicts? According to historian Will Durant, history isn’t encouraging:

“Some conflicts are too funda­mental to be resolved by negotiation; and during the prolonged ne­gotiations (if history may be our guide) subversion would go on. . . Such interludes of widespread peace are un­natural and exceptional; they will soon be ended by changes in the distribution of military power.”

—Will and Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History (1968)

The world’s political and military leaders, we would hope, know that a nuclear war would be catastrophic. But our brain—a brain that evolved from an ape brain—is prone to nationalistic pride, dis­trusting those who are different, and obeying charismatic authority figures (even monoma­niacal insane ones). It’s prone to conforming to the behavior of the masses like good sheep, even displaying ideological fervor.

Now mix in grotesque global economic disparities. Add overpopulation pressures, resource shortages, local ecological collapses and global climate destabilization. Stir in willful ignorance, stu­pi­dity, relentless greed, fear, selfish­ness, indiffer­ence, lust for power, primal religious conflicts, entrenched racism, and virulent xenophobia. Sprinkle on more fear, plus our brain’s tendency for simplistic solutions and paranoid emotional respon­ses. Whip it all together and shove it into history’s oven of nightmares. Yes, our political and military leaders must know that a nuclear war would be catastrophic, but. . . .

Nobel Prize-winning philosopher Arthur Koestler observes in the book, Brain, Mind and Behavior:

“The trouble with our species is not an overdose of self-asserting aggression but an excess of self-transcending devotion, which manifests itself in blind obedience and loyalty to the king, country, or cause…One of the central features of the hu­man predica­ment is this overwhelming capacity and need for identifi­cation with a social group and/or system of beliefs, which is indifferent to reason, indifferent to self-interest, and even to the claim of self-preser­vation.”

Emeritus physics professor Mark Perakh, author of the book, Unintelligent Design, adds his resigned rage:

“Most probably the 21st century will see devastating wars and enormous explosions of barbarism. Humans as a species are the most stupid of all animals. There is hardly anything more stupid than a war, but humans seem to be unable to live without it. The struggle between reason and obscurantism… is just a footnote to the idiocy of wars that humanity sinks into with an inevitable regularity.”

Our existential dilemma

The detonation of even a small fraction of our nuclear weapons could likely result in the greatest catastrophe in human history, one that could unravel much of civilization as we know it and even push us to the brink of extinction. Thus, our policies of nuclear deterrence must never fail. Never! Never! No failure. Ever! Yet, year after year the roulette wheel of human conflicts continues to spin and the minute hand on the doomsday clock ticks closer to midnight.

Is a nuclear war inevitable? Well, one formidable obstacle to lasting peace is the mili­tary-industrial complex, itself. All military organizations are trained to fight, to kill. Also, they must have actual or potential enemies in order to justify their budgets. Hence they are designed to be very in­effective at negotiation and compromise, critically important skills we need on this planet today. Somehow we must catch onto this and recognize that one of the greatest con­flicts in the world today is between the mili­taries of the world and the human species.

“U.S. weapons manufacturers actively pro­mote the sale of their products to foreign nations irrespective of human rights abuses, type of government, or aggressive actions against neighboring states.” “…Members of Congress see military spend­ing as a big public works job program­—and a source of juicy pork for their states and districts.”

—The Defense Monitor & Center for Defense Information bulletins

For the first time in human history the fate of our entire species is in the hands of a very few decision makers. Do their evolved brains really have what it takes to survive at so dangerous a juncture, to not, sooner or later, make the fatal decision?

“The mind resists involvement with horror as, in a normal person, it resists preoccupation with death. And in consequence we leave the issue of nuclear arms, their control and their conse­quences to the men who make horror their ev­eryday occupation. It is a reckless, even fatal, delegation of power.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith

End Times Theology

And then there are the tens of millions of Americans who believe in biblical apocalyptic fatalism or Armageddon theology—that Christ can’t return until after World War III. They believe that this “final” war will start in the Middle East and spread and that the eventual des­truc­tion of Earth is inevitable. . .except for them, the Saved. Such End Times biblical beliefs have the poten­tial for being deadly in the hands of true believers in the Pent­a­gon, in the Air Force Academy at Colorado Springs, in Congress, and in the Execu­tive Branch. After all, why negotiate for peace in good faith if God’s apocalypse is at hand? Effective disarmament talks might even interfere with God’s timetable for the world. So, tens of millions of Christian Americans who might other­wise be working and praying for peace are now hoping that nuclear Armageddon and the Second Coming will happen in their lifetime.[i]

According to Dr. Gerald Larue, Profes­sor Emeritus of Archae­ology and Near Eastern Studies, Uni­versity of Southern California, Armageddon theology portrays an angry, des­truc­tive God who requires absolute blind obedience from those who would be among his chosen ones. In that very demand are the elements of irresponsibility and destruction for the human species. Finally, to quote Blaise Pascal,

“Men never do evil so com­­pletely and cheer­fully as when they do it from religious conviction.”

Some closing thoughts

We can no longer sit back and risk blind patriotism, ultra-nationalism, or religious fanaticism erupting in violence. All over the world are trouble spots that could some day escalate into a nuclear catastrophe. Never before has the United States been less secure. The absurdity and tragedy of the human species worldwide wasting over a trillion dollars a year on militarization, to say nothing of the hu­man talent diverted from the real problems of sur­vival on our ecologically endan­gered planet, is deeply and profoundly depressing to me. But it will be us, the “naked ape”, who are responsible for the demise of our species, if it comes, not the divine fulfillment of some apocalyptic plan prophesied in an ancient book.

“The unleashed power of the atom has changed every­thing save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.”

—Albert Einstein, 1946

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[i]In 2004 at the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School, Bill Moyers gave his much reproduced speech on Armageddon Theology, easily found on the web. For the entire text, go to CommonDreams.org.

C Rulon: Nuclear War

By Charles L. Rulon
Emeritus, Life & Health Sciences
Long Beach City College ([email protected])

Preface

Headlines in recent years have focused heavily on nuclear weapons in North Korea and Pakistan, plus Iran’s attempt to join the “nuclear club”. And most recently, horrendous nuclear meltdown problems in the earthquake-tsunami-damaged nuclear power plants in Fukushima, Japan have seriously elevated global concerns over radioactive fallout and contamination. Thus, the current relevance of this paper.

Nuclear death toll

In August, 1945, the United States exploded a sin­gle nuclear fission bomb over Hiro­shima and another over Nagasaki. Both cities were destroyed, 125,000 Japanese were kil­led outright, and within months another 100,000 had died from in­jur­ies and radioactive fallout. Yet, today, each of our Trident sub­marines has the firepower of about 200 Hiroshima bombs, or eight times the fire­power released in the entire six years of World War II! The total nuclear arsenals of the world (deployed weapons and reserves), is now estimated at around 23,000, or roughly 2000 times the total firepower used during World War II.[i] Thus, despite our considerable arms reductions over the last two decades, we still have the capacity to obliterate all human life many times over.

Radioactivity

The meltdown of the nuclear fuel in the Chernobyl power plant in Russia in 1986 erupted in a radioactive cloud that spread out over most of Europe. Up to 18 tons of reactor core fuel was spewed into the atmosphere, releasing 50 times as much radio­active material into the air as was re­leased at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Russia was left with 27 ghost towns and cities too contaminated by radioactivity to be occupied in the foreseeable future and with 80,000 square miles that must be evacuated for thousands of years. The Chernobyl reactor core will remain dangerously radioactive for billions of years!

Yet, if just one Trident II submarine released its ars­enal of nuclear weapons, the radio­act­iv­ity re­leased into the atmosphere would be equi­valent to several thousand Chernobyl disasters. Fol­lowing even a “limited” nuclear war, the high levels of radioactivity from fallout would contami­nate most food and water supplies world­wide and would slowly and painfully kill over a billion or so people along with their farm animals and wild­life.

Toxic smog

All metal in a 3.5 mile radius from the blast center of a one megaton nuclear bomb would vaporize or melt. Out to 7 miles, all rubber and plastic would ignite and burn. Incineration of oil tanks and refineries, along with stor­age tanks of hazardous chemicals, rub­ber pro­ducts and anything else that can burn would produce toxic smog which could cover much of the Northern Hemi­­sphere. Extreme­ly acid rains and acid fogs would be com­mon. In addition, the heat from the nuclear blast would chemically unite the oxygen and nitrogen in our air to form oxides of nitrogen. Once in the stratosphere, the toxic smog plus the oxides of nitrogen would destroy much of the remaining ozone layer which absorbs most of the harmful ultraviolet light from the sun. As the ozone is destroyed, ani­mal life on land would go blind and skin cancers would skyrocket.

Pandemics

Most sanitation facilit­ies would be destroyed, people’s nat­u­ral resis­tance would be drastically lowered and antibiotics, plus most 20th century medi­cine would be largely unavailable. Thus, deadly in­fect­ions and global epidemics (plague, cholera, typhoid, dysentery, etc.) would return with a vengeance. Swarms of rapidly producing insects and rod­ents would damage remaining food supplies and spread disease.

The medical effects of a one megaton explo­sion on Los Angeles

If a single one-megaton nuclear war­head were drop­ped on Los Angeles, one to three million people would be killed outright and several million seriously injured.[ii] For comparison, The United States suffered a total of around one million casual­ties in our Civil War, World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam combined. There is no identifiable event in human history in which millions of people were killed or seriously injured in one place in one moment.

Then there would be hundreds of thousands to millions of temporary “survivors” who, before dying horribly over the next several days to weeks, would have extensive third-degree burns and/or suffer crushing injuries of the chest, abdomen and limbs; skull fractures; spinal cord in­juries; multiple lacerations, hemorrhage, shock, blindness, ruptured lungs and acute radiation sickness. Many more would die over the next several months as a result of disease, radioactive damage, toxic smog and/or human violence. Longer-range problems would include raging epidemics spawned by millions of decomposing human corpses, lack of safe water and an explosive growth of insect vectors. There would be essentially no hospitals, ambulances, pain killers, safe water, medics, lab equipment, X-rays, blood, burn centers, or drugs available for any of the seriously injured.

A call to medical responsibility

When asked by the White House in 1981 to devise a plan for medical disaster planning following a nuclear war, representatives from two organiza­tions, Phy­si­cians for Social Responsibility and Internat­ional Phy­sicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, res­ponded that, as physicians, scientists, and concerned citizens, they were alarmed by an inter­national climate that increasingly presented nuclear war as a “rational” possibility. These professional organizations felt impelled to renew the following warning, based on medical and scientific analysis:[iii]

a. Nuclear war, even a “limited” one, would result in death, injury, and disease on a scale that has no precedent in the history of human existence.

b. Medical “disaster planning” for nuclear war is meaningless. There is no possible effective medical response. Most hospitals would be destroyed, most med­ical personnel dead or injured, most supplies un­available. Most “survivors” would die.

c. There is no effective civil defense. The blast, plus the thermal and radiation effects would kill even those in shelters and the fallout would reach those who had been evacuated.

d. Recovery from nuclear war would be essentially impossible. The economic, ecological, and social fab­ric on which human life depends would have been de­stroyed in much of the world.

Leaders of these organizations maintained that any physician who even assisted the U.S. Govern­ment in such “disaster planning” would be committing a pro­foundly unethical act, since their participation would create the illusion that meaningful survival would actually be possible. In 1985 the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW) received the Nobel Peace Prize.

Some final thoughts

All of the mega-tonnage in our nuclear arsenals would yield but a fraction of the power of the asteroid that triggered the global mass extinct­ion 65 mil­lion years ago. Yet, Earth recov­er­ed in 5-10 mil­lion years and went on evolving new species. Ice ages have covered most of Europe and North America, yet evolution con­tinued on. Bacteria will survive nuclear wars, as will mil­lions of insects. Also certain to survive will be blue-green algae, at one time the dominant form of life on this planet. They can sur­vive in boiling water, or the intense cold of liquid he­lium. They can survive in the salt water of the Dead Sea and the parched dryness of deserts. And they can survive high exposure to nuclear radiation. But humans cannot; we will be gone.

Harvard paleontologist Stephen J. Gould reminded us over 20 years ago in his book, Wonderful Life, that if through our greed, stupidity, narrow reli­gious beliefs, indifference, or what­ever, we destroy our chance to survive as a viable soc­ial species (and even take most other species with us as in a nuclear war), the Earth will bleed, bandage up and continue on, evolving new life forms over the next tens of millions of years. But the human species with all of its bril­liant sci­entific discoveries, its music, art, “smart” wea­pons and thousands of different religious sects will be gone forever. Tens of millions of years from now there will be few traces left of the damage once caused by the naked ape that emerged from the trees to rule planet Earth only a few seconds ago in the infinity of space and time.

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[i] http://www.icanw.org/history> Between the 1960s and 1980s, an intensive arms race took place between the United States and Soviet Union. In 1986 the arms race reached its peak. At that time the two superpowers together had over 70,000 nuclear weapons in their arsenals. The total explosive power of these weapons would have been enough to annihilate the world and almost all its living creatures approximately 25 times over.

[ii] A one megaton nuclear bomb has the explosive power of one million tons of TNT. Most warheads are smaller than one megaton, although bombs as large as 60 megatons have been tested.

[iii] http://archives-trim.un.org/webdrawer/rec/424483/view/Items-in-UN%20Centre%20for%20Disarmament%20-%20Assistant%20Secretary-General%20%28ASG%29,%20Jan%20Martenson.PDF