Is There No Way to Avoid Nuclear War?
Will Earth Be Ruined in Nuclear War?
WHAT is set down here is not doomsday talk by some fundamentalist religious sect. It is the sober conclusions of men who have spent years compiling authoritative studies and governmental reports on the catastrophic effects of nuclear war on all life on earth.
To recall Hiroshima as a backdrop against which to magnify in quantum terms the global concussion of 1,000 megaton bombs falling on nations—that is what is meant by a nuclear holocaust.
It is so shocking, so benumbing to the senses, that most people try to block it out of mind, to pretend the peril is not there, to live on in an ‘eat, drink, for tomorrow we die’ state of make-believe. They become insensitive to ordinary disasters. There seems to be no turning back. It is as though some superhuman force drives man toward self-destruction.
Scientists can cling to no glimmer of doubt that man has laid hold on the power to self-destruct. But with humankind would go the animal life and the fowl life. The most likely survivors might be some forms of insects that would then swarm in uncontrolled plagues to hasten their own demise. Vegetation, including plant crops, grains and vegetables, would be devastated. Trees first, grass last. Land erosion would feed minerals into waterways where overgrowths of algae and microscopic organisms would deplete the oxygen content and starve the surviving marine life. Along with all man-made things—shelter, factories, utilities, governments—the natural environment would be altered tremendously.
A full-scale holocaust would add up to more than its local parts. For instance, what if the seventy-six nuclear power plants in the United States were among the 10,000 targets the Russians were bombing? According to Scientific American, the vaporizing of a single gigawatt (gigas means “giant”) atomic energy plant would add a species of long-lived radiation that would prevent habitation over a vast area of land for decades. It would become part of the fallout ascending into the stratosphere to circulate around the earth until after months and years it falls to contaminate the whole surface of the globe. Long before this, the immediate radiation would have poisoned land, air and sea, and penetrated tissues, bones, roots, stems and leaves of living things.
From ground bursts there would emerge lofting clouds of dust into the stratosphere to becloud the planet and possibly cool the earth’s surface. At the same time a related casualty could be the layer of ozone that envelops the earth and filters lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sunlight. The National Academy of Sciences in 1975 estimated that a detonating of 10,000 megatons of nuclear bombs in the northern hemisphere would deplete 70 percent of the ozone layer here, and as much as 40 percent in the southern hemisphere. “If it were not for the absorption of much of the solar ultraviolet radiation by the ozone,” the US Department of Defense and the Energy Research and Development Administration jointly concluded, “life as currently known could not exist except possibly in the ocean.”
Living organisms and their nonliving surroundings, scientists are realizing, have a strong interdependence on one another. While soil, water and air have been the environment for life, it appears that life has been the environment for soil, water and air. Dr. Michael McElroy, a physicist at Harvard’s Center for Earth and Planetary Physics, believes that the life processes of birth, metabolism and decay are chiefly responsible for keeping the balance of such important atmospheric elements as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, even the amount of ozone in the stratosphere.
So the very “metabolism” of the earth depends on the quality of life upon it.
The ecosphere is a global system in which a whole constellation of species form a balanced, self-reproducing whole. The ecosphere of planet Earth is carefully regulated. It is balanced and self-perpetuating. The one disturbing influence in its midst is man. At present he is decimating life forms off it on an average of three species a day. He will pollute or disrupt any fraction of it for greedy gain. But now he threatens not a fraction but all of it.
He can utterly ruin the earth.
[Box on page 6]
NO END OF WAYS TO DIE
● Incineration by the fireball or thermal pulse
● Perish in the initial radiation
● Crushed or hurled to death by the blast wave or its debris
● Lethal radiation by the local fallout
● Perish in an epidemic
● Ultraviolet ray poisoning from the sun after the ozone layer is depleted
● Delayed radiation poisoning [End Box]
[Picture on page 7]
Helpless victims of man’s greed