Op/Ed: WW III Ground Zero. Population, 5
- Details
- Category: Op/Ed, Legal Commentary
- Published on Friday, 03 May 2024 11:44
- Written by Dr. Jane M. Orient, M.D.,
Are you more worried about climate change than nuclear war? In a Washington Post op-ed, George Will observes that negligible public anxiety accompanies the intensifying danger of global incineration from nuclear war in a extinction level event.
Like most commentators, Will assumes that the only possible outcome after the first salvo is global extinction. He refers to journalist Annie Jacobsen's March 2024 book Nuclear War: a Scenario. This revives the 1980s climate catastrophe theory of nuclear winter.
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Nonsurvivability is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There would be maximum casualties if people did not use protective measures—or if, having survived, people did not do the work that all societies require to continue living.
Nuclear weapons effects, while horrendous, are limited, and depend on yield, time, and distance. The 1950s American civil defense program had the goal of enabling Americans to return to work as soon as possible.
The film on "The Five Men at Ground Zero," produced in 1957, records the experience of five soldiers who volunteered to stand directly under the high-altitude explosion of a 2-kiloton nuclear weapon. At that time, Cold War America's main worry was a surprise attack by Soviet bombers. Anti-aircraft defense was not equipped to handle fleets of high-flying, fast-moving planes. But a single relatively low-yield nuclear explosion by an air-to-air warhead could destroy an entire fleet.
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Volunteers were sought for a test to reassure the public. Standing on the ground, they felt a heat pulse, saw a bright flash of light, and observed the fireball in the sky. Only 15 percent of the warhead's energy is released as ionizing radiation, and at this distance had a negligible effect on persons on the ground. The fireball would have destroyed the attacker—but the volunteers were uninjured and lived long lives, some well into their nineties.
More than 3,000 "Genie" warheads were produced and deployed, but the only one ever detonated was for this public relations demonstration.
The intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) made these warheads obsolete, and brought us the age of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD). But the basic facts in the film are unchanged. Nuclear effects diminish with time and distance. All the existing arsenals in the world could not cause an extinction event—unless it somehow caused catastrophic climate change.
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The prospect of massive destruction and the end to millions of lives is reason enough to stop escalations leading to WW III, whether nuclear or not. A nuclear explosion is not the end—people must think about and plan for what comes next, as spinning apocalyptic scenarios will not make us safer, but only more prone to despair. It is irresponsible for governments or individuals who have people dependent on them to plan for suicide. Panic-mongering is itself a weapon of war.
Additional information:
· Nuclear winter theory melts down.
· By 1990, nuclear winter scientists already pulling back
· Was nuclear winter Soviet scare propaganda?
· Don't plan to die: The Good News about Nuclear Destruction YouTube
Jane M. Orient, M.D. obtained her undergraduate degrees in chemistry and mathematics from the University of Arizona in Tucson, and her M.D. from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1974. She completed an internal medicine residency at Parkland Memorial Hospital and University of Arizona Affiliated Hospitals and then became an Instructor at the University of Arizona College of Medicine and a staff physician at the Tucson Veterans Administration Hospital. She has been in solo private practice since 1981 and has served as Executive Director of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS) since 1989.
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She is currently president of Doctors for Disaster Preparedness. She is the author of YOUR Doctor Is Not In: Healthy Skepticism about National Healthcare, and the second through fifth editions of Sapira's Art and Science of Bedside Diagnosis published by Wolters Kluwer. She authored books for school children, Professor Klugimkopf's Old-Fashioned English Grammar and Professor Klugimkopf's Spelling Method, published by Robinson Books, and coauthored two novels published as Kindle books, Neomorts and Moonshine.
More than 100 of her papers have been published in the scientific and popular literature on a variety of subjects including risk assessment, natural and technological hazards and non-hazards, and medical economics and ethics. She is the editor of AAPS News, the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness Newsletter, and Civil Defense Perspectives, and is the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons.
If you would like to discuss these issues, contact me at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Jane M. Orient, M.D., Executive Director, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons.