anyone for nuclear war? - India bats it out

[peaccenicked]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../06/ixport.html (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2002/06/06/wkash06.xml&sSheet=/portal/2002/06/06/ixport.html)
Are these guys serious?

[bleed3r]

Scary... This isn't as interesting to me as the CMC, but almost as terrifying. However, I seriously doubt that the US will let nukes be launched. One of the few times when you can be happy and feel protected, at least to an extent...

[bleed3r]

"This is jumping the gun," he said. "Our intention is not to have an all-out war. It would be a limited action."

Wow... "Oh no no, we don't want to fight you, we just want to invade..."

[peaccenicked]

Sorry about the double post.
However, this is really scary stuff. There sooner the peace movement makes its voice heard accross the globe the better.

[Valkyrie]

Yes, Nukes are by far the most threatening to civilization. this is the direct result of Reagan's missile fetish. Every country assumes it must follow suit.

The Russian - US nuclear disarmament pact is a farce in itself too. Get rid of a couple thousand or so on each side and they still have a couple thousand or more each left. Don't they know it only takes ONE?

[deimos]

are there numbers about how many people in india and pakistan will die if they nuke each other?

[peaccenicked]

on Tue, Jun. 04, 2002

Calculating global reach of a regional nuclear war
By Faye Flam
Inquirer Staff Writer

If India and Pakistan start exploding nuclear weapons, they could kill millions of people from the blasts themselves, from burns, and from radiation sickness.

They would also send radioactive poisons into the atmosphere, where they could rain back down on the subcontinent. Small amounts would also spread around the globe, where they could pose a risk to food supplies thousands of miles away.

As tensions increase over the countries' competing claims on Kashmir, scientists and policy experts are starting to think about the unthinkable, estimating the extent and range of death and environmental destruction with physics and climate predictions.

Many scientists say dangerous fallout is very unlikely to spread beyond the two countries; others caution that the world must monitor radiation levels everywhere to be safe.

"In terms of health effects [in the United States], I think the risks are vanishingly small," said Arthur Upton, a former National Cancer Institute director and a leading authority on the health effects of radiation. "I don't think one can say it's a public health threat."

That's because by the time the radiation travels across the globe, it would spread out in the air so much that it would add only slightly to the normal background radiation, Upton said.

Ordinary "background radiation" - which emanates from space, seeps up from Earth's core, and is ingested in food - exposes the average American to about 100 millirems of exposure per year, he said. (A millirem is a unit of absorbed radiation; one millirem is the amount absorbed by the average TV viewer over one year.)

A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would add less than one millirem a year to the average American's exposure, Upton predicted.

How fallout spreads depends on many complicated factors. The winds both near the surface and in the upper atmosphere, when and where it rains, and whether bombs explode in the air or close to the ground all make a huge difference.

A government estimate calculates the immediate death toll at nine million to 12 million, said David Albright,a physicist at the Institute for Science and International Security, a Washington think tank that deals with nuclear issues.

An estimate of the worst-case scenario by the Natural Resources Defense Council estimates fatalities as high as 30 million. That assumes the war resulted in 24 missiles launched over 15 major cities, said Matthew McKinzie, a physicist with the environmental group. In that estimate, the blasts are assumed to be close to the ground, creating maximum fallout for the region and spreading the contamination 25 to 50 miles from each of the blast sites.

Shock waves

Albright said Pakistan has 30 to 50 nuclear weapons of about the same destructive power as the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs, 10 to 15 kilotons. India has 50 to 100 such weapons.

Both countries have tested these weapons, India starting in 1974 and Pakistan in 1998.

If a nuclear weapon is dropped over one of India's or Pakistan's crowded cities, the casualties would be enormous and would come from the tremendous shock waves, which produce hurricane-force winds, and from heat, which can cause third-degree burns a mile from ground zero. Others would be killed by radiation sickness after being exposed to gamma rays and neutrons.

Radiation sickness, as the world learned at Hiroshima, can take days or weeks to kill. Then there is the longer-term damage from fallout.

Contaminated dust

"It gets trickier to estimate fallout damage," Albright said. If the blasts go off close to the ground, they contaminate dust, which settles on the region over a period of hours, spreading radioactivity over hundreds of square miles. Because prevailing winds go from west to east, India would most likely suffer the worst damage from this.

People all over the region could get doses of about 500 rems, said Albright, and while modern medicine can save people who get this dose, people in a war-torn India or Pakistan are unlikely to get the care they would need.

If nuclear weapons explode above ground, as they did over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, radioactive elements are lofted high in the atmosphere, where they are diluted and become unlikely to cause radiation sickness.

But in such a scenario a cocktail of radioactive elements would travel thought the upper atmosphere, eventually surrounding the entire globe. When they finally did fall to Earth they could contaminate food supplies with long-lived radioactive material such as iodine, cesium and strontium, Albright said.

Small amounts of radiation can become more concentrated in milk and other food products, as happened after the 1986 Chernobyl accident.

Others, including a former State Department physicist, say this is very unlikely.

India's monsoon season, which starts in the next several weeks and lasts through the summer, would probably cause the destruction to stay closer to the region because heavy rains would bring radioactive materials down before they could travel far, in the form of "rain-out." Winds at that time are more unpredictable.

During other times of the year the contaminants would probably travel in cigar-shaped plumes, the direction of which can depend on the unpredictable weather of the day.

In the United States, scientists announced recently that nuclear tests in Nevada in the 1950s did cause radioactive fallout in regions as far away as Upstate New York.

"There were hot spots," said Albright, sprinkled around the country, that were determined by where rain happened to fall soon after the test bombs were exploded. Utah also had serious hot spots; in one region people had to throw their milk away.

Albright said that scientists would have to work fast to prepare to monitor the world for radioactive contamination, should any bombs be dropped. If there is long-range contamination, people can still remain healthy by avoiding contaminated food.


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