‘i ~ Se ee P es*  ee a es

The following are excerpts
Jrom an address given Sept. 19 by
‘Jonathan King on the ‘Medical
and Biological Consequences of
Nuclear War.’ King is a professor
of microbiology at the

Technology, a consultant to the
World Council of Churches and a
member of various peace

| Organizations in the U.S.

Massachusetts Institute of.

It has been 35 years since a lone
Boeing B-29 called the Enola Gay
dropped the first nuclear weapon
On the’ civilian population of
Hiroshima. That immediately
Killed over 100,000 men and
women, the majority of whom
Were non-combatants.

At the present time, the U.S.
arsenal contains about 30,000
nuclear warheads, all of them
more powerful than the Little
Boy bomb dropped on
Hiroshima. The warhead on the
Titan II missile, the fuel from
which exploded just this morning
in Arkansas, is 200 to 400 times
more powerful.

tothe U.S., has built its arsenal to
Some 20,000 nuclear warheads. In
addition, Britain, France and In-
dia have nuclear weapons and
soon Pakistan and South Africa
will have them.

The weapons arsenals vastly
Outnumber the numbers of
abi against which they can be

On the day of the anniversary
of the bombing of Hiroshima,
president Carter issued Directive
59. This changes the U.S. strategy

| and. commits us to-developing

sufficient weapons capacity to
launch a first strike against the
Soviet Union; to developing
Weapons so accurate and so
numerous that the Soviet Union’s
ability to retaliate would be —
theoretically — eliminated. The
Newspapers clothed jit in soft
language, calling it an altered
Strategy, from one. of targeting
Cities to targeting military installa-
tions ... But the only reason
you want a weapon so accurate is
So you can hit a missile while it is
Still in its silo —in other words, to
have the accuracy to launch a first
Strike,

The back-up for this new
Strategy was the military
budgeting outlined the year
before, giving the go-ahead for
the vast new policy of weapons
construction, including the con-
Struction of the MX missile
system. According to the defence
department, it is the largest con-
Struction project in human
history, including the pyramids.
It involves building roads which
will be equivalent to one quarter
of the highway capacity in the
U.S. And besides creating a water
shortagein the area, it will createa
world-wide concrete shortage and
bulldozer shortage . . .

Then there is the decision to go
ahead with the neutron bomb, the

The Soviet Union, responding : ~

\decision:to develop nerve gas —

in violation of the Geneva con-
vention — and the decision to
place 570 Pershing missiles in
Europe, a decision which is
equivalent to the Soviet Union
placing missiles in Mexico or in
Canada, targeted onthe U.S...

Let me describe to you the con-
sequences of a nuclear attack, of,"
‘say, a 10-megaton capacity (the
Titan II warhead is about nine
magatons—Ed.) — and
remember that Vancouver 1s
clearly a target in any nuclear war.

The blast itself would excavate
a crater a half mile in diameter,
250 to 300 feet deep. The initial
blast, the shock wave would
destroy all structures, even the

DISARMAMENT WEEK

most heavily concrete reinforced,
within a radius of four
miles . . . At ten miles, the only
thing left standing would be —
maybe — reinforced concrete
structures, the pillar of certain
bridges or elevated highways.
The blast wave would move at
600 miles per hour. And
remember that when the windows
in buildings shatter, they pick up
the momentum of that shock
wave. Shards of glass will bemov-
ing, then, at 600 mph. I won’t
describe to you what these shards

Of glass will do to those people in

their path...

That is the blast.

When the bomb explodes, it
creates immense amounts of
radiation. The atmosphere sur-
rounding the blast is heated to
hundreds of thousands of

_ degrees. The fireball created

moves up from the centre within
minutes so that the temperature is
raised to hundreds of thousands
of degrees within a radius of one
mile. The heat is so intense that
people out in the open 20 miles
away would suffer second degree
burns.

To give you an idea of the in-
tensity of high level radiation for
the kind of explosion I am talking
about — even within a mile
radius, people inside 11 feet of
concrete would still receive a
lethal dose of radiation. Sodo not
think that if you have a fallout
shelter, even one with a foot of
concrete and its own oxygen sup-
ply that you will be safe — you
will not.

Then there is the secondary
radiation, the fallout. Because of
the winds and the firestorm, there
is a> tremendous amount of
radioactive debris that will be
thrown up into the atmosphere
and drift down over a period of 24

to 48 hours. People as far away as |

200 miles downwind will receive a
lethal dose of radiation. |

In tribute to:

ANKER |
GILSTEAD, —
a staunch communist, —
from his comrades

_in the Burnaby Club, CPC

In a city like Boston where I
live, with 600,000 population in
the downtown area and 2,000,000
in the metropolitan area, the
estimate is that 750,000 will die
immediately as a result of the
blast. Only 10 percent would sur-
vive the second day . . . And the
idea that for the survivors, life
would come back to normal is a
fiction of the greatest magnitude,
ahugelie. I think it was John Her-
shey who wrote, referring to the
victims of a nuclear war: ‘‘The
living will envy the dead.”” When
told of those words, former
Soviet premier Kruschev said:
“No, the living will be as the
dead.’ .

6

The question is: Why? Why, if
these weapons are going to result
in nuclear war, and if the war
would result in the destruction of
life in the northern hemisphere, is
the U.S. going ahead?

Why is it building a whole new
generation of nuclear weapons;
why did it fail to sign the SALT Il
treaty which the USSR ratified
and signed; why did the govern-
ment this year appropriate the
largest military budget in the
peacetime history of the U.S.

(and I believe the largest military

budget in the wartime history)?

I want to speak here not as an
expert but as a citizen who is
angry. As you know the U.S.
economy is declining. Last year,
the standard of living went down

for the first time. Canadians are _

feeling the same decline.

But military spending is the
golden egg — for the defence cor-
porations. Everything is cost
‘plus. No matter what the costs’
are, the profit is over and above.
There is no competition: you
don’t have to worry about
Toyota or Volkswagen building a
better one, because the govern-
ment won’t buy weapons from
foreign producers. The weapon
doesn’t even have to work
because the military will buy it
whether it works or not.

The economy may fall apart
for the average American but the
military contractors will ride the
crest. And they know this. They
also know that the average
American or Canadian knows
that a missile doesn’t feed you or
house you or get you to work in
the morning. They know that
people don’t want to give up their
tax dollars for things like missiles.

[ The imperative of disarmament —

So to get people to give up their
taxes, it is necessary to create a
war danger and to heat up that
war danger.

Then there is the political com-
ponent. I foresee situations like
that in South Africa. We know
that one day, the black people in
South Africa are going to move to
take their country back again. We
know that against that move-
ment, the apartheid government
is going to use every weapon it can
get from West Germany, France
andthe U.S. . . . And the people
of South Africa are going to have
to fight back with bullets as has
been so tragically necessary
elsewhere in the world. I don’t
think that the U.S. is going to arm
them. They will turn to the Soviet
Union and other east bloc coun-
tries. I think that the U.S. is going
to threaten those countries and
say: If you continue to provide
aid to the liberation forces in
South Africa, we are going to
strike you with nuclear weapons.

But that is not now a credible
threat as it would result in total
destruction. In order to make it a
credible threat, you have to build.
a whole new scale of nuclear
weapons that is so accurate and
destructive that it could hit every
missile silo and every airport in
the Soviet Union.

@

How are we going to changeit?
And there is a feeling, even as we
sit here, to push it out of our
minds. Well, things have changed
from years ago. Over the last 30
years, the economies of the U.S.
and Canada were expanding, and
the choice was not guns or butter.
The average worker could have
guns and butter. But that is not
the case now.

The policies of 30 years ago are
coming home to roost and our
economies are being destroyed.

That is why Chrysler went
bankrupt. Unlike Japan where
they were investing their produc-
tive capacity into making better
cars, the U.S. was doing it to
make better missiles. But every
dollar that goes into developing a
missile is a dollar that doesn’t go
into housing, or schools, or into
making a window that doesn’t let
the wind through.

Mike Wallace of UBC told me
last night that the money which

- Canada will be spending to buy

the F-18 fighter planes — about

' destroyed because the productive

$4 billion — is enough to refit
every home in Canada to make it
energy efficient. That means that
people are beginning to suffer the
effects of these weapons even
without their use.

What we have to do is go out
and explain to people: Look,
your everyday life is being

capacity of your country is going
into weapons. ;

Canada is the only country in
the world which developed
nuclear power but did not
develop nuclear weapons. But the
economy is being destroyed in the
same way the U.S. economy is —
the connections between the two
are so close.

You are going to buy F-18
fighter planes — so that money
can’t be used for homes. You’re
going to have a component con-
tract for the cruise missiles — so
that productive capacity can’t
then be used to develop solar
energy or build railroad track.

If you study your economy you
will find many sectors are suffer-
ing because money is being drain-
ed off for the military. And I
would bet that the new research
park at UBC is going to do con-
tract research for U.S. defence
manufacturers or their Canadian
subsidiaries, including those
manufacturing the cruise missile
components.

You must make the citizens of
Canada aware of these issues.

In the U.S. we are trying to
build a movement — at the
grassroots — to go to the people
on their issues and speak to them
about our issues. We’ve explain-
ed to them for example that the
reason for the military — and if
they wanted to re-open it, they
were going to have to take a posi-
tion on military spending. And
pretty soon we’re going to have a
situation where if someone runs
for Sffice on a war plank, we’re
going to be able to mount a cam-
paign to defeat him.

I think this will happen more
and more across the United
States. In Britain already, there is
a nuclear disarmament move-
ment growing which is deman-
ding that there be no missiles on
British soil. Itis alarge movement
which takes in the Labor Party
and the labor movement.

It is a slow process and a dif-
ficult process — but it is being
done. And you can do it here. J

S

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COMING EVENTS

OCT. 29 — Parliament of Peoples
for Peace report back at a public
meeting and slide show, Langara
campus, 100 W. 49th Ave., Van. at
7:30 p.m. Hear B.C. delegates, Bert
Ogden, B.C. Peace Council, Alan
Passarell, NDP MLA (Atlin), Eila
Male, Finnish Organization of Can-
ada, Lorne Robson, B.C. Provincial
Council of Carpenters. Admission

J tree.

OCT. 31 — YCL Hallowe'en Dance.
See display ad for details.

NOV. 8 — Banquet and dance
commemorating the 63rd Anniver-
sary of the October Socialist Revo-
lution. See display ad for details. ©

NOV. 8 — Come celebrate the 63rd
anniversary of the Great October
Socialist Revolution with the South
Fraser Regional Committee, CPC at
Sunnyside Hall, 154th and 18th

Ave., Surrey. Banquet, speaker,
entertainment and refreshments. 6
p.m. Adults $6.

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PACIFIC TRIBUNE—OCT. 24, 1980—Page 11