TARGET AREAS Mrs. GRIFFTHS. And, as a matter of fact, the shelter program that you have explained to us considers hit cities abandoned after the blast. Mr. CANNELL. No, it doesn't, because, as I explained, there are a number of strategic situations where cities aren't the targets. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. That is true. But a city that is hit would certainly be abandoned under this shelter program. I mean, there would be little chance that anybody would survive. Mr. CANNELL. This is not a total program; it is the first year of a program. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. But under the present circumstances you are going to abandon the cities that get hit, right? Mr. CANNELL. I think that is the wrong way to phrase the question. Even in those cities that are targets, as I tried to explain, aiming error means that you will buy some lives in those cities by the mere fact of identifying and marking shelters. It is not an abandonment. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. If it is a shelter that will protect. I have already explained to you that in my district you are not going to have any shelters. Mr. CANNELL. Your people are not without recourse, however. There are a number of expedient things that people can do in the time between a detonation and the fallout coming back down to earth. And in this interim period I see no other recourse than for them to do things for themselves. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Let me point out to you that they are not going to be able to do anything for themselves unless this program has a tremendous educational impact, unless you educate them practically one by one. Mr. CANNELL. It is envisioned in our program. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Unless you do that, it won't happen. I have already heard from one of the civil defense administrators of a neighboring State who pointed out in regard to the question I asked the Secretary on the educational program that they had never been told in that State what they were supposed to do. TWO BOMBS ON A CITY Mr. RIEHLMAN. What is going to happen if you have a second bomb dropped right on that same target area? Mr. CANNELL. I oversimplified the problem by explaining it in the relation to one bomb per city, which isn't necessarily the way one targets. Usually you have to assign more than one weapon to some of the larger cities, which means the smaller ones don't get any. And some of the smaller cities are in need of fallout shelter which would very effective in those areas. There are all of these optional ways to assign the weapons, but on a national estimate, you still had only so many weapons to assign. If you don't save people one place, then you save them in another. be Mr. ROBACK. You are saying, Mr. Cannell, that the enemy has got so many weapons in a given stockpile or targeting program, and if he has to put more on one city, some other city doesn't get it? Mr. CANNELL. There is a range of ways to distribute them, and we considered this when we said how many lives we would save. We have tried many ways of allocating them and it is just that different people are saved. NEED FOR CONTINUING SHELTER PROGRAM Mr. ROBACK. In relation to Mrs. Griffiths' question about the hazard, as far as the Department of Defense is concerned, this is a 1- or 2year program for fallout shelter protection which does not preclude any further programs? Mr. CANNELL. I think perhaps we have put undue emphasis on the point of the people whose lives we save with the first-year program. Another equally important aspect is to have the planning base for determining the extent and nature of a continuing program. Mr. ROBACK. For determining the optimum program? Mr. ROBACK. There is nothing in the testimony, outside of this little excursion that we had this morning into the Secretary's testimony before another committee, there is nothing in any concept that you have in the Department of Defense that precludes planning for and ultimately achieving an optimum shelter organization? Mr. YARMOLINSKY. I think I should speak to that. And the answer is, certainly not. The program that we have presented to the Congress is a program intended primarily to save, we hope, 10, 15, 20 million lives, and secondarily, to develop the next facts so that we could present a further program to the Congress in the following year. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. As the head of the program, are you going to depend on Nike-Zeus or shelters? Mr. YARMOLINSKY. No, Mrs. Griffiths. The question as to whether we should undertake a large-scale primary blast shelter program, is one that seems to me can't be answered until we know a good deal of the results of this survey, and more than we know now about the effectiveness of Nike-Zeus. I am not saying that this is a question that we have to wait to settle for 1 or 2 or 5 years. I would hope that by fiscal year 1963 budget time we would have some kind of answer to bring before the Congress, and a program to propose. But we don't know enough now to answer that question. We do know enough to know, and I can assert it here, that we cannot rely on any kind of active defense system to protect this country against fallout. Therefore, our primary problem is the problem of fallout protection. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. If it would take ten years to protect by Nike-Zeus, and in the meantime you would know exactly what additionally the Russians would have, and the bomb would drop in 5 years, I presume you would be for a shelter program now. REVISED EDITION OF "EFFECTS OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS" Mr. ROBACK. Mr. Yarmolinsky, you have with you some representatives of the Atomic Support Agency. Mr. YARMOLINSKY. The Defense Atomic Support Agency, we do. Major Stebbins. Mr. ROBACK. Major Stebbins, can you tell us when the revised "Effects" handbook will be published and available? Major STEBBINS. It is in its final draft form now. For the past 6 or 8 months we have been actively engaged in preparing it under the editorship of Dr. Samuel Glasstone. It has been fully coordinated with technical people not only in the AEC, but in many of the Government laboratories and other contractors that have knowledge in this area. The final draft has been submitted for the ultimate coordination between the administrative people in the Department of Defense and the AEC. I anticipate that it will be presented to the Commissioners of the AEC shortly. Mr. ROBACK. The AEC has the editorial responsibility, do they? Major STEBBINS. Dr. Samuel Glasstone is the editor of the docu ment. Mr. ROBACK. Does he work for the AEC under contract? Major STEBBINS. He is contractor to the AEC, and has been working very closely with us in the Defense Atomic Support Agency in the actual physical preparation of the material. Mr. ROBACK. Now, do you regard the material in this handbook as the essence of authoritative information in regard to nuclear weapons effects? Major STEBBINS. I think Mr. ROBACK. Let me ask you, why do you put out this handbook? Major STEBBINS. It is a document which the Government makes available to all people who are interested in weapons effects. Mr. ROBACK. And what does it purport to convey to those people? Major STEBBINS. The goal of the document is to make available, to anyone who wants to know, blast effects, radiation effects, and other effects from weapons of different types and which burst under different conditions. It suggests what might happen to targets and people in the vicinity of targets. It gives the users many factors-for instance, they could estimate what possible levels of radiation might be distributed on the ground from weapons of various sizes, and what kinds of shielding materials they might be able to use to protect themselves. The book suffers from some defects because it attempts to be allinclusive and addresses itself to everyone. There is probably in the 600 short pages available in the document the best single collection of weapons effects information that the Government is able to put together. It is a technical book by comparison to other documents that the lay public might pick up on this particular subject. Yet, on the other hand, for some technical people it is inadequate, because it does not go into all the details as fully as possible. RADIATION DECAY RATE Mr. ROBACK. Does the Defense Atomic Support Agency have an analysis of the decay rates from radiation which is different from estimates that other agencies have? Major STEBBINS. There have been many estimates of decay rates from radioactive fallout. Mr. ROBACK. What would be the civil defense implications if one group estimates that radiation decays more quickly than the other? It might make a lot of difference, might it not? Major STEBBINS. Yes, it certainly would. Mr. ROBACK. So what does-what will the weapons effects handbook say about this problem? Major STEBBINS. It has an extensive section on this particular problem. It attempts, without going into all the background, to present an estimate of the manner in which fallout materials will decay, which is sufficiently accurate during the times of interest, namely, when the radiation rates are high, to allow people to plan the kinds of programs necessary to provide protection from this radiation. Mr. ROBACK. Is this the same information that was in the unrevised edition? Major STEBBINS. It has been brought up to date. The basic concept of the rates of decay has not changed, in that, for planning purposes, the expression that the radiation levels at any time after the bomb has burst are equal to some value measured at unit time after the bomb has burst, times a power of the time that is of interest. This is the so-called t-1.2 rule. Mr. ROBACK. That relationship has been used, has been cited for many years, and still is. You say that basically the same information is used today, you haven't modified that? MEASUREMENT OF ACTUAL DECAY RATE ESSENTIAL Major STEBBINS. For planning purposes, this is probably the single best, simple, numerical relationship available. The new handbook will give figures which are very closely related to that particular power law. For planning purposes it is probably good for several hundred days after the bomb bursts. Now, actually real fallout, as experienced in many of our tests in the past, and as we might expect to get in the future, can depart from this particular relationship rather radically. But if we try to characterize the different fallout fields that we have studied, and try to average them into one particular law which will give you something to plan with, then this is the rule to use. In the real situation one would be foolish to use the planning rule. The only way you can tell what you are actually getting is to measure it. And it is a very important part of, not only civil defense but also defense within the military, to have instruments available to actually measure the radiation rates that one is receiving at any one particular time, and to keep track of these rates over the whole period of time that one is exposed to it. Mr. ROBACK. Are you making the point that it is important to have actual measurements because the physical law or the physical relationship that you cited may not be accurate enough to predict for protection purposes; that is, the prediction has to be squared with what happens? Major STEBBINS. That is right. And this rule is the best planning guide that one has available today. It represents the wide variety of different conditions which have prevailed in the past. When you go into a fallout field or take samples from it and make measurements over periods of time extending up to 200 days, as we have done in the past, we find that if you plot activity from this fallout material on a graph and attempt to fit a curve to this plot, it can often be expressed as a power law fairly accurately. Sometimes the power law is t-0.9. Sometimes it is t-2.0. It depends upon the circumstances under which the bomb was burst. It depends upon the meteorological conditions. It depends upon the soil that the bomb was burst on. There are many factors which can change the radiochemical proportions in any particular area of a fallout field. And it varies from place to place in one field from one bomb. Mr. ROBACK. And depending on which relationship you might select and I understand there have been several different analysesit might make a difference in seeking the protection factor you might want, might it not? Major STEBBINS. As far as the rule that you use to decide how you are going to protect yourself, I don't think that this would affect it particularly. Mr. ROBACK. Suppose you get under one formula a much higher predicted concentration the first day than you get under another. Obviously, wouldn't that raise a question as to whether you needed a larger protection factor? Major STEBBINS. To the extent that the formula that you use is a better representation of what you are actually going to get, then that is true, it might affect your planning in this area. Mr. ROBACK. More important, it might determine how long you might stay in the new shelter, might it not? Major STEBBINS. In the absence of any measurements at the time, it could influence how long you would stay in the shelter. But, of course, you really have to know how much you are getting when you first go in, or when the fallout arrives. And if you have no measurement at all, then you may be in serious trouble. Mr. ROBACK. And it also might give you a different concept of what the residual or longtime hazard was; that is, long time in the sense that radiation persists for a long time. One prediction might show you a blank, and the other lingering radiation over a long period of time, isn't that the case? Major STEBBINS. Any departure that one rule has from another will certainly influence it. OCDM USE OF t-1.2 RULE Mr. ROBACK. Mr. Brewer, does the OCDM have an official formula which it uses to advise civil defense planners as far as the decay rates of radiation are concerned? Mr. BREWER. We use the same one. Mr. ROBACK. The same one as whom? Mr. BREWER. The t-1.2 rule is the planning guide available to all agencies, including the OCDM. Mr. ROBACK. Has not ОCDM made calculations which show rather marked divergence from the t-1.2? Mr. BREWER. We are guided by the same technical data as the Defense Atomic Support Agency. And we are aware of the variations |