THE POSTATTACK ENVIRONMENT

There is one important question which is raised by the effects of modern weapons today, the question of survivors envying the dead. This is an important point; the most frightening possible point. This question is raised mainly because modern weapons have long-lasting effects.

This committee and the Joint Committee have been the two principal sources of information on these effects, so I will not surprise you when I say, perfectly soberly and reasonably, that if there is a war today the environment will be more hostile to human life for say, 10,000 years.

Now, one can argue this statement; it might be wrong. However, the best scientific evidence indicates that it is correct, that the environment will be more hostile to human life for 10,000 years or so. I am thinking now of the longer lived, radioactivity due to carbon 14. To many people this statement carries the implication that it is not worth living in that hostile environment. That is, of course, much too quick and shallow an opinion. As testimony before this committee and before the Joint Committee at the 1959 hearings has brought out, while the environment would be more hostile, it would not be so hostile as to preclude normal and happy lives for the survivors.

In other words, the survivors can rebuild, they can reconstruct and, in many cases, they would not notice the greater hostility of the environment. It would be a statistical effect which would be discernible in the mortality tables, but not by the average individual's personal observation.

The average individual would go through life running somewhat greater risks of various types of diseases and greater risks of having genetically deformed children, but when these risks are compared to the risks normally run today, they are not startlingly larger. The quality of life, would not necessarily have been changed dramatically. When trying to explain this point, when trying to explain that civil defense is not ineffective because of these long-lived, long-term effects, one can get into very serious trouble.

Let me go over some of the phrases which I have just used to indicate what happens.

NORMAL POSTWAR LIFE

I made the comment, both here and in my book, that objective studies indicate that the postwar environment would not be so hostile as to preclude normal and happy lives.

I would conjecture that I have gotten about 50 letters, mostly from psychiatrists taking me to task for that remark. Partly, I think, they object to the term "normal and happy"; I suppose they would argue that people are not normal and happy today, so why do I think the war would make a difference?

I am not, of course, claiming that the war would make people happier or more normal, but what I claim to say, and as far as I know it has not been contradicted by any evidence, is that insofar as one can lead a normal and happy life today, the long-term physical conditions after most wars would not be such as to preclude living a normal and happy life then.

I think the reason why I received such a hostile reaction to this remark has to do with some very natural human reactions. Let me give a sort of homely example which illustrates one of the problems one must surmount if one wishes to explain what we might face postwar.

Imagine for a moment that you have a friend, who is a mother and who has just lost her only child, and that she is grieving over her loss. Life looks totally black. She may literally not be able to envisage ever recovering from her grief. The world may seem permanently out of kilter. This is the end.

You might walk up to this woman and say: "In 5 years you will in some sense have recovered from your grief; you will be laughing at jokes. You won't forget your child. You may even be reminded of him very intensely every now and then. But nevertheless you will be leading a normal and happy life."

That is, by and large, an accurate prediction. But she won't thank you for making it. She will be very angry at you, and so will all of her friends. They will say it was not appropriate to bring this analysis up; the mother's grief deserves respect. One should not ignore it, and by making this comment you seem to be ignoring it.

However, in the kind of things this committee is considering, one must be this hardheaded, this callous, if you will, in order to understand the problems involved.

One must be able to recognize that for most people deep grief is transitory, that most people recover, that life does go on even if many, including trained psychoanalysts, reject the idea.

COMPLETE RANGE OF CIVIL DEFENSE PROBLEMS MUST BE FACED

There is another reason why people think civil defense is ineffective. This is more technical than the ones I have discussed. This reason is illustrated by the next chart. This is the last chart from my book that I will use today. I do not intend to give you my 2-day lecture today. (See fig. K-3.)

FIGURE K-3.-A COMPLETE DESCRIPTION OF A THERMONUCLEAR WAR INCLUDES THE ANALYSIS OF

There are good sound technical reasons for worrying about the effectiveness of civil defense. Any man today who says that we, as a Nation, can survive a war is saying something very complicated. He is saying that we can handle all of the problems that are lumped together in each of the eight phases of a thermonuclear war which are mentioned on this chart. If we fail on any one of these phases in a crucial way then we may have failed completely. In a sense, one gets no credit at all for a grade of 90 per cent, even if it deserves an A for effort.

He is saying, first of all, that we will have the program in place the day the war occurs.

Now, I read last week's testimony before this committee, and I noticed that several times members of the committee were concerned as to the rate at which the program would be put in. Skepticism was expressed as to whether or not the program will move fast enough.

Such skepticism can be justified by historical examples. By and large, defense programs in this country have lagged, and unless an urgent effort is made they will continue to lag. So one must worry that the program will be in place at the time it is needed.

This worry about phasing also includes worries about possible enemy reactions. One must worry that the enemy does not go faster than we do, so that by the time we have procured programs adequate for 1960, it is 1965 and we are facing a new threat which has obsoleted our 1960-type preparations.

There is one important factor which helps alleviate the problem of obsolescence. There are many different kinds of wars which can occur, and there are many different prewar circumstances which can change the character of the war. I will have a lot to say about this in a few moments. But I would just like to mention that even though the program may be obsolete for some wars and some circumstances, it is likely to retain much value for other wars or circumstances. However, it is difficult for even professional analysts to keep these many cases in mind.

We have again a psychological reaction which is very hard to fight. Most people, including professional analysts, want to worry about the worst case that can happen.

SURPRISE ATTACK-THE WORST CASE

Now, it is literally true, as far as I can see, that if the enemy is determined to kill Americans with a surprise attack out of the blue that is directed against population, then no program that is currently being suggested is going to cut the loss of lives much below half the population.

Therefore, if he is trying to kill Americans with a surprise attack out of the blue, that is a problem which is very difficult, if not impossible, except even here one can argue that he prefers 90 million dead to 180 million dead.

But our weakness in the worst case does not settle the problem. Most wars that are actually likely to occur would have a quite different character and programs which are designed to meet less ferocious wars or less difficult wars can be very valuable.

We do not refuse to go to a doctor when we have pneumonia because he cannot cure cancer. His ability to cure pneumonia is valuable to us precisely because we may catch pneumonia when we do not have cancer.

The same principle is applicable to programs which are designed for special situations, programs which will not work under all situations, but may still be valuable in the special situation. In some ways this is the character of the program we are discussing here today.

Actually you have already had some testimony as to the effects of different kinds of wars, and Norman Hanunian will discuss some effects on casualties in more detail later. I will therefore leave this

question of the different kinds of wars, except for a sort of typology discussion at the end of my testimony.

The next problem is protection against the effects of fallout. This committee has heard much testimony already with regard to this important problem and, in addition, the witness who follows me, Norman Hanunian, will discuss the performance of different degrees of fallout protection. The witness following him, Jerry Strope, will discuss some recent developments in the more adequate forms of fallout protection, so I will not discuss the problem of fallout protection today. In fact, I would like to emphasize that important as fallout protection is, it may have been overemphasized recently to the neglect of other very important aspects of civil defense.

REORGANIZATION AFTER ATTACK

The next problem, the problem of getting things started again, is a very difficult one to analyze. In fact, it is quite clear that nobody can do a study which will prove rigorously that if you give the social organism the kind of shock that a large thermonuclear war would give, that the social organism would not in some sense die. Nobody can demonstrate rigorously how things can be put together after the disorganization of an attack.

This inability to demonstrate viability is not a shocking or a new thing. If you lose a leg, no doctor can demonstrate that if he gets you to the hospital that he can get the blood stopped and that you will survive even with the best medical treatment. He cannot do this rigorously because no one knows enough about the bodily process involved to demonstrate the details of the healing process.

One has to depend on faith and previous experience. Other people have lost a leg and have survived, and, therefore, one believes that you can also under those circumstances.

Even if you only cut your finger, neither I nor anyone else can prove that it will heal, because, again, nobody understands the full details of the mecanism of clotting and healing. But we know you do get healing, and we also know if you put sulfa or iodine on the cut, it increases the probability of healing and decreases the probability of infection.

Civil defense has the same character, except that we lack a relevant experience. In order to argue that the social mechanism will restart, one must have faith in the ability of people to improvise, to meet emergencies reasonably intelligently, and then one can give them facilities and make other preparations to help them meet these emergencies, to improve their capability to improvise and organize.

But even after elaborate preparation, one will still be depending upon the survivors' ability to rise to the occasion. If the survivors were robots, that could only rigidly obey preset instructions, one would indeed have serious doubts about the possibility of restarting things.

Insofar as we have historical examples, and some of them are close to thermonuclear wars in intensity, people do seem to rise to the occasion. Faith that they will do so is not an unreasonable or desperate hope. It is the expected thing. It is what a gambler would be willing to bet will happen, even though one cannot prove it will happen. Therefore, while whatever studies that are done will have

an important gap in them, I do not believe that our inability to demonstrate feasibility rigorously is an annihilating weakness. On the other hand, it is clear that much fruitful work can be done in analyzing feasibility and looking for difficulties and ways to circumvent them.

RESTARTING PRODUCTION

The next problem is the maintenance of economic momentum. This is also a tricky problem and one which Sidney Winter will discuss at some length. The problem of the maintenance of economic momentum at an adequate level reflects the fact that it is not only necessary to be able to recuperate eventually, but one must recuperate before one runs out of supplies to such an extent that major additional hardships are inflicted on the survivors.

To go back to the patient analogy, it may be perfectly correct to estimate that if one gets the patient to the hospital he will recover. but if one fails to get him to the hospital he may still die.

While the patient has an intrinsic capability to recover, he still needs such things as warmth, sustenance, care, food, and medicine while recovering. In our case these things can only be supplied out of stocks on hand, postattack production, and imports from other countries. The sum of these must be at a high enough level to do the job.

One thing which makes me optimistic about U.S. recovery is the fact that for the highest priority items, food, shelter, water, and clothing, we need not have any shortages, at least nationally. In other words, all of the attacks we have analyzed, at least for the early 1960's, leave enormous stocks of these items; therefore, one does not have the problem of split-second timing in postattack recuperation. For example, we will not face starvation even if we do not get agriculture going for a year or two.

Of course, preparations must be made for utilizing these resources, particularly food. As I understand, these preparations will be made. There are plans being drawn up to predistribute the food before the attack, so that we will not have to depend on the national transportation system after the attack to distribute it. These preparations are not necessary because studies indicate that the national transportation system would work adequately. Most of us think it will work, but we cannot rely on these studies. We prefer to insure against it not working, against our studies being wrong.

LONG-TERM RECUPERATION

The next problem is the long-term recuperation problem. Recuperation here has many facets: economic, social, political, psychological, and, in a subtle way, moral.

The only one which has been studied with any care is the economic. Here I think we can say with some confidence that if we can handle phases 4 and 5 adequately, the economy will come back with amazing resilience; in other words, countries like the United States are extremely competent, once they get started, at producing capital and consumer goods. Sidney Winter will have more to say about this subject later, but, depending upon the war, one would conjecture that we could rebuild the destroyed wealth in less than a generation, in all