PROTECTION FROM UNIMPROVED BASEMENTS

Mr. ROBACK. Do we understand, Mr. Hanunian, that within the area above the gray, the potential for fallout protection is within that red area?

Mr. HANUNIAN. This is how I appraised the potential, and I say I appraised, realizing that I am not expert at this; this is my notion of the effectiveness of basements-the possible effectiveness of basements as compared to virtually no protection at all.

I should add, as I intend later to do, a qualification to that, but let me defer that until later. I will treat later better qualities of shelters. These are unimproved basements.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Unimproved?

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. You mean just ordinary basements, without closures?

Mr. HANUNIAN. That is right.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. And without any adaptations?

Mr. HANUNIAN. Basements as they exist. This is the sort of thing one could get into now.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Mr. Chairman, if I may ask, in a 5-room house? Mr. HANUNIAN. In the typical dwelling house, dwelling place, yes. Mrs. GRIFFITHS. How far from the direct hit?

Mr. HANUNIAN. There is no specification in the calculations of how far the people are from a direct hit. That is to say, there is no cutoff point. What has been used here is a damage function which allows for high percentage fatalities due to blast and thermal radiation, and so on, close to the bomb, fading out to very small percentages remote from the bomb, the calculation being made with this continuous variation of possible outcomes-the probable percentage of the people killed at each distance from the bomb, allowing for the aiming error, and allowing for the uncertainty of weapon effects and the differences in quality of protection from one person to another.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Of course, that allows for the normal type of basement which has openings to the outside, windows and doors which have not been adapted?

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes.

Let me say simply that the basement protection assumed here-the way the protection enters into the analysis—is by giving it the following numbers:

It is assumed that people are protected to a factor-by a factor averaging 10. Actually I divided the population into three parts, for lack of more detailed information, factors of 5 for one-third, 10 for one-third, and 20 for one-third.

Some basements are better than others. It takes a lot of information, a lot more information than is available presently to get an accurate idea of what these shelters would be like in detail.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. You can summarize it then by saying while there is some protection in the normal basement, unless special measures were taken inside that basement to exclude the free flow of radiation into the basement from apertures of certain kinds, that the percentage of people saved would be small in relation to what it could be if measures were taken to close the apertures and provide certain types of shielding in a corner of the basement?

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes, substantial improvements over the results you have seen would be possible.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Do you have any chart showing that?

Mr. HANUNIAN. I will have later.

FOOD AND WATER SUPPLY ASSUMED

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. Mr. Chairman, does it assume that the people in the basement have an uncontaminated water supply?

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes, it is assumed here that once they have survived the blast and the prompt effect of the weapons, the only threat to them is from the radiation, the fallout radiation, and that this is from external radiation, not from some contaminated food. That is one of the assumptions, yes.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. But the picture is drawn on things not really available today.

Mr. HANUNIAN. The picture is drawn on the basis of the kind of civil defense program that could be instituted very quickly. That is to say, people could be informed almost overnight, presumably in a matter of a few weeks, by intensive publicity, efforts to draw water and stockpile it in containers in their basements, and to do the same with food.

I suppose there would not be 100-percent reaction to that; that is, the cooperation would not be perfect. Some would not get the word. Here, however, what I am doing is, as I have been saying, trying to indicate sensitivity to civil defenses. The yellow indicates absolutely no civil defenses, no regard at all for fallout, for example.

The red indicates the better steps that could be taken without building any new shelters, without any construction activity at all. Later I want to show what can be done if you do engage in some shelter construction.

FALLOUT ONLY FIRST OF A SERIES OF DANGERS

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. But it would be just as fatal if you had no regard for merely one area, wouldn't it? I mean if you did everything else correctly, but you used contaminated water, would not that be fatal? Mr. HANUNIAN. Oh, that is right. You simply have to take each link in the chain of possibilities that may lead to your death, and see to it that link does not, in fact, lead to it.

The gamma radiation coming in through the windows, to some extent through the walls, is one threat. That is the one I am worrying about here.

I have assumed, in effect, that the other threats are overcome or are reduced to ineffectiveness by actions of the population, by drawing water in containers ahead of time, for example; by having food stockpiled in the basement, and medicines; by having improved sanitary facilities.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Will you please speak a little louder.

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes.

Mr. RIEHLMAN. That assumption would be drawn on the fact that people had been instructed to some degree

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes.

Mr. RIEHLMAN (continuing). Prior to the attack.

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes. Here [pointing to the uppermost segments] there is no instruction, no knowledge, heedless behavior essentially.

Over here [pointing to the lower segments] there is instruction, there is indoctrination, in fact the population is assumed to heed the instruction, take maximum advantage of the basements that are available, yes.

Mrs. GRIFFITHS. May I say again, make clear, I think the top of the diagram which shows no knowledge, is sort of a false picture, because it really is no knowledge of just one item. It is not no knowledge at all, but if on one thing you failed, you can die.

Mr. HANUNIAN. Yes. The criticism has some validity, I must confess. However, the gamma radiation is the major threat. That must be overcome. Then, after you think you see a way of overcoming that, then there are other things that you must also do, I agree.

EFFECT OF ATTACK VARIABLES ON CASUALTIES

Well, to resume my statement, it is apparent that fallout might very substantially increase the level of fatalities. If surface bursts were used exclusively, and that is assumed here, fallout's contribution might well be much as this chart suggests. Fallout has the potential of adding at least 10 percentage points to the percentage of the population killed by blast in each attack depicted.

This amounts to raising each total by at least 20 million dead. Even when blast damage is itself appallingly heavy and fallout accounts for only a modest proportion of all deaths, as here in the attacks on cities, then we find that the absolute numbers of deaths due to fallout radiation is nonetheless large, 20 million, as I suggested.

Second, it is clear that even when fallout is taken into account, the uncertainty in predictions of the number of dead that enemy attacks might produce still arises in very large part from ignorance about the megatonnage he will deliver to population centers.

The differences between the city bombing bars and the military target bars are the most prominent feature of the chart, either with the large attack-the 3,000-megaton attack-or the small attack-300 megatons.

Third, the effectiveness with which blast survivors exploit what shielding is available to them makes an important difference to the final levels of deaths. Population behavior can quite conceivably alter survival by 10 percentage points even though civil defense shelters may not have been built.

Fourth, our uncertainty about certain weapon characteristics I mentioned earlier, fission fraction and radioactivity level, is revealed by these estimates to be only a little less important than population behavior, civil defense-wise.

Fifth, we may note that total deaths are rather insensitive to the yield of individual weapons, if attacks are directed against military installations. That is to say, looking at the 3,000-megaton attack against military installations, we find the tops of the bars, for example-or the bottom of the yellow segment, for another-are just about at the same level.

Much the same is true here at 300 megatons.

But, perhaps, the most important inference to be drawn from this chart is that the casualty levels from plausible attacks would all be op

pressively high. We ought to explore every possibility for reducing them.

One of the critical factors is the amount of shelter likely to be available to our population. I shall now address myself to this aspect of the problem.

AVAILABILITY OF SHIELDING

As a nation, we have not so far made any great strides in improving the shielding available to the general population or even in identifying those structures whose nature would make them passable fallout shelters. Nor have we managed to impress upon many people how they might sensibly behave if faced with nuclear attacks.

Thus, until developments of recent weeks, it seemed entirely possible that an attack, say, in 1963 would find the U.S. population still unprepared and making rather ineffective use of what shelter existed.

INDOOR-OUTDOOR BEHAVIOR PATTERNS

Even then, however, people would surely not expose themselves to the maximum possible dose. To do so would require absurd behavior, staying outdoors around the clock, day after day.

Actually, people outside the areas where structural damage was significant would presumably spend at least their sleeping hours indoors, benefiting from whatever shielding their quarters happened to afford. Surely part of the remainder of each day would also be spent indoors. If most people would behave in some such fashion it would turn out that the general population would fare little worse than it would have if, unaware of the fallout hazard or indifferent to it, everyone resumed peacetime behavior patterns immediately on sensing the attack's end.

The casualty estimates I label "incidental protection" here (the yellow bars talked about) have been made using the shielding factors appropriate to peacetime behavior patterns. The population ought to do no worse. Account has been taken of the fractions of time that sectors of the population would normally spend out of doors and in various kinds of buildings.

On the average, in this incidental protection case indicated by the yellow, about 60 percent of all radiation is effectively eliminated by environmental shielding. By way of a reasonableness check, the 40 percent residual can be compared with residuals of 70 percent for a person in the open, 30 to 60 percent in a frame house and 10 percent in a factory. These are generalized sorts of figures, of course.

USE OF EXISTING BASEMENTS

The other case considered so far assumes as I have indicated, that equal parts of the population receive 5, 10, and 20 percent of the nominal radiation. This is consistent with planning factors for continuous occupancy of ordinary basements and foxholes. It would also be consistent with part-time occupancy of improved basements, basements with sandbagged windows, for example; or, better, with sandbagged walled and roofed shelters built in corners of the basements. The fatalities estimates, however, are simply labeled "basement protection."

FIGURE NH-4.-PERCENTAGE OF POPULATION HAVING READY ACCESS TO DWELLING BASEMENTS, BY REGION

In this connection, we should note that basements are by no means universally available. Only about 60 percent of the U.S. population has ready access to dwelling basements, and the percentage varies regionally. (See fig. NH-4.)