Mr. WINTER. As I said, these calculations for capacity comparison are made for the manufacturing industries.

Now, it is true that there is a transportation input into these other industries, and it is true that this has been assumed to be available. That is correct.

Mr. MORSE. Could you, by application of operations, research, feed in other variables such as the disturbance of the transportation network and come up with some sound figures?

Mr. WINTER. I spoke of the need for further research earlier, and this is certainly one of the areas where I think this should be done. It is a complicated problem to consider the geographical distribution of economic activity, and the transportation net connecting the economic activity in this country.

It is very complicated, but I think it is feasible and I believe this should be done.

Mr. MORSE. Thank you, Mr. Winter.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

COORDINATION OF RESEARCH

Mr. HOLIFIELD. I would just like to say that your presentation indicates a tremendous area for research and development, and I would assume that under the division of responsibilities which is contemplated by the President in his new plan for the Office of Emergency Planning, that this would naturally fall within their category of functions.

I would assume that studies of this kind will fall within the Office of Emergency Planning functions.

Mr. WINTER. It would appear so to me. That seems to be the role for that office that is envisaged.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Mr. Roback has a question or two.

Mr. ROBACK. Are these studies conducted by yourself and others at Rand public service studies, or are they conducted specifically for Government agencies?

Mr. WINTER. The earlier RAND Corp. study was, as you probably know, a public service study.

However, some of the work that I am reporting here has been supported in connection with studies of active and passive defense for the Air Force. I emphasize again, however, that these are my personal views.

Mr. ROBACK. Are you acquainted with a study that appears to be part of a contract performance for the Air Research and Development Command, under contract No. AF-49638-549, entitled "Outline of an Analytic Approach to Predicting Societal System Recovery From an Air Attack"?

Are you familiar with that study?

Mr. WINTER. Yes, I am.

Mr. ROBACK. Did you get anything from that study?

Mr. WINTER. I think that the goal of this study, of supplying a comprehensive and systematic approach to the problems of recovery, is very commendable.

As I have said, I think that such an approach is required. However, my reaction to that particular attempt is that I would say that the realities of data availability have been largely ignored.

The question of feasible simplifications of the problem has not been faced. The study is laid out in outline in the report you mentioned and it is clearly infeasible because the required data are not available. Also, I believe that the people who put this particular report together might have been benefited from greater attention to some of the earlier work in this area.

Mr. ROBACK. So the question is whether the Federal Government, through its contract or other resources, is utilizing or employing these efforts in useful ways or not.

Of course, we could study all facets of these problems, but the question is: Is there any direction, any integration, of this effort so that the studies are made toward some systematic purpose?

Mr. WINTER. There are some very serious problems in trying to stimulate research on the questions that need to be answered and in providing integration.

Every time I contemplate this problem and try to reconcile the needs of decisionmakers for answers with the necessity of allowing sufficient freedom to the research worker, to permit him to exercise his imagination, I am simply staggered by the complexity of the issues that are raised.

And I am afraid that I have no solution.

Mr. ROBACK. Mr. Winter, will you comment, in relation to recovery as against survival requirements, on the proposed redistribution of wheat surpluses?

Mr. HOLIFIELD. At this time the chairman is going to stop the questioning and ask you to appear before the committee at 2 o'clock for such answers to this question and other additional questions as may be required.

The bells have been heard and it is necessary now for the members to go to the floor.

Mr. Gouré, are you still in the room?

Mr. GOURÉ. Yes, sir.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. I will ask you, sir, to confer with the staff, in view of the time limitation, and the staff will make a report on such matters that they may want to discuss with you of a classified nature. Mr. GOURÉ. Very well.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. We will adjourn until 2 o'clock.

(Whereupon, at 12:15 o'clock p.m., the subcommittee was recessed, to revconvene at 2 p.m. the same day.)

AFTERNOON SESSION

Mr. HOLIFIELD. The subcommittee will be in order.
Mr. Roback has a question.

REDISTRIBUTION OF SURPLUS WHEAT

Mr. ROBACK. At the end of the morning session, Mr. Winter, I inquired about the food distribution from the standpoint both of survival and of recovery requirements. Do you have any comment on the proposed plan to redistribute wheat surpluses.

Mr. WINTER. I believe that the idea of distributing the food around the country, so as to locate it more in proportion to population, is an excellent idea.

One would expect that this would be carried out for enough food supplies for relatively a short period of time such as 6 months.

This seems reasonable to me, that it should not be necessary to redistribute the entire stock, since one would assume that the transportation system will be functioning again within several months. Mr. ROBACK. What about the problem of processing? Mr. WINTER. The problem of processing?

Mr. ROBACK. In other words, does it make sense to distribute unprocessed food, which might pose problems of postattack organization of machinery and equipment and facilities for processing?

Mr. WINTER. If there is no capacity in the area for processing of food, then that would certainly constitute an objection to the program unless one regarded it as a very austere program.

After all, unprocessed wheat can be eaten but, presumably, one would like to make sure that there were processing facilities available if possible.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Has there been any study on the contamination of wheat by radiation?

Mr. WINTER. I am certainly not an expert on that, Mr. Chairman. I can only give you what my impression is.

As I understand it, there is no serious problem there, that wheat in ordinary storage would not be contaminated, and that even grain exposed to direct fallout could be salvaged after disposal of portions that had actually come in contact with the fallout.

That is just my impression.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. I think your impression is right.

If there is a minimal coverage of the grain itself to avoid direct contact with the wheat and mixture of the fission products with the wheat itself, why, it would seem to me there would not be enough mineral content in the wheat to absorb any radiation to cause it to be inedible after a short length of time.

Mr. WINTER. That is my understanding.
Mr. HOLIFIELD. Any further questions?
Mr. ROBACK. Off the record.

(Off the record discussion.)

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Thank you, Mr. Winter.

STATEMENT OF H. H. MITCHELL, M.D., RAND CORP.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Dr. Mitchell, you may proceed.

Dr. MITCHELL. If I may, I will, before I start my testimony, give the biographical data requested by the committee.

I received my bachelor's degree at the University of Arizona in 1936; master of science degree at the University of Southern California in 1938; and my medical degree at the Washington University School of Medicine in 1945.

I was with the RAND Corp. from 1952 to 1954, at which time I was drafted and served as a lieutenant commander in the Medical Corps of the Navy, assigned to the Surgeon's Office of the Armed Forces special weapons project, from the years 1954 to 1956.

Upon finishing that tour of duty, I returned to RAND and have been there ever since. Primarily, my concern has been with weapon effects and medical aspects of this whole area of nuclear warfare, weapon testing, and civil defense.

ECOLOGICAL PROBLEMS AND POSTWAR RECUPERATION

My purpose in appearing before the committee is to call attention to one of the most important but as yet unemphasized areas of civil defense; namely, assessing and solving ecological problems of the postattack environment. At present one can only try to pose questions properly and suggest areas for research because in its major aspects, this has been a strangely neglected field.

The Joint Committee on Atomic Energy in June 1959 heard the testimony of John N. Wolfe, an ecologist with the Atomic Energy Commission. This testimony was quite pessimistic. One of its chief values is that it has caused various people to look at the ecological consequences of nuclear war more closely. At the RAND Corp., Dr. Hill and I have become concerned with the problem. At OCDM, effort is being applied, to my knowledge, under the direction of Jack Green, and in May of this year, with Mr. Richard Park as chairman, the National Academy of Sciences Advisory Committee on Civil Defense held an ecology conference to explore the possibility of doing further work in this area.

This conference was attended by about a dozen or so of the wellknown ecologists around the country, including Dr. Vincent Shultz of the AEC. It was an orienting conference to get them thinking about the problem and make suggestions for the program at OCDM. This is all that is going on to my knowledge.

Mr. ROBACK. Did they publish a study, Dr. Mitchell?

Dr. MITCHELL. No. The last communication I had from them was about 3 weeks ago which contained a summary statement of one of the participants of the conference.

The anticipation was that sometime before September, all the reports would be in and the document would be published.

Ecology may be defined as the study of the relationships of populations of organisms (plant and animal) to each other, along with the effects of the physical and chemical environment on these relationships. For our immediate purpose we are interested in how disturbances caused by a nuclear attack will affect man's ability to exist because of possible failures in the biological-environmental complex. It is analogous to the problem in the industrial economy associated with natural resources, stockpiling, and bottlenecks.

The interactions of populations of living organisms and their relationships to the environment make up a dynamic system, with living and nonliving substances being moved about in what is known as an ecosystem. This is the fundamental unit of ecology, and it is within this unit that we will be looking for problems relating to postattack survival and recuperation. Nuclear war might conceivably lead to complete sterilization of life in a particular area because of fire and

radioactivity. Or there could be a selective removal of one or more essential biotic elements, which could have significant sequential effects (e.g., removal of higher plants leading to floods and erosion and followed by decreased agricultural output later).

It is important to realize that we in the United States are in some sort of rough equilibrium with most of our ecosystems. There is a flow of food, fibers, and other material into the economy of man and there are also various levels of control over harmful aspects such as disease and infestation. Prevention of animal and plant disease involves ecological principles. Insect infestations are also a major concern. Disturbance of established relations could lead to serious unexpected consequences for man in the postattack environment. Even in peacetime, ecological dislocations can be serious. An interesting example involving insects is the population oscillation of the locust in the Asiatic Middle East. The locust lives in desert or semiarid country and in most years is nonmigratory and eats no crops. At intervals for reasons not completely understood, the population density greatly increases. The locust actually undergoes anatomical changes and starts to emigrate into cultivated lands, eating all crops in its path. This is the type of phenomenon which could occur in the disturbed conditions of our postwar environment, and the risk of insect infestation, its consequences, and amelioration should be studied in detail.

The main direct effects of nuclear weapons on various ecosystems will be from fire and fallout radiation. Fire, of course, will have a direct effect by burning forests, grasslands, wildlife and livestock. The indirect consequences of this must also be examined. Radiation will affect various species of plant and animal life directly, and different results may be expected at various levels of radiation. Another effect of radiation is the passage of isotopes through the food chain to final deposition in man. A great deal of attention has been given to this effect because of the interest in fallout from tests and its hazards to man. However, we want to examine this problem from a broader ecological point of view and assess such radiation hazards as the possibility of the soil becoming sterilized through the destruction of decomposers (bacterial and fungi), the inability of crops to grow, or the upsetting of population balance between two or more life forms because of differential radiosensitivity.

For instance, if two forms of life were in balance, if one was a predator on the other, and if you find that the predator was very radiosensitive, you might kill that one and then the other organism would flourish.

NOT A HOPELESS PICTURE

For those of us who believe that civil defense is vital for the effective survival of the United States in the event of nuclear attack it is important to emphasize the difference between a hopeless situation and a grim one. If a situation looks hopeless, one does noth