been severely burned become more susceptible to fire because the cover that grows during the first few years after a fire is more easily ignited and the dead snags left from previous fires burn more readily. For example, most of the Tillamook burn area burned over again in 1939 and in 1945, and a smaller fire covering 38,000 acres burned in 1951. Research and development aimed at improvement of methods of fighting forest fires, particularly in the presence of fallout, might lead to a real capability to combat fires following a nuclear attack. The use of aircraft to fight forest fires has increased during recent years and further development of these techniques could be of great importance.

The development of more tree farms and improved methods of reseeding or replanting burned forest areas could also be of great service in repairing forest damage during the recovery period following a nuclear attack.

Most of these measures would greatly reduce our peacetime forest fire damage and would not be wasted in the event, as we all fervently hope, that no nuclear attack is experienced.

CONCLUSIONS ON MASS FIRE THREAT

Fire damage to urban and forested areas from a nuclear attack is frequently estimated by taking the most pessimistic values for all factors involved. This leads to gross overestimates of the damage likely to be experienced. By making the situation appear hopeless, such estimates do a great disservice by preventing actions which could do much to reduce the damage from a nuclear attack and help speed recovery during the postwar period.

Preliminary study indicates that fire damage to urban areas is likely to be confined largely to areas seriously damaged by blast. In relatively infrequent weather situations, fire may spread beyond the areas of blast damage, but even in these cases, increase in damage area due to fire spread is unlikely to exceed a factor of two.

Estimates that conclude that fire would destroy the greater part of our forest and range lands are probably very erroneous, because the enemy would use his weapons to better advantage by assigning them to military or urban targets and spread of fire from such targets to forest areas is unlikely to occur for the major portion of these targets. Many measures can be taken before attack that would reduce the fire damage, if an attack should occur, and also aid in postattack recovery. Such measures require study, research, and development. Those that show real merit should be incorporated into civil defense systems.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Thank you Dr. Hill. You have certainly given us a very comprehensive paper on this particular subject. It is good to have it in the record because I don't believe it has been thoroughly done before.

Any questions?

Mrs. GRIFFITH. No questions. It was very interesting.

Dr. HILL. Thank you.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Mr. Morse.

Mr. MORSE. No questions. I would like to congratulate Dr. Hill on his scholarly treatment.

RELATIVE EFFECTS OF FIRES

Mr. ROBACK. I wonder if Dr. Hill would comment on the relationship between burning and other weapon effects from the standpoint of civil defense programs.

Dr. HILL. You mean the amount of effort that has been put into studying it?

Mr. ROBACK. In terms of the fire hazards, let us say, of thermonuclear attack in relation to the civil defense program that we heard testimony on today.

Dr. HILL. All I can say is that it is my general conclusion that the damage resulting from fire will be rather of a third order effect compared to the potential damage from blast and radiation effects. However, it is not to be denied that in some instances there may be real spreading conflagrations. There is a small probability of it but there is a chance it might occur in some target areas.

I am not acquainted with any efforts going on, proposed in the new program, toward this. The reference which I quoted which is being done by the Forestry Service in the Department of Agriculture under contract with the Broadview Corp. has been done for some little time and whether there is any idea of extending this work or not, I don't know.

Maybe Dr. Mitchell knows something about that. That is the only comprehensive Government program that I know anything about in the forest fire area.

I think it is very important in connection with the idea of personnel shelters. If one plans to make shelters, as Mr. Strope mentioned yesterday, in the areas where you get significant protection from blast and therefore may have significant blast damage, the experiment which he understook involving the fire effect was very important. However, I think that the assumption that shuch shelters would be in rather open areas where the proximity of the intense fire would not be as great, might allow him to get away without closing off the ventilation system, I mean this wouldn't be true for big shelters under buildings and so forth, as he mentioned. I think this requires more research. It should be looked into.

SPREAD AND LENGTH OF FIRES

Mr. HOLIFIELD. What about shelters in residential areas where you had the usual 1- and 2-story buildings. Would there be enough material there that would ignite to cause a fire storm?

Dr. HILL. I think it could happen, particularly in fairly densely built-up, highly combustible areas.

Now, in very good residential areas with not a very large built-upness, it would be less likely to happen. But I must say I would be very unhappy to build a shelter in close proximity to my house as it would have to be, without having some way of shutting off outside ventilation and providing for the purification of air for a period of a half-day or a day, whatever it may be.

Mr. ROBACK. Would you think that is the length of toxic heat effects?

Dr. HILL. Judging from the Hiroshima-Nagasaki fires and Japanese and German experience in World War II, fires burn sometimes that long. You can look at that chart again if you like.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. But your fire storms didn't last that long. In the single area, as the fire against those small buildings in the cities of Japan burned, it swept by, did it not?

Dr. HILL. We have to differentiate between Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Remember, in Hiroshima the fires ignited over the whole area which eventually burned, and the spread was internal to this perimeter. By about 2 to 3 hours it had reached its maximum intensity but it burned for a considerably longer time, 10 to 12 hours, so a half day in that case.

Now, in Nagasaki, you are correct. This fire was a progressive fire so that it wasn't burning at its maximum intensity all of the time indicated, which was 55 to 57 hours. Each specific area wolud have had a shorter duration.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. As I remember, there was a series of canyons at Nagasaki and it was

Dr. HILL. That is right.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Flat land with waterways in between as compared to Hiroshima.

Dr. HILL. That is right. Hiroshima was more cut up than Nagasaki in terms of the distributories of the river, but the ridges and hills had a great influence on the fire in Nagasaki.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. In small houses like they had there, and most of them were one-story houses, as I understand it, there wouldn't be enough_combustible material there to feed a fire, let us say, in one block. I am talking now about a fire storm type of fire, not a smoldering fire

Dr. HILL. Well, you can get some idea

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Which would be strong enough to suck the oxygen out of the air.

Dr. HILL. That is exactly what happened.
Mr. HOLIFIELD. It is?

Dr. HILL. The winds were 35 to 40 miles per hour at the periphery. You see, it was highly combustible, very densely built up, so there was a lot of fuel there, and even fireproof buildings were thoroughly gutted because the blast opened them up and made their combustible contents available to fire from radiation and fire brands going through the broken windows, and so forth. The fire spread up and in between floors and then the whole thing took off and reached its maximum intensity somewhere between 2 and 3 hours, and it burned fairly briskly for 10 to 12 hours. It smouldered for several days.

Mr. ROBACK. Mr, Chairman, Mr. Kahn agreed to sum up the testimony of his associates and himself and he is here now. As far as the schedule is concerned, this completes this particular series of hearings.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Thank you, Dr. Hill, for your presentation.

Mr. Kahn, would you like to come forward now and give us your summary for your group?

FURTHER STATEMENT OF HERMAN KAHN, HUDSON INSTITUTE

Mr. KAHN. We shouldn't refer to it as my group, since I am no longer with the RAND Corp., except in a consultant capacity. But, for Auld Lang Syne's sake I would be delighted to think of myself as an informal spokesman with, however, all the responsibility for my remarks being on my own shoulders.

I would like to sum up the testimony in terms of where civil defense is and where it might want to go, and I would like to start from the less important and go on to the more important.

But, as I mentioned in my original testimony, the less important can still be very important indeed. It can even be close to essential.

SIZE OF CIVIL DEFENSE RESEARCH EFFORT

The first thing I would like to suggest is the need for more research. Research, of course, is always a good thing. Everybody calls for more research, and even if the call is made in a ringing fashion, it would still make very few enemies. It may take some courage to say you are against research; it takes very little to say you are for it.

You may make a few enemies if you put a dollar price on the suggestion. I would suggest something like $100 to $200 million per year. Mr. MORSE. You still make a lot of enemies.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. I made a lot yesterday just suggesting $95 million. Mr. KAHN. I will now make a few extra. I can afford them more than you can, both percentagewise and on an absolute scale. An amount of $100 to $200 million dollars a year is not a completely thoughtless number. It is a number which came out of the work we did back in 1957. All the work I have done since tells me that in terms of the need for knowledge, this number is not high. It is low. What makes it high is that today we could not spend that much money efficiently. It would be spent inefficiently in the sense that after we had spent it we would notice, if we spent it very well that about half of the expenditures had not produced interesting results. If we spent the money badly, then maybe 95 percent would be wasted in this sense. However, this question of percent waste is a poor measure of efficiency. If we ask, "Is the total knowledge gained worth the total waste involved in all of the research projects together?" The answer is likely to be, "Yes." Even if we ask the harder question, "Could this valuable information have been obtained as expeditiously without such wastage?" the answer is likely to be "No."

The reason why I am suggesting a sort of crash program in research is because we have a whole series of very difficult problems in this area some of which take very expensive research to do adequately.

Let me give one example. For some years the AEC spent between $10 and $20 million a year studying strontium 90. Their studies were almost completely concentrated on the peacetime problem. I made a comment once in a briefing to the AEC that they had spent less than $20,000 specifically on the wartime strontium 90 problems. (This statement was made some years ago and is not true today, although even today the spirit is not wholly false.) A member of the AEC

staff who was at the briefing came up to me later and said, "Where did you get that sum? It seems to me too large We don't spend anything on wartime studies." I replied, "Well, I believe you had someone brief the President. You must have spent at least that much on that briefing." He said, "You either overestimate the time that chap spent or his salary."

The reason why this is an important example is that the wartime strontium 90 may well be more important than the peacetime problem and also much harder to understand and alleviate. Yet we cannot get any intense research effort on it because it is not here today. It is again one of those hypothetical and abstract academic problems. However, the peacetime problem is here now, so it does get attention.

In fact, both this committee and the Joint Committee were successful in drawing attention to the peacetime problem. They were successful because people thought of Sr90 as a very serious public health hazard. As a result, a great deal of money was spent investigating this problem. Well, I would now like to see money spent on the hypothetical wartime hazards which are just as important, in my view, possibly more important.

Mr. HOLIFIELD. It would be more important because the amount of fission that was being discharged into the air by the nuclear test was infinitesimal alongside the amount that would be spewed into the air in the event of a nuclear war.

Mr. KAHN. I think that is correct. In other words, a war might not be extraordinarily likely, but it is possible, and the Sr is then a question of survival as opposed to being one of a number of peacetime public health problems.

Well, I do not believe we will get adequate studies of these wartime problems unless, (a) people are very friendly to such studies, and (b), the money is available.

If there is a relatively large total budget, then the problem is not one of fighting for each separate study but one of, "well, we have got to spend this money anyway. Let us look for problems to spend it on." That is the only way you will get serious consideration of some of the less obvious possibilities and problems.

Therefore, I would suggest a large sum of money for research in all aspects of civil defense.

PROBLEMS OF CIVIL DEFENSE RESEARCH

The civil defense problem is in many ways more complicated than most research and development problems. Let me make some comments on why this is true.

First of all, we have to show imagination. This is true in any kind of research. It is more true in civil defense than in most areas because we are often not faced with concrete and checkable problems. When somebody builds a BMEWS system, you not only build the system, but you test it and see if it actually picks up missiles. Since you are right at the edge of the art, and a failure will be very noticeable even in peacetime, you work very hard.

If you are building a mach 3 plane, you have actually got to fly the plane. If it doesn't work, the plane will fall down and everybody will notice it. Most research and development ends up with things