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? (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 ing. If it is grim, one can look for ways to ameliorate the grimness. And the general result of our studies in the civil defense area show that when thought and effort are applied much can be done. What usually happens when we look at some large-scale problem relating to a nuclear attack on the United States is an overwhelming feeling of hopelessness and pessimism regarding its solution. However, as we break the problem down and study its component parts we usually find them manageable if we are willing to do what is necessary. Some aspects of a problem are shown to be unimportant while others present difficulties which must be resolved, either by research or by application of already available knowledge. FIRE DAMAGE AND ECOLOGY The first discussion of large-scale fire from an ecological point of view was in the testimony of Dr. Wolfe, previously mentioned. It was very pessimistic for at least two reasons. No attention was directed to preventive action. Actually, the testimony did not call for that. It was a direct response to that particular level of attack that the committee investigated. It also lacks serious quantitive attention to the expected initiation and spread of fires. Dr. Hill will address this committee concerning his study regarding this problem. Whatever the final expectation from fire damage would be today, the possibility of preventive action should be assessed. It is certainly conceivable that large firebreaks could be created by planned cutting during commercial logging operations. Forest management, in other ways, might contribute to limiting damage. Fire is the main factor responsible for perpetuation and maintenance of longleaf pine and controlled fires are used in forest management. The use of fire on the prairies in the interests of agricultural productivity was practiced by the Indians. And forestry management also suggests that light surface fires reduce the danger of severe crown fires by reducing combustible litter. Thus we get a glimpse of the need for research on fires as well as grassland and forest practices which might effectively limit damage and favor recovery of these areas to their natural state. RECOVERY OF DAMAGED LAND When areas are severely damaged, whether or not they come back naturally depends in part on the degree of damage and the subsequent chain of events. A local area of exemplary interest is the Copper Basin of Tennessee, where fumes from a copper smelter have killed all rooted plants over a large area. Attempts to reforest this area have not yet succeeded. The erosion and the accompanying changes in the microclimate of the area have combined with the originally destructive forces to create a desert where the land has become too hostile for even artificial reconstruction by conventional techniques. (See fig. M-1, p. 334.) |