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

which are at least partially checkable. But research and development for civil defense has the unfortunate character-or fortunate, depending on which side you are on-that you don't test it in a war and except for the kinds of things Jerry Strope discussed, you don't test it in any other way, by and large. Therefore, you must be very imaginative. I realize that I certainly could have made this remark even if we had been more imaginative than we have been, and it would have been easy to be less imaginative, so I am not making a serious charge against the previous work. But let me refer, say, to Jerry Hill's testimony. I think of his testimony as being about the first sober description I have seen of what might be called the environmental fire problem; I would doubt that Dr. Hill spent more than 4 or 5 weeks on it.

Dr. HILL. Just about right. When I first heard I was going to testify-I had been reading some in the area but hadn't written anything.

Mr. KAHN. It just shouldn't be possible upon a thing as important as that to turn out an important document in 4 or 5 weeks. It shouldn't be possible. It is only possible because we haven't worried about it sufficiently. We haven't worried about it sufficiently partly because of a lack of imagination.

EFFECT OF WAR ON THE SOCIETY

This comment or a similar one can be made on the complete range of problems that can be lumped together as the soft problems-the social, political, economic, psychological, and moral problems.

I am not saying that this area has not been studied at all. It has been. For example the Committee on Disaster Studies has been conducting research for many years on catastrophe, panic, and so forth, but almost all the reports

Mr. HOLIFIELD. Excuse me. There is a rollcall vote on the Freedmen's Hospital bill. I assume we will have to go and answer the rollcall.

We will adjourn for about 20 minutes, while we answer the rollcall. (At this point a short recess was taken.)

Mr. HOLIFIELD. The subcommittee will be in order.

Mr. KAHN. The Committee on Disaster Studies has for many years looked at, collected information on, and analyzed data on national disasters, on panic and matters of that sort. However, almost all of their reports will contain a statement to the effect that it is dangerous to apply this experience to thermonuclear war because conditions then are different.

This is, of course, correct. But the net result is that there is almost no work aimed directly at thermonuclear war. That is, there is no attempt to apply the data at all. The number of reports and I speak here not as an expert but a person who tries to get these reports and read them-that actually seriously address themselves directly to the social science aspects of the postattack world is negligible. I know of about six that really make a serious attempt and at least three could still be regarded as off-the-top-of-the-head variety. The others are either too slight or insignificant even to be considered.

INSURING SURVIVAL OF FREE INSTITUTIONS

This task is important for two separate reasons. It is important because it is possible such studies may show that we may need special preparations which will facilitate recuperation or prevent damage. For example, I could imagine special preparations to preserve the free press, preserve the political system, preserve the political parties, labor unions, church, and things of this sort, which will help us recuperate a free society. I could imagine a situation in which if we didn't make preparations for the preservation of such institutions, we might find that it was more difficult, or impossible, to restore the kind of society we had previously. This is an almost unexplored field except for some financial measures, and even there it is a barely explored field.

PROBLEMS OF PANIC AND GRIEF

There is another reason for looking at what might be called the soft aspects. This is because even if you can't make preparations you still want to predict what will happen, or at least understand the possibilities. You want to do the analysis, even if you can't affect the events. The main reason for doing this is first to understand what the risks of thermonuclear war are, and secondly to justify or condemn, as the case may be, various proposals.

Let me discuss a rather specialized example. I don't know how many people have taken up with me the question of postattack grief. This is the notion that because of the enormous number of casualties, all of the pleasure, all of the taste will permanently go out of life for almost everyone.

Now, as far as I know, that just hasn't happened in anything that has occurred before, and one would not expect it to happen even as a result of a large thermonuclear war.

One reason I would not expect it to happen is because, in a sense, grief is family-sized. If one loses a close relative or close friend, one will grieve. If one loses one's family, one will grieve even more. But, in some sense, that is about as far as one can go. Most people would not mourn for a million people much more than they would mourn for their family.

I speak not as an expert but just as a man who has observed human behavior under varying conditions, but I have some confidence in these observations.

It is very hard to make a statement such as I have just made. Let me refer for a moment to my previous testimony when I discussed the problem of the grieving woman who has lost a child and trying to explain to her that the world is not ended. People are not accustomed to discussing such problems or thinking about them. As a result, I find all kinds of stories, attitudes, views, being held by people who I would have thought would know better.

Unless we learn to think soberly about these effects, to estimate correctly those which seem actually to be there and to dismiss or discount those which are not, I don't believe we will have serious programs in this country. Nobody is going to work hard for a program of just saving life, unless they feel that the quality of life is somehow worthwhile.