Will the World End in a Nuclear Holocaust?

Will Earth Be Ruined in Nuclear War?

BY THIS year 1982 “nuclear powered” nations are said to have stockpiled at least 50,000 nuclear warheads. The combined power of these weapons would rival an explosion of 1,600,000 bombs of the kind the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in August 1945.

A mere 300 superbombs out of that grisly arsenal, if dropped in a concerted assault on key population centers in the United States, could annihilate 60 percent of the population and turn vast areas into a wasteland. Americans suspect that 300 megabombs amount to no more than 3 percent of the Soviet arsenal. In turn, Americans are prepared to destroy the Russians in a similar manner.

ON AUGUST 6, 1945, at 8:16 that morning, the people of Hiroshima were up and starting about their day. It was a warm, peaceful morning.

A fraction of a second later tens of thousands of people were charred, blasted and crushed to death. The center of a city of 340,000 inhabitants was simply flattened.

Victims not yet dead stirred in an unreal state. “I found myself lying on the ground covered with pieces of wood,” Mrs. Hanuko Ogasawara, a young girl at the time, recalls. “When I stood up in a frantic effort to look around, there was darkness. Terribly frightened, I thought I was alone in a world of death, and groped for any light. . . . Suddenly, I wondered what had happened to my mother and sister . . . When the darkness began to fade, I found that there was nothing around me. My house, the next door neighbor’s house, and the next had all vanished. . . . It was quiet, very quiet​—an eerie moment. I discovered my mother in a water tank. She had fainted. Crying out, ‘Mama, Mama,’ I shook her to bring her back to her senses. After coming to, my mother began to shout madly for my sister, ‘Eiko! Eiko!’”

Her cries were joined by others. These scenes, from a volume of recollections called Unforgettable Fire, include this account by Kikuna Segawa:

A woman who looked like an expectant mother was dead. At her side was a girl about three years of age who had brought some water in an empty can she had found. She was trying to let her mother drink from it.

Within half an hour, as some of the darkness lifted from the pall in the sky, the fire storm broke out. Professor Takenaka tried to rescue his wife from under a roof beam. The flames drove him back while she pleaded, “Run away, dear!” It was a scene multiplied endlessly as husbands and wives and children and friends and strangers had to abandon the dying in the fires.

An hour after the blast a “black rain” started to fall on the downwind portions of the city. The radioactive fallout kept sifting until late afternoon. The whole conflagration of fumes and fire was churned by a strange, violent whirlwind that lasted for hours. Ragged processions of the burned and injured began to emerge from the fire storm. A grocer is quoted by Robert Jay Lifton in his book Death in Life: “They held their arms bent . . . and their skin​—not only on their hands but on their faces and bodies too—​hung down. . . . Many of them died along the road. I can still picture them in my mind​—like walking ghosts. They didn’t look like people of this world.”

Some of them were vomiting​—an early symptom of radioactive sickness. Physical collapse accompanied emotional and spiritual collapse. People suffered and died, stupefied and listless, without uttering a sound. “Those who were able walked silently toward the suburbs in the distant hills, their spirits broken, their initiative gone,” wrote Dr. Nichikhito Hachiya in his Hiroshima Diary.

Within three months the number of dead from the Hiroshima bomb mounted to an estimated 130,000. But the final toll continues to drag on. Weeks after the bombing countless survivors began to break out with skin hemorrhages. These first signals, accompanied by vomiting and fever and thirst, might be followed by a deceptively hopeful period of remission. But sooner or later the radiation attacked the reproductive cells, especially the bone marrow. The final stages​—the loss of hair, diarrhea and bleeding from the intestines, mouth or other parts of the body—​brought death.

A wide range of illnesses developed from exposure to radiation. Reproductive processes were altered. Birth defects, cataracts, leukemia and other forms of cancer characterized the lot of those exposed to the Hiroshima bomb.

To recall Hiroshima as a backdrop against which to magnify in quantum terms the global concussion of 1,000 megaton bombs falling on nations​—that is what is meant by a nuclear holocaust.

It is so shocking, so benumbing to the senses, that most people try to block it out of mind, to pretend the peril is not there, to live on in an ‘eat, drink, for tomorrow we die’ state of make-believe. They become insensitive to ordinary disasters. There seems to be no turning back. It is as though some superhuman force drives man toward self-destruction.

Scientists can cling to no glimmer of doubt that man has laid hold on the power to self-destruct. But with humankind would go the animal life and the fowl life. The most likely survivors might be some forms of insects that would then swarm in uncontrolled plagues to hasten their own demise. Vegetation, including plant crops, grains and vegetables, would be devastated. Trees first, grass last. Land erosion would feed minerals into waterways where overgrowths of algae and microscopic organisms would deplete the oxygen content and starve the surviving marine life. Along with all man-made things​—shelter, factories, utilities, governments—​the natural environment would be altered tremendously.

A full-scale holocaust would add up to more than its local parts. For instance, what if the seventy-six nuclear power plants in the United States were among the 10,000 targets the Russians were bombing? According to Scientific American, the vaporizing of a single gigawatt (gigas means “giant”) atomic energy plant would add a species of long-lived radiation that would prevent habitation over a vast area of land for decades. It would become part of the fallout ascending into the stratosphere to circulate around the earth until after months and years it falls to contaminate the whole surface of the globe. Long before this, the immediate radiation would have poisoned land, air and sea, and penetrated tissues, bones, roots, stems and leaves of living things.

From ground bursts there would emerge lofting clouds of dust into the stratosphere to becloud the planet and possibly cool the earth’s surface. At the same time a related casualty could be the layer of ozone that envelops the earth and filters lethal levels of ultraviolet radiation from the sunlight. The National Academy of Sciences in 1975 estimated that a detonating of 10,000 megatons of nuclear bombs in the northern hemisphere would deplete 70 percent of the ozone layer here, and as much as 40 percent in the southern hemisphere. “If it were not for the absorption of much of the solar ultraviolet radiation by the ozone,” the US Department of Defense and the Energy Research and Development Administration jointly concluded, “life as currently known could not exist except possibly in the ocean.”

Living organisms and their nonliving surroundings, scientists are realizing, have a strong interdependence on one another. While soil, water and air have been the environment for life, it appears that life has been the environment for soil, water and air. Dr. Michael McElroy, a physicist at Harvard’s Center for Earth and Planetary Physics, believes that the life processes of birth, metabolism and decay are chiefly responsible for keeping the balance of such important atmospheric elements as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen, even the amount of ozone in the stratosphere.

So the very “metabolism” of the earth depends on the quality of life upon it.

The ecosphere is a global system in which a whole constellation of species form a balanced, self-reproducing whole. The ecosphere of planet Earth is carefully regulated. It is balanced and self-perpetuating. The one disturbing influence in its midst is man. At present he is decimating life forms off it on an average of three species a day. He will pollute or disrupt any fraction of it for greedy gain. But now he threatens not a fraction but all of it.

He can utterly ruin the earth.