cramer@kontron.UUCP (09/21/86)
Ever since I was a child, I've heard the claim made that both the U.S.
and the Soviet Union have nuclear arsenals sufficient to kill the
entire populations of each country {50, 100, 5000} times over. Until
recently, I just accepted this as a matter of fact. My question is:
How is this statement derived?
I've seen writings from various pacifist groups that linearly scale
the deaths at Hiroshima up by the total available megatonnage to
"show" that the current arsenals can kill 28 x 10^9 people. (Anyone
that doesn't understand the flaw in this shouldn't be posting
authoritative statements to this group.)
Several years ago I saw an study commissioned by Congress that
postulated a 5050 megaton war. Assuming one megaton warheads (on the
high side for the Soviet Union, and way high for our arsenal), this
means 5050 bombs *successfully* delivered and detonated by a
combination of ICBM, SLBM, bombers, and cruise missles -- a pretty
plausible number. And yet the worst case envisioned by this study
certainly didn't kill off the whole population of the U.S. -- much
less the rest of the world.
Can anyone point me to a real study that derives the "overkill"
numbers?
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