ARMS-D-Request@XX.LCS.MIT.EDU (Moderator) (02/05/86)
Arms-Discussion Digest Wednesday, February 5, 1986 9:47AM Volume 6, Issue 43 Today's Topics: any women here? SDI Plutonium in the air: how dangerous? A hard rain is gonna fall. [Ayers.PA: RISKS-2.5 & "Some simple calculations"] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue 4 Feb 86 17:53:43-PST From: Lynn Gazis <SAPPHO@SRI-NIC.ARPA> Subject: any women here? Yes, I am a woman. Lynn Gazis sappho@sri-nic ------------------------------ Date: 5 February 86 09:22-EDT From: ATSWAF%UOFT01.BITNET@WISCVM.WISC.EDU Subject: BITNET mail follows From: Wendy Fraker (419) 537-2832 ATSWAF at UOFT01 To: Arms-Digest Subject: Reply to Bruce Nevin's Query Yes there are Bruce...at least one. ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 31 Jan 86 14:34:49 pst From: sun!fluke.uucp!tikal!sigma!bill@ucbvax.berkeley.edu (Bill Swan) re: SDI In article <8601280534.AA28403@ucbvax.berkeley.edu> somebody wrote: >Arms-Discussion Digest Tuesday, January 28, 1986 12:03AM >Volume 6, Issue 36 > >>Re: A Scenario on the Attack Capabilities of SDI >>Consider this Star Wars Scenario: [...] >>So, the power which launches the first complete SDI under these >>presumptions would have a good start on being able to rule the world [...] > >On Sunday, ABC aired a program [...] in which the point was made that the >US was the first world power that never wanted to be a world power, that >in fact if world domination was our plan, we could have accomplished it >after WWII. Instead [...] we instituted the Marshall Plan. > >If SDI ever shows signs of being viable and we actually launched such a >system [...] would we really care about being able to rule the world? >Or would we be interested in maintaining the status quo or to paraphrase >Reagan, "live and let live" philosophy? [...] hofmann I also watched that program. One point I think you missed is that by the end of WWII the American citizen was sick and tired of war. The USA _might_ have been able to achieve world domination through military might, at a terrible cost to itself. Instead it become a world power, _willingly_, by the economic means already at hand (the largest surviving significant industrial base). The Marshall Plan was merely enacted as a cheaper way to provide a reliable buffer against the Red Menace, by building Western Europe up as a dependent (and hopefully grateful) ally. The stuff we were taught about how we instituted the Marshall Plan out of the goodness of our red-blooded American hearts is just propaganda. There are different ways to rule the world, and just because we didn't take it by military force doesn't mean that we don't want have a desire to rule (i.e. control) the world. -- William Swan {ihnp4,decvax,allegra,...}!uw-beaver!tikal!sigma!bill ------------------------------ Date: Tue 4 Feb 1986 21:32:07 EST From: Paul Dietz <dietz%slb-doll.csnet@CSNET-RELAY.ARPA> Subject: Plutonium in the air: how dangerous? SDI would distribute a lot of Pu in the air, but the lethality of plutonium is greatly exagerated. Measuring the radioactivity (in disintegrations per second) of the Pu against that of naturally occuring airborne alpha emitters (polonium is the main one, I believe) it turns out the plutonium adds a small fraction to the natural background of airborne alpha-emitting particulates. In other words, Raymond Harwell is talking nonsense. I think the Pu-238 sources used in spacecraft are designed to withstand booster explosions, reentry into the atmosphere and impacts with the ground. The Pu-238 source from the Apollo-13 LEM is somewhere on the floor of the Pacific, I think. ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 4 Feb 86 23:37:23 EST From: Herb Lin <LIN@MC.LCS.MIT.EDU> Subject: A hard rain is gonna fall. From: Marc Vilain <MVILAIN at G.BBN.COM> This brings up a similar issue with the Strategic Defense Initiative. If that radioactive debris were distributed uniformly, there would be one lethal dose for every 25 square metres of the northern hemisphere. Bad assumption. Most of boost-phase intercept occurs over the Soviet Union. The regrettable lesson, is that success of an engineering application, if defined overly narrowly, may not be success at all. This general point is well-taken, despite my comments above. As they say, "The operation was a success but the patient died." ------------------------------ Date: 4 Feb 86 09:05:41 PST (Tuesday) From: Ayers.PA at Xerox.COM To: RISKS-LIST:, RISKS at SRI-CSL.ARPA cc: Ayers.PA at Xerox.COM Re: RISKS-2.5 & "Some simple calculations" If we're going to talk about SDI and WWIII rather than computers, please, let us at least use responsible analysis. Vilain quotes Some simple calculations indicate the likely consequences of SDI interceptions of Soviet ICBMs. A Soviet first strike could involve the simultaneous launching of some 5000 nuclear warheads at targets in the US. If only 20 percent of these warheads, each containing 10 kg of plutonium 239, are disintegrated (without a nuclear explosion) in the northern hemisphere, about 10^13 lethal doses (if inhaled or ingested) of alpha-emitting plutonium would be released -- about 5,000 doses per person in the northern hemisphere. If that radioactive debris were distributed uniformly, there would be one lethal dose for every 25 square metres of the northern hemisphere. Not all the radioactive material will have immediate effects on Earth but, however delayed the fallout of stratospheric plutonium might be, its long half-life (24,000 years) would ensure its eventual arrival at altitudes likely to be occupied by human beings, other animals and plants. This arithmetic [of?] "simple calculations" is irrelevant. The "if"s are totally bogus. Every year, the US spreads about one fatal-dose per person of Arsenic Trioxide onto food-plants via crop-dusters. And how many fatal doses of salt does Connecticut spread on the roads every winter? If you believe the quote, everyone in the northern hemisphere is already dead (more than one fatal dose per person) from the atmospheric bomb tests of the '50s and 60's. Bob ------------------------------ End of Arms-Discussion Digest *****************************