6 ms·

Survival of the Relocated Population of the U.S. After a Nuclear Attack (1976) [pdf]

33 points by benbreen 11y ago

hga 11y ago
As discussed briefly in Nuclear War Survival Skills, which also came from Oak Ridge, the real trick is food starting not long after the event, but it's not that difficult.
dctoedt 11y ago
The summary [1] is worth reading. Apart from protecting against fallout radiation exposure, the most urgent need is transportation, to deliver food. <excerpt> ... the location of people as planned with the current program and the location of grain stocks indicates a possibility that millions may perish from food shortages unless food shipments are begun within two or three weeks after the attack. Sufficient grain to feed the entire population of the U.S. for several months to more than a year, depending on the season, exists in storage in the local areas where it is produced. When the quantity of grain in storage is less than a year's supply, there is adequate grain growing in the fields, much of which can be harvested with little radiation hazard to agricultural workers if appropriate precautions are taken. If the attack occurs in June, when crops are on the average most vulnerable to fallout radiation, about one-third to one-half of the annual crop yield could be destroyed. Additional crop failure could occur due to increased ultraviolet radiation resulting from depletion of the ozone layer. ... Citizens' Band radios will probably survive in numbers adequate for critical civilian communications e In 1973, there were approximately 4 million CB transmitters in the U.S., and this number may double by 1977. Shipment of food and other crucial supplies wi.11 use primarily trucks and trains, of which at least 60% may be expected to survive because of relocation measures taken during the crisis period. Ships and barges may not be very useful in the first few weeks after the attack because of fallen bridges and destroyed locks and docks, although the vessels themselves may survive because of crisis period action. Oil pipeline terminals will be damaged or destroyed in crucial locations, and most of the refineries will be destroyed. However, about two billion gallons of diesel and about three billion gallons of gasoline would survive in tank storage outside of the major risk areas, which would be more than adequate for the trains and trucks to carry out survival missions during the first few weeks after the attack. At least 20 million gallons of aircraft fuel will survive in tanks at lesser airports, which may be available to light aircraft of the Civil Air Patrol. First priorities should be given for reconnaissance of transportation routes, surveying blockages by debris and fallen bridges, and monitoring radiological hazard with aerial survey meters. Very few large interconnected power plants are expected to be operating in the first few weeks after an attack because of disruption of the transmission grid by blast and fire. It is anticipated that electrical power will not be essential :for basic survival in the first few weeks after the attack and will gradually be restored during the recovery period. </excerpt> (Extra paragraphing added.) [1] http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1976/3445600218921.pdf#page=23 http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1976/3445600218921.pdf#page...
- njharman 11y ago
  A lot has changed in 50years. Number, size, accuracy of weapon impacts. Farming's reliance on mechanization, pesticides, fertilizer. Way more food is manufactured/processed. How many people even know what to do with a sack of flour and a firepit. Transportation changes, trucking vs rail. I'm not sure but the general push for efficiency, JIT warehousing, I wonder if our food stocks on hand is the same. Also, I'm guessing the fall of USSR, rise of Terrorism as new bugaboo. I wonder how much study, effort, and prepardness USA government has put into full scale nuclear war "defense" of late. Population increase.
  - Roboprog 11y ago
    > How many people even know what to do with a sack of flour and a firepit? A few do. And she/he would have some very motivated students :-) Otherwise, yes, it's kind of fuzzy mapping the situation of the early 70s to the current day.
  - hga 11y ago
    Well, we're also turning a substantial fraction of our corn output into ethanol to burn for fuel. Stop that, and the feed used for animals, factor in a much reduced population, and the numbers probably work out. How many people even know what to do with a sack of flour and a firepit. That's where things start getting really sticky. Nuclear War Survival Skills has a simple design for a pestle made out of three pipes bound together, in this scenario people are not likely to get anything as refined as flour. Then boil it into porridge.
    - lostlogin 11y ago
      If you get fallout into my sough dough starter I'm going to to be pissed. There is a small amount of evidence that brewers yeast may be helpful - mostly from sites like the link below. Simultaneously awful design and alarming advice. Check these highlights. "Apple Pectin Capsules This can force strontium through the body, without its being absorbed. Sunflower Seeds Eat for radiaiton[sic] poisoning. Source of pectin to attract, bind and eliminate radiation from the system." http://www.newfoundationspubl.org/shepherdspurse/archiv10.htm http://www.newfoundationspubl.org/shepherdspurse/archiv10.ht...
rocky1138 11y ago
This is really interesting, but if I was planning a nuclear attack on a country, I would attack twice: once for the initial effect and secondly to take out whatever support is built in its aftermath, which is what this document talks about building. I don't see this report tackling that. They assume only one large-scale attack.
- hga 11y ago
  Doing that would require both serious reconnaissance to know where to attack, and enough weapons surviving our counter-stroke. And of course we could play the same game, or at least continue hunting and knocking out their weapons. The study has to make some simplifying assumptions, and you could evolve it yourself by assuming some fraction of those surviving get zapped in due course. But not likely all. The plan was, though, to put us down for good, Western Europe was the prize, the US an obstacle to taking it, and too far away to seriously occupy and extract value from.
- joshvm 11y ago
  You assume that you're not retaliated against. This is the essence of MAD, a kind of bizarre gentleman's agreement. The general opinion was that as soon as the nukes start flying, you can pretty much assume that your country is going to get decimated as well. When you nuke someone, there's a good chance they'll do exactly the same to you. Both sides planned for automatic counter strikes even in the event that the command chain was broken, though whether the capability was actually there is uncertain. Not to mention that you will probably have allies. There is a good chance that if Russia had bombed the US, most of NATO would have turned on Russia. The Cold War wasn't exactly peacetime, but it wasn't open war either. An act of such extreme aggression as a nuclear strike would have had far-reaching consequences. You wouldn't have been able to sit on your hands, waiting for the person you bombed to set up the field hospitals before bombing them again. On the other hand if you'd just nuked a superpower, you'd have started a world war. Odds are you're going to go back and bomb them some more anyway, and they're going to try and bomb you back. It's true though, these reports tend to assume that a nuclear strike is the end of the conflict rather than the start of a protracted war. Although maybe they tend to focus on the civilian side and assume that the military is going to be off doing its thing.
neffy 11y ago
Bear in mind that the Nuclear Winter estimates weren't published until 10 years later... http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_uranium15.htm http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_uranium15.... and it was after that they started getting a bit more serious about arms reductions.
- hga 11y ago
  The TTAPS study is bullshit (more details on request); if you do thorough 3D atmospheric simulations, as was done later at LLNL, you get at worst a season or two of cooler temperatures, but hardly the end of the world. And I wouldn't really characterize the following period as "a bit more serious about arms reduction", compared to the glory days of détente in the '70s. All you really have for that period is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which returned Europe to the situation before the USSR started deploying SS-20s in major quantities (per Wikipedia, eventually 405, each with 3 MIRVed warheads). After that, it's START I, which was signed a few months before the USSR dissolved at the end of 1991.
  - neffy 11y ago
    Extra details would indeed be interesting. There are known global climate impacts linked to single volcanic events e.g. Tambora in the 19th century, Krakatoa, etc. "All" you have is START 1, which resulted in an 80% reduction of nuclear weapons. In addition there was a fair amount of behind the scenes assistance from the US in helping clean up the somewhat precipitous situation the USSR left itself in with the nuclear weapons - granted they started removing them months before the collapse. The public debate changed subtly after that report. The folks arguing - as you appear to be - that a nuclear war wouldn't be that big a deal, got a lot quieter. "I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left." Mao Tse Tung, 1957
    - hga 11y ago
      In short, the study uses a 1 dimensional model of the atmosphere, a particle of soot can go up or down, but there are no winds, no oceans, etc. These models are said to be especially prone to failing hard when given extreme inputs, and the second part is the soot they claimed would be lofted into the air, sizes and quantities, which they did not justify, or justify well (can't remember, it's been decades since I read the paper). Their excuse for using such a model was a lack of computing resources, and they were indeed dear back then. But that made their running a massive propaganda campaign based on this inadequate at best "science" all the worse. Anyway, LLNL, which had serious supercomputer resources for designing nuclear warheads and such, ran 3D simulations with more plausible inputs, and indeed found effects were possible, but they weren't a big deal. Certainly not on the scale of some of the bigger volcanic events. (It's a bit arrogant to automatically humans are so capable of changing the earth that much, especially that quickly; compare, as you do, to events like Tambora.) The folks arguing - as you appear to be - that a nuclear war wouldn't be that big a deal, got a lot quieter. Not that I noticed. Especially since we never argued that, only that it wouldn't be "the end of the world". Maybe we just got more thoroughly ignored by the media, after all, the sainted Carl Sagan was wielding SCIENCE! and we were nobodies. Note Sagan and Turco of the TTAPS team should have been a little more modest when the prospect of Kuwait's oil wells getting set on fire in the first Gulf War came up, their theorizing did not match the reality to soon follow. Of course, to the extent this might be an issue (and even modest effects would be less than welcome in the aftermath of a major nuclear exchange), it made SDI/BMD all the more important, to prevent city busting in the first place....
farmfood 11y ago
And co-authored by Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize, Physics, 1963): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Wigner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Wigner.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
briancarnell 11y ago
The report seems to rely on the then-widespread usage of CB radios to preserve post-attack civilian communications, but that technology seems to have largely been abandoned except by truckers. Would we have a harder time today in a post-attack scenario maintaining communications as compared to the late 1970s and the CB craze?
- jcrawfordor 11y ago
  That's a question that I'm pretty fascinated with personally. When it comes to communications after a major disaster, we continue to plan to rely primarily on 'conventional' radio via e.g. clear-channel AM radio stations and other major commercial broadcasters which have worked with the government to prepare solid contingency plans. For this reason, it's a good idea to own a portable radio or two even though you wouldn't normally use them, and to familiarize yourself with an AM news station (e.g. KCBS 740 KHz in the bay area). Of course, for two-way communication we are all quite dependent on our cellphones. The cellular networks own mobile equipment and other provisions for providing service in a contingency situation, and ideally there could be no interruption in service (as the generators at many cell sites could hold them until service crews arrive, in the case of loss of electricity, for example). But in practice it's easy to imagine a few scenarios that would have the cellular network significantly deteriorated in a region for days, such as a major earthquake that damaged infrastructure and made it difficult to get equipment and fuel to the area. In the short term, I wouldn't count on it. In the long term, the effort involved in restoring cellular service could be enormous but it would be a reasonably high priority. It'd be a good idea for more people to own accessible point-to-point radio equipment with a decent range. I don't know how to achieve this though. CB equipment is bulky and now relegated to its own particular subculture. The amateur radio industry has produced a lot of high-quality handhelds but they're designed to be the opposite of accessible. There have been some ideas based on peer-to-peer relay between mobile phones but the range remains very limited. Maybe someone could come up with a good product in this space.
- hga 11y ago
  Back then they could wave their hands and correctly say there were so many CB radios they'd be enough for post-attack civilian communications, at least at shorter ranges. But that doesn't mean you couldn't get by with many fewer working radios, and FRS and GMRS equipment is out there in some quantities, in addition to hams, many of whom are set up for emergency communications And as noted by jcrawfordor cell phones are a zillion times more ubiquitous than CB radio sets ever were. In fact, noting the pattern that many less developed 3rd World counties leapfrogged over land lines straight into cell service, following that pattern in the rebuilding would probably work out pretty well. ADDED: and WiFi equipment is also ubiquitous, and with directional antenna can travel pretty far. So we'll have quite a bit of stuff to work with, and people are pretty good at cobbling together solutions for problems like this.

33 points by benbreen 11y ago

hga 11y ago

As discussed briefly in Nuclear War Survival Skills, which also came from Oak Ridge, the real trick is food starting not long after the event, but it's not that difficult.

dctoedt 11y ago

The summary [1] is worth reading. Apart from protecting against fallout radiation exposure, the most urgent need is transportation, to deliver food. <excerpt> ... the location of people as planned with the current program and the location of grain stocks indicates a possibility that millions may perish from food shortages unless food shipments are begun within two or three weeks after the attack. Sufficient grain to feed the entire population of the U.S. for several months to more than a year, depending on the season, exists in storage in the local areas where it is produced. When the quantity of grain in storage is less than a year's supply, there is adequate grain growing in the fields, much of which can be harvested with little radiation hazard to agricultural workers if appropriate precautions are taken. If the attack occurs in June, when crops are on the average most vulnerable to fallout radiation, about one-third to one-half of the annual crop yield could be destroyed. Additional crop failure could occur due to increased ultraviolet radiation resulting from depletion of the ozone layer. ... Citizens' Band radios will probably survive in numbers adequate for critical civilian communications e In 1973, there were approximately 4 million CB transmitters in the U.S., and this number may double by 1977. Shipment of food and other crucial supplies wi.11 use primarily trucks and trains, of which at least 60% may be expected to survive because of relocation measures taken during the crisis period. Ships and barges may not be very useful in the first few weeks after the attack because of fallen bridges and destroyed locks and docks, although the vessels themselves may survive because of crisis period action. Oil pipeline terminals will be damaged or destroyed in crucial locations, and most of the refineries will be destroyed. However, about two billion gallons of diesel and about three billion gallons of gasoline would survive in tank storage outside of the major risk areas, which would be more than adequate for the trains and trucks to carry out survival missions during the first few weeks after the attack. At least 20 million gallons of aircraft fuel will survive in tanks at lesser airports, which may be available to light aircraft of the Civil Air Patrol. First priorities should be given for reconnaissance of transportation routes, surveying blockages by debris and fallen bridges, and monitoring radiological hazard with aerial survey meters. Very few large interconnected power plants are expected to be operating in the first few weeks after an attack because of disruption of the transmission grid by blast and fire. It is anticipated that electrical power will not be essential :for basic survival in the first few weeks after the attack and will gradually be restored during the recovery period. </excerpt> (Extra paragraphing added.) [1] http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1976/3445600218921.pdf#page=23 http://web.ornl.gov/info/reports/1976/3445600218921.pdf#page...

njharman 11y ago
A lot has changed in 50years. Number, size, accuracy of weapon impacts. Farming's reliance on mechanization, pesticides, fertilizer. Way more food is manufactured/processed. How many people even know what to do with a sack of flour and a firepit. Transportation changes, trucking vs rail. I'm not sure but the general push for efficiency, JIT warehousing, I wonder if our food stocks on hand is the same. Also, I'm guessing the fall of USSR, rise of Terrorism as new bugaboo. I wonder how much study, effort, and prepardness USA government has put into full scale nuclear war "defense" of late. Population increase.
- Roboprog 11y ago
  > How many people even know what to do with a sack of flour and a firepit? A few do. And she/he would have some very motivated students :-) Otherwise, yes, it's kind of fuzzy mapping the situation of the early 70s to the current day.
- hga 11y ago
  Well, we're also turning a substantial fraction of our corn output into ethanol to burn for fuel. Stop that, and the feed used for animals, factor in a much reduced population, and the numbers probably work out. How many people even know what to do with a sack of flour and a firepit. That's where things start getting really sticky. Nuclear War Survival Skills has a simple design for a pestle made out of three pipes bound together, in this scenario people are not likely to get anything as refined as flour. Then boil it into porridge.
  - lostlogin 11y ago
    If you get fallout into my sough dough starter I'm going to to be pissed. There is a small amount of evidence that brewers yeast may be helpful - mostly from sites like the link below. Simultaneously awful design and alarming advice. Check these highlights. "Apple Pectin Capsules This can force strontium through the body, without its being absorbed. Sunflower Seeds Eat for radiaiton[sic] poisoning. Source of pectin to attract, bind and eliminate radiation from the system." http://www.newfoundationspubl.org/shepherdspurse/archiv10.htm http://www.newfoundationspubl.org/shepherdspurse/archiv10.ht...

rocky1138 11y ago

This is really interesting, but if I was planning a nuclear attack on a country, I would attack twice: once for the initial effect and secondly to take out whatever support is built in its aftermath, which is what this document talks about building. I don't see this report tackling that. They assume only one large-scale attack.

hga 11y ago
Doing that would require both serious reconnaissance to know where to attack, and enough weapons surviving our counter-stroke. And of course we could play the same game, or at least continue hunting and knocking out their weapons. The study has to make some simplifying assumptions, and you could evolve it yourself by assuming some fraction of those surviving get zapped in due course. But not likely all. The plan was, though, to put us down for good, Western Europe was the prize, the US an obstacle to taking it, and too far away to seriously occupy and extract value from.
joshvm 11y ago
You assume that you're not retaliated against. This is the essence of MAD, a kind of bizarre gentleman's agreement. The general opinion was that as soon as the nukes start flying, you can pretty much assume that your country is going to get decimated as well. When you nuke someone, there's a good chance they'll do exactly the same to you. Both sides planned for automatic counter strikes even in the event that the command chain was broken, though whether the capability was actually there is uncertain. Not to mention that you will probably have allies. There is a good chance that if Russia had bombed the US, most of NATO would have turned on Russia. The Cold War wasn't exactly peacetime, but it wasn't open war either. An act of such extreme aggression as a nuclear strike would have had far-reaching consequences. You wouldn't have been able to sit on your hands, waiting for the person you bombed to set up the field hospitals before bombing them again. On the other hand if you'd just nuked a superpower, you'd have started a world war. Odds are you're going to go back and bomb them some more anyway, and they're going to try and bomb you back. It's true though, these reports tend to assume that a nuclear strike is the end of the conflict rather than the start of a protracted war. Although maybe they tend to focus on the civilian side and assume that the military is going to be off doing its thing.

neffy 11y ago

Bear in mind that the Nuclear Winter estimates weren't published until 10 years later... http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_uranium15.htm http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/ciencia/ciencia_uranium15.... and it was after that they started getting a bit more serious about arms reductions.

hga 11y ago
The TTAPS study is bullshit (more details on request); if you do thorough 3D atmospheric simulations, as was done later at LLNL, you get at worst a season or two of cooler temperatures, but hardly the end of the world. And I wouldn't really characterize the following period as "a bit more serious about arms reduction", compared to the glory days of détente in the '70s. All you really have for that period is the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which returned Europe to the situation before the USSR started deploying SS-20s in major quantities (per Wikipedia, eventually 405, each with 3 MIRVed warheads). After that, it's START I, which was signed a few months before the USSR dissolved at the end of 1991.
- neffy 11y ago
  Extra details would indeed be interesting. There are known global climate impacts linked to single volcanic events e.g. Tambora in the 19th century, Krakatoa, etc. "All" you have is START 1, which resulted in an 80% reduction of nuclear weapons. In addition there was a fair amount of behind the scenes assistance from the US in helping clean up the somewhat precipitous situation the USSR left itself in with the nuclear weapons - granted they started removing them months before the collapse. The public debate changed subtly after that report. The folks arguing - as you appear to be - that a nuclear war wouldn't be that big a deal, got a lot quieter. "I’m not afraid of nuclear war. There are 2.7 billion people in the world; it doesn’t matter if some are killed. China has a population of 600 million; even if half of them are killed, there are still 300 million people left." Mao Tse Tung, 1957
  - hga 11y ago
    In short, the study uses a 1 dimensional model of the atmosphere, a particle of soot can go up or down, but there are no winds, no oceans, etc. These models are said to be especially prone to failing hard when given extreme inputs, and the second part is the soot they claimed would be lofted into the air, sizes and quantities, which they did not justify, or justify well (can't remember, it's been decades since I read the paper). Their excuse for using such a model was a lack of computing resources, and they were indeed dear back then. But that made their running a massive propaganda campaign based on this inadequate at best "science" all the worse. Anyway, LLNL, which had serious supercomputer resources for designing nuclear warheads and such, ran 3D simulations with more plausible inputs, and indeed found effects were possible, but they weren't a big deal. Certainly not on the scale of some of the bigger volcanic events. (It's a bit arrogant to automatically humans are so capable of changing the earth that much, especially that quickly; compare, as you do, to events like Tambora.) The folks arguing - as you appear to be - that a nuclear war wouldn't be that big a deal, got a lot quieter. Not that I noticed. Especially since we never argued that, only that it wouldn't be "the end of the world". Maybe we just got more thoroughly ignored by the media, after all, the sainted Carl Sagan was wielding SCIENCE! and we were nobodies. Note Sagan and Turco of the TTAPS team should have been a little more modest when the prospect of Kuwait's oil wells getting set on fire in the first Gulf War came up, their theorizing did not match the reality to soon follow. Of course, to the extent this might be an issue (and even modest effects would be less than welcome in the aftermath of a major nuclear exchange), it made SDI/BMD all the more important, to prevent city busting in the first place....

farmfood 11y ago

And co-authored by Eugene Wigner (Nobel Prize, Physics, 1963): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Wigner https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Wigner.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

briancarnell 11y ago

The report seems to rely on the then-widespread usage of CB radios to preserve post-attack civilian communications, but that technology seems to have largely been abandoned except by truckers. Would we have a harder time today in a post-attack scenario maintaining communications as compared to the late 1970s and the CB craze?

jcrawfordor 11y ago
That's a question that I'm pretty fascinated with personally. When it comes to communications after a major disaster, we continue to plan to rely primarily on 'conventional' radio via e.g. clear-channel AM radio stations and other major commercial broadcasters which have worked with the government to prepare solid contingency plans. For this reason, it's a good idea to own a portable radio or two even though you wouldn't normally use them, and to familiarize yourself with an AM news station (e.g. KCBS 740 KHz in the bay area). Of course, for two-way communication we are all quite dependent on our cellphones. The cellular networks own mobile equipment and other provisions for providing service in a contingency situation, and ideally there could be no interruption in service (as the generators at many cell sites could hold them until service crews arrive, in the case of loss of electricity, for example). But in practice it's easy to imagine a few scenarios that would have the cellular network significantly deteriorated in a region for days, such as a major earthquake that damaged infrastructure and made it difficult to get equipment and fuel to the area. In the short term, I wouldn't count on it. In the long term, the effort involved in restoring cellular service could be enormous but it would be a reasonably high priority. It'd be a good idea for more people to own accessible point-to-point radio equipment with a decent range. I don't know how to achieve this though. CB equipment is bulky and now relegated to its own particular subculture. The amateur radio industry has produced a lot of high-quality handhelds but they're designed to be the opposite of accessible. There have been some ideas based on peer-to-peer relay between mobile phones but the range remains very limited. Maybe someone could come up with a good product in this space.
hga 11y ago
Back then they could wave their hands and correctly say there were so many CB radios they'd be enough for post-attack civilian communications, at least at shorter ranges. But that doesn't mean you couldn't get by with many fewer working radios, and FRS and GMRS equipment is out there in some quantities, in addition to hams, many of whom are set up for emergency communications And as noted by jcrawfordor cell phones are a zillion times more ubiquitous than CB radio sets ever were. In fact, noting the pattern that many less developed 3rd World counties leapfrogged over land lines straight into cell service, following that pattern in the rebuilding would probably work out pretty well. ADDED: and WiFi equipment is also ubiquitous, and with directional antenna can travel pretty far. So we'll have quite a bit of stuff to work with, and people are pretty good at cobbling together solutions for problems like this.