----- Original Message -----
From: "Ticia" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Brin-L" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Monday, September 17, 2001 1:55 PM
Subject: nuclear strikes (was: Re: Who did it?)
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> > I repeat - there's nothing
> > particularly special about dying in a nuclear explosion.
>
> True, if at the center of the attack you'd die right way. Dead is dead.
>
> But what about the periphery? The thousands of people and the entire
> ecosystem that die slow deaths due to radiation fallout, cancer, and
> gruesomely mutated unviable offspring, *decades* after the fact?
>
There are a zillion myths concerning radiation. While nuclear weapons do
terrible things, its basically because the make a very very big "boom."
Lets look at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The total deaths were are 100k IIRC.
The long term cancer deaths from 87,000 people who were in a study because
they were exposed is 431 above a background of 7244 expected cancer deaths.*
And, most of these deaths were from people who received high doses.
Unviable offspring in people exposed were observed, but all of those
offspring were exposed to radiation in uterus (sp). The study found no
evidence of an elevated rate of any health problems for offspring conceived
by people who were exposed to the radiation after said radiation
exposure.**
> How can we possibly justify that?
>
> But there's other ways of killing your enemies, ways that do not involve
> leaving a natural disaster legacy for generations to come (or not come
> anymore).
Bikini had been the main weapons testing area for the US. The radiation
exposure there should be close to the upper limit expected at a a site that
would take a multi-bomb hit. The radiation danger has lessoned, after < 40
years) to the point where the natives can move back and live there with
exposure less than the international allowable limits. The only risk is for
eating food grown there...and that is not a high risk...and one that will
not last for a long time.
Remember, for ALARA reasons, we use the linear model to determine deaths
from low level exposure, even though there is significant data that
indicates that this overstates the real risk. (Easy to understand data:
Aberdeen's death rate should be higher that those areas of Europe with lower
background.) I'm not against this. But, we cannot use this to answer the
question of what the real risk from a nuclear strike will be. The long term
radiation risks will be small compared to the risk of getting blown up.
Let me put it this way. The long term death radiation toll from a nuclear
hit on New York would be less than the death toll from the two planes. The
immediate death toll would be higher.
>Not to mention the fallout winds which would blow all over
> neigbouring countries and end up in our own back yards.
>
That risk would be even lower.
> I just don't understand why they made those weapons in the first place.
Well
> I do, of course, but now that we look at this Earth as a fragile sole
> ecosystem, and know about the long term dangers of radiation, how can we
> continue to make them, even think of using them? (rhetorical)
>
That's not the problem with nuclear weapons. Radiation has relatively
minimal effect on the environment. If we had, God forbid, a massive nuclear
war, the fires would cause far more ecological damage than the radiation.
Nuclear weapons are scary, for good reasons and bad. The good reason is
that they can kill many people. The bad reasons is the false rumors of
three eyed monsters coming from them.
Dan M.
Dan M.
*http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/rerfupda/death/lss12pt1.htm
**http://www.rerf.or.jp/eigo/historic/histpers.htm#populations
