No Policemen Died in Nagasaki

DDP Newsletter, November 2013, Vol. XXXI, No. 6

When he visited Hiroshima and Nagasaki recently, Stephen Jones found his motivation to work for civil defense rekindled, despite decades of rejection by Americans.

In the Hiroshima Museum, he saw a poster on display that says that no policemen died in Nagasaki. The reason is that a policeman who survived Hiroshima (one of some 165 “double survivors”) carried a message to his fellow police in Nagasaki, which was hit 3 days later. Although the Japanese knew nothing about the atomic bomb, the policeman told them that a bright light would be followed within seconds by a deadly shock wave. Tsutomo Yamaguchi,a surviving ship designer for Mitsubishi, also brought this message from Hiroshima to his company in Nagasaki, and many in his section were saved from serious injury from flying glass (http://tinyurl.com/m4qx5n4). He died at age 93.

Common-sense action could save most of the people who are outside the radius of complete destruction: If you see a flash, drop and cover (“duck and cover”).

If it takes a 100-mph wind to knock a person down while standing, it would take about a 300-mph wind to blow him away if he is lying down. Any shadow or cover, even thin clothing, leaves, or a newspaper, protects against flash burns. Lying prone may also reduce initial radiation exposure because there are likely to be more obstacles such as building foundations and cars between the person and the source of the gamma radiation, according to a document in the UK National Archives referenced in “Duck and Cover” on Wikipedia.com. The flash may provide from 7 sec to 20 seconds of warning.

If there were more warning, more could survive, as by taking shelter below ground. One person survived at Hiroshima in the basement of a reinforced concrete building a mere 170 m from Ground Zero, and lived into his early 80s.

Instruction about radiation and nuclear science has been virtually eliminated from American public schools, Jones states, and most people in government who were knowledgeable about civil defense have retired or died. Institutionally, government and the American public are opposed to civil defense—with individual exceptions.

South Carolina state officials actually threatened Jones with arrest for distributing free radiation monitors to thousands of police and firefighters, though he had the cooperation of county officials. Firefighters were ordered by the Salt Lake Unified Fire Authority/ Salt Lake County Emergency Management officials not to accept free radiation monitors. The Pima County (Ariz.) Sheriff’s Department returned some 200 donated NukAlerts despite initially expressing enthusiasm about them.

Resistance, lack of interest, and actual inability to produce enough instruments quickly enough to meet the needs of millions of first responders mean that expedient defense is all that Americans have in this age of nuclear proliferation.

Nevertheless, Jones believes, information alone—in the hands of first responders—could enable the U.S. to defeat the nuclear threat. Defeat—because the panic caused by nuclear weapons would cause more damage than the weapons themselves, just as it did in the initial days of the mass bombing of London in World War II. It is most important for first responders to survive because they have the abilities and the public confidence to help preserve the structure of society.

War itself is catastrophic and has wiped out whole peoples even before the invention of gunpowder. The most important effect of nuclear weapons is psychological. While devastating, they are not nearly as destructive as is believed. It would take 400 nuclear warheads, not one, to wipe out Los Angeles, Jones states. And the area of 90% survival with drop and cover is 15 times as large as the no-survive area.

The enclosed 60-second training card is largely the work of the late Kirk Paradise of Huntsville/ Madison County Emergency Management Agency, who re-established the public fallout shelter system. Very well received in Japan, it has been translated into Japanese, and is also being distributed in Pakistan.

It is helpful to point out, Jones reminds us, that drop and cover is also useful in the event of meteor/ asteroid strikes (http://tinyurl.com/l439uvz), or chemical explosions.

Please show the card to any first responder of your acquaintance. We will send you as many cards as you can have distributed to police and firefighters. You can also download it or send a link to http://www.ddponline.org/storage/card.pdf.

 

COMBATING RADIATION PHOBIA

 

The Fukushima disaster (see September issue) showed the dangers of irrational response to low-dose radiation. “If the public does not panic because it has lost its fear of small doses of radiation through the Fukushima experience, the main weapon of terrorism—panic— is neutralized,”Jones states, and suggests the following links.

• Kearny Fallout Meter instructions: http://tinyurl.com/pwn6qdj
• Easiest explanation to understand as to why there is no danger in the U.S. from Fukushima: Shane Connor http://tinyurl.com/jwejtcn
• Best Scientific explanation as to lack of danger: Jerry Cuttler http://tinyurl.com/mudrb54
• Supporting Scientific explanation: Bobby Scott http://tinyurl.com/l4x8c9u
• Supporting Scientific explanation: Ed Calabrese http://tinyurl.com/l2fs756

Allen Brodsky offers the following rule of thumb for assessing the safety of ingesting contaminated food or water if you have an open-window Geiger counter. If the count from a 9-oz sample of food is no higher than that from an orange Fiestaware plate 1 cm away from the probe, it is likely safe enough for short-term emergency use. More complete information is found in his book Actions for Survival, available from amazon.com.

Japan has lowered the amount of radioactivity allowed in food from 500 to 100 Bq/kg, and has likely banned bananas (about 15 Bq per banana and 6 or 7 bananas/kg) and Brazil nuts (which exceed the limits that may be released from a nuclear installation). The limits apply to cesium, not potassium (found in bananas) or radium (found in Brazil nuts), but the local municipalities making the measurements [like the human body] are unlikely to distinguish the source of the beta or alpha particles (Tim Worstall, Forbes 4/2/2012, http://tinyurl.com/cjjoman).

Worstall also reports that the Fukushima-derived radiation in a steak from a Pacific blue fin tuna is about the equivalent of one-twentieth of a banana. More strikingly, the dose from cesium in the tuna is only 0.2% of that from the naturally occurring polonium-210 in the fish. Furthermore, the cesium content of the fish in August 2012 was down to half the levels found in August 2011 (Forbes 11/16/13, http://tinyurl.com/ls9jfau).

In 2013, the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) Task Group admitted that projections of danger from doses less than 100 mSv (10 rad), based on the linear no-threshold theory, are “speculative, unproven, undetectable and ‘phantom’” [emphasis in original]. In addition to imposing tremendous costs and discouraging beneficial uses of radiation, “radiophobia contributes to motivating radiological terrorism and promoting nuclear proliferation,” write Yehosua Socol et al. (cited in Dose-Response, doi: 10.2203/dose-response.13-044.Socol).