DDP Newsletter January 2018 Vol. XXXIV, No. 1
After this month’s false alarm, all Americans should heed the words of Toshiharu Kano (https://tinyurl.com/y75o5m9f), author of Passport to Hiroshima, whose mother was pregnant at the time of the Hiroshima bomb:
“I am the last, closest to ground zero (800 meters from hypocenter), living survivor of Hiroshima atomic bomb of August 1945. Many of the tens of thousands of victims there tragically perished from an unfamiliarity of how to protect themselves from the unique effects of a nuclear bomb’s flash, blast and radiation. As a US citizen living in middle America today I see a hauntingly similar vulnerability growing among the general public here ever since Civil Defense was discontinued after the Cold War era.
“The ‘Good News About Nuclear Destruction’ (www.goodnewsnuke.com/) is that if all Americans were trained again in the…basics of what to do and not do if nuclear weapons were ever unleashed again, we could instantly make all nukes 90% less lethal. “Ideally, while I’d like to see a world free of nuclear weapons someday, in the meantime we should all embrace rejuvenating public Civil Defense to greatly minimize their lethality.”
The bad news, however, is that the torrent of media coverage of the false alarm in Hawaii did nothing to educate people about where to “seek immediate shelter”—or what to do if they have no warning at all. Instead, we learned about how the false alarm was sent by mistake, and why Hawaiians were left in suspense for 38 minutes although the error was discovered in only 5 minutes. Reportedly, the governor forgot his Twitter password! (https://tinyurl.com/y86es45m). Could our warning system be this fragile?
There will be an investigation and drills on avoiding messages that might “create a false panic.” The responsible employee, who “feels really bad,” might lose his job, according to the London Daily Mail (https://tinyurl.com/yb35javo).
But what about the Hawaii Civil Defense Agency? When civil defense supporters visited the emergency management agency on one of the islands some years ago, they asked, after a conversation about hurricane readiness, what plans do you have for response to a nuclear attack? Well, we just hope that doesn’t happen.”
The prospect of a nuclear North Korea is not new. Edward Teller and Lowell Wood spoke about this at the DDP meeting in 2000 (https://tinyurl.com/y9bzmqr6). According to National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, U.S. intelligence has underestimated the rate of North Korea’s progress. It detonated its sixth nuclear bomb in September 2017; this was believed to be its first successful test of a thermonuclear weapon (hydrogen bomb). In 2010, North Korea invited former Los Alamos National Laboratory director Siegfried Hecker to visit and showed him a uranium enrichment facility in an old building, which had been undetected despite regular satellite surveillance (https://tinyurl.com/yaa68bjn). Some experts believe that North Korea may have enough material to build 60 bombs (https://tinyurl.com/yal7sn3r). Analysts speculate that its next satellite launch could be for testing a hardened reentry assembly proved out by atmospheric detonation of a warhead (Threat Journal 12/30/17, https://preview.tinyurl.com/ydellgv3).
How has North Korea made such progress despite international sanctions? Rocket debris recovered by ASouth Korea revealed bearings with Cyrillic characters indicating Russian origin, a Chinese infrared camera, and pressure transmitters manufactured in Britain (ibid.). North Korea depends on China for food and energy, and 90% of its trade is with China. It seems inconceivable that China could not stop Kim Jong-un’s nuclear program if it wished. Does it not give China great leverage in dealing with the U.S.?
“It should be a national scandal that North Korea’s belligerence is in the news at all. It is made possible only because of the fecklessness of successive U.S. administrations to build a national missile defense capable of stopping a nuclear attack,” writes Brian T. Kennedy, president of the American Strategy Group (https://tinyurl.com/y7gm2ej7).
“Although we possess the technology and technical know-how—from missile interceptors based on land, sea, or in space—to make North Korea’s arsenal completely irrelevant, we choose instead to leave the American people vulnerable to such an attack. This is a relic of the absurd Cold War mentality that missile defense was ‘destabilizing’ and that we were somehow safer if we let the U.S. population remain held hostage to nuclear attack.” Barack Obama was a long-time opponent of missile defense, nuclear weapons, and a robust American military, Kennedy writes, but the policy of strategic vulnerability was a carryover from previous administrations.
Kennedy writes that if a nuclear attack comes, “it will not be an angry strike by the seemingly volatile Kim Jong-Un, though it may appear that way. It will have been from a cold calculation by China’s Xi Jinping and the Communist politburo that they no longer wished to live with the perceived hyper power of the United States” (ibid.).
Missile defense should be pursued with Manhattan Project urgency, in Kennedy’s view. But considering that America is at risk now, not five years from now, we need immediate means to save as many American lives as possible.
The only rapidly available means is self-help civil defense. At a minimum:
- Obtain a copy of Cresson Kearny’s Nuclear War Survival Skills and the items needed to build a Kearny Fallout Meter. While there is still time and availability, you might wish to buy a factory-made KFM, a NukAlert, a SIRAD card, or calibrated Cold War civil defense instruments, e.g. from www.ki4u.com.
- Learn the basics about radiation. Fallout looks like dirt or grit. You are protected by shielding with earth, concrete, anything else massive, and distance. Fallout decays by the 7:10 rule: a 7-fold increase in time means a 10-fold decrease in dose-rate. Do not panic. The earth will not be uninhabitable forever; if you avoid exposure to a big dose you are likely to have a normal lifespan in good health; survivors do not needed to be treated as outcasts as they were in Japan.
- If you see a bright flash, drop and cover. This would potentially save more lives than anything else; it saved many in Nagasaki (https://tinyurl.com/mv6g6o5).
Give copies of the enclosed 60-second training card (https://tinyurl.com/yarl3mqa) to as many people as possible, especially first responders. Review the resources at www.ddponline.org and www.physiciansforcivildefense.org.
PUBLICATION SCHEDULE
Because of the editor’s other obligations, only one issue was published in 2016, March, vol XXXIII, no. 2. No issues were published in 2017; however, the Climate Change IQ Project was done (www.ddponline.org). We now plan to resume a bimonthly publication schedule, with volume XXXIII beginning with this issue.