CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION AND SUMMARY OF CONCLUSIONS CHRONICLE George Bernard Shaw once opined ‘Much of your space and time is being wasted on the subject of atomic warfare. The disuse of poison gas in the 1939-45 war, because it was as dangerous to its users as to their targets, makes it very unlikely that atomic bombs will be used again. If they are, they will promptly make an end of all our discussions by making an end of ourselves. .. . Still, give me space for another cry in the wilder- ness, that my unquiet spirit, wandering among the ruins of empires, may have at least the mean and melancholy satisfaction of saying: ‘I told you so.” "* Project SUNSHINE was born of kindred unquiet spirits, most of which, however, are not as grimly pessimistic as Mr. Shaw’s. Its purpose is to inquire into the nature of the various large-scale disasters that conceivably might result from the detonation of large numbers of nuclear or thermonuclear weapons. By “large scale’ we imply areas many magnitudes larger than the immediate destruction area, and thereby also connote an ex- panded temporal span. The first reasonably comprehensive study of this problem, by Nicholas M. Smith, was submitted to the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission in the Spring of 1949 and was resubmitted in final form at the end of that year under the code name of Project GABRIEL.* A far less thorough butsimilar study was made available in unclassified form in a section of The Effects oidtomioecho ts” *References appear at the end of each chapter. tThe original Project GABRIEL report, having been superseded by several others, including the present report, is no longer available.