44
RADIATION STANDARDS, INCLUDING FALLOUT
‘The
effects on our people, however, would have been dramatically different.
Unprepared as we were on that date, it was estimated that there would
have been 50 million fatalities, about 12 million of which would have
resulted from fallout. There were estimated 20 million seriously injured ; 50 percent of dwellings were estimated to have been destroyed or
rendered unusable for a period of several months. It is altogether conceivable that an all-out nuclear war could involve several times the
megaton yield of this example; in which case the effects would be even
greater. For comparison, the present concern over the possible effects
of fallout from weaponstests to date, has to do with a zero to one onehundred-thousandth chance of development of leukemia, zero to one
three-hundred-thousandth chance of developing bone cancer, and a
one one-millionth chance an infant being born with a gross physical
or mental defect among the first generation offspring.
This should makeit clear that in a nuclear war situation in which
survival of a whole peopleis at stake, a totally different set of standards
of radiological protection must be invoked. Report No. 29 of the National Committee on Radiation Protection offers criteria that are
applicable to this situation. It is significant to note that this report
fuggests that exposures to as much as 500 roentgens may be accumulated during the emergency and produce at the time no medically
significant symptoms. Thisis twice as much as any radiation worker
is permitted to accumulate during a lifespan of 70 years under the
radiation protection guides established by the Federal Radiation
Council in Staff Report No. 1. There wouldstill need to be the basic
approach of keeping overall radiation exposures as low as possible.
This approach is compatible with achieving the best possible total
survival and recovery.
Radiation exposures that would be incurred would range from fatal
in a few hours, days, or weeks to exposures comparable to what the
surviving Japanese within two to three thousand meters of the hypocenters received at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Even our annual 40,000 deaths from automobiles pale by comparison
with the nuclear war. Persons in the open in some of the very heavy
fallout areas would have been exposed to three to ten thousand roentgens per hour or more. A very few minutes of that would, of course,
have resulted in fatal exposure. A large percentage of the survivors,
perhaps 20 million people, would have received an average whole body
external radiation exposure of 200 rad, at varying dose rates, far
higher than the 0.15 rad average for the lifetime exposure which has
been estimated would result from weapontests through 1961.
As to Sr®° and Cs’, the less heavily contaminated part of the country (75 to 80 percent of the land mass) would within a few years have
had values of Sr®° and Cs"? in the soil in the range of 20 to 50 times
the levels likely to result from tests prior to 1961. In the more heavily
SHEENRiNEERAIR ERIN
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through 1961 (280 megaton explosive—117 megaton fission).
tre
on the biological and environmental effects of nuclear war, it was
assumed that over a relatively brief period of time, probably not more
than a day or two, a total of 3,946 megatons were detonated. All of
the 263 nuclear weapons which were delivered on the United States
were detonated on the ground at 224 locations within the continental
United States. The yield was 1,446 megaton TNT equivalent and 723
megatons of fission, roughly six times the total yield of weaponstests