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SESSIONVII
PSYCHOSOCIAL REACTIONS (Continued)

PROBLEMS OF POST-ATTACK RECOVERY
EISENBUD: There seemed to be a fair amount of interest on the
question of what would have been the fate of the heavily bombed nations
following World War II had outside help not arrived, particularly during
the first critical winter. John, you've indicated some interest in this.
Do you want it or should we just throw it out?
HEMLER: Well, as we were talking this morning it became apparent that in order to extrapolate the way we need to for a general
war situation, we have to move quantum jumps from the situations
that we've experienced in the past. This would require a rather large
number of assumptions and, of course, a number of studies have been
done in this area. I think there are many questions that need to be addressed in this type of general war environment, but | thought perhaps
as another intermediate step in the route to that quantum jump extrapolation it would be worthwhile discussing Japan, using one single assumption.
We have, in the case of Japan in World War Il, a country being hit
for a number of years with a large number of conventional and incendiary weapons so that a good amount of its industry and its population
had been hit and destroyed. Then, coupled to that, two nuclear weapons were detonated to provide the radiation environment, however
limited it might be. I thought perhaps there might be several things
we could do with just one basic assumption and then perhaps several
variations of the theme. The basic assumption is similar to the one
that was mentioned at the end of the last session, that no outside help

comes after this catastrophe, It's a major catastrophe—not only a nuclear catastrophe—but a conventional war as well. Suppose that no outside help had come. Could we extrapolate from there and then, perhaps
to give us a little variation here, maybe move the weapons in position
and/or locaton—just the two weapons that we're talking about here,
Whether this would be useful, I'm really not sure.

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