a theoretical construction and carries along all the inherent uncertainties, both physical and biological, which have been discussed in
many of the preceding sections of this report.
The numbers generated
in the above paragraph are cited, not as absolutes, but as relative
values, to point up a significant relationship:
namely, that a local
area may be lerge enough to be regarded as a critical geographical
parameter.
This local area will be above the safety levels for
strontium-90 long before this situation exists on a world-wide basis
if the contamination is brought about by surface bursts of nuclear
weapons.
.
It may be superfluous to point out that the problems faced by
those of the target population left alive after having been hit by 750
one megaton bombs would be likely to be such as to make that of accumulating one microcurie of strontium-90 in their bones over the next
generation or so a very secondary consideration.
It seems apparent
that a military requirement which would result in mounting such an
attack against a population would be so over-riding as to ignore the
possibility of carcinogenesis in the remnants of the population some
20 years later.
On the other hand, if the 50% of the strontium-90 which does
not fall out locally on the target area is distributed uniformly worldwide, then the bone deposition outside the local area would be 1.54x10"
microcuries, and thus 2 x 25,000 MI = 50,000 MI of surface burst |
weapons on any target area would be required to bring the world outside
that target area to the 1 microcurie bone level.
in relating to atmos-
_pheric or other storagemechanisms,stillunresolved.
Thereis
~considerable evidence pointing to stratospheric storage of radioactive
material, but the quantity of material involved and the rate at which
it descends are still in dispute.
The British have estimated that half
the material located above the tropopause will descend from the stratosphere into the troposphere every 5 years and that the material will
18
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