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Show rmm 1 From the Murray Greensheet j Fifteen to twenty minutes. ! That's how much time the county's civil defense office presently would have to notify no-tify the public of an up-j up-j coming nuclear blast in the i event the Soviet Union launched a sudden attack on j the United States. ! From the time the civil i defense office phone rang, ! we'd have fifteen or twenty minutes before the first bomb hit. With such little notice, we would be hard hit. As many as 100,000 people likely would le killed in the initial blast. More would die later of radiation exposure. As horrendous as the carnage car-nage would be, another 500,000 people in the valley ' probably would survive the j nuclear explosion plus the subsequent 15 day period in which radiation is lethal. All those figures seem ominous, also remote. The human element vanishes when one talks of hundreds hun-dreds of thousands of people. peo-ple. Lost in the commas and the string of zeros is the fact that people, not numbers are dying. While the Afghanistan crisis has aroused some war talk in Washington, government govern-ment officials In general concur con-cur that the threat of a nu- i clear confrontation is not immi lo it. At least not now. Yet, the realization has grown in the past decade that efforts must be made to limit li-mit the potentially devastating devastat-ing effects a nuclear attack would have on this country. j The SALT I talks have driven home the realization that the U.S. could be sever-j sever-j ly damaged if a nuclear war broke out. While American anil Soviet So-viet negotiators were trying try-ing to Impress one another with their respective nuclear arsenals, it became quite clear that oftMSive matchups match-ups had little meaning. Soviet nuclear weapons could deal a deadly blow to America. American nuclear weapons would have a limited limit-ed Impact on the Russian people, for whom an elaborate elabor-ate civil defense program has been set up. The Russians likely would lose fewer people than the 20 million estimated to have been killed during World War II. It's like a football game. Both teams have good offenses. of-fenses. Only one has a good defense. Who wins? As every football fan knows, if you don't have a good defense, you don't win. Since the SALT I talks were completed, U.S. officials of-ficials have been moving to shore up this country's defensive de-fensive weaknesses. Last April, the Federal Emergency Management Agency came Into existence bringing all the various em -ergency operations under the control of a single organization. organiza-tion. With more coordinated efforts ef-forts government officials feel they can develop plans to evacuate large metropolitan metropoli-tan areas in less than 48 hours. If they can, they can reduce re-duce the threat of a hostage situation far more dangerous than the current situation in Iran - the UJS. beingfheld "nuclear hostage." |
