The Hundredth Monkey/3 It Could Happen Any Minute

"Nuclear war," according to Roger Fisher, Professor of Law at Harvard, "is not a solution. It is worse than any problem it might 'solve.'"

An all-out nuclear war between the U.S. and Russia could kill hundreds of millions of people and subject the survivors to radiation sicknesses — and cause countless mutations of the genetic blueprints of our species.*

(*If our nuclear insanity continues, our descendants may be so mutated that they cannot even be classified as members of our species, Homo sapiens.)

"Nuclear weapons aren't weapons — they're an obscenity," said Dr. Marvin Goldberger, President, California Institute of Technology.

According to Dr. Herbert L. Abrams of the Harvard Medical School, the corpses produced by a nuclear war between Russia and the United States if laid end to end would reach from the earth to the moon.

Could any worthwhile human desire however right, good or needed be actually achieved by this sacrifice of the human race?

Rear Admiral Gene R. LaRocque, United States Navy (retired), suggests that a nuclear war may be started by mechanical mishaps and electronic and personnel errors:

. . . one of our strategic submarines, the George Washington, ran right into a Japanese ship just a few months ago and sank it! That's one of our best missile submarines! . . . We've lost two of our nuclear attack submarines that sank in the ocean and we don't know why to this day — the Scorpion and the Thresher. And earlier this year one of our missiles was accidentally fired from Arkansas because a mechanic dropped a wrench. . ..

We've had several incidents where nuclear weapons have literally fallen out of airplanes, literally just fallen through the bomb bays. Probably the most interesting one is the one that fell out of a strategic bomber in the Carolinas some years ago. . . . landed in Carolina in a swamp, and they looked all over for that nuclear weapon. We haven't found it yet. . . .*

(*The Defense Department bought the land, put a fence around it, and now it's a nuclear safety area! From a talk given on October 31, 1981 at a Los Angeles symposium organized by Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Council for a Livable World.)

Daniel Ellsberg, who was an assistant to former Secretary of Defense McNamara, reminds us of an accident in 1961 when an Air Force plane carrying a 24-megaton bomb crashed in North Carolina.

On crash impact five of the six interlocking safety mechanisms on the bomb failed!

Only one switch kept the bomb from unleashing the equivalent of 1,000 Nagasaki-type explosions!*

(*From Survival newsletter, Sept.-Nov. 1981, published by Southern California Alliance for Survival.)

We've been lucky so far!

A Russian airplane carrying a nuclear weapon crashed in the Sea of Japan.

U.S. submarines carrying nuclear missiles have collided with Russian ships.

By mistake, we dropped on Spain four plutonium bombs which fortunately did not explode.

Oops — so sorry!

The failure of a 46 computer part has produced a false signal that Russian missiles were on the way.

On November 9, 1979, a reportedly fail-safe computer responded to a war games tape by turning on all American early warning systems around the world!

On June 3 and again on June 6, 1980, computer errors in our warning system began a rapid chain of events that could have ruined the planet.

You and I may have been only minutes from nuclear death when these technical errors were spotted!!!*

(*Military folks will protest that, while true, the above are unfair statements. They haven't blown us apart yet, have they?)

What if an error is not detected within minutes?

Up until the last half of this century, civil defense was usually protective against ordinary bombs.

With less than thirty minutes warning of a missile attack, we can forget it!

The fire storm of a nuclear missile will turn most underground shelters into crematoriums, anyway.