"My God, look at that son of a bitch go!" With these words of unabashed exultation, Robert Lewis, the co-pilot of Enola Gay—the B-29 aircraft that dropped the world's first atomic bomb on Hiroshima—swung away to escape the cloud mushrooming upwards. After seeing the death and destruction Little Boy unleashed, Lewis revised his reaction to: "My God, what have we done?" The director of the Manhattan Project tests, Kenneth Bainbridge, was emphatic: "We're all sons of bitches now."
AS war-mongrels on both sides of the border bare their canines in a super-hot summer, the question looms: is the dreaded Nuclear Winter around? Both Atal Behari Vajpayee and Mian Nawaz Sharif have what it takes. So, has the Doomsday clock begun to tick away in the subcontinent for the world's first full-blown nuclear war in which both sides possess The Weapon? And, will Nuclear Winter follow?
Temperatures as low as –30°Celsius for months; darkness all day for weeks; dying plants; forest fires; storms; food and fuel shortages; radiation; contamination; starvation; death. The End?
Yes and no. First, the good news: the newest nuclear wannabes are still in the kiloton category. India's biggest bomb produced an explosion the equivalent of 40-55 kilotons of TNT. Pakistan's was even lower. The two nations would have to rain their targets with thousands of those at one go if Nuclear Winter is to set in. Their arsenals (CIA guesstimate: India 40, Pak 12) don't permit that just yet; their economic status probably won't.
The bad news is that both governments, their atomic energy scientists and defence strategists, are working on this 'perceived' weakness. Within days of fathering the bomb, Atomic Energy Commission chairman R. Chidambaram was announcing how he and his Oppenheimers could come up with an even more potent device. Abdul Qadeer Khan will presumably say the same soon to his men.
Clearly, a worst-case scenario is not entirely misplaced. The two nations have fought three wars over territory (Kashmir) in 50 years. Add to this religious fundamentalism (Hindu bomb, Muslim bomb), and you can't underestimate their ability to self-destruct. US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said on NBC: "No generation has been this close to a nuclear disaster before." First things first: just what is a Nuclear Winter? The dictionary describes it drily: "n. a period of extremely low temperatures, caused by obstruction of sunlight, that has been suggested would occur as a result of nuclear war." But, Dr Carl Sagan and his associates—Drs Turco, Toon, Ackermann and Pollack—who announced their theory in '83 painted a ghastly picture.
They said that if a nuclear war was fought with weapons upwards of 5,000 megaton range, burning cities and forests would send up almost 225 million tons of smoke into the troposphere. Which, over a period of two weeks, will be evenly distributed in the northern hemisphere (India and Pakistan included). In the days to follow, this smoke will block the sun's rays from reaching the earth's surface, especially between latitudes 30 degrees and 70 degrees north.
Then, catastrophe. Forget those who die instantly when the bombs fall. As per the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), a worse fate awaits survivors in a Nuclear Winter:
STARVATION: Urban survivors may face shortages of water, food and fuel. Low light levels may inhibit photosynthesis. Food can't be grown on the frozen wastelands. Tropical forests may be destroyed. Dead and dry conifers may kindle massive forest fires.
RADIATION: Radioactive fallout from the detonation of nuclear weapons may render water unpotable. Food items may get contaminated causing an outbreak of cancers and tumours.
CONTAMINATION: Ruptures from nuclear, oil and gas storage facilities may spill into rivers and streams killing aquatic organisms. Freshwater systems may freeze to considerable depths. Phyto-plankton may die rapidly; food chains may get disrupted.
DEPLETION: The nuclear exchange will damage or even destroy the ozone layer, causing enough additional ultra-violet rays to reach the earth's surface, resulting in a noticeable increase in skin cancers and cataracts.
STORMS: The difference in temperature between cold continental land masses and warmer oceans may create violent coastal storms. Within a month, the cloud blocking the sun's rays, now much thinner, may cover much of the earth's surface. Result: unbridled chaos. With both countries likely to aim their nuclear arsenal at civilian targets to effect maximum damage, and given the total state of unpreparedness of our cities in terms of bomb shelters and other infrastructure, the casualties may be high, high, high.
MAYBE, probably, perhaps. It's a good thing most predictions about Nuclear Winter are still in the 'may cause this, may cause that' realm. US military experts like Eugene G. Zutell, of the Arizona Department of Emergency and Military Affairs, say the Nuclear Winter theory is pure overkill. Normal meteorological processes like rain and snow would negate the impact.
"In seven to ten days, before the theoretical initiation of the cooling effect, an amount of water far greater than the weight of smoke generated by the nuclear exchange, will rain out of the atmosphere, and in doing so, will have a significant cleansing effect," he explains. "Couple this with the commonly demonstrated fact that smoke and dust particles injected into the atmosphere spontaneously create rain conditions. Historical records describe a black rain in Hiroshima within hours of Little Boy."
But then, a Nuclear Winter hasn't happened before. Says Dr Amit Sengupta of the Delhi Science Forum: "Much of the euphoria over the bomb in both nations is a result of ignorance. It's been an ill-informed debate so far. Few know what a bomb is, and fewer still know what it can do if it is used by both parties. People still haven't realised what they're playing with."
What we do know is what happens under the mushroom cloud when only one nation has a bomb and drops it. And that's scary enough. "In order to envision the consequences of a nuclear holocaust," says Shinji Takahashi of the Nagasaki Institute of Applied Science who has analysed survivor-surveys for the UN, "we must first use our imagination and reconstruct the hell created by the atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
HEAT: The 12.5 kiloton "son of a bitch" that Robert Lewis dropped on Hiroshima killed 70,000 instantly, a casualty of 5,600 per kiloton. The temperature at the hypocentre reached 3,000-4,000 degrees (iron melts at 1,550 degrees). Michiko Yamaoka was 15 years old and 800 metres from the 'hypocentre' on August 6, 1945. Her face was burnt beyond recognition. She has since undergone 27 facial plastic surgeries.
BLAST: It's estimated that at the moment of the explosion, the blast pressure was 35 tons per square metre at a velocity of 440 metres per second at the hypocentre. Ten seconds later, the blast had spread out over 3.7 km. "With a ghastly roar, whirlwinds of flame were rolling violently downhill like bright red drum cans," says eyewitness Yoshito Matsushige, then a photographer with The Chugoku Shimbun.
CANCERS: If you've escaped instant death from the heat and blast, the chances of surviving the effects of radiation depend on your distance from the 'hypocentre' and the number of neutrons released into the air. Little Boy released only 3 per cent, yet caused hair loss, diarrhoea; internal bleeding of intestines and blood vessel ruptures. Or worst—cancer. Sadako Sasaki was two when the bomb fell. Ten years later, she was attacked by the 'A-bomb disease', a euphemism for leukemia. She died the same year.
Says Dr Nanao Kamada of Hiroshima University: "In Hiroshima, in the first seven years, there was leukemia; then thyroid cancers till 1960; breast cancer up to 1970; lung, stomach and colon cancers till 1975; skin cancers from 1975-85. And a high frequency of lung and hepatitis cancers all through." His co-researcher Dr T.S. Kumaravel found an excess relative risk of breast, ovarian, thyroid, bladder and non-melanoma skin tumours.
SMALL HEAD DISEASE: Studies on prenatally exposed A-bomb survivors show that the incidence of survivors with small head circumference and severe mental retardation increased with increasing radiation dose. Yuriko is 53 years old. Her mother was 26 and pregnant when Little Boy fell. Tests show that Yuriko, now 53, has the intelligence of a 27-month-old child.
IN-UTERO: In-utero studies by the Radiation Effects Research Foundation found a reduction in IQ with increasing dose, a higher incidence of mental retardation in the heavily exposed and a change in rate of growth and development. Approximately 80 per cent of the mental retardation was caused by radiation exposure in the 8-15 weeks of gestation.
The bottomline: any which way you look at it, playing around with the atom will get you: in war or winter.
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