What's it like to be near Ground Zero in a nuclear blast? Recently it was my privilege to interview one of the survivors of one of those blasts, retired Col. Richard Rowland, a career US Army veteran, who was less than a mile from the detonation of a nuclear device. He shared his memory of that with me when I met up with him at FreedomFest in Las Vegas where Richard, a great conservative thought leader, founder and chairman emeritus of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is a regular.
He intimately conveys an experience few other Americans have shared. And so, read on.
But first…
The Washington Examiner recently published an article headlined How to survive a nuclear bomb in DC (yes really). Much of my work takes me into DC so I found that headline a real attention-grabber.
The article itself rather belies the optimism of the headline:
At least that's the best guess from experts. And that's really a best-case scenario if the bomb comes from a North Korean missile. If it's a Russian or Chinese missile carrying a nuclear bomb? Even less.
Here's the reality: Nuclear war is just as terrifying now as it was in the Cold War and there's not a lot you'll be able to do to protect yourself — but there are some things.
Tom Nichols, a professor at the Naval War College, says it's very simple.
"The long and short of this is why Eisenhower was not a big fan of civil defense programs. There's not a lot you can do," he said.
... "It makes no sense to run," Nichols said. "You don't know how accurate the bomb is. For all you know, you're running toward it. That bomb could go off anywhere within a few miles."
... [F]or the White House that's the area between 13th and 19th streets NW to the east and west, and L Street NW and Constitution Avenue to the north and south — everyone is likely to die. The blast of the bomb will destroy even the sturdiest concrete buildings.
The scariest thing about a nuclear bomb blast is this may be the best place to be if you're going to fall victim to the bomb. Outside of that range, death is still nearly guaranteed, but it becomes (sic) far more horrifically and slowly.
Comforting to know that, by offering instant death, it "may be the best place to be."
Civil Defense drills and associated artifacts such as basement "bomb shelters" were a fact of life in my youth during the 1950s and 60s. I remember "duck and cover" drills in grammar school. The Air Raid sirens in my home town of Albany, New York -- themselves (disused) artifacts of WWII -- would signal the students of PS 16 (and all the city schools) to duck under our desks and then be led by our teachers into the inner, windowless, hallway as a vague "What do we do next?" staging ground.
Many public and office buildings then displayed metal yellow and black "fallout shelter" signs. Not that we had, or should have had, much confidence that they would provide meaningful shelter from fallout. My dear father Max, if memory serves, was a member of the Civil Defense corps. He would leave occasionally for mysterious night drills while my dear mother Rosalind, my brother, and I watched Leave It To Beaver.
At least once a week every radio and TV station in America would pause to "test" the Emergency Broadcast System, which, as recited by the Federation of American Scientists, would play a high-pitched tone for about 30 seconds accompanied by this announcement:
With the Cuban missile crisis, especially, and Air Force generals such as Curtis LeMay yearning to ignite a nuclear World War III and trying to egg JFK into launching our nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union with a cavalier willingness to accept tens of millions of civilian casualties in return for "winning," this was no joke.
The anxiety of it all seeped into the popular culture with such movie dramas as Fail-Safe and such cinematic black comedies as the crypto-nihilist Stanley Kubrick's greatest movie, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (a copy of the shooting script reportedly from screenwriter Terry Southern's own collection still resides serenely in my collection).
There is, as ever, a backstory.
Pyongyong has recently exploded its sixth nuclear weapon. Scary.
This has propelled the threat of nuclear war back into the news. Six seems like a lot.
That said, the United States in its nuclear weapons testing heyday, conducted 1,054 such tests, 928 of them in Nevada. Some vintage photos here.
Our having done so, of course, is a horse of a different color.
Americans were, as we still are, the Good Guys.
Still, let's take a short trip into Yesteryear with a rare first-hand account of what it was like to be less than a mile from one of those nuclear blasts.
In 1959 or 1960, then-first lieutenant Richard Rowland was stationed at Camp Stewart, Georgia. He received a notification soliciting those who would like to witness an atomic blast as an observer. The government offered to pay the way for volunteers there and back … plus a small per diem.
Rowland volunteered and recalled to me:
They taught us about atomic blasts, what went on, and took us out to the tower, which was about 500 feet high, and we climbed it and looked at where the bomb was going to be. We toured the area. We received two days of training. They issued us a gas mask, a field jacket and an olive-green army blanket and told us to go down into the trench, put on the gas mask, squat down, put the field jacket over our head, fold the blanket two or three times and put it over our heads and then put out hands over our faces. We must have had ear plugs, don't remember but I bet we did, am sure we did.
The trench was about 5000 feet from the blast tower. When they were going to set off the blast we went out in the back of an army truck -- in fatigues, about forty of us into a trench about 10 feet deep. I was surprised how deep it was. It was just dirt. I don't remember any reinforcement.
There were many delays. We were supposed to be there 5 days, it was about 14 days, they kept delaying it because of weather or wind. Day after day. During the time we were out at the Army camp I sneaked into town, came out to the Flamingo Hotel, which was all by itself out there in the desert.
The night of the test, 10PM comes to mind, we were trucked out to and climbed into the trench, following an incline, not a difficult climb, maybe 12%, at the end. The trench was maybe shoulder wide. We followed the procedures about the gas mask, field jacket, blanket and so forth. We looked up at the top of the trench and could see the stars.
Then, over the loudspeaker a man's voice began to count down from 100 … 99, 98, 97 … just as promised … to 1, zero. Then there was a 13-kiloton explosion.
First came an extremely loud noise. Then, with all this stuff over my head, my eyes were closed, it was startling to see every bone in my hands like you would see in an X-ray. They hadn't briefed us on this (or else I missed it).
I later spoke with the tail gunner of the Enola Gay. He told me he had also experienced seeing every bone in his hands through his closed eyelids after they dropped the bomb on Hiroshima. The light had penetrated the skin of the aircraft and he could see every bone.
The wind went out like a hurricane. The dust was flying through the air, you could hear things colliding, noisy and scary, and this terrible wind. And then it got dead silent. Everything was way out yonder, dead quiet. They had trained us about this. You could hear a pebble drop in the trench. You could have heard a pin drop.
Then we heard this kind of dull roar from way away. The wind was rushing back to fill the vacuum the blast had caused and the wind was full of junk hitting junk. It was very scary. There was a lot of damage being done above us and something could have collided above the trench and dropped in and killed us, but didn't. When the wind quit, which it did abruptly, we filed out.
My time sense was all distorted, I don't know whether we were in there for 20 minutes or an hour.
We waited a brief while for the truck. It wasn't a boring wait. I don't remember any conversation. We were call kind of cowed and none of us had a damn thing to say. We got into the back of the truck which took us right back to the barracks where we were sleeping (with an outside latrine).
We went to bed. I was under a kind of minor shock. Probably they had us shower first, but I don't remember.
The next day we were examined by the medical and science people, checking this and checking that, and we were shown around the blast area. We went to where the tower had been and it was atomized, there was nothing, except on every one of the four concrete footings there was about half an inch of metal which had melted and congealed there.
Of the goats, sheep, cattle and chickens that had been penned closer to the blast, the corrals were gone and the animals were nowhere to be seen. Further out, the corrals were there and the animals therein had some injuries from having been hit by the debris but no sign of burning. Further out, the animals showed no injuries.
We toured the debris field, I was still in a daze. I remember that one of the tanks that was closer to the blast had lost its turret. It had been pulled off and blown away. I had been a tank officer so I thought, "What a tough blast!"
In the next day or so, after they checked us over and when our medical records were "tainted" properly, they sent us home. Every six months I had a mandatory check for a couple of years. I had an elevated radiation reading for a couple of years and then that went away.
It was in my file and sometimes the medical people were asked to check me. Eventually I got tired of being a curiosity so I took the record of having been in the nuclear test out of my [medical] file and threw it away.
That was then. This is now.
There is a rather bright ray of hope, amidst the angst, for continuing the nuclear weapons build-down and winding down the last vestiges of the prospect of nuclear war. Last August, as reported in The Washington Post:
TRUMP: Yeah. Nuclear to me -- number one: I would like to de-nuke the world. I know that President Obama said global warming is the biggest threat. I totally disagree. I say that it's a simple one: Nuclear is our greatest threat worldwide. Not even a question, not even close. So I'd like to de-nuke the world. I would like Russia and the United States and China and Pakistan, and many other countries that have nuclear weapons, get rid of them.
Let us not casually dismiss the sincerity of Trump's characterization of nuclear weapons as a "scourge."
Moreover, "de-nuking" isn't just rhetoric. It's policy. There are strong signals that continued dramatic reductions in nuclear arsenals are not just possible but probable. As AP reported last March, the Air Force is shrinking its ICBM-based nuclear weapons from 450 to 400, the lowest level in over half a century.
Just beneath all the political noise there is a lot of signal that sanity continues to blossom. Let us in passing salute President Reagan for initiating the process of the nuclear weapons build-down and both Presidents Bush (especially President George W. Bush) for continuing the process of nuclear disarmament from its psychotic height of close to 60,000 such weapons to, currently, the merely neurotic level of around 3,000, deployed, worldwide.
Still too many. Yet something approaching a 95% reduction is worth noting and celebrating as a trend worth accelerating. Hello progressives? In this matter paleoconservatives (like me) and libertarians are not your adversaries. We, potentially, are strange bedfellows in waiting.
Let's express a passing appreciation to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee for awarding the world's most prestigious humanitarian prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) "for its work to draw attention to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences of any use of nuclear weapons and for its ground-breaking efforts to achieve a treaty-based prohibition of such weapons."
Appreciation is due to the People's Republic of China for constraining its strategic nuclear force to around 200 such weapons.
Special appreciation to former Defense Secretary William Perry for his heroic crusade to advance the safety of the world by eliminating its most dangerous aspect, the volatile ICBM-based weapons, a redundancy in the nuclear "triad." Perry makes a conclusive case that a nuclear weapons "dyad" would more safely, and less expensively, provide all the deterrence necessary.
Also a hat tip to Trump White House former chief strategist (and America's current favorite bête noir) Steve Bannon. During his recent appearance on 60 Minutes, Bannon "argued that the Pentagon's $1 trillion nuclear-modernization program should be cancelled--and that the money should be reinvested 'in Cleveland, in Baltimore, in the inner cities of this country.'"
Pristine paleoconservative philosophy!
Bannon's stated position is consistent with President Trump's (and China's) policy. More, it is fully consistent with the estimate of a couple of US Air Force civilian employees that 311 American nuclear weapons would be ample. That's far fewer than the estimated 1800 strategic nuclear weapons America now has deployed.
Don't fancy seeing "every bone in your hands like you would see in an X-ray" through your closed eyelids? Don't really find much comfort in the thought that instantaneous death from being at Ground Zero is "the best place to be if you're going to fall victim to the bomb"?
Me neither! Nuclear war isn't healthy for children and other living things.
And remember, America:
We're the Good Guys!
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Ralph Benko is an advisor to nonprofit and advocacy organizations, is a member of the Conservative Action Project, a contributor to the contributor to the ARRA News Service. Founder of The Prosperity Caucus, he was a member of the Jack Kemp supply-side team, served in an unrelated area as a deputy general counsel in the Reagan White House. The article which first appeared in Forbes.
Tags: Ralph Benko, nuclear war, nuclear bomb detonation, Forbes To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service and "Like" Facebook Page - Thanks!
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