S D S C Strategic & Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Working Paper Defence Studies Centre Working Paper No. 401 The Probabilities of On the Beach: Assessing ‘Armageddon Scenarios’ in the 21st Century Desmond Ball May 2006 Professor Desmond Ball is Special Professor at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Australian National University. He was head of the Centre from 1984 to 1991. This is a revised version of a paper prepared for a conference on Science and Ethics: Can Homo Sapiens Survive?, organised by Manning Clark House, and held in Canberra on 17-18 May 2005. Published by the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University, Canberra National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry Ball, Desmond, 1947– The Probabilities of “On the Beach”: assessing “Armageddon Scenarios” in the 21st Century ISBN 978 0 7315 5475 1 ISBN 0 7315 5475 2 1. Nuclear weapons – United States. 2. Nuclear weapons – Russia (Federation). 3. Nuclear weapons – South Asia. 4. Nuclear weapons – East Asia. 5. Biological weapons. 6. Chemical weapons. I. Australian National University. Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. II. Title. (Series: Working Paper (The Australian National University. Strategic and Defence Studies Centre); no. 401). 355.0217 Copyright This book is copyrighted to The Australian National University. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be made to the publisher. Strategic and Defence Studies Centre’s Publication Program Established in 1966, the SDSC is located within the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia. It specialises in the study of strategic issues—predominantly in the Asia-Pacific region. The Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence series is a collection of monograph publications arising principally from research undertaken at the SDSC. Recent previous Canberra Papers have focused on major aspects of Australian defence policy, disease security in Northeast Asia, ballistic missile defence, the complexities of dealing with radical Islam, and aspects of transnational crime. A major title on the Allied Geographical Section in the Second World War was launched by the Chief of Army at the 2005 Chief of Army’s History Conference in Canberra. As at 2006, all papers in the Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence series are peer reviewed. SDSC Working Papers are shorter than the Canberra Paper series and focus on areas of current research interest to SDSC academic staff or the Centre itself. Topics of previous Working Papers have included Australia’s defence policies, intelligence on Iraq’s WMD, Western air power, instability in the US-ROK alliance, and the threat of terrorism and regional development. In addition, the SDSC also holds a number of ‘one-off’ publications. A list of recent Centre publications appears on the SDSC website at <http://www.rspas.anu.edu.au/sdsc/>. Advisory Review Panel Editorial Board Emeritus Professor Paul Dibb Professor Hugh White Professor Desmond Ball Dr Chris Chung Professor David Horner Dr Brendan Taylor Professor Hugh White Mr Christian Enemark Professor Anthony Milner Miss Meredith Thatcher (Series Editor) Professor Virginia Hooker Professor William Tow Dr Coral Bell Dr Pauline Kerr Publisher Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Tel: +61 2 6125 9921 Australian National University Fax: +61 2 6125 9926 Canberra, ACT 0200, Australia Email: http://rspas.anu.edu.au/sdsc The Probabilities of On the Beach: Assessing ‘Armageddon Scenarios’ in the 21st Century Desmond Ball Introduction This paper has four sections. The first section reviews the debate about ‘Nuclear Winter’ in the 1980s and the proposition that a nuclear war would inject sufficient amounts of dust, smoke and other particulates into the upper atmosphere to significantly reduce the temperature and ambient light on the planet and hence to threaten the survival of the human race. The second summarises recent developments with respect to US and Russian nuclear weapons capabilities, including some disturbing aspects of the US nuclear posture. The third discusses the current proliferation of nuclear weapons in South Asia and Northeast Asia and assesses the prospects for nuclear war in these regions. Finally, the fourth section briefly discusses developments with respect to chemical and biological weapons (CBW) and the threat of pandemics of new infectious diseases. On the Beach and ‘Nuclear Winter’ Fears that the development of nuclear weapons would lead to the obliteration of the human race surfaced at the very beginning of the nuclear age. Some scientists involved in the Manhattan Project worried that an atomic detonation might spark a chain reaction that would burn up the Earth’s entire atmosphere, instantly and horrifically extinguishing all life. Albert Einstein himself wrote in 1947 of ‘the danger of starting a chain reaction of a scope great enough to destroy part or all of the planet’. It was the theme of numerous novels and films in the 1950s and 1960s; others imagined the travails of small groups of humans who survived and struggled to re-create civilisation. Nevil Shute’s On the Beach quickly became the best- known of the ‘extinction novels’; the movie was perhaps eclipsed by Stanley Kubrick’s hilarious parody of nuclear strategy, Dr Strangelove, released in 1964. I re-read On the Beach in April 2005. I have my grandfather’s copy, which my grandmother had given him when it came out in 1957 and which I first read when my parents inherited it after my grandparents died in the early 1960s. I had not read it since, although I have seen the movie, produced in 1959 (with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Anthony Perkins and Fred Astaire), about once a decade. It is still an entertaining story, albeit simple like the 1950s, but implausible on both technical and strategic grounds. It describes the last months of humanity, © 2006 The Australian National University 2 Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Working Paper No. 401 in Melbourne around 1964, after a nuclear war between Russia and China, in which both had used cobalt bombs, producing worldwide radiation which had already killed everyone in the northern hemisphere and was inexorably reaching the city. The idea of a cobalt bomb originated with Leo Szilard, who opposed the US thermonuclear weapons (H-bomb) program, and who publicised it in an article in February 1950, not as a serious proposal for a weapon but to point out the imminent possibility of building Doomsday-weapons that could destroy all life on earth. It involved covering an H-bomb with a thick outer layer of Cobalt-59 that on detonation would transmute into Cobalt-60, which produces highly energetic (and thus penetrating and lethal) gamma rays and has a half-life of 5.26 years, long enough for airborne particles to settle and cover the earth before significant decay has occurred, and making it impractical to protect and sustain substantial numbers in fallout shelters. The Doomsday mechanism in Dr Strangelove was a gigantic complex of nuclear devices covered with cobalt. Nevil Shute’s scenario involved a Russo-Chinese war in which ‘most’ of the bombs had ‘cobalt elements’. The Russian strategy was to reduce the Chinese population by half and to make northern China, from Shanghai up, uninhabitable for a couple of decades. The Chinese ‘aimed to blanket the Russian industrial regions with a cobalt fallout, city by city’, and ‘turn the Russians back into agricultural people’; they could then occupy the safe areas as they desired.1 They each grossly underestimated the toxicity of the Cobalt-60. However, the doomsday scenario greatly underestimated, implicitly at least, the amount of cobalt and the number of bombs required for global extinction. To cover every square kilometre of the earth’s surface with just one gram of cobalt would require the disbursement of more than 100 tonnes of transmuted Cobalt-60, involving more than a thousand bombs. Several thousand would be required to ensure that every square kilometre actually received a dose. In such a world, where cobalt was the main currency of nuclear strategy, parts of humanity would have had to move into vast complexes deep underground, to experiment with new social structures and prepare for the possible influx of millions of people who would need to stay there for anything from 20 to 100 years, depending on the intensity of the gamma radiation on the surface. As far as is known, only one bomb with a cobalt element was ever tested—a British device tested at Maralinga on 14 September 1957. The prompt effects of particular nuclear scenarios, in terms of casualties and levels of urban- industrial destruction and damage, are fairly easy to estimate. The calculus involves only a few variables: the density of the population and industrial capacity; the number of nuclear detonations, the specific points of detonation and whether the weapons are air-burst or ground-burst; the yield of the weapons; and the local meteorological conditions. The blast effects are easiest to calculate, depending only on the warhead yield, as measured in kilotons or megatons, and the hardness of objects in the area of detonation, as measured in pounds per square inch (psi) overpressure. An overpressure of 3-5 psi will destroy most residences and lightly constructed commercial buildings; stronger constructions, including reinforced concrete structures, are destroyed by 10-20 psi. Fifty percent of the people in areas receiving more than 5 psi will die; assuming that an equal number will die in areas receiving less than 5 psi, then blast fatalities will equal the number of people in a 5 psi circle. A one megaton weapon, detonated at an altitude of 2,400 metres, would produce 5 psi out to © 2006 The Australian National University The Probabilities of On the Beach: Assessing ‘Armageddon Scenarios’ in the 21st Century Desmond Ball 3 a distance of six kilometres.2 The impact of radioactive fallout is much more difficult to assess.