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- WASHINGTON (AP) -- A doomsday scenario, written by an anti-nuclear physicians
group and published in the New England Journal of Medicine, reads more
like a Hollywood script than a scientific paper.
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- The first nuclear missiles would come
from a rogue Russian submarine making an unauthorized launch. After the
first missile broke the surface of the Barents Sea, 6.8 million Americans
would have just 30 minutes before a ``giant firestorm'' turned them to
dust. Then all-out nuclear war could break out, erasing billions from Earth.
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- ``There's an assumption of a crew-wide
collusion and cooperation,'' Bruce Blair, one of the paper's authors, acknowledged
Wednesday. ``It would require a conspiracy of some magnitude to pull this
off.''
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- The crew would not only have to breach
command-and-control protocol, but also gain access to top secret launching
codes.
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- Most experts believe a more plausible
scenario for an accidental post-Cold War nuclear confrontation would involve
defending against a false warning indicating Russian or U.S. missiles were
in the air.
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- But both the Clinton and Yeltsin administrations
have assured the world repeatedly that plenty of safeguards exist.
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- ``We believe there is good command and
control of both the U.S. and Russian deployed nuclear weapons that would
preclude an accidental launch,'' said P.J. Crowley, a White House spokesman.
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- Mikhail Shurgalim, a Russian Embassy
spokesman, scoffed at the scenario, saying safeguards would ``prevent any
such disastrous thing.''
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- ``It sounds like total stupidity,'' he
said of the paper.
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- Physicians for Social Responsibility
argues in its report that nuclear accidents can happen because Russia and
the United States maintain several thousand strategic warheads each, many
on high alert. The weapons' targets were symbolically removed in 1994.
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- The physicians and other health care
groups, saying medical facilities would be overwhelmed by an atomic blast,
have been lobbying since the 1960s for elimination of nuclear weapons.
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- Most of the five-page paper lobbies against
atomic arms, making it more of an opinion piece than scientific evaluation,
acknowledged a deputy editor of the journal, Gregory Curfman. But he said
it was reviewed by peers and published because doctors have an interest
in the topic.
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- ``The scenarios we felt were pretty speculative
and it contains elements of opinion,'' he said. ``But we decided that if
there were one of these accidents, there would be serious health implications
to discuss.''
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- Dr. Christine Cassel, a paper co-author,
said that after the Cold War, ``The public lost interest in the possibility
of nuclear war. But the threat, the risk, did not stop. It just changed.''
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- In 1989, when the Cold War was still
on, Cassel played herself in a Gene Hackman star vehicle, ``The Package,''
about the possibility of a nuclear holocaust.
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- Since the Soviet Union's dissolution,
the report argues, Russia's ``nuclear command system has steadily deteriorated''
and poorly paid troops are disgruntled, deserting, and even committing
suicide.
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- ``The saga of the Mir space station bears
witness to the problems of aging Russian technical systems,'' the paper
notes.
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- According to the paper scenario, a Delta-IV
sub patrolling the Barents Sea north of Russia launches 16 missiles, each
armed with four 100-kiloton nuclear warheads -- each warhead eight times
the strength of Hiroshima.
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- Assuming a 25 percent failure rate, a
dozen missiles would hit eight U.S. cities at night -- Washington, New
York, Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Seattle --
killing nearly everyone at ground zero, or 6.8 million people.
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- ``There may be a rare survivor, but essentially
everyone dies,'' said Dr. Ira Helfand, a co-author who estimated another
6 million to 12 million would die of radiation sickness in the following
month.
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- ``This could lead to all-out nuclear
war,'' he added. The report said billions could die worldwide.
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- The bombing would create ``a giant firestorm
with hurricane-force winds'' and boiling air temperatures, later followed
by deadly epidemics of illness and infectious diseases among refugees,
the report said.
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