ABM Dangers

Physicist Ralph Lapp was part of the Manhattan Project, and long served as a nuclear specialist for the Defense Department. In recent years, however, he has severed connections with all Government projects and thus is free to speak out on U.S. nuclear and weapons policies. Speak out he does. Last week at the University of Washington, Lapp not only criticized the U.S. decision to deploy a thin anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defense system, but also pointed out the damage the system could wreak on the very population it was intended to protect.

Calling the ABM move a political decision made to "deprive the Republicans of a defense issue," Lapp suggested that the U.S. should instead use its long-established deterrent policy to protect itself against possible ICBM attack by China in the 1970s. His proposal: a China Polaris patrol armed with high-yield nuclear weapons programmed to hit specific Chinese targets.

Spectacular Pancake. There were potential dangers, Lapp warned, in the U.S. ABM system, which will use Spartan missiles armed with one-megaton warheads to intercept incoming ICBMs high above the atmosphere and smaller, faster Sprint missiles to intercept in the atmosphere any missiles that evade the Spartans.

Lapp took strong issue with the Pentagon's Dr. Finn Larsen, who last month insisted that the population below would scarcely notice the explosions of Spartan and Sprint warheads, and that at worst humans might suffer temporary blindness if they were looking directly at the flash. Exploded 100 miles above New Brunswick, N.J., Lapp said, a one-megaton weapon would create a spectacular, incandescent fire-pancake 50 miles up so large that it would overlap both New York and Philadelphia.

If a Sprint caused an incoming ICBM to explode at an altitude of 50 miles or less, the results would be more devastating. Quoting from an AEC publication, Lapp reported that in a test of a megaton-range weapon exploded 50 miles over the Pacific in 1958, exposed rabbits had suffered retinal burns at slant distances up to 345 miles from the blast. Furthermore, the AEC document read, "it is felt that there would be some danger to human beings at distances greater than 200 miles under similar circumstances."

Lower-altitude explosions in the atmosphere would be even more disastrous, Lapp calculates. The detonation of a ten-megaton ICBM by an intercepting Sprint at an altitude of 50,000 feet would produce second-degree skin burns in people over an area as large as 2,000 sq. mi. and cause dry paper to ignite over an area of 3,000 sq. mi.

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