Word: piel
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...this point, however, there is an extraordinary gap in the argument: Piel does not discuss the effectiveness of fall-out shelters, granted the experts' assumptions about the enemy's attack design. Instead, he denies these assumptions, and spends a great part of his article describing the nature and effects of an attack on a heavily-populated area. These are, to be sure, harrowing pages to read; but since he has already said that "no responsible official or consultant suggests that anyone can be protected against what are called the 'prompt' effects of nuclear weapons: the initial radation, heat and blast...
...Piel does call attention to an objection to shelters in areas on the perimeter of a blast which he feels--and rightly--has been neglected: the firestorm which the detonation of a bomb at the proper height can cause. As the size of the bomb increases, he points out, the fire radius increase at many times the rate at which the blast radius increases. Thus, "the 50-megaton bomb... must have a blast radius of about 13 miles, but an incendiary radius of 50; a 100-megaton bomb would have a blast radius of about 17 miles and an incendiary...
There is no defense against this firestorm, "a conflagration so huge that it must be reckoned a metereological event." Piel has the shelter advocates on two counts: not only does a firestorm-producing blast render defence of the metropolitan area impossible (the central city being the target); but if the bomb is detonated at that height, fall-out is minimized. Piel thus presents the vision of people being suffocated and cremated in backyard shelters, protecting themselves against fall-out that will never rain...
Though thoroughly argued, however, this is a minor point. Piel ought to deal with the questions raised by the experts' assumptions. But he dodges these; taking refuge in the possibility of a "counter-force plus bonus" attack, in which the enemy diverts a percentage of his missiles from military to civilian targets, or in the fact that since military targets are distributed over the whole country, both attack designs have the same effect. And both make defence impossible. But the point is that, if these possibilities are admitted, the "illusory" nature of civil defence is self-evident, and hardly requires...
Perhaps sensing the inadequacy of his argument, however, Piel descends to another level to bolster it. Here he is--for better and for worse--on more familiar ground: civil defense is an illusion because it rests on "a delicate paradox," that while its purpose is to minimize the loss of life in the event of an attack, its effect may be to increase the probability of an attack...