July 7, 2003	Monday	Jumadi-ul-Awwal 6,1424

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ISLAMABAD, July 6: Three years ago, on July 13, 2001, the Ninja Theatre in the US staged a play called “effects of nuclear war”. The drama made a lighthearted attempt, looking at death and destruction that nuclear weapons pose to civilian life.

With Indian and Pakistani armed forces standing eyeball to eyeball at the border in 2001, newspaper reports gave an impression of a serious danger that if push came to shove the two countries might have used weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), against each other, although each country was declaiming that it would certainly not be the first to strike.

But, use of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) are no laughing matter in the words of former professor emeritus and nuclear scholar Dr Inamur Rahman, who gave a talk on “effects of nuclear war and possible protective measures” at a meeting of the Scientists Club, at PARC auditorium here on Saturday.

His lecture attempted to initiate a domestic dialogue about understanding the magnitude of horror of nuclear weapons, if used anywhere. As he put it, a whole city would disappear from the face of the earth in the fraction of a second.

He said the use of only three kilo tons of TNT during World War-II killed 20 million people. Nuclear fission creates temperature equivalent to the heat of the sun, and every thing within two miles is sucked in the vacuum created by the intense heat and evaporate. “In these conditions, death will be almost certain, but it is better to die with knowledge of the mass destruction and mutilation we all face.”

“We came to this knowledge after the destruction caused at Hiroshima and Nagasaki where the first atom bomb was dropped, and there a survivor, who was two miles away, said he reached down for a woman, but her skin had already peeled off her body. He saw a man walking on the bridge evaporated, but his shadow was left behind, imprinted on the pavement because of intense radiation. Human kind cannot survive that level of radiation,” Dr Rahman said.

He said no escape was possible from the site where WMDs were dropped. However, certain precautions are possible for those who live far away from the site of the holocaust.

People living in the valleys have better chance of survival. The scientist said people living away in fall out underground shelters could survive radiation provided the walls were lined with four-inch thick steel, or had more than 12 inches thick walls, or 48-inch thick wooden walls.

“One would have to live for five to six weeks in these fallout shelters which must be stocked with sufficient food as well as water, medicines, reading and playing materials, toilet papers, and most important an air filtration plant to keep out radiation.”

Dr Rahman said people must be sensitized against symptoms such as loss of appetite, nausea, vomiting, fatigue, diarrhoea, redness and pain in the skin, confused state of mind, and unstable gait. These symptoms indicate that WMDs had their effect and then biological assistance such as blood transfusion, and bone marrow biopsy can be called for.

In reply to a question, he said in Afghanistan and Iraq, 238 varieties of uranium bullets were used and there was evidence that lungs of about eight British soldiers were affected but that did not take into account thousands of local people on whom the bullets were fired.

Dr Rahman said the journey started with the discovery of Radium by Marie Currie, but it was unfortunate that instead of using this discovery to profit mankind, scientists had turned to developing destructive weapons out of them. — Jonaid Iqbal