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ef our country, a good part of its power coming from Grand Coulee Dam. Picture the power used for industry, for transporta- tion, for heat and light. Picture all these phenomena going .6n in this part of the country for two years, and then picture all of this energy being concentrated in the space of a few cubic feet, and being released within a millionth or two of a second. This is the phenomenon which takes place when a thermonuclear bomb goes off. The reactions which take place during such an explosion are more intense than those which go on in the interiors of most star's, Iet alone on the surface of the earth. It would burn the eyes of an individual some 300 miles away from the point of the explosion. It would look about 100 times as bright as the sun at a distance of 100 miles from the point of the explo- sion. It would set fire to objects and char human skin over an area considerably larger than 1000 square miles. This is the effect of a single weapon which can be carried in a single missile or plane. - In addition to the blast, in addition to the fire and the heat released by such an explosion, large quantities of radioactivity are produced. We can point out that an H-bomb explosion in March, 1954, caused some 7,000 square miles to be covered by lethal quantities of radioactivity. The whole land surface of the earth, not just that now used by human beings for their living and growing of food, but all land above sea level over all the surface of the eath, could be covered by about 8,000 such explo- sions. Eight thousand weapons costing about one million dollars a piece — eight billion dollars, about onefifth of our annual military budget. This is the cost in money of enough weapons to destroy the earth’s population. In the Holifield Committee hearing (about which you will be hearng more this evening from Emil Mazey), assumptions were made about the effects of a limited nuclear war. In the words of the committee, “The attack pattern and basic assump- tions established by the subcommittee for consideration in these hearings reflected an attack against the United States on a Limited scale.” That is, the number and total megatonnage of the weapons employed were less than the potential that the enemy is capable of launching against us. In this limited, hypothetical attack only 263 nuclear weapons were used. Yet fifty million Americans were killed immediately, twenty million were seriously injured, half of the homes in the nation were made unuseable, and heavy doses of radioactivity covered vast areas of the country. , - “We are placing this kind of destructive capability at the finger tips, not only of leaders of national powers, but in the hands of small numbers of people sitting in submarines, small numbers of people flying bomber planes, small numbers of 4