Binary code Mystery number three - стр. 20

A light built into the table lit up in front of the speaker, a man with a beard, wearing a pyramid-shaped hood, began his report.

– Gentlemen, colleagues, like-minded people, let me remind you that the Doomsday Clock shows half a minute to midnight. The position of the hands on its symbolic dial is determined by the editorial board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, which once included the creators of the first atomic bomb. Half a minute to midnight is an alarming number. There are several reasons for the current switch. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists board of directors justified its decision by the fact that the nuclear powers are modernizing and expanding their arsenal of nuclear weapons. Does this mean that nuclear war is really close at hand? If two years ago one could almost unequivocally say "no" to this question, now confidence in the unreality of such a scenario has significantly weakened. So: if there is a war tomorrow. Let's imagine that the irreparable has happened: nuclear war has started and American warheads are about to successfully reach their target. In this case, first of all, all forces will be thrown to ensure the safety of the country's leadership. After ensuring the safety of the country's leadership, qualified personnel, without whom the economy cannot function, will be evacuated. Alas, in the event of a sudden nuclear strike, the civilian population will have a hard time – the fortified bunkers will accommodate only a few people. The main measure to save the civilian population is its emergency evacuation 300 kilometers away from the epicenter of the explosion. In general, in the event of a sudden attack in urban areas, only people in fortified shelters, i.e. qualified personnel and management representatives, will be saved. If we talk about large cities, the only hope for the ordinary population remains the subway, but not all of them, but only deep subway stations.

The man thought for a moment and continued:

– The experience of detonating a nuclear bomb at the Totsk test site showed that over the next several decades, the incidence of cancer increased several times in people living in the area. This experiment shows that the use of nuclear weapons in a populated area is not an inevitable death sentence for all its inhabitants. It is important to understand that the use of an atomic bomb in a more densely populated area would, first of all, destroy buildings and people within a radius of several kilometers, but still would not make rescue measures meaningless. The only case in the history of the USSR when the methods of shielding the population from the radiation threat were actually applied is the Chernobyl disaster. The Civil Defense forces performed the evacuation scenario before the nuclear bomb explosion, and it is in it that the three-day period appears. The fact is that the activity of radionuclides formed during the explosion of a uranium charge decreases a thousand times in three days. Of course, even in case of timely evacuation a large number of human casualties cannot be avoided. Civil defense forces will start burying the bodies of the dead three days after the nuclear strike. The mass graves will be huge. According to a model compiled by British colleagues, an attack on Moscow would be carried out with 48 Trident ballistic missiles launched from submarines. The model assumes that the number of casualties in the 12 weeks after the explosion would be 4 million. The contamination of water supplies and the destruction of residential buildings will cause an increase in the incidence of all kinds of diseases, because radiation has a detrimental effect on the human immune system. In reality, the number of victims may significantly exceed the above figures.