—Why Will Ye Die?GP10591981

(—Commentary on a TV Documentary, "The Defense of America"—by CBS.)

WE WILL BEGIN TONIGHT WITH A LOOK AT THE DEFENSE OF AMERICA. Just how well equipped is the United Stats to deal with Soviet aggression should a surprise nuclear missile attack be launched on key cities & installations within America?

"THE SOVIET UNION HAS MADE IT PLAIN that they not only believe that a nuclear war is survivable‚ they believe that it is winnable."—Reagan: "Our friends & allies feel they can no longer depend on us, no longer trust us & the Soviet Union has shown its contempt for us & how much it knows it now out-powers us militarily."

FOR 100 YEARS WE HAVE KEPT OUR ENEMIES AT BAY & fought our battles on foreign soil. We have aborted direct confrontations with our most powerful adversary, the Soviet Union. The nation is about to commit itself to the biggest defense spending in our history! (—& commit suicide!)

AND AIR FORCE MOCK-UP OF A MINUTEMAN MISSILE NOSECONE is not much taller than a couple of steamer trunks. Scientists call this MIRV (Multiple Independently-targeted Re-entry Vehicle). In plain language it is a three-headed bomb. Each of these warheads is 25 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. As this nosecone streaks through space, the warheads would drop one at a time on individual targets many miles apart.

BUT WHAT HAS THE PRESIDENT & THE PENTAGON WORRIED is that the Soviet Union now has so many MIRV missiles with warheads even bigger than these, that it might be tempted to try what is called Limited Nuclear War—war in which the Soviets would launch a surprise attack that could wipe out up to 90% of our land-based missiles & most of our bombers. This, the argument goes, would cripple our ability to retaliate & we'd be forced to surrender. We are, it is said, now vulnerable to a Soviet first-strike. (Ha! So why not now?)

"THE SOVIET UNION DOES BELIEVE THAT A NUCLEAR WAS IS POSSIBLE, IS SURVIVABLE, & IS WINNABLE BY THEM. They have the nuclear edge today to attack our silos, our nuclear weapons, & still have enough left that if we retaliated in any way with, let's say, some surviving submarine missiles or something, that they can attack our industrial centers & our population, & it has been estimated military intelligence that the casualties in such a war would be ten to one in favour of the Soviet Union."—Reagan. (How does he know?)

AMERICA'S STRATEGIC NUCLEAR FORCES ARE DIVIDED INTO THEE PARTS CALLED THE "TRIAD": Missiles buried underground; bombers which can be airborne within minutes; & missile-firing submarines which can prowl the ocean undetected. This Triad was designed so that a surprise attack could not destroy all our forces.

THIS IS THE LEAST VULNERABLE LEG OF THE TRIAD, THE SUBMARINES. One Poseidon submarine can dump as many as 100 nuclear warheads on the Soviet Union. We have 39 of these subs which can deliver about 4‚000 warheads on target. The Soviets have 62 with about 1,000 warheads. American subs are considered superior & both sides are trying to build bigger ones. Once these American subs are out to sea, & there are 25 out there all the time‚ they cannot be knocked out by a Soviet first-strike. If the Soviets did attack & destroy most of our land-based missiles & bombers‚ they would still have to take into account those 25 American subs loaded with 400 missiles, carrying 3,000 nuclear war heads. (The submarine nightmare!)

THE B-52 BOMBER IS NOW OLDER THAN SOME OF THE PILOTS WHO FLY IT! Each of these aircraft can carry up to eight nuclear warheads, but soon will be able to carry 16 long-range Cruise missiles. We have 350 B-52s which can now deliver 2,400 warheads. The Soviets have never put much emphasis on long-range bombers‚ they have 150 armed with 300 warheads. Critics argue that nuclear war would be over in the six to ten hours it would take these bombers to reach their targets!

THERE IS NO DEBATING THAT THESE LAND-BASED MISSILES that make up the third part of the Triad would be the first on target. We have 1,052 of them with 2,152 warheads‚ the biggest & most powerful & most accurate missiles in our arsenal. The Russians have put almost all their strategic eggs in the missile silos—they now have 1,400 missiles with 5‚000 warheads‚ & are still building new ones.

LT. GENERAL KELLY BERKE, CHIEF OF AIRFORCE RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT SAYS: "I have always found the hypothetical nuclear scenarios inherently implausible. I've never seen one that I thought was really likely to transpire. But on the other hand, the history of war & conflict between nations shows many instances of war starting from altogether implausible reasons."

THE DECISION TO FIRE AMERICAN MISSILES AT SOVIET TARGETS WOULD BE MADE because here in the Colorado Rockies America's electronic defenses verify that the United States was being attacked. Deep inside this granite mountain is NORAD, "The North American Aerospace Defense Command", which tracks every object approaching the United States.

NORAD IS BUILT TO SURVIVE. Yet everyone here knows that all of the steel & all of the granite could protect the command post only in the event of a near miss. A direct hit by a large nuclear warhead would turn this 100-million-year old mountain into an instant tomb!

THIS IS AMERICA'S WAITING ROOM FOR WAR! If the Soviets ever tried to wipe out our land–based missiles in a surprise attack, the first warning would appear on these consoles. Here a combined force of Americans & Canadians log every object in space, treating everything with suspicion. This is how we would react: Seconds after a Soviet missile is launched, the heat detectors in our satellites would speed the information to one of these screens.

GEN. WARREN MOORE OF NORAD: "AT THE OUTSET WE'LL HAVE AN OCCASIONAL LAUNCH, so we'll begin to look it at very quickly & the satellite will give you an indication, or a scan of where it may be going. It's looking at it & determining how much power it's got & it's trying to type the missile itself. AT the outset you're going to have something around 30 minutes warning, & by the time it traverses to the point where it reaches the radar, you have 17 minutes to go!" (—To Doomsday!)

I SUPPOSE WHAT WORRIES US IS: THERE'S SO LITTLE TIME HERE! Gen. Berke: "That worries us as well. It's 17 minutes generally before the missile's gonna hit, before the President's brought in. In half-an-hour we know that something's coming probably, but in 17 minutes we'll be able to define it more accurately. We'd like to improve our ability to present to the President the kind of data that he needs to make that decision." With 17 minutes to go, what does the President do?

UNTIL RECENT YEARS THE STRATEGY WAS TO RIDE OUT THE ATTACK, hold all the missiles in reserve & then decide how to retaliate. Concern that the land-based missiles may not survive a first-strike has led the Reagan Administration to focus new attention on another strategy—launch under attack. That is, launch some of our missiles the moment the first Soviet missiles explode, but before we know the scope of the attack.

CLEARLY LAUNCHING OUR MISSILES BY MISTAKE IS THE ULTIMATE NIGHTMARE! In one 18-month period there were 47 false alarms triggered by, amongst other things, the Soviet training launch, a failed computer chip, on another occasion a gas fire in the Siberian pipeline.

LET'S SAY THE SOVIET UNION LAUNCHES A FIRST-STRIKE, they decide to take out all 1,053 of the land-based missiles. How can you do that without destroying this country? "I think that's creditable—it sounds incredible! People think, ten million Americans, my God, how could that happen, how could I describe it? But the Soviets lost 20 million Russians in WWII & they survived." (So we lose a few million—maybe you!)

A NUCLEAR EXCHANGE TODAY COULD KILL MORE AMERICANS & RUSSIANS IN FIVE DAYS OR EVEN FIVE OURS, THAN WWII DID IN FIVE YEARS. So if we want to maintain control over such a war, we had better make sure the President lives through it. That probably means getting him out of the White House, across Washington by helicopter to Andrew's Air Force Base, where the President's get-away plane is parked to get the President out of danger, & keep him in command of our nuclear forces.

"A LOT OF PEOPLE THINK THAT ONE OF THE TACTICS THAT THE SOVIETS MIGHT USE would be essentially to decapitate the commanding control structure by killing the President & the rest of the command structure in Washington." What happens after that? "Well, I think people pretty well know that authority cascades down through the various specified civilian decision-makers to within the military structure. I think some people like to jocularly say that it would be a two-star general in "Looking Glass", a plane over Nebraska, who will make the decision.

ONCE A WEEK HE FLIES WHAT IS OFFICIALLY CALLED THE "LOOKING GLASS" PLANE, OR UNOFFICIALLY THE DOOMSDAY PLANE! His assignment is to maintain a link between the President & nuclear President & nuclear forces everywhere. If the President & his staff are wiped out or SAC headquarters is destroyed, these are some of the men who would run the war.

THERE IS ALWAYS A LOOKING GLASS PLANE IN THE AIR, a flying command post complete with code books & targeting options. But the men aboard this plane know that all the code books in the World don't begin to tell you what the effects of a limited war would be. (The Bible does! Read Rev. 18!)

WE KNOW WHAT NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS LOOK LIKE‚ but the more you talk to the people who deal with nuclear weapons, the more you realise how little we know about nuclear war. In a blast like this‚ for instance‚ an electromagnetic force more powerful than any lightning bolt is released. Communications would be disrupted for a thousand miles. Neither we nor the Soviets know whether other missiles could find their targets after the first missiles explode, & no missiles have ever been test-fired across the Earth's magnetic pole. (So where do they land?)

ONLY THE SUBMARINES THOUSANDS OF MILES FROM THE U.S. MAINLAND WOULD BE UNAFFECTED BY A SURPRISE ATTACK. But communicating with the subs, difficult under ideal conditions, might become impossible. It is for this reason that we suspected that a submarine commander might be able to fire his nuclear missiles without codes released by the President.

WE KNOW THAT LAND-BASE MISSILES & BOMBERS CANNOT BE LAUNCHED INDEPENDENTLY, they have built–in technical safeguards. But what about the submarines? It has never been admitted publicly before, but Admiral Powell Carter confirmed to us for the first time that, "Yes, a submarine commander & his crew have the capability to launch their nuclear missiles in a crisis, if they have lost communications with a command structure."

EVEN THOUGH IT WOULD TAKE THE COOPERATION OF PRACTICALLY THE ENTIRE CREW TO FIRE THE MISSILES‚ the fact remains that these men have the capability to wage a nuclear war ball all by themselves. Any Soviet planner contemplating a surprise attack must take into account that the subs would be out there. The subs might be out contact for awhile, but they would be able on their own to continue to expand the war.

WE KNOW NOW THAT OUR MISSILES ARE AIMED AT THOUSANDS OF DIFFERENT TARGETS IN THE SOVIET UNION, military installations, industrial areas & key strategic cities. If you look at a map of the United States, it isn't hard to guess which strategic Americans targets, which American cities, would be designated by the Russians for quick destruction!

OMAHA WOULD BE GROUND ZERO FOR A SOVIET MISSILE DIRECTED ON SAC HEADQUARTERS. SAC of course, is the control center for all of America's strategic nuclear forces. It is largely underground‚ three stories under, to shield it from the shock of a nuclear explosion. It was not designed to withstand a direct hit.

IN THE NEXT 53 SECONDS WE WILL SHOW YOU WHAT WOULD HAPPEN WHEN ONE 15–MEGATON NUCLEAR WEAPON EXPLODES IN FRONT OF SAC HEADQUARTERS. The blast of a 15-megaton ground burst would devastate Omaha just that quickly. The fireball would remain on the ground for 20 seconds & open a crater three-quarters of a mile across. It would then rise to a height of 80,000 feet in less than a minute‚ generating enough heat to cause second & third degree burns 16 miles away!

15-MEGATONS IS ONE THOUSAND & FIFTY HIROSHIMA EXPLOSIONS, AT THE SAME MOMENT IN THE SAME PLACE! Anybody in Omaha that made reflex glance at the fireball 35 miles away—& Omaha is only 15—would be blinded by retinal burning! There'd be thousands, tens-of-thousands of people on the side of Omaha that's closest to the SAC base with third degree burns. There would be skull fractures, there would be ruptured lungs, there would be crushing injuries of the thorax, there would be broken backs, there would be deep lacerations & hemorrhage!

EVEN AT 11 OR 12 MILES THE OVER-PRESSURES ARE GREAT ENOUGH to take an ordinary window & turn it into a thousand pieces of glass flying at 100 miles an hour, a lethal weapon for anybody inside that room! And that's not including the every high probability that with all of these fires, all of the ignition points, all of the gasoline stations & boilers & broken steamlines & so on, that a mass conflagration or firestorm would develop & simply burn all of Omaha for the next six or eight hours.

THE REASON THAT'S IMPORTANT IS THAT ANYBODY THAT WAS IN A SHELTER WOULD BE DRY-ROASTED AS IN A CREMATORIUM! The temperatures get to be 800 degree Celsius, the oxygen in the shelter is evacuated. In our limited experience of firestorms in conventional war in Hamburg & Dresden in WWII, the only people who survived were those that fled! So you have, let's be very conservative & say 200,000 seriously injured people with all of these kinds of injuries.

WE HAVE NEVER IN HUMAN HISTORY HAD 200‚000 PEOPLE SERIOUSLY INJURED AT ONE PLACE‚ at one moment with possible exceptions of Hiroshima & Nagasaki. One 15-megaton nuclear weapon exploded near Omaha would result in approximately 132‚000 deaths by fire, a million–&–a-half deaths from radiation sickness—total dead over two million in six weeks time there alone!

Q: "WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THOSE PEOPLE WHO HEARING ALL OF THIS SAY, `I don't doubt you for a moment, but if we believe that a nuclear war is unwinnable & unsurvivable, then we are defeated, & we're going to become what the Soviet Union wants, because they believe that they can win it & can survive a nuclear war!’" I don't think conflict in the World is going to end. It will end the World!

IN THE HISTORY OF MANKIND WE'VE ALWAYS THOUGHT IN TERMS OF KILLING THE ENEMY so we can survive, since we first gathered ourselves into communities. But that is not true any more. If you attempt to kill your enemy by nuclear weapons‚ you will also die!

(SO "WHY WILL YE DIE?" DEAR ONES?—BECAUSE YOU FAILED TO HEED GOD'S WARNINGS TO FLEE!—Get out now while you can! If you don't care for yourselves, why do you want your children to go through a hell like that?—Get out of America!

(GOD COMMANDS YOU!: "THOU SHALT NOT LET ANY OF THY SEED PASS THROUGH THE FIRE!" "There shall not be found among you anyone that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire!" "For when ye make your sons to pass through the fire ye pollute yourselves with all your idols!" (Lev.18:21; Deut.18:10; Eze.20:31.)

(IT IS YOUR IDOLS THAT ARE KEEPING YOU THERE! Rather cast your idols into the fire now, & flee with your children from the fire to come! My God, how can you wait any longer when it could be any day now!

(PLEASE FOR GOD'S SAKE & YOUR PRECIOUS KIDS' SAKE, FLEE NOW WHILE YOU STILL CAN! Tomorrow will be too late! "Behold, now is the day of salvation!"—2Cor.6:2. "Today if ye will hear His voice‚ harden not your hearts!" (Heb.3:7—Read it all!) Behold, I have warned you! I have delivered my soul! Your blood will not be upon my hands! God help you! In Jesus' name, amen!)