- Wednesday, May 23, 1984 - North Shore Ne@y. _ NEWS photo ae Peters BIRD’S eye view of Vancouver harbor was taken from a pier near Seabord Lumber in North Van. Prof. Robert Jastrow, founder of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute, believes that the threat of nuclear holocaust is diminishing substanually. He based this notion on something more than wishful thinking. According to his calculations, the total megatonnage in both the American and Soviet nuclear arsenals has dropped dramatically in the last 24 years. He belheves it will continue to drop — to be amortized, as it were, until a point ts reached where nuclear weapons themselves will be virtually obsolete The reason? Smart warheads Increased ac curacy Computers Jastrow notes that when the Germans were raming V 2s on Brituan tour decades ago, they tigured they were doing well af a rocket hit within ten miles of its target Today's IC BMs can strike within OO yards of a target The M® missile now being tested in the US and its Soviet counterpart are ox pected ta have an accuracy of 180 yards after having travelled halfway around che world Sall, pouimitive Compared to Pershing 2) warheads this as relatively the which SIMMONS & SEALY MATTRESSES AT LOW WAREHOUSE PRICES with CONFIDENCE HOME FURNISHINGS Warvhouse Olstibution Centre OPEN TO THE PUBLIC 1075 Roosevelt Creao. (behind the Avaton) open Mon -Gat. from Gam ie 830 pre 985-5738 Strictly personal by Bob Hunter Just a wild hope? HE BEST NEWS I’ve run across in years is an article in the latest issue of Science Digest. It is quite revolutionary. have been deployed by the Americans in West Germany. The precision of the Pershing 2 marks a quantum leap in missile technology. They can come down within 25 yards of a target. The difference is that the Pershing 2 has a= smart warhead — a built-in com- puter with radar eyes and an electronic brain, capable of scanning the terrain below and matching it up with a map stored in its memory. This allows it to steer the warhead almost directly to its target during the last moments of flight. Sounds deadly and pro- vocative. Yet Jastrow. sees hope. He writes. ‘Itas one of paradoxes of our times that the remarkable accuracy of the smart warhead, apphed to nuclear Upped missiles, may lead to the virtual disappearance of these ternble weapons How so? According to Jastrow. as the accuracy of American and Soviet [CBMs has increased, their nuclear payloads have become steadi- ly smaller. Originally, the warheads tended to be enor- mous since they could only reach the approximate vicini- ty of their targets and needed a large radius of destruction to achieve their military objectives. But today’s U.S. warheads are One-seventh the size they were in 1960. The total destructive megatonnage of the American arsenal is one- quarter of the nearly 12,000 megatons it was in the 1960. Soviet nuclear warheads have decreased in size by a factor of three. Likewise, the Soviet arsenal 1s smaller, down from about 9,000 megatons to around 7,000 megatons For a Jastrow bombs military argues, are quile sirable In fact, some military experts think they deployable at all Jf used on the battlefield, they con taminate the terra and pre vent the advame of Crhoaps planner, bigger under aren't one’s own {sed oan large ptt ttc ce cee ee ee ee ee eee ‘THE NATURAL CUT toliows the tiow ot the han and is cut exactly as the Mar falls Comte and let dey cor tilow dry THE NATURAL PFRM Torwe thie Show Thee te rs ce rele eomane Thy abet as rar apreme gtd ae $35 ye ee 922- 6161 KRenalssance - NATURAL os °3 INCLUDES SMAMPOO & CONDITIONING WITH THIS AD EXPIRES * ot 228 numbers, they produce the Day After effect with its real threat of nuclear winter. A modern military task in- volves the destruction of command posts, fuel depots, ammunition dumps, missile silos. Jastrow predicts that such tasks will increasingly be assigned to smart warheads carrying very smal! nuclear charges. ‘‘Eventually,’’ he writes, ‘‘as the first genera- tion of smart warheads evolves into the second and third generations, and ac- curacies improve from dozens of yards to yards and then feet, the small nuclear weapon may give way (to an ordinary charge of TNT."’ This won’t eliminate war, but it holds out the promise of delivering the world from the threat of a nuclear holocaust. Jastrow’s argument boils down to the fact that nuclear arsenals are shrinking as ac- curacy increases, meaning that the total amount of fallout, even from an all-out exchange, would be far less than it once would have been And as the revolution in misstle technology pro- gresses, the military need for immense, dirty bombs diminishes (00 T think this is more than just a wild hope Who knows? 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