JF Ptak Science Books Post 2628
This title may sound overly dramatic, but it really isn't. As part of the Mutually Assured Destruction game plan there was an absolute necessity for calculating the leftovers from a nuclear exchange in order to convince the aggressor nation (which of course in 1964 would be the Soviet Union) that in spite of massive destruction the U.S. would be situated to carry out acting as a government/society/military in the post-war world. Part of figuring all of that out would entail a massive amount of bean counting for personnel, materiel, natural resources, and so on in a nearly endless list of stuff that runs the U.S., and then figuring out where it all was, and how it would/could be affected by a nuclear strike at XX locations, and that with different yields, and weather patterns, and so on, on into the night, of how a nuclear attack of x-capacity would affect the tactical and strategic and social base of the U.S. So you'd have to gather all of that data, and then lay it all on in XX scenarios that would all be played out in computer simulations.
And that is what this interview is all about--explained on the radio to a general listening audience by Joseph Coker, who was at the time chief of the NREC (the National Resource Evaluation Center). All of this made its own crazy sense, and all of it had to be done, running both towards and away from the black hole that did and didn't exist.
Notes
UNIVAC, Division of Sperry Rand Corporation, INSIGHT: Mr. William Hines, Science Editor, Washington Star, (and) Mr. Joseph Coker, Director, National Science Evaluation Center, Office of Emergency Planning, as Broadcast on Radio Station WGMS, Washington, D.C., April 13, 1964. 11x8.5", cover, 6pp.
Joseph Coker, chief of the National resource Evaluation Center, Office of Emergency Planning, Executive off of the President, who served in the U.S. Navy on the US Strategic Bombing Survey Ships' Bombardment section, and who later became a leading official in the U.S. Atomic Preparedness programs (such as the President's Committee on Emergency Preparedness).
William Hines (1917-2005), Washington Star and Chicago Sun-Times, and a pioneering NASA reporter. (Chicago Tribune, http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2005-03-07/news/0503070252_1_chicago-sun-times-nasa-mr-hines)
The rest of the document was scanned in black and white:
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