CIVIL DEFENSE

The preceding items contain all the data (and references) needed to check the energy balance by no more than arithmetic. Ask your 6^th grade daughter to check it on a pocket calculator, and as a reward tell her that she is doing a lot better than the Director of Cornell's Laboratory for Planetary Studies.

There are, of course, many more blunders in this scary-tale just as in ABC's Big Lie, but we hope to have shown enough to make any physics freshman throw up. If we have been harsh on Sagan, it is because he is a professor of astronomy who should be judged by different standards than butterfly student Ehrlich, dropout Lovins, or doleful ballad minstrel Jonathan Schell.

But being out of the ballpark by four orders of magnitude is a minor cosmetic blemish compared with the fraudulent pretense that America's population is defenseless once retaliation-deterrents and negotiations with murderous liars have failed. Certainly the boob tube boobs did not intend it, but there must have been some brains in those 80 million skulls that realized that this horrorama could be interpreted as an argument against deterrence by threat of retaliation, and in addition, as an argument for civil defense. There must have been some brains that asked whether it would not have been better to prepare food, shelter, medical aid and evacuation plans in time; why people in shelters survived; why so little medical aid was available (in part, because the Physicians for Social Responsibility boycott such aid as "preparing nuclear war"); why the population of Kansas City would be virtually wiped out, but most of the population of Minsk (and probably of any Swiss city, too) would survive. And there must have been some who asked whether it would not be better to use American technology for keeping Soviet missiles out rather than for doubling the slaughter on the other side.

But all of this is still in the realm of technicalities. The real Sagan stands up in a box "Something you can do" accompanying his scary-tale in Parade. Build-down, cut the defense budget, nuclear freeze, write to Reagan and Andropov.

It is all so old and tired, so very old and very tired ("Write to Mr. Chamberlain, M. Daladier, Signor Mussolini and the German Fuhrer...").

There is no need to find out about temperature drops. Nuclear war need not be fought because it can be prevented. Never in history has a nation been attacked while it had the will to resist and the clear capacity to destroy the attacker.