By Gretchen Keiser

Speakers at Emory University during Ground Zero Week had a peculiar type of information at hand. As Tom Kayserling, a senior medical student weeks away from becoming a doctor put it: the facts are specific and the effects are unfathomable.

Kayserling stood in front of an overhead projector in a lecture hall and told how many people would probably be killed immediately if a one-megaton nuclear bomb exploded of Central City Park in Atlanta during non-working hours.

The estimate is that if one such bomb, a relatively small nuclear weapon, exploded in the air over downtown Atlanta, some 363,000 people would die and another 350,000 would be severely injured.

While scientific data and census information can pinpoint casualties, Kayserling reminded the audience that what he was trying to describe is also unfathomable because it is without precedent in human history.

A one-megaton bomb has 70 times the power of the weapon which exploded over Hiroshima in 1945, the only event to which the human imagination can compare it. The U.S. nuclear arsenal has weapons now with 20 megatons of explosive power. To explode one, Kayserling said, is the equivalent of detonating 1,400 Hiroshima-type bombs in the same place at the same time.

Not only would the destruction at Hiroshima seem limited in comparison with the destructive potential of today's nuclear weapons, but the response to such a catastrophe would be different. At Hiroshima and Nagasaki, help came from outside the cities after the atomic explosions to care for those who survived, and eventually, to rebuild the cities.

A nuclear war, with cities under attack and crippled in many places would preclude the possibility of help from outside for those who survived the attack. In addition, physicians who have studied the possibility of medical response to nuclear attack say that available facilities and skilled personnel are simply dwarfed by the magnitude of the destruction.

For example, the tens of thousands of people who would be suffering from the most severe type of burn, third-degree burns, in a major city like Atlanta after a nuclear attack would outnumber the hospital beds available to threat burn victims throughout the United States by hundreds of times.

Such pieces of information have been more available to the public in recent years as organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility and Ground Zero began a mission to inform and educate about the consequences of nuclear war. While the facts, particularly of the inability of medicine to respond to nuclear devastation, are chilling, the hope of those organizing the week is not to paralyze people with fear.

Part of the problem has been that people refuse to look at the issue of nuclear war, said Dr. Robert DeHaan, a professor of embryology at Emory Medical School Department of Anatomy who was chairman of Atlanta's Ground Zero Committee.

"The whole idea of nuclear war and of nuclear armaments is something we have tended to push in the background, that we have tended to deny," Dr. DeHaan said.

The aim of Ground Zero Week was to provide an opportunity around the country for people to begin to educate themselves so that they could participate in an informed way as national nuclear policy is formed by the government.

While Ground Zero does not promote a partisan viewpoint, Dr. DeHaan said, the organization is motivated by the belief that "nuclear arms must be eliminated from the face of the earth eventually."

Reaching that goal will involve a complex process of negotiation, he said, but he proposed several actions that could be taken now. They include the recognition that with 50,000 nuclear weapons now stockpiled, "we do not need more, as if somehow that is going to increase our security or head us in the right direction," he said.

Dr. DeHaan said the United States, Soviet Union and other nations possessing nuclear weapons should establish a mutual surveillance mechanism which would enable governments to find out whether any nuclear alert was accidentally triggered, rather than touched off by a true attack. Without some communication system, it is feared that an accidental warning could trigger retaliation and touch off a real attack.

In addition, Ground Zero Week speakers encouraged people to become informed about nuclear armaments and policy. In his own case, Dr. DeHaan said, he gradually became aware that "this was an issue different from all other issues."

"It seems reasonable to conclude that it could involve the entire human race," he said. "It is not the same as previous wars. It is for the first time the attempt to save the earth.'