Since the fall of Nicaragua’s President Anastacio Somoza Debayle in 1979, "millions of Nicaraguans died defending their nationalistic cause," pontificates Mr. Darwin B. Buenaventura (Malaya, Apr. 20).

When Mr. Buenaventura says, "millions," I presume he means at least 2 million people. If so, Mr. Buenaventura obviously does not know what he talking about.

The population of Nicaragua was estimated at 2.5 million in 1980. If Mr. Buenaventura is correct, fully 80 per cent of all men, women and children in Nicaragua must have been killed since then.

In any war, the number of those wounded is anywhere between two to six times the number of people killed. If Mr. Buenaventura is right anywhere between 5 to 15 million Nicaraguans must have been wounded. But this is patently ridiculous since there are only 2.5 million Nicaraguans in 1980.

Even if we make the ridiculous assumption that several atomic bombs had been dropped on Nicaragua, we couldn’t get the casualty figures Mr. Buenaventura believes as gospel. Around 100,000 died in Hiroshima and slightly fewer in Nagasaki -- and these were densely-populated cities. Nicaragua, on the other hand, is most sparsely-populated county in Central America, with it’s 2.5 million people occupying an area about the size of Luzon, with Mindoro, Catanduanes, and Masbate thrown in.

One last datum to demonstrate the ridiculousness of Mr. Buenaventura’s claim: the number of American casualties in World War II was 1,076,245. These are casualties, not deaths. The number of deaths inaction was 291,557; there were 113,842 other deaths. The United States put 16,112,566 men in uniform -- which means that 1 out of every 16 soldiers was a casualty. I cannot see how one can have "millions" of deaths in the light of the 1983 military figures for Nicaragua 48,800 men in the armed forces and 50,000 in the reserves (25,000 on duty in the army), plus 4,000 the border guard and 30,000 in the civilian militia.

Mr. Buenaventura would have us believe that the war in Nicaragua is being fought with a fury several orders of magnitude greater than that of World War II.

Finally, I am curious about how Mr. Buenaventura will explain how the population of Nicaragua could have increased from 2.5 million in 1980 to 2.8 million in 1983. No human population could register a 300,000 increase in five years from a base of 2.5 million while sustaining at least 2 million deaths, Amoebas, yes, but not human beings.

Mr. Buenaventura says that these are "facts and evidence I had studied at U. P." As an alumnus of the University of the Philippines myself, I join Dean Armando J. Malay in bewailing the precipitous drop in academic standards represented by a student like Mr. Buenaventura and the faculty members churning out students like him.

GIL GONZALES de AVILA