There have been books, movies and TV shows about the detonation of nuclear weapons in major urban centers. Much of the drama in such shows lies in how people react and cope after the attack. Now scientists are working on a huge computer simulation to try and better understand exactly how people would really react if they survived a nearby nuclear detonation.
The U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) is “…a combat support agency whose goal is to reduce the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction.” It’s parent agency is the U.S. Department of Defense. The DTRA awarded a grant of about half a million dollars to the Center for Social Complexity (CSC) last May. The CSC is located at George Mason University. The GMU is “…a specialized venue for pursuing interdisciplinary advanced research, discoveries, and inventions that support exploration and analysis of human social phenomena. The Center subscribes to the philosophy of exploiting synergistic interactions between purely theoretical and applied policy research.”
The purpose of the grant is to fund a study to develop a sophisticated computer simulation of how twenty million people would react in the first thirty days after a nuclear attack on New York City. The three-year project will follow millions of software agents as they make decisions and move around the simulated area as their needs, surroundings and social networks dictate. It is expected that most of them would stay near where they were when the bomb hit, follow emergency instructions and take care of injured people nearby.
William Kennedy, the lead researcher on the grant, said in an interview that the first step would be to do basic research and generate text descriptions on how the people, the infrastructure and the environment would be affected by the blast. Then they will begin to translate the descriptions into computer programs. His group has already created other computer models of natural disasters in similar-sized areas. They will be using an open source computer simulation program called MASON that was created at GMU for most of the modeling.
The research group is studying public responses to natural disasters in the U.S. over the past hundred years. Their model will be based on the detonation of a relatively small nuclear warhead of about ten kilotons of TNT in Manhattan. This is about the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima at the end of World War II. It is also about the size on the warheads that North Korea are testing.
The individual software agents are designed to act like people usually do in a major disaster. Their first priority is always to find and help other members of their family if they are nearby when the bomb hits. If they are at work, they will help and cooperate with people they work with. If they are in the midst of strangers, they will tend to form ad hoc “families” and work together. After the detonation, they will try to get out of their current area to find food, water and shelter.
The researchers are currently working on maps of New York City that contain infrastructure that the software agents might interact with including police stations, fire departments, government buildings, commercial establishments, road, bridges, schools, hospitals, etc. It is assumed that a small detonation at ground level will leave communication networks intact, so cell phones and land lines will be available.
Psychological effect such as fear, terror, depression, etc. will be included in the modeled behavior as well as physical injuries. Behavior will be modeled at five-minute intervals for the first few hours after the attack, then it will move on to modeling at fifteen-minute intervals. Considerable computational power will be required. The terms of the grant require that the researchers provide published papers and academic advancement of the two Ph.D candidates involved in the study.
