Part 1 of 2 Parts
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) reports that they are now moving away from planning for the aftermath of small nuclear detonations in U.S. cities carried out by terrorists to planning for big nuclear detonations over sixty of the biggest U.S. cities by “state actors.” A two-day National Academy of Sciences workshop for public health officials and emergency response groups is currently being held at the NAS headquarters. This shift is at least partly because of the threat now posed by North Korea.
Luis Garcia is the chief of FEMA’s chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear branch. He recently told a reporter that their focus is on one hundred to one thousand kiloton detonations. The current nuclear detonation guidance for emergency planners was released by FEMA in 2010. These guidelines were related to one to ten kiloton blasts which would be smaller than the nuclear detonations at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of WW II. Following the attack on 9/11, it seemed reasonable to focus on nuclear attacks by terrorists which would likely be small bombs.
When N.K. tested a thermonuclear device last year that was estimated to be in the range of two hundred and fifty kilotons, planners realized that they had to start thinking in terms of big nuclear detonations over U.S. cities. Cham Dallas of the Institute for Disaster Management at the University of Georgia told the attendees at the NAS workshop, “The North Koreans have really changed the calculus. We really have to look at thermonuclear now.”
At the NAS workshop, Dallas speculated that a rough estimate of the deaths that would result from an urban detonation of a nuclear device could be derived by multiplying one hundred thousand by twice the number of megatons in the bomb. This would mean that if a one megaton device were detonated over a major city, there would be about two hundred thousand fatalities. There would also be many survivors with major burns and radiation caused illnesses.
The new guidelines will apply to the sixty largest U.S. cities. They will be based on newer detonation models developed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) . These new models include weather patterns that will direct and distort the clouds of fallout from a detonation. They also include estimates of the shelter provide by concrete buildings. A representative of LLNL said, “A 10 times larger [explosion] yield does not make things 10 times worse.” If people remain in shelters for hours or days after a detonation, there will be fewer cases of radiation sickness.
There are also other contingencies that are taken into account in the new LLNL model. There might be cyberattacks that accompany nuclear attacks. Infrastructure such as power plants or cell phone systems could be crippled. Another possibility is that a single nuclear detonation could be triggered and then blackmail messages could follow with the threat of more detonations if terms are not met. Garcia responded to an audience question that FEMA had also considered a scenario in which a nuclear bomb detonation, a cyberattack, an electromagnetic pulse and a biological weapon release all occurred at the same time somewhere in the U.S.
Please read Part 2