Total Destruction Of Buildings Near Blast Would Be Followed By Widespread Fatalities In Radioactive Fallout Over Many Miles
Even a small, primitive nuclear bomb detonated on the National Mall in Washington would inflict enormously devastating damage over a wide area, according to information presented to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.
The committee was presented both with a report co-authored by a Harvard scholar, and separately by maps of Washington showing the extent of devastation that were drawn by the University of Georgia College of Public Health.
Beyond the physical damage, there would be the destruction of first responders including police, fire and rescue, hospital and other assets across a wide area, according to the study.
The maps showed hospitals being annihilated in the blast.
While the study assumed a 1-kiloton or a 10-kiloton bomb transported to the Mall, and detonated on the ground or in a building, one would assume that a low air burst of a nuclear weapon delivered via a rogue nation missile would inflict worse devastation over a wider area, though it might involve less radioactive fallout.
By whatever means a nuclear weapon is delivered, chances are steadily worsening that the nightmare will become reality.
Ashton B. Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in Harvard University, warned that the odds of a nuclear nightmare are increasing. He co-authored the study, “The Day After: Action in the 24 Hours Following a Nuclear Blast in an American City,” with Michael M. May and former Secretary of Defense William J. Perry.
“While the probability of a nuclear weapon one day going off in a U.S. city cannot be calculated, it is almost surely larger than it was five years ago,” Carter warned the panel.
He cited the rogue nations that are conducting nuclear programs.
North Korea, he observed, “has the bomb, reflecting the greatest failure of U.S. nonproliferation policy in a generation.”
As well, “Iran bids fair to follow Pakistan’s nuclear technology, already put on the market once by Abdul Qadeer Kahn” or A.Q. Kahn, and the Pakistanian nuclear technology could wind up being sold to terrorists “if Pakistan grows unstable,” Carter said.
He didn’t detail the missile programs of North Korea and Iran in recent years, focusing instead on nuclear weapons that terrorists would smuggle into the United States.
Iran has acquired missiles of steadily longer range; tested multiple missiles in a mass salvo; launched a missile from a submerged submarine; and refused to stop processing nuclear materials. Further, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said Israel must be wiped from the map.
North Korea has launched a missile that arced over Japan. As well, North Korea has detonated a nuclear weapon underground, and is developing a Taepo Dong-2 missile that could strike the United States.
North Korea, especially, is short on cash, and analysts fear the isolated regime might sell a fully assembled atomic bomb to terrorists.
Or, Carter indicated, terrorists might steal bombs. “Russia’s arsenal remains incompletely secured 17 years after the end of the Cold War,” Carter said.
“And enrichment and reprocessing, the essential processes for producing highly enriched uranium and plutonium, respectively, could proliferate with the spread of nuclear power to generate electricity.”
In a simple mathematical calculus of calamity, Carter noted that in the past five years “terrorism has spread into a global movement,” and unfortunately more “nuclear materials that can be lost or stolen plus more terrorists aspiring to mass destruction equals a greater probability of nuclear terrorism.”
Carter made clear that even a small nuclear device would cause chaos such as the nation never has seen.
“The scale of this disaster would quickly overwhelm even the most prepared city and state governments,” he said, meaning that the federal government would have to step in, led by the Department of Homeland Security, to manage the crisis.
Further, “within a circle of about two miles in diameter — the length of the Mall here in Washington — the devastation from the blast would be near total,” he said.
Oozing out from that would be a cigar-shaped radioactive fallout a few miles long, heading downwind from the blast. This would be deadly, with “fallout … severe enough to submit people who lived there to lethal doses of radiation even if they took modest shelter,” such as hiding in a basement, he said. It would be even worse if people attempted to flee the area, and they became trapped in gridlocked traffic as radioactive fallout rained down upon them.
Longer term, people living far enough from the blast that they wouldn’t die or become sickened by radioactivity still could receive a high enough dose that their chances of contracting cancer later in life would increase perceptibly, according to Carter.
Then there will be the mental effects. Such an attack would elicit horror on a surreal scale for many people in the region. But even more, terrorists could claim to have many nuclear weapons, inciting panic in populations hundreds or thousands of miles from an attack.
While the federal government would attempt to track down the terrorists and find out which nation provided the nuclear materials or weapons to them that were used in the attack, it might not be simple for the United States then to launch a nuclear retaliation against the guilty nation, since its cooperation may be vital to discovering the identity of the terrorists, Carter noted.
A key point, he concluded, is that the federal government shouldn’t overreact with draconian measures that would destroy freedoms. At the very least, he said, any harsh measures should be put in place only with sunset provisions, so that they would have to be reviewed and approved again or go out of existence.
The Maps
According to the maps, a 1 kiloton bomb would obliterate all large office buildings in an area covering several blocks near the White House, including the White House itself.
In a surrounding block or two, 10 percent to 50 percent of people would die, and in another block or two outside that, 10 percent to 50 percent would be casualties. And in a much wider area, there would be extensive injuries from flying glass from windows blown apart by the bomb.
If the weapon involved a 10 kiloton bomb, the area of total devastation would be much larger, perhaps 10 to 15 blocks in diameter. A surrounding area extending perhaps another five blocks would see 10 percent to 50 percent fatalities, and another five blocks out would see 10 percent to 50 percent casualties.
Severe fallout downwind from the blast would blanket scores of blocks in the downtown area, and in the 10 kiloton detonation, would drift out in a blocks-wide area extending through the District of Columbia and out to the Capital Beltway. Injuries from flying glass might be seen 20 miles from the blast.
It is to prevent such a catastrophic calamity from striking any U.S. or allied city that the Missile Defense Agency is assembling a multi-layered shield against any nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction that might be delivered by enemy missiles.