A feel-good email making the rounds and posted at a number of web sites (e.g. here) by a retired US Army munitions and training expert, entitled ‘The “Real” Deal about Nuclear, Biological,
and Chemical Terrorist Attacks’ wants us to buck up and not be paralyzed by envisioning what devastation could lie in store if our terrorist enemies got hold of weapons of mass destruction. He makes a stab at blaming the media for exaggerating the dangers we face. The message has been lauded by many — and reviled by the US Army — for offering commonsense, empowering advice and reassurance about the aftermath of such an attack. Take This, Terrorist Boogeyman is the Washington Post‘s take on the issue, including the reaction from the US Army: “Retired SFC Red Thomas’s article offers some common sense advice for unprotected victims of a NBC [nuclear/biochemical] attack. However, his article doesn’t reflect the U.S. Army’s position for individual defense and contains an overwhelming amount of incorrect material. . . .”
Many have found a most useful aspects of Thomas’s article to be its reminders that a terrorist nuclear attack would be a low-yield weapon with limited destructive power and range.
The effects of a nuclear bomb are heat, blast, EMP, and radiation. If you see a bright flash of light like the sun, where the sun isn’t, fall to the ground!
The heat will be over in a second. Then there will be two blast waves, one outbound, and one on its way back. Don’t stand up to see what happened after the first wave; anything that’s going to happen will have happened in two full minutes.
These will be low yield devices and will not level whole cities. If you live through the heat, blast, and initial burst of radiation, you’ll probably live for a very very long time… These will be at the most 1 kiloton bombs; that’s the equivalent of 1,000 tons of TNT.
Here’s the real deal, flying debris and radiation will kill a lot of exposed (not all!) people within a half mile of the blast. Under perfect conditions this is about a half mile circle of death and destruction, but, when it’s done it’s done. EMP stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse and it will fry every electronic device for a good distance, it’s impossible to say what and how far but probably not over a couple of miles from ground zero is a good guess. Cars, cell phones, computers, ATMs, you name it, all will be out of order.
[He goes on to describe radiation effects, somewhat understating them IMHO.]
I was pointed to this issue by Electrolite, and PNH’s discussion there is a good starting point:
It’s an interesting issue. Thomas admits that there are errors and overgeneralizations in his original email. But his main point seems to me correct. One of the luxuries of regarding nuclear attacks as “unthinkable” is that it spares us having to think about what it would be like to be in, say, midtown Manhattan if a smallish nuclear device were detonated downtown, or in the harbor. What it would be like: it would be horrible. What would be needed immediately: lots of rational people who grasp that what’s at hand isn’t the end of the world. In such an eventuality, and let’s pray it never comes to pass, Sgt. Thomas’s common-sense attitude may turn out to have been a wholesome piece of advance planning for the imagination.
Some people always think that discussing these things amounts to an effort to play down their awfulness. It’s not. If even a small nuclear weapon (or “dirty bomb”) ever goes off in a city anywhere, it will be a ghastly calamity. It’s rational to fear such a thing. But the difference between fear and terror is specificity . Understanding the scope and likely limits of a terrorist-sponsored nuclear attack may make the difference between the unboundedness of terror and the specificity of fear.
He’s absolutely right that gristly descriptions of the effects of a nuclear attack are not in the service of inuring us to their awfulness and making them acceptable options. “Thinking the unthinkable” is not enabling but rather taking power over and countering the nuclear threat. The thrust of my work, and that of many, in the disarmament movement of the ’70’s and ’80’s was precisely to publicize in excruciating detail the biological, psychological and sociological consequences of nuclear weapons. What facilitates acquiescence to the nuclear threat has always been what Robert Jay Lifton termed “nuclear numbing,” the denial of the unprecedented terror of the effects of these weapons. And whatever graphic details drag people out of their numbed denial empowered the desperation, terror and rage giving momentum to the polity’s disarmament sentiment. That’s why reading Hersey’s Hiroshima is one of the most significant acts of conscience and courage a responsible person could do in coming to terms with the nuclear threat in the postwar period. That’s why the network broadcast of The Day After in the early ’80’s (a made-for-TV film about the aftermath of a largescale nuclear attack on the US), and the reversal on the ban on the horrific BBC documentary War Games (depicting post-nuclear Britain) were so momentous to consciousness-raising, along with such lesser measures, taken by anti-nuclear activists throughout the world, as the conference I organized as a medical student in New Haven in 1980 (with Lifton as a keynote speaker), Not Just Your Ordinary Nightmare: envisioning the effects of nuclear terror on children.
So here’s where I differ with Red Thomas. Even though it’s useful to remind people that a terrorist’s nuclear weapon smuggled into the US in a suitcase or detonated aboard a ship in a US harbor would likely be a low-yield weapon, looking at the effects in unflinching detail can empower us to face the threat realistically without defusing the terror. In many respects, terror expands to fill all the room made available for it. Indeed, I’ve commented in FmH before that part of my reaction to the WTC devastation was that I assimilated it in my mind to the nightmare of a nuclear attack on lower Manhattan. A species of the unthinkable had come to pass. A small-scale attack would have many important similarities to, as well as differences from, the massive thermonuclear devastation we forced ourselves to imagine 20-30 years ago — not the least would be the lingering and horrendous radiation effects which, as I’ve said, are Thomas’s major underestimation. The center of an attacked US city would probably be uninhabitable for years, if not decades, and we would have a generation of people not unlike the Japanese hibakusha living out a slow radiation sickness death. And a witnessing public psychologically traumatized beyond belief, no matter with what foreknowledge they had been empowered. In this sense, even after a limited attack, Khruschev’s pronouncement that “the survivors would envy the dead” might approach being true.
Thomas’s feel-good bluster that we should not let the terrorists win by giving in to irrational fears is so much whistling in the dark if the fears are not irrational. After all, they wouldn’t be terrorists if they weren’t willing — and able — to impose terror, with impunity, beyond the bounds of that to which anyone could humanly expect to be subjected. We won’t stop them from detonating a suitcase nuclear weapon by making however many loud proclamations that we’re not afraid, because they know as well as we do that it’s a bluster. Now bear in mind that I don’t make this argument to conclude that there’s nothing we can do; quite the contrary. Terror need not be paralyzing, but the denial of terror certainly is.
