Clinton Admin Experts Re Nuclear Aftermath

[johnkarls]

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
The New York Times

After the Bomb
By WILLIAM J. PERRY, ASHTON B. CARTER and MICHAEL M. MAY
Published: June 12, 2007

THE probability of a nuclear weapon one day going off in an American city cannot be calculated, but it is larger than it was five years ago. Potential sources of bombs or the fissile materials to make them have proliferated in North Korea and Iran. Russia’s arsenal remains incompletely secured 15 years after the end of the Soviet Union. And Pakistan’s nuclear technology, already put on the market once by Abdul Qadeer Khan, could go to terrorists if the president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, cannot control radicals in that country.

In the same period, terrorism has surged into a mass global movement and seems to gather strength daily as extremism spills out of Iraq into the rest of the Middle East, Asia, Europe and even the Americas. More nuclear materials that can be lost or stolen plus more terrorists aspiring to mass destruction equals a greater chance of nuclear terrorism.

Former Senator Sam Nunn in 2005 framed the need for Washington to do better at changing this math with a provocative question: On the day after a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, “what would we wish we had done to prevent it?” But in view of the increased risk we now face, it is time to add a second question to Mr. Nunn’s: What will we actually do on the day after? That is, what actions should our government take?

It turns out that much could be done to save lives and ensure that civilization endures in such terrible circumstances. After all, the underlying equation would remain a few terrorists acting against all the rest of us, and even nuclear weapons need not undermine our strong societies if we prepare to act together sensibly. Sadly, it is time to consider such contingency planning.

First and foremost, the scale of disaster would quickly overwhelm even the most prepared city and state governments. To avoid repeating the Hurricane Katrina fiasco on a much larger scale, Washington must stop pretending that its role would be to support local responders. State and local governments — though their actions to save lives and avoid panic in the first hours would be essential — must abandon the pretense that they could remain in charge. The federal government, led by the Department of Homeland Security, should plan to quickly step in and take full responsibility and devote all its resources, including those of the Department of Defense, to the crisis.

Only the federal government could help the country deal rationally with the problem of radiation, which is unique to nuclear terrorism and uniquely frightening to most people. For those within a two-mile-wide circle around a Hiroshima-sized detonation (in Washington, that diameter is the length of the Mall; in New York, three-fourths the length of Central Park; in most cities, the downtown area) or just downwind, little could be done. People in this zone who were not killed by the blast itself, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them, would get radiation sickness, and many would die.

But most of a city’s residents, being farther away, would have more choices. What should they do as they watch a cloud of radioactive debris rise and float downwind like the dust from the twin towers on 9/11? Those lucky enough to be upwind could remain in their homes if they knew which way the fallout plume was blowing. (The federal government has the ability to determine that and to quickly broadcast the information.) But for those downwind and more than a few miles from ground zero, the best move would be to shelter in a basement for three days or so and only then leave the area.

This is a hard truth to absorb, since we all would have a strong instinct to flee. But walking toward the suburbs or sitting in long traffic jams would directly expose people to radiation, which would be the most intense on the day after the bomb went off. After that, the amount would drop off day by day (one-third as strong after three days, one-fifth as strong after five days, and so on), because of the natural decay of the radioactive components of the fallout.

*****
William J. Perry, a professor at Stanford, and Ashton B. Carter, a professor at Harvard, were, respectively, the secretary and an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton administration. Michael M. May, also a professor at Stanford, is a former director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.