Texan_Til_I_Die
07-01-2005, 02:01 PM
WASHINGTON — What if we fail to prevent an attack? Assume every line of defense against nuclear terrorism is breached: the efforts to lock up nuclear material abroad, to spy out hidden weapons programs, to deter rogue states and capture terrorists, to detect smuggled bombs at the border or downtown — every preventive measure. Assume someone, somehow, gets all the way through. It only has to happen once.
Assume that this someone puts together a crude atomic bomb, of
the "Little Boy" type dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, a heavy and
awkward device but one still small enough to fit into a medium-size
truck.
Assume that of all the potential targets in the world, from Los
Angeles to Moscow, the spot where this someone parks the bomb is on
Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the U.S.
Capitol.
Assume the bomb goes off. Now what?
The First Minutes: 15,000 Dead
At zero hour, the conventional explosives in the bomb go off. They
launch a slug of highly enriched uranium down a surplus artillery
tube toward another, larger, but still less-than-critical mass of
uranium. As the two come close, the radiation each emits destabilizes
atoms in the other, which causes those atoms to split, which emits
more radiation, which splits more atoms, which emit more radiation —
a nuclear chain reaction. If the bomb makers botched their
calculations, the energy released blows the uranium slugs apart too
early — a 1-kiloton fizzle, still as powerful as 1,000 tons of TNT,
occurs. If the bomb makers got it right, the two uranium masses slam
together with sufficient force to reach supercritical mass for a
fraction of a second. Depending on the details of the bomb's design,
the resulting explosion has the force of 12,000 to 18,000 tons of
TNT — 12 to 18 kilotons.
Parked midway between the White House and the Capitol, the bomb is
right in front of the National Archives at 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW,
where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are
displayed. The Archives is vaporized. The dust that was the
building, the documents, the pavement outside, the Navy Memorial
across the street, the bodies — all now highly radioactive — shoots
five miles up in the air. Remember that dust: It will start coming
back down as "fallout" in about 15 minutes.
In the first second, the blast flattens the Justice Department and
the FBI's headquarters, one block west of the Archives, and the
Federal Trade Commission, one block east. The offices of the Internal
Revenue Service — less than a quarter-mile west from ground zero —
and both wings of the National Gallery of Art — within half a mile
southeast — collapse. Northward, the shock wave plows through blocks
of office buildings to smash in the southern end of the new
Convention Center; southward, it blows through the Museum of Natural
History, then races over the Mall — and the tourists on it — to
destroy the Smithsonian Castle — 0.41 miles — and damage the Energy
Department — at 0.49 miles distant — which oversees the U.S. nuclear
programs.
The force of the blast is fading at this range, and as it uses up
some of its energy in plowing through one massive building after
another. But those same structures are channeling the force of the
explosion up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, toward the White House and
the Capitol.
The ground-level detonation of a 12-kiloton bomb, the lowest
estimated yield for the Hiroshima bomb, produces 5 pounds of pressure
per square inch — enough to flatten houses and smash up reinforced
concrete or monumental stone buildings — at a distance of about 3,400
feet from ground zero. A 15-kiloton bomb, the middle estimate,
produces such force at about 3,700 feet; an 18-kiloton bomb, the
extreme high end, at about 3,900 feet. From the midpoint of
Pennsylvania Avenue to the center of either the White House or the
Capitol is just over 4,000 feet. The Founding Fathers' obsession with
the separation of powers, made physical in L'Enfant's design for the
federal city, puts the seats of the executive and legislative
branches a mile and a half apart — by happenstance, just far enough
that no single Hiroshima-style device can wreck them both.
Both buildings are badly damaged, however. The White House, low to
the ground, partially shielded by the Treasury, and rebuilt with
reinforced concrete by President Truman, sustains less damage than
the sandstone-and-marble Capitol, exposed high on its hill. But even
on the far side of each structure from ground zero, doors blow in,
windows explode in showers of glass, walls crack. In rooms
overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, the clothing and skin of victims
burn. But these two citadels of democracy stand.
Beyond the Capitol and the White House, the shock wave drops off. How
fast? Hard to tell. No one has ever set off a nuclear weapon at
ground level in a city: U.S. bombers detonated the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombs nearly 2,000 feet up in the air to ensure maximum
destruction unimpeded by obstacles on the ground. Naval Postgraduate
School professor Robert Harney calculates that in the densest cities —
like Manhattan with its skyscrapers — exploding the device at ground
level might cut the radius of destruction by roughly half, compared
with a ground burst on a perfectly flat plain; by one-third,
estimates the RAND think tank; by a few percent, caution government
experts speaking anonymously.
Assume, though, that all the urban uncertainties damp the blast force
down to that of a 10-kiloton bomb on an open plain. Almost every
building within a half-mile of ground zero collapses onto its
occupants. Wood and brick structures collapse, and reinforced
concrete or monumental stone structures take heavy damage, at up to
two-thirds of a mile, just short of the White House and Capitol. A
mile or so away — around Capitol Hill, Farragut Square, and Mount
Vernon Square — houses are damaged but mainly still standing, which
means most of their occupants survive. Two or three miles away,
windows shatter violently from Adams Morgan to Arlington. People who
happen to be looking straight at the flash are blinded — most of them
temporarily — at 13 or 14 miles out. Hundreds of drivers crash.
According to estimates in the Department of Homeland Security's
unpublished National Planning Scenario No. 1, nearly 15,000 people
are dead — 95 percent of them within that lethal half-mile of ground
zero — and another 15,000 are injured.
All of this takes less than 15 seconds.
As minutes pass, the electrical power grid reels from the sudden loss
of every substation downtown and a surge of electromagnetic pulse up
power lines. Fuses blow and safeties trip in "many states," National
Planning Scenario No. 1 guesstimates. Well into West Virginia,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, all the lights go out.
And then, across the region, the emergency generators kick in at
firehouses, police stations, local emergency operations centers,
major hospitals, and military bases. Broken windows aside, the
Pentagon remains intact. So does Fort McNair, home to the military's
local homeland defense command, Joint Force Headquarters-National
Capital Region. Said Army Col. James Bartran, JFHQ-NCR's operations
chief, "This area has more capability for responding than anywhere
else in the nation; that's here and ready." Totally outside the blast
zone are Andrews Air Force Base, Bolling Air Force Base, Fort
Belvoir, the hospitals at Walter Reed and Bethesda, and even Reagan
National Airport. So, too, are the fire, police, and medical services
of Alexandria and Arlington and Fairfax counties in Virginia, of
Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland, and even
District of Columbia responders in the northern and eastern portions
of the city.
Hundreds of miles above Washington, military satellites are measuring
the explosion and the mushroom cloud. Data fill the screens at
Colorado Springs, home of U.S. Northern Command. At Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Los Alamos and
Sandia laboratories in New Mexico, nuclear weapons scientists turn
from the TV news to start software that predicts the fallout path.
And at the Homeland Security Department's alternative command post
outside Washington — location undisclosed — dazed functionaries
mechanically punch through checklists to assemble an Interagency
Incident Management Group. They call agency after agency, backup
number after backup number, until they get the military people and
the scientists and the emergency managers and the local responders
all talking to each other.
The country is already starting to move. So is the fallout. Now
everything depends on time.
The First Hours: Your Instincts Can Kill You
Everyone for miles has seen the flash. Everyone can guess what's
happened. Everyone knows the obvious things to do. And most everyone
is wrong.
Checking CNN won't work: The power's out.
Picking up the phone won't work: Even if the attack didn't crash the
network, everyone's calls to 911 or to their family will.
Jumping into your car won't work: A few hundred thousand people just
had the same idea — imagine rush hour, only with most stoplights out
and the streets downtown blocked by rubble.
Even professional lifesavers have to fight their instincts. Rushing
to the rescue won't work: More than 15,000 people are injured —
that's more than all the firefighters — paid and volunteer combined —
and hospital beds in the D.C. area. Besides, most victims are trapped
inside several square miles of burning, collapsed, or tottering
buildings, with the streets to reach them gridlocked.
And while people are fighting traffic, either to flee ground zero or
to get there to help, the fallout is starting to come down.
Everyone's first reaction is wrong because the problem is not, in
fact, the nuclear blast. If at this point you're still alive and
uninjured — and after a Hiroshima-sized explosion at ground level, 99
percent of the people in the D.C. area are — then your real problem
is the radioactive dust that the blast threw into the air. According
to the estimates in National Planning Scenario No. 1, an explosion
that kills 15,000 people outright could eventually expose 200,000
people to lethal doses of radiation if they stay exposed and
unprotected in the fallout path for 24 hours. Sitting downwind in
gridlock, with your vehicle's windshield shattered, goes a long way
toward giving you a lethal dose. All sorts of simple alternatives —
moving away from downwind, seeking proper shelter, even taking a
shower — go a long way toward saving you.
Fallout is simply radioactive dust, launched miles into the air in a
mushroom cloud and then carried on the wind. Much of it is alpha
particles, whose radiation cannot penetrate bare skin, or beta
particles, which cannot penetrate layers of clothing. Both are most
dangerous if inhaled — or if they settle on food that is eaten
unwashed. More deadly are the gamma rays, whose radiation can go
through walls. But even gammas cannot hurt you from cloud height. The
danger starts when the dust settles to earth.
The ideal is to avoid the fallout in the first place. In apocalyptic
gridlock, you cannot drive very far. But you may not have to. Normal
winds blow the cloud into a long but narrow plume, just a few miles
across. In typical Washington-area weather, Virginia, Montgomery
County in Maryland, and most of the District itself are not in the
fallout path at all. People in the path could conceivably walk out of
the fallout zone in the 10 or 15 minutes before the dust begins to
fall — if they know which way to go.
But, of course, you cannot count on perfectly typical weather. The
wind might shift; the breeze you feel at ground level may be blowing
crosswise to the radioactive clouds five miles up; a still day might
cause the fallout to seep outward slowly in all directions; sudden
rain or snow could wash the dust out of the sky, heavily dousing
everything beneath the storm but sparing areas farther out.
If you do not want to trust in weather and traffic, the alternative
is what the experts call "sheltering in place." You want to be in a
building, as solid as possible to block the gamma rays, as airtight
as possible to keep out radioactive dust. You need to turn off air
conditioning, close vents, seal the seams around windows and
doorways. If you wondered what former Homeland Security Secretary Tom
Ridge was talking about, this is what you need the duct tape for.
Abandon rooms with windows broken by the blast.
The dust that does not seep into the building will settle outside, on
the roof and on the ground, emitting gamma rays. A car with an intact
windshield stops 30 to 50 percent of the radiation — probably not
enough, however, to save someone who's inside the car and stuck in
traffic a few miles downwind of ground zero. A wood-frame house,
similarly, stops just 30 to 60 percent of gamma rays. A windowless
basement stops 90 percent. The middle floors of a concrete
apartment building, safely away from both roof and ground, stop 99
percent or more. But there is no 100 percent protection.
For those whom evacuation and shelter fail — or for those, like the
thousands fleeing in blind panic, who never try either — there is
still decontamination. A lethal dose of radiation takes time to
build. The sooner the radioactive dust is off the skin, the better.
And it is not that hard to remove. "Radiation contamination is
easier than chemical," said Col. David Jarrett, a medical doctor and
the director of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in
Bethesda. "Simply removing the clothes and washing takes off up to 90
percent."
Every major Washington-area hospital has some decontamination
facilities, but 10,000 radiation patients in one day would swamp
them. So mass decontamination falls to fire departments, with their
mobile pumps and generators; their protective gear; their hazardous-
materials experience; and, because both Maryland and Virginia have
nuclear power reactors, their years of radiation training. Area
firefighters can quickly set up special decontamination tents, and
they have plans to take over buildings that have lots of showers — so
high school gyms, for example, are a good place to head for. In the
chaos of those first hours, said Michael Cline, state coordinator at
the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, "the real key is to
make sure people go to those facilities." It will take every
firefighter available to man the decontamination sites, and every cop
to control the crowds pouring in panic out of the city.
So who goes in to save the wounded? Even if first responders can get
downtown in time to save blast victims, they still have to get back
out before radiation claims both rescued and rescuer alike. Breathing
masks keep alpha particles out of the lungs, protective clothes keep
betas off the skin, but nothing light enough to wear can keep out
gammas. Responders have radiation sensors, modeling software, and
Energy or Defense Department analysts on call to map the radiation
plume, plus dosimeters to measure their own exposure. Existing safety
standards, written for nuclear power plant accidents, mandate "turn-
back limits" on lifesaving runs into the fallout zone.
"Responders are going to have to assess risk relative to lives
saved," said Fairfax County Fire Chief Michael Neuhard. "It may well
be that you are committed largely to decontamination, to treating
people on the periphery." Tens of thousands of people fleeing the
city could be saved by decontamination. Tens of thousands of others
downwind will need help evacuating or finding shelter. Sending rescue
workers into the fallout zone will probably cost more lives than it
will save.
"We need people to be able to take care of themselves for 72 hours,"
said Lara Shane, director of public education for the Homeland
Security Department. For any disaster, from nuke to hurricane, DHS
advises stockpiling a three-day supply of food and water, a
flashlight, and a radio — a battery-powered radio. The power is out;
most stations are off the air. But government transmitters and a few
private channels will be broadcasting on backup generators. And
everything and everyone, from satellites to Energy Department survey
planes to local firefighters, are trying to track the fallout plume.
At some point — in minutes with good planning, in hours without it —
those little battery-powered radios will come alive with urgent
bulletins: where the cloud is drifting, what areas should evacuate,
what roads are open, and where people can find shelter or
decontamination sites.
And all this time, the radiation that keeps the helpers out of
downtown, and the victims in it, is fading. By the physicists' rule
of thumb, 90 percent is gone in seven hours, 99 percent in seven
times seven — that is, 49 — hours, or two days; and 99.9 percent in
seven times seven times seven hours, or two weeks: the civil
defense "all-clear" standard from the Cold War.
The First Days: Nation in Motion
Find a small pond. Throw a big rock in it. Now watch the ripple
effect.
That, in essence, is the United States after a nuclear terrorist
attack. In the early hours, disaster and response alike are local,
limited by wind speed and gridlocked highways. In days, the effects
convulse the entire country.
With perfectly average weather — a big assumption — the fallout
spreads to the east and north along a path 200 miles long and 25
miles wide, drifting out to sea north of Atlantic City, before its
radioactivity fades below the National Response Plan's threshold for
increased risk of cancer — 1 rem, which is one-fifth of the
acceptable annual dose for nuclear power workers; the rem is the
standard unit of measurement for human exposure to radioactivity.
Real-world uncertainty about shifts in the wind keeps millions of
people on alert to evacuate or take shelter, anxiously following
broadcast bulletins as if awaiting a particularly violent hurricane —
but without the years of planning that guide Gulf Coast evacuations.
Local governments, the Red Cross, and the National Guard struggle to
control, feed, shelter, and in some cases decontaminate what National
Planning Scenario No. 1 guesstimates to be half a million displaced
people. With local hospitals overflowing or contaminated, thousands
of patients are shipped out across the country — the less sick they
are, the farther they go — to military, veterans, and private medical
centers activated under the National Disaster Medical System.
As victims ripple outward from the fallout zone, rescuers are
converging inward. The first responders are reeling now. Many are
dosed with radiation despite taking precautions, most are using
contaminated equipment. All are exhausted from working nonstop shifts
wearing heavy protective gear. But as the front line crumbles,
reinforcements from the next ring of counties step forward, and from
the next county after that, and then the next state, and the next.
"What you have kicking in is something called statewide mutual aid,"
said Arlington Fire Chief James Schwartz, who commanded units from
four counties at the Pentagon on 9/11. "As Arlington has depleted its
capability helping the District, its emergency management system
would contact the state: You could see units from Fredericksburg or
Richmond coming into Northern Virginia." A parallel system exists in
Maryland. Nationwide, the District and every state but California
and Hawaii are party to the Emergency Management Assistance Compact,
which provides databases and advance teams to match what disaster-
struck states request with what unaffected states can offer. Federal
resources, civilian and military, rally under the National Response
Plan.
Across the country, firefighters, paramedics, police, soldiers, and
volunteers are loading up their trucks and rolling toward Washington.
The resources the nation can mobilize are staggering. The United
States has more than 155,000 emergency medical technicians, 600,000
police and sheriff's deputies, a million firefighters, 1.6 million
active-duty military troops, and 1.1 million in the Reserves and
National Guard. Taking just 10 percent of those people from their
regular duties equals a midsized city of rescuers. The Red Cross
alone mustered nearly 55,000 volunteers for 9/11. And in this sea of
numbers are countless islands of specialized capabilities. Washington-
area jurisdictions have mobile communications vans and generators.
Virginia alone has 13 state-sponsored hazardous-materials teams with
radiation-monitoring equipment.
The Energy Department has several airplanes and helicopters equipped
to monitor fallout from the air, and rapidly deployable teams of
nuclear scientists. The Homeland Security Department controls a
Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies prepacked to be
moved by air. And the military has all of this and more: mobile
hospitals, hazard-suited rescue units, radiation sensors, mobile
water purification, warehouses full of Meals Ready to Eat, and the
trucks, planes, and helicopters to transport them around the world.
In a few days, just as the radiation ebbs, all this aid flows in.
The greatest challenge, in fact, is not getting the resources but
coordinating them. At the World Trade Center on 9/11 — one incident
in one jurisdiction — firefighters and police had neither radios nor
procedures designed to work together. The Pentagon response that day
was smoother, with four neighboring jurisdictions reinforcing
Arlington's Fire Chief Schwartz. And "since Sept. 11, we've really
made a concerted effort on interoperability," said Scott Graham, a
battalion chief in Montgomery County. "Communications within the
region have improved greatly."
But even now, Washington-area agencies sometimes have to physically
swap radios to talk on each other's networks. And nationwide, no
common channel, no standard protocol links either local governments
or federal agencies.
The nation has, at least, adopted a common framework that organizes
all of these assets. Under the Incident Command System — developed by
local firefighters, endorsed by Homeland Security, and being taught
to federal civilians and the military alike — the local government of
the stricken area has command. Units from neighboring jurisdictions
answer requests from the local chief. So do the federal agencies —
from Energy to Health and Human Services to the Environmental
Protection Agency to Defense. They are grouped according to 15
functions by the National Response Plan, and all of them are, in
theory, coordinated by a "principal federal official" named by the
secretary of Homeland Security. "Issues beyond the secretary's
authority to resolve," the National Response Plan says
unhelpfully, "are referred to the appropriate White House entity for
resolution."
How well this structure comes together after a nuclear explosion is
unknown. "Many times, in national exercises," said Red Cross
Executive Vice President Alan McCurry, "we stop before we get to this
part."
The First Weeks: Thousands Fall Ill
By the 14th day after the attack, power should be back on across most
of the area. Radiation levels fall to a thousandth of their peak.
Rescue workers from across the country are in place and, one hopes,
organized. But now, depending on how well sheltering, evacuation, and
decontamination went in the first hours after the attack, tens of
thousands of exposed people start to die.
"Most of the deaths occur at two-to-four weeks after the incident,"
said Col. Jarrett, citing studies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and nuclear
power accidents. Victims will start vomiting a few hours after
exposure, but then they enter a latent phase: "They have a couple of
weeks before they start becoming clinically ill, and they can be
moved to treatment centers across the country, not as patients, but
as passengers," said Jarrett. The bad news is, there is no cure for
radiation sickness — not yet, anyway.
Radiation sickness is strange and slow. A high enough dose of
radiation can kill in hours, but anyone close enough to get that much
is probably dead from the explosion. The less intense energy of the
fallout bombards the body and breaks random bits of DNA. Until the
cells can repair their genetic code, they cannot divide to make new
cells. That's it: "All that radiation does is stop cells from
dividing," said Evan Douple, a health physicist with the National
Academy of Sciences. "It doesn't kill them."
But a few tissues have such high wear and tear that they need new
cells constantly. The most obvious, and least essential, is the hair
follicles, which explains why cancer patients lose their hair during
radiation therapy. Another one is the lining of the digestive tract.
At a dose of 1,000 rems or more — 200 times the maximum permitted for
nuclear reactor workers in a year, the lining stops regrowing. In
seven to 10 days, the lining wears right through, causing infection
and internal bleeding. At a dose of a few hundred rems, the bone
marrow stops replenishing white blood cells for the immune system and
platelets for clotting. After a few weeks, minor injuries continue to
bleed and infections fester unchecked.
Specialized treatments do exist. The best known is potassium iodide,
stockpiled for the population around nuclear power plants and sold on
survivalist Web sites as "antiradiation pills." Atomic reactions
produce radioactive iodide, which accumulates in the thyroid gland,
particularly in growing children, eventually causing cancer. Flooding
the body with good iodide keeps out the bad. Unfortunately, it does
nothing about the dozens of other radioactive isotopes in the fallout
from an atomic bomb, which will kill you long before you can develop
cancer.
The National Stockpile also includes chelating agents — most famously
a substance known as "Prussian blue" for its normal use, as a dye —
which chemically bind with certain types of radioactive particles
inhaled from the fallout cloud and flush them from the body. Scarce
and expensive, chelators still do nothing to reverse the damage done
before you take them.
Once the immune system is compromised, the only treatment available
today is intensive care: infusions of antibiotics to control
infection, platelets to control bleeding, and, at the cutting edge,
hormonal growth factors to jumpstart the recovery of bone marrow.
This regime has saved victims of radiation accidents — if started
promptly, under a doctor's supervision, in a fully equipped hospital.
There is no way to provide that standard of care for tens of
thousands of victims.
The government has ramped up its research into the next generation of
growth factors, which would regenerate bone marrow without the
traditional panoply of other treatments. The Armed Forces
Radiobiology Research Institute sees the most promise so far in a
steroid called 5-Androstenediol, brand-named "Neumune" by the
institute's corporate development partner, Hollis-Eden
Pharmaceuticals. Neumune requires no refrigeration, has no known side
effects, and can be packaged in disposable needles like the nerve gas
antidotes now issued to troops and first responders. Five injections
over five days dramatically boost survival rates in animals.
So far, unfortunately, that first injection has to be given within
four hours of exposure, before the damage to cells outraces the
capacity for regrowth. But it is probably impossible to distribute
tens of thousands of stockpiled doses across a fallout zone within
four hours; and Hollis-Eden's own cost estimates for mass production
are $75 to $100 per person: too high to put Neumune in every
citizen's emergency kit. The current cost and the four-hour window
wouldn't impede first responders, however. With Neumune in their
gear, they could be far bolder in fallout-zone rescue operations.
Long-Term Costs
The high toll of a nuclear attack continues long after the fires die
down. In the worst case — no one gets to shelter, no one evacuates,
no one is decontaminated — National Planning Scenario No. 1 estimates
that radiation-damaged DNA will manifest, eventually, as 50,000 cases
of cancer, half of them fatal. People keep dying for decades.
The scenario does not even guess the economic cost. Abt Associates, a
research and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., estimates $150
billion to $3 trillion for the loss of life alone, plus up to $500
billion in property damage. The indirect disruptions ripple
unpredictably through the world economy. Just closing the highways
and rail lines through Washington costs shippers $5 billion a week.
And in contrast to the swift federal response to stabilize the
financial markets after 9/11, the Treasury and other key agencies may
be too badly damaged and decimated to intervene quickly. "If there's
a long gap between the attack and the ability of the federal
government to start running in a normal way," said Goldman Sachs Vice
Chairman Robert Hormats, "that has a very serious economic impact,
psychologically in particular."
How long before the seat of government is restored — if it is
restored? "When you go back depends on what standards you use," said
Thomas Cochran, a physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The traditional approach to cleanup is to demolish badly contaminated
buildings, which would include the White House and the Capitol, scrub
every surface of the rest, then dig up the top few inches of asphalt
and soil and cart all of it away, if anywhere will take it. Meeting
the EPA standard for public safety — no more than 15 millirem of
radiation exposure per year — would cost trillions of dollars for a
midsized city, according to a study led by Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory researcher Barbara Reichmuth. But the cost drops by half
or more when the acceptable threshold is raised to 100 or, better,
500 millirem, which is still just 10 percent of the 5-rem level
approved for nuclear reactor workers. The nation may well develop a
new tolerance for radiation hazards.
Overall, though, it is impossible to calculate the total cost of a
nuclear attack on Washington, because that cost depends on what is
done in the first hours, days, and weeks after the attack, which in
turn depends on what is done in the years before. If fallout places
hundreds of thousands of people at lethal risk, then improving the
response by just 1 percent saves thousands of lives. Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, for example, has proposed running
computer models of various combinations of nuclear yield and weather
conditions for selected cities, providing baseline scenarios for
planners. That data might allow radio announcements about shelters
and evacuation to air a few crucial minutes faster. So might more
drills, better communications, or a clearer chain of command.
The odds of a nuclear attack are low. But experts say the huge
potential cost of such an attack merits more preparation. And such
preparation would save lives in more-likely disasters. Research into
drugs to heal irradiated bone marrow could spin off into treatments
for immune disorders such as AIDS. Predictive models, decontamination
gear, and public-warning systems for nuclear fallout would be useful
in a reactor leak, a nerve gas attack, or an ordinary chemical spill.
More hospital beds would help with outbreaks of anthrax, smallpox, or
avian flu. Compatible radios and common training for emergency
responders would make a difference every time a cop or firefighter
responded to a call across the county line. A battery-powered radio
would be handy anytime the lights went out. In the worst-case nuclear
disaster, these everyday defenses would matter that much more. It
might be wise to think how best to use them.
"It's not good enough anymore to plan to do these plans," said
Shelley Hearne, director of the Trust for America's Health, a
nonpartisan group that advocates building a strong public health
infrastructure. "Everyone hates this conversation; but I get even
madder when I see how little we deal with it. There are things we can
do, and do well — and it's OK to talk about it."
Assume that this someone puts together a crude atomic bomb, of
the "Little Boy" type dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, a heavy and
awkward device but one still small enough to fit into a medium-size
truck.
Assume that of all the potential targets in the world, from Los
Angeles to Moscow, the spot where this someone parks the bomb is on
Pennsylvania Avenue, halfway between the White House and the U.S.
Capitol.
Assume the bomb goes off. Now what?
The First Minutes: 15,000 Dead
At zero hour, the conventional explosives in the bomb go off. They
launch a slug of highly enriched uranium down a surplus artillery
tube toward another, larger, but still less-than-critical mass of
uranium. As the two come close, the radiation each emits destabilizes
atoms in the other, which causes those atoms to split, which emits
more radiation, which splits more atoms, which emit more radiation —
a nuclear chain reaction. If the bomb makers botched their
calculations, the energy released blows the uranium slugs apart too
early — a 1-kiloton fizzle, still as powerful as 1,000 tons of TNT,
occurs. If the bomb makers got it right, the two uranium masses slam
together with sufficient force to reach supercritical mass for a
fraction of a second. Depending on the details of the bomb's design,
the resulting explosion has the force of 12,000 to 18,000 tons of
TNT — 12 to 18 kilotons.
Parked midway between the White House and the Capitol, the bomb is
right in front of the National Archives at 700 Pennsylvania Ave. NW,
where the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are
displayed. The Archives is vaporized. The dust that was the
building, the documents, the pavement outside, the Navy Memorial
across the street, the bodies — all now highly radioactive — shoots
five miles up in the air. Remember that dust: It will start coming
back down as "fallout" in about 15 minutes.
In the first second, the blast flattens the Justice Department and
the FBI's headquarters, one block west of the Archives, and the
Federal Trade Commission, one block east. The offices of the Internal
Revenue Service — less than a quarter-mile west from ground zero —
and both wings of the National Gallery of Art — within half a mile
southeast — collapse. Northward, the shock wave plows through blocks
of office buildings to smash in the southern end of the new
Convention Center; southward, it blows through the Museum of Natural
History, then races over the Mall — and the tourists on it — to
destroy the Smithsonian Castle — 0.41 miles — and damage the Energy
Department — at 0.49 miles distant — which oversees the U.S. nuclear
programs.
The force of the blast is fading at this range, and as it uses up
some of its energy in plowing through one massive building after
another. But those same structures are channeling the force of the
explosion up and down Pennsylvania Avenue, toward the White House and
the Capitol.
The ground-level detonation of a 12-kiloton bomb, the lowest
estimated yield for the Hiroshima bomb, produces 5 pounds of pressure
per square inch — enough to flatten houses and smash up reinforced
concrete or monumental stone buildings — at a distance of about 3,400
feet from ground zero. A 15-kiloton bomb, the middle estimate,
produces such force at about 3,700 feet; an 18-kiloton bomb, the
extreme high end, at about 3,900 feet. From the midpoint of
Pennsylvania Avenue to the center of either the White House or the
Capitol is just over 4,000 feet. The Founding Fathers' obsession with
the separation of powers, made physical in L'Enfant's design for the
federal city, puts the seats of the executive and legislative
branches a mile and a half apart — by happenstance, just far enough
that no single Hiroshima-style device can wreck them both.
Both buildings are badly damaged, however. The White House, low to
the ground, partially shielded by the Treasury, and rebuilt with
reinforced concrete by President Truman, sustains less damage than
the sandstone-and-marble Capitol, exposed high on its hill. But even
on the far side of each structure from ground zero, doors blow in,
windows explode in showers of glass, walls crack. In rooms
overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, the clothing and skin of victims
burn. But these two citadels of democracy stand.
Beyond the Capitol and the White House, the shock wave drops off. How
fast? Hard to tell. No one has ever set off a nuclear weapon at
ground level in a city: U.S. bombers detonated the Hiroshima and
Nagasaki bombs nearly 2,000 feet up in the air to ensure maximum
destruction unimpeded by obstacles on the ground. Naval Postgraduate
School professor Robert Harney calculates that in the densest cities —
like Manhattan with its skyscrapers — exploding the device at ground
level might cut the radius of destruction by roughly half, compared
with a ground burst on a perfectly flat plain; by one-third,
estimates the RAND think tank; by a few percent, caution government
experts speaking anonymously.
Assume, though, that all the urban uncertainties damp the blast force
down to that of a 10-kiloton bomb on an open plain. Almost every
building within a half-mile of ground zero collapses onto its
occupants. Wood and brick structures collapse, and reinforced
concrete or monumental stone structures take heavy damage, at up to
two-thirds of a mile, just short of the White House and Capitol. A
mile or so away — around Capitol Hill, Farragut Square, and Mount
Vernon Square — houses are damaged but mainly still standing, which
means most of their occupants survive. Two or three miles away,
windows shatter violently from Adams Morgan to Arlington. People who
happen to be looking straight at the flash are blinded — most of them
temporarily — at 13 or 14 miles out. Hundreds of drivers crash.
According to estimates in the Department of Homeland Security's
unpublished National Planning Scenario No. 1, nearly 15,000 people
are dead — 95 percent of them within that lethal half-mile of ground
zero — and another 15,000 are injured.
All of this takes less than 15 seconds.
As minutes pass, the electrical power grid reels from the sudden loss
of every substation downtown and a surge of electromagnetic pulse up
power lines. Fuses blow and safeties trip in "many states," National
Planning Scenario No. 1 guesstimates. Well into West Virginia,
Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey, all the lights go out.
And then, across the region, the emergency generators kick in at
firehouses, police stations, local emergency operations centers,
major hospitals, and military bases. Broken windows aside, the
Pentagon remains intact. So does Fort McNair, home to the military's
local homeland defense command, Joint Force Headquarters-National
Capital Region. Said Army Col. James Bartran, JFHQ-NCR's operations
chief, "This area has more capability for responding than anywhere
else in the nation; that's here and ready." Totally outside the blast
zone are Andrews Air Force Base, Bolling Air Force Base, Fort
Belvoir, the hospitals at Walter Reed and Bethesda, and even Reagan
National Airport. So, too, are the fire, police, and medical services
of Alexandria and Arlington and Fairfax counties in Virginia, of
Montgomery and Prince George's counties in Maryland, and even
District of Columbia responders in the northern and eastern portions
of the city.
Hundreds of miles above Washington, military satellites are measuring
the explosion and the mushroom cloud. Data fill the screens at
Colorado Springs, home of U.S. Northern Command. At Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory in California, and Los Alamos and
Sandia laboratories in New Mexico, nuclear weapons scientists turn
from the TV news to start software that predicts the fallout path.
And at the Homeland Security Department's alternative command post
outside Washington — location undisclosed — dazed functionaries
mechanically punch through checklists to assemble an Interagency
Incident Management Group. They call agency after agency, backup
number after backup number, until they get the military people and
the scientists and the emergency managers and the local responders
all talking to each other.
The country is already starting to move. So is the fallout. Now
everything depends on time.
The First Hours: Your Instincts Can Kill You
Everyone for miles has seen the flash. Everyone can guess what's
happened. Everyone knows the obvious things to do. And most everyone
is wrong.
Checking CNN won't work: The power's out.
Picking up the phone won't work: Even if the attack didn't crash the
network, everyone's calls to 911 or to their family will.
Jumping into your car won't work: A few hundred thousand people just
had the same idea — imagine rush hour, only with most stoplights out
and the streets downtown blocked by rubble.
Even professional lifesavers have to fight their instincts. Rushing
to the rescue won't work: More than 15,000 people are injured —
that's more than all the firefighters — paid and volunteer combined —
and hospital beds in the D.C. area. Besides, most victims are trapped
inside several square miles of burning, collapsed, or tottering
buildings, with the streets to reach them gridlocked.
And while people are fighting traffic, either to flee ground zero or
to get there to help, the fallout is starting to come down.
Everyone's first reaction is wrong because the problem is not, in
fact, the nuclear blast. If at this point you're still alive and
uninjured — and after a Hiroshima-sized explosion at ground level, 99
percent of the people in the D.C. area are — then your real problem
is the radioactive dust that the blast threw into the air. According
to the estimates in National Planning Scenario No. 1, an explosion
that kills 15,000 people outright could eventually expose 200,000
people to lethal doses of radiation if they stay exposed and
unprotected in the fallout path for 24 hours. Sitting downwind in
gridlock, with your vehicle's windshield shattered, goes a long way
toward giving you a lethal dose. All sorts of simple alternatives —
moving away from downwind, seeking proper shelter, even taking a
shower — go a long way toward saving you.
Fallout is simply radioactive dust, launched miles into the air in a
mushroom cloud and then carried on the wind. Much of it is alpha
particles, whose radiation cannot penetrate bare skin, or beta
particles, which cannot penetrate layers of clothing. Both are most
dangerous if inhaled — or if they settle on food that is eaten
unwashed. More deadly are the gamma rays, whose radiation can go
through walls. But even gammas cannot hurt you from cloud height. The
danger starts when the dust settles to earth.
The ideal is to avoid the fallout in the first place. In apocalyptic
gridlock, you cannot drive very far. But you may not have to. Normal
winds blow the cloud into a long but narrow plume, just a few miles
across. In typical Washington-area weather, Virginia, Montgomery
County in Maryland, and most of the District itself are not in the
fallout path at all. People in the path could conceivably walk out of
the fallout zone in the 10 or 15 minutes before the dust begins to
fall — if they know which way to go.
But, of course, you cannot count on perfectly typical weather. The
wind might shift; the breeze you feel at ground level may be blowing
crosswise to the radioactive clouds five miles up; a still day might
cause the fallout to seep outward slowly in all directions; sudden
rain or snow could wash the dust out of the sky, heavily dousing
everything beneath the storm but sparing areas farther out.
If you do not want to trust in weather and traffic, the alternative
is what the experts call "sheltering in place." You want to be in a
building, as solid as possible to block the gamma rays, as airtight
as possible to keep out radioactive dust. You need to turn off air
conditioning, close vents, seal the seams around windows and
doorways. If you wondered what former Homeland Security Secretary Tom
Ridge was talking about, this is what you need the duct tape for.
Abandon rooms with windows broken by the blast.
The dust that does not seep into the building will settle outside, on
the roof and on the ground, emitting gamma rays. A car with an intact
windshield stops 30 to 50 percent of the radiation — probably not
enough, however, to save someone who's inside the car and stuck in
traffic a few miles downwind of ground zero. A wood-frame house,
similarly, stops just 30 to 60 percent of gamma rays. A windowless
basement stops 90 percent. The middle floors of a concrete
apartment building, safely away from both roof and ground, stop 99
percent or more. But there is no 100 percent protection.
For those whom evacuation and shelter fail — or for those, like the
thousands fleeing in blind panic, who never try either — there is
still decontamination. A lethal dose of radiation takes time to
build. The sooner the radioactive dust is off the skin, the better.
And it is not that hard to remove. "Radiation contamination is
easier than chemical," said Col. David Jarrett, a medical doctor and
the director of the Armed Forces Radiobiology Research Institute in
Bethesda. "Simply removing the clothes and washing takes off up to 90
percent."
Every major Washington-area hospital has some decontamination
facilities, but 10,000 radiation patients in one day would swamp
them. So mass decontamination falls to fire departments, with their
mobile pumps and generators; their protective gear; their hazardous-
materials experience; and, because both Maryland and Virginia have
nuclear power reactors, their years of radiation training. Area
firefighters can quickly set up special decontamination tents, and
they have plans to take over buildings that have lots of showers — so
high school gyms, for example, are a good place to head for. In the
chaos of those first hours, said Michael Cline, state coordinator at
the Virginia Department of Emergency Management, "the real key is to
make sure people go to those facilities." It will take every
firefighter available to man the decontamination sites, and every cop
to control the crowds pouring in panic out of the city.
So who goes in to save the wounded? Even if first responders can get
downtown in time to save blast victims, they still have to get back
out before radiation claims both rescued and rescuer alike. Breathing
masks keep alpha particles out of the lungs, protective clothes keep
betas off the skin, but nothing light enough to wear can keep out
gammas. Responders have radiation sensors, modeling software, and
Energy or Defense Department analysts on call to map the radiation
plume, plus dosimeters to measure their own exposure. Existing safety
standards, written for nuclear power plant accidents, mandate "turn-
back limits" on lifesaving runs into the fallout zone.
"Responders are going to have to assess risk relative to lives
saved," said Fairfax County Fire Chief Michael Neuhard. "It may well
be that you are committed largely to decontamination, to treating
people on the periphery." Tens of thousands of people fleeing the
city could be saved by decontamination. Tens of thousands of others
downwind will need help evacuating or finding shelter. Sending rescue
workers into the fallout zone will probably cost more lives than it
will save.
"We need people to be able to take care of themselves for 72 hours,"
said Lara Shane, director of public education for the Homeland
Security Department. For any disaster, from nuke to hurricane, DHS
advises stockpiling a three-day supply of food and water, a
flashlight, and a radio — a battery-powered radio. The power is out;
most stations are off the air. But government transmitters and a few
private channels will be broadcasting on backup generators. And
everything and everyone, from satellites to Energy Department survey
planes to local firefighters, are trying to track the fallout plume.
At some point — in minutes with good planning, in hours without it —
those little battery-powered radios will come alive with urgent
bulletins: where the cloud is drifting, what areas should evacuate,
what roads are open, and where people can find shelter or
decontamination sites.
And all this time, the radiation that keeps the helpers out of
downtown, and the victims in it, is fading. By the physicists' rule
of thumb, 90 percent is gone in seven hours, 99 percent in seven
times seven — that is, 49 — hours, or two days; and 99.9 percent in
seven times seven times seven hours, or two weeks: the civil
defense "all-clear" standard from the Cold War.
The First Days: Nation in Motion
Find a small pond. Throw a big rock in it. Now watch the ripple
effect.
That, in essence, is the United States after a nuclear terrorist
attack. In the early hours, disaster and response alike are local,
limited by wind speed and gridlocked highways. In days, the effects
convulse the entire country.
With perfectly average weather — a big assumption — the fallout
spreads to the east and north along a path 200 miles long and 25
miles wide, drifting out to sea north of Atlantic City, before its
radioactivity fades below the National Response Plan's threshold for
increased risk of cancer — 1 rem, which is one-fifth of the
acceptable annual dose for nuclear power workers; the rem is the
standard unit of measurement for human exposure to radioactivity.
Real-world uncertainty about shifts in the wind keeps millions of
people on alert to evacuate or take shelter, anxiously following
broadcast bulletins as if awaiting a particularly violent hurricane —
but without the years of planning that guide Gulf Coast evacuations.
Local governments, the Red Cross, and the National Guard struggle to
control, feed, shelter, and in some cases decontaminate what National
Planning Scenario No. 1 guesstimates to be half a million displaced
people. With local hospitals overflowing or contaminated, thousands
of patients are shipped out across the country — the less sick they
are, the farther they go — to military, veterans, and private medical
centers activated under the National Disaster Medical System.
As victims ripple outward from the fallout zone, rescuers are
converging inward. The first responders are reeling now. Many are
dosed with radiation despite taking precautions, most are using
contaminated equipment. All are exhausted from working nonstop shifts
wearing heavy protective gear. But as the front line crumbles,
reinforcements from the next ring of counties step forward, and from
the next county after that, and then the next state, and the next.
"What you have kicking in is something called statewide mutual aid,"
said Arlington Fire Chief James Schwartz, who commanded units from
four counties at the Pentagon on 9/11. "As Arlington has depleted its
capability helping the District, its emergency management system
would contact the state: You could see units from Fredericksburg or
Richmond coming into Northern Virginia." A parallel system exists in
Maryland. Nationwide, the District and every state but California
and Hawaii are party to the Emergency Management Assistance Compact,
which provides databases and advance teams to match what disaster-
struck states request with what unaffected states can offer. Federal
resources, civilian and military, rally under the National Response
Plan.
Across the country, firefighters, paramedics, police, soldiers, and
volunteers are loading up their trucks and rolling toward Washington.
The resources the nation can mobilize are staggering. The United
States has more than 155,000 emergency medical technicians, 600,000
police and sheriff's deputies, a million firefighters, 1.6 million
active-duty military troops, and 1.1 million in the Reserves and
National Guard. Taking just 10 percent of those people from their
regular duties equals a midsized city of rescuers. The Red Cross
alone mustered nearly 55,000 volunteers for 9/11. And in this sea of
numbers are countless islands of specialized capabilities. Washington-
area jurisdictions have mobile communications vans and generators.
Virginia alone has 13 state-sponsored hazardous-materials teams with
radiation-monitoring equipment.
The Energy Department has several airplanes and helicopters equipped
to monitor fallout from the air, and rapidly deployable teams of
nuclear scientists. The Homeland Security Department controls a
Strategic National Stockpile of medical supplies prepacked to be
moved by air. And the military has all of this and more: mobile
hospitals, hazard-suited rescue units, radiation sensors, mobile
water purification, warehouses full of Meals Ready to Eat, and the
trucks, planes, and helicopters to transport them around the world.
In a few days, just as the radiation ebbs, all this aid flows in.
The greatest challenge, in fact, is not getting the resources but
coordinating them. At the World Trade Center on 9/11 — one incident
in one jurisdiction — firefighters and police had neither radios nor
procedures designed to work together. The Pentagon response that day
was smoother, with four neighboring jurisdictions reinforcing
Arlington's Fire Chief Schwartz. And "since Sept. 11, we've really
made a concerted effort on interoperability," said Scott Graham, a
battalion chief in Montgomery County. "Communications within the
region have improved greatly."
But even now, Washington-area agencies sometimes have to physically
swap radios to talk on each other's networks. And nationwide, no
common channel, no standard protocol links either local governments
or federal agencies.
The nation has, at least, adopted a common framework that organizes
all of these assets. Under the Incident Command System — developed by
local firefighters, endorsed by Homeland Security, and being taught
to federal civilians and the military alike — the local government of
the stricken area has command. Units from neighboring jurisdictions
answer requests from the local chief. So do the federal agencies —
from Energy to Health and Human Services to the Environmental
Protection Agency to Defense. They are grouped according to 15
functions by the National Response Plan, and all of them are, in
theory, coordinated by a "principal federal official" named by the
secretary of Homeland Security. "Issues beyond the secretary's
authority to resolve," the National Response Plan says
unhelpfully, "are referred to the appropriate White House entity for
resolution."
How well this structure comes together after a nuclear explosion is
unknown. "Many times, in national exercises," said Red Cross
Executive Vice President Alan McCurry, "we stop before we get to this
part."
The First Weeks: Thousands Fall Ill
By the 14th day after the attack, power should be back on across most
of the area. Radiation levels fall to a thousandth of their peak.
Rescue workers from across the country are in place and, one hopes,
organized. But now, depending on how well sheltering, evacuation, and
decontamination went in the first hours after the attack, tens of
thousands of exposed people start to die.
"Most of the deaths occur at two-to-four weeks after the incident,"
said Col. Jarrett, citing studies of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and nuclear
power accidents. Victims will start vomiting a few hours after
exposure, but then they enter a latent phase: "They have a couple of
weeks before they start becoming clinically ill, and they can be
moved to treatment centers across the country, not as patients, but
as passengers," said Jarrett. The bad news is, there is no cure for
radiation sickness — not yet, anyway.
Radiation sickness is strange and slow. A high enough dose of
radiation can kill in hours, but anyone close enough to get that much
is probably dead from the explosion. The less intense energy of the
fallout bombards the body and breaks random bits of DNA. Until the
cells can repair their genetic code, they cannot divide to make new
cells. That's it: "All that radiation does is stop cells from
dividing," said Evan Douple, a health physicist with the National
Academy of Sciences. "It doesn't kill them."
But a few tissues have such high wear and tear that they need new
cells constantly. The most obvious, and least essential, is the hair
follicles, which explains why cancer patients lose their hair during
radiation therapy. Another one is the lining of the digestive tract.
At a dose of 1,000 rems or more — 200 times the maximum permitted for
nuclear reactor workers in a year, the lining stops regrowing. In
seven to 10 days, the lining wears right through, causing infection
and internal bleeding. At a dose of a few hundred rems, the bone
marrow stops replenishing white blood cells for the immune system and
platelets for clotting. After a few weeks, minor injuries continue to
bleed and infections fester unchecked.
Specialized treatments do exist. The best known is potassium iodide,
stockpiled for the population around nuclear power plants and sold on
survivalist Web sites as "antiradiation pills." Atomic reactions
produce radioactive iodide, which accumulates in the thyroid gland,
particularly in growing children, eventually causing cancer. Flooding
the body with good iodide keeps out the bad. Unfortunately, it does
nothing about the dozens of other radioactive isotopes in the fallout
from an atomic bomb, which will kill you long before you can develop
cancer.
The National Stockpile also includes chelating agents — most famously
a substance known as "Prussian blue" for its normal use, as a dye —
which chemically bind with certain types of radioactive particles
inhaled from the fallout cloud and flush them from the body. Scarce
and expensive, chelators still do nothing to reverse the damage done
before you take them.
Once the immune system is compromised, the only treatment available
today is intensive care: infusions of antibiotics to control
infection, platelets to control bleeding, and, at the cutting edge,
hormonal growth factors to jumpstart the recovery of bone marrow.
This regime has saved victims of radiation accidents — if started
promptly, under a doctor's supervision, in a fully equipped hospital.
There is no way to provide that standard of care for tens of
thousands of victims.
The government has ramped up its research into the next generation of
growth factors, which would regenerate bone marrow without the
traditional panoply of other treatments. The Armed Forces
Radiobiology Research Institute sees the most promise so far in a
steroid called 5-Androstenediol, brand-named "Neumune" by the
institute's corporate development partner, Hollis-Eden
Pharmaceuticals. Neumune requires no refrigeration, has no known side
effects, and can be packaged in disposable needles like the nerve gas
antidotes now issued to troops and first responders. Five injections
over five days dramatically boost survival rates in animals.
So far, unfortunately, that first injection has to be given within
four hours of exposure, before the damage to cells outraces the
capacity for regrowth. But it is probably impossible to distribute
tens of thousands of stockpiled doses across a fallout zone within
four hours; and Hollis-Eden's own cost estimates for mass production
are $75 to $100 per person: too high to put Neumune in every
citizen's emergency kit. The current cost and the four-hour window
wouldn't impede first responders, however. With Neumune in their
gear, they could be far bolder in fallout-zone rescue operations.
Long-Term Costs
The high toll of a nuclear attack continues long after the fires die
down. In the worst case — no one gets to shelter, no one evacuates,
no one is decontaminated — National Planning Scenario No. 1 estimates
that radiation-damaged DNA will manifest, eventually, as 50,000 cases
of cancer, half of them fatal. People keep dying for decades.
The scenario does not even guess the economic cost. Abt Associates, a
research and consulting firm in Cambridge, Mass., estimates $150
billion to $3 trillion for the loss of life alone, plus up to $500
billion in property damage. The indirect disruptions ripple
unpredictably through the world economy. Just closing the highways
and rail lines through Washington costs shippers $5 billion a week.
And in contrast to the swift federal response to stabilize the
financial markets after 9/11, the Treasury and other key agencies may
be too badly damaged and decimated to intervene quickly. "If there's
a long gap between the attack and the ability of the federal
government to start running in a normal way," said Goldman Sachs Vice
Chairman Robert Hormats, "that has a very serious economic impact,
psychologically in particular."
How long before the seat of government is restored — if it is
restored? "When you go back depends on what standards you use," said
Thomas Cochran, a physicist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
The traditional approach to cleanup is to demolish badly contaminated
buildings, which would include the White House and the Capitol, scrub
every surface of the rest, then dig up the top few inches of asphalt
and soil and cart all of it away, if anywhere will take it. Meeting
the EPA standard for public safety — no more than 15 millirem of
radiation exposure per year — would cost trillions of dollars for a
midsized city, according to a study led by Pacific Northwest National
Laboratory researcher Barbara Reichmuth. But the cost drops by half
or more when the acceptable threshold is raised to 100 or, better,
500 millirem, which is still just 10 percent of the 5-rem level
approved for nuclear reactor workers. The nation may well develop a
new tolerance for radiation hazards.
Overall, though, it is impossible to calculate the total cost of a
nuclear attack on Washington, because that cost depends on what is
done in the first hours, days, and weeks after the attack, which in
turn depends on what is done in the years before. If fallout places
hundreds of thousands of people at lethal risk, then improving the
response by just 1 percent saves thousands of lives. Lawrence
Livermore National Laboratory, for example, has proposed running
computer models of various combinations of nuclear yield and weather
conditions for selected cities, providing baseline scenarios for
planners. That data might allow radio announcements about shelters
and evacuation to air a few crucial minutes faster. So might more
drills, better communications, or a clearer chain of command.
The odds of a nuclear attack are low. But experts say the huge
potential cost of such an attack merits more preparation. And such
preparation would save lives in more-likely disasters. Research into
drugs to heal irradiated bone marrow could spin off into treatments
for immune disorders such as AIDS. Predictive models, decontamination
gear, and public-warning systems for nuclear fallout would be useful
in a reactor leak, a nerve gas attack, or an ordinary chemical spill.
More hospital beds would help with outbreaks of anthrax, smallpox, or
avian flu. Compatible radios and common training for emergency
responders would make a difference every time a cop or firefighter
responded to a call across the county line. A battery-powered radio
would be handy anytime the lights went out. In the worst-case nuclear
disaster, these everyday defenses would matter that much more. It
might be wise to think how best to use them.
"It's not good enough anymore to plan to do these plans," said
Shelley Hearne, director of the Trust for America's Health, a
nonpartisan group that advocates building a strong public health
infrastructure. "Everyone hates this conversation; but I get even
madder when I see how little we deal with it. There are things we can
do, and do well — and it's OK to talk about it."