thedrifter
06-24-05, 01:14 PM
Surviving a Nuclear Attack on Washington, D.C.
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., National Journal
WASHINGTON — What if we fail to prevent an attack? (see GSN, June 1).
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 discussed in the previous five installments of this series. 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.
continued.........
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., National Journal
WASHINGTON — What if we fail to prevent an attack? (see GSN, June 1).
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 discussed in the previous five installments of this series. 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.
continued.........