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The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is holding a "public health grand round" at its Roybal campus in Atlanta, Georgia. The topic is "Public Health Response to a Nuclear Detonation":
The CDC is holding a session January 16 to discuss personal safety measures and the training of response teams "on a federal, state, and local level to prepare for nuclear detonation."
The meeting, part of the agency's monthly Public Health Grand Rounds, will include presentations like "Preparing for the Unthinkable" and "Roadmap to Radiation Preparedness," and it will be held at the CDC's headquarters in Atlanta. "Grand rounds" are a type of meeting or symposium in which members of a public health community come together to discuss topics of interest or public importance.
This isn't the first time in recent months that official entities have informed the public about the consequences of a possible nuclear strike. In August, amid escalating nuclear rhetoric from North Korea, Guam's Homeland Security and Office of Civil Defense released a two-page fact sheet about what to do in the case of a nuclear event. And in December, Hawaii started monthly testing of a nuclear warning siren system -- the first such tests since the end of the Cold War.
It had been planned in April and has nothing at all to do with any particular statements or tweets.
Also at Time.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Thexalon on Sunday January 07 2018, @03:53PM (6 children)
How I arrived at the 30 million number:
1. There are 25 million North Koreans. Now, not quite all of them are going to get killed, but a lot will. I figured about 5 million lucky ones. So 20 million casualties on the NK side.
2. Shooting down missiles is hard. As in, the best systems the US has probably take out 1/2 to 2/3 of incoming missiles. Oh, and when you hit them, they still explode, so depending on where you hit them that might not help. The North Koreans have anywhere between 15 and 60 nuclear missiles, depending on whose analysis you read. So, based on that math, I figured at least 5 would hit something. Targets in range of those missiles include Seoul (population 9.5 million), Busan (population 3 million), and Tokyo (population 9 million). Based on that, 10 million deaths outside of NK seems entirely plausible.
3. Seoul, Busan, Tokyo, and several other targets are well within range of NK's conventional weapons as well. So even if the nukes aren't as advertised, they could still do a lot of damage and kill a lot of people.
As for the radiation cloud getting into China and Russia, that's a result of the American nukes, not the NK's, so how good NK's nukes are is not relevant for that portion of the scenario.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday January 07 2018, @04:37PM (5 children)
Only if they intended to do that, one of the reasons why USA blew up so many nukes was to figure out how to control the fallout - modern nukes (ok, since the 60s) has fallout in an area not much bigger (about twice the radius iirc) of the blast.
Also - the more fallout the less bang per unit of radioactive material (one of the nicer things with hydrogen bombs is btw that they are insanely clean for the level of bang)
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Bobs on Sunday January 07 2018, @05:33PM (4 children)
Fallout is is hard to manage.
- Where fallout lands depends upon the wind.
- One of the issues with planning for a strike on multiple targets, is the prevailing winds can be different in different areas.
- Do you optimize military/nuclear strikes by waiting for just the right weather conditions? Or something else?
- If waiting for right wind conditions, what are looking for?
- Blow out to sea (-> Japan)
- Blow North (China, Russia)
- Blow East (China, India)
- Blow South (South Korea)
- Since it was US decision if/when to strike, US bears responsibility for fallout.
- And the stuff can be airborne for a long time, and travel far.
- American West coast routinely getting air pollution / particles from China. So radioactive cloud hits the US?
The Radioactive cloud / fallout from multiple nuclear strikes is a significant issue.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Sunday January 07 2018, @08:38PM (3 children)
- Where fallout lands also heavily depends on at which altitude you chose to detonate, and what yield(s) used.
- Yup, they differ, but if this matters someone screwed up planning anyways.
- Optimize the strikes by chosing the yields and altitudes needed to hit the intended targets with minimum mobile fallout (camouflet strikes are better than airbursts at hardend target for instance, and has a nice minimal mobile fallout).
- Not having fallout of significance leaving NK?
- Blow out to (eastern) sea - great, nuke Pyongyang with up to about 8Mt with impunity
- Blow North - 6Mt Pyongyang
- Blow West (assume you meant that here) - The east cost, stay below 4Mt. Use multiple multi-kt nukes for pyongyang.
- Blow South - Stay below 2Mt for pyongyang, increase for further north.
The trick is to just make sure you detonate it on the right altitude to not get too much reflection from the ground and not high enough to get into different airflows (the reverse of how you optimize where to detonate a cobalt-bomb), oh, and stay away from dial-a-yield bombs and if possible use multiple warheads (better area coverage and flatter blast for same yield).
- Agreed
- Unless the bomb was a true rushjob the fallout will be remarkably (in terms of radioactivity) clean if if travels far.
- Japan managed to botch a few active nuclear plants, that radioactivity is worse than the ones from bombs in terms of mobility, just how much even reached hawaii? (Also, heck, I'd welcome if it reach USA, especially if someone points out that a pack of cigarettes would give them a higher radioactive dose. To get a sense of just how much of a non-issue this is, this is where Tsar Bomba (google maps) [goo.gl] was detonated, that was a 50Mt nuke, note that stuff closer to that area than NK-US (picked Chuginadak Island for sake of getting a round number and where people start to care) is stuff like everything of mainland europe all the way to spain, moscow, svalbard, uk, the arctic, turkey, kazakhstan, mongolia, greenland, the coast of new foundland (canada) and most of alaska). (Google maps takes actual distance into account, which matters at great distance [wikipedia.org]), as far as I know USA doesn't even have 50Mt nukes, and since fallout wasn't that much of an issue in alaska or new foundland when the tsar bomba detonated...)
The cloud/fallout is a local issue unless you fail to learn from all that atmospheric testing or fail to consult charts.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Sunday January 07 2018, @09:05PM (2 children)
No, the trick here is that:
- using technology that probably hasn't been maintained perfectly or tested recently
- built by government contract
- being handled by people who are in a high-stress situation (yes, I know, trained military and all that, but even military guys aren't going to be thinking "ho-hum, we're about to start a nuclear war") and have never actually done the real thing before
- with minimal margin for error
All works perfectly as designed.
Part of the problem is that North Korea just isn't very big, which means that it doesn't require much of a mistake to hit SK, China, or Russia.
And again, you're talking about actions that will kill millions of civilians. That's a no-no for a reason.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 07 2018, @09:29PM
Nukes are maintained. We are constantly rebuilding them. On a regular schedule, each warhead gets shipped back to a national laboratory to be disassembled and have old components replaced.
Accuracy is very high now. Granted, it would be higher without democrat obstruction, but it is pretty good. This is why we are no longer much into 20 megaton warheads.
Killing millions of civilians is how war works. We haven't really had a war since Japan surrendered. Some folks need killing. Many lives, all around the world, are a negative value for us.
(Score: 2) by Aiwendil on Monday January 08 2018, @01:11AM
As already pointed out by AC they undergo regular rebuilds (also - is this issue about age of explosives (affects both efficency and shape, either of which can cause a fizzle), rust on cabling and such (which also can cause fizzles) - the timings of implosion bombs are insane).
Regarding testing everything but the warhead gets tested regularly, and the warhead is replaced with dummies of same weight and weightdistribution for such.
I agree that humans are the weak link, but hopefully the nuke will be delivered via ICBM from someone with presence of mind and not some PTSD'd frontline-assignee.
Regarding degree of error - let me google that - oh, seems like 50% chance for an ICBM to hit within 200m of target, with never versions down to about 90m. And we are talking about munitions where you count the blast in kilometers. I'd say they are well within close enough. (btw, if you aim at pyongyang you need to miss by more than 80km/50mi to hit outside of NK)
I agree that the deathtoll would be high (then again, the initial _conventional_ NK counterstrike at SK would probably exceed it - unless SK got a heads up from US), but the fallout wouldn't really be that much of an issue (especially not in the grand scheme of tihings)
(Nuking a city would be a war crime, but not because of the nuke but because you are targetting civilians. So using nukes isn't a no-no, but the choice of targets discussed are)