U.S. Army instructions to surviving infantry in the case of a tactical nuclear weapon detonation is to hide, trying to get as much physical ground between them and the explosion site.
Things like hiding in a ditch, cuddling yourself to put as much material between vital organs and outward radiation.
If it goes off, it goes off: evacuation and missile defense are the only protection pre-explosion. Missile defense only works against a single delivery method. If the bomb is hidden in a building or smuggled in a truck, it's not going to help. If a government is tipped off, they can try to defuse it, and several countries have emergency teams to deal with things like that. (ex: NEST teams in the U.S.)
They keep extensive databases of different warhead types to speed things up, but the problem is that it is hard to find a warhead.
Evacuation, given enough time, could work. But can you imagine evacuating a large city? What about other countries like China and Japan, with extremely densely packed cities?
Deep shelters are a possibility. But how do you deal with people who overcrowd them? How do you get food and water into the shelters? How long are they going to have to wait there? People will panic and do irrational things.
Plasma Man wrote:I think a dirty bomb is a lot more likely than a proper nuke, but instructions for what to do should be fairly similar for both, as regards avoiding radioactive contamination. On a purely selfish level, it really doesn't worry me, because a) it's very unlikely to happen, and b) even if it does, I'm about as well off as it is possible to be.
A dirty bomb wouldn't have the kind of range that a military-grade nuclear weapon would, though, although the ionizing radiation problem is the same. Most of the damage from a dirty bomb is psychological: people panic because of radiation, which they can't see and don't understand. Education in this case is very, very important.
I lol'd hard at
nowfocus and
Glmclain's posts and overall I agree with them.
That said, the literature is divided here as to whether you can actually have a working evacuation/defense plan for a city or not against a nuclear attack.
I feel it's more of a political message: Obama's administration wants to cut down on nuclear weapons, so they need to build up some fear to remind everyone what a nuclear weapon could do. If you make it sound like you can DO SOMETHING against a nuclear weapon, people will think about it and be afraid.
HungryHobo wrote:Terrorism just isn't that big an issue.
I disagree, and I'm pretty sure recent events prove my point. 9/11 cost many lives, millions of dollars in damage/lost jobs and led to a war which is currently still being fought. Terrorist attacks in Japan using chemical weapons wounded many, many people and spread fear throughout an entire city. The Japanese terror/cult cell went completely undetected until that attack. They had recruited a nuclear scientist, had large amounts of funding, and had bought lands in Australia with plans to extract Uranium. And, based on a cult ideology, they were completely irrational, so very hard to deter. They really just wanted to kill people, and it's hard to have something like MAD work when the opposing side wants to die. The technical difficulties in making a nuclear weapon are now gone; advanced physics which, before, were known by only a select few very well trained people is now taught in part in high school. A PhD student in physics wrote a dissertation on how to make a nuclear weapon using only open sources; his advisor had been part of the Manhattan Project, and confirmed the warhead would have worked. It was classified Top Secret as soon as it was finished (they had warned the FBI).
Basically what I'm trying to say: terrorists can operate undetected. They can inflict, and are willing to inflict, serious damage. They are either hard to deter or impossible to deter. And the technology to make a nuclear weapon is out there. The only stopping point, and the only reason why there has not been nuclear terrorism, is getting the fissile material.
That said, putting resources into civil defense against a nuclear warhead explosion seems a bit of a waste, considering you can spend it on actually securing loose fissile material.
