Posted on 06/27/2008 3:30:20 PM PDT by Flavius
It is a grim, almost unthinkable scenario: a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon, smuggled into the United States, is detonated in a major U.S. city, perhaps even the Bay Area.
Top federal officials and medical experts gathered in Washington on Thursday to consider this nightmare vision. Their conclusion: Cities and states are frightfully ill-prepared for dealing with an attack using a small nuclear bomb.
"Few of them have coordinated response plans for the aftermath of nuclear terrorism," said Brooke Buddemeier, a specialist in the radiological and nuclear counter-measures division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "There is a general lack of understanding of the response needs and uncertainty over federal, state and local roles and responsibilities."
Federal officials are worried enough to have convened a National Academy of Sciences committee on medical preparedness for a nuclear attack by terrorists. The panel is holding its first two-day meeting in Washington this week.
(Excerpt) Read more at sfgate.com ...
Maybe the Armed Forces would be welcome there then.
I fear not even then...
There’s an amphibious anti-tank vehicle that’s built to be locked down and sealed in the event of nuclear attack. Better than nothing if you can find one...in time...
I was an NBC NCO in the Service,Not much you can do except stay downwind.
After an attack like this, shouldn’t we sit down and talk with the groups responsible for this INDESCRETION? /S
I fear Chemical and Biological more. Easier to transport and far more deadly in the long run.
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One reason for the lack of nuclear preparedness is that leftists and their media allies campaigned constantly against it during the Cold War. We are still living with the legacy of this campaign.
John Mack of Harvard, for example, claimed that any preparation for survival after a nuclear attack was immoral since it would allegedly make nuclear war more acceptable. The real purpose, of course, was to facilitate Soviet strategy by encouraging appeasement.
The media created a subculture of fatalism about nuclear attack and did everything possible to exaggerate effects whose horrific nature really needed no exaggeration. I remember an anti-nuke hippie telling a tv crew at demonstration that just 10 nuclear weapons would literally blow the Earth apart. She said this with a straight face and the tv droids ate it up.
For some years in the 1980s, pro-Soviet “peace” groups distributed a bumpersticker that piously claimed “There is no Shelter from Nuclear War.”
Nowadays, there is no Soviet Union to incite or reward appeasement propaganda and the moonbats are suddenly worried about survival. Eventually they will learn how to profit from appeasing Iran and various other nuclear crazed barbarians, and this whole nuclear survival business will once again be an object of ridicule, dismissal and dishonest propaganda.
San Fransisco would be the easiest place to nuke.
Not only will we talk to them, but they have the right to retain a lawyer and the right to petition the US courts like any other citizen after they set off their nukes.
Especially with the nuke detonating over the city taking out all the fairies flitting around in the air.
No...we should have Obama and Rev Wright tell the bombers how awful that was....and “You did that without blinking an eye!”
“After an attack like this, shouldn’t we sit down and talk with the groups responsible for this INDESCRETION?” /S
You’re absolutely right. I’m sure President Obama will negotiate the best surrender terms for us that he possibly can. /S
Downwind? Wouldn’t I want to be upwind?
I take it you mean upwind relative to the “event”.
I nuke in Kalifornication would be blamed on Bush, not the scum terrorists who detonated it.
bump
I nuke = A nuke
(beer impared typing)
Not impressive. After 50 years of far bigger threat, this doesn’t rise above the background noise.
Why on earth would America’s enemies attack their fellow travelers in San Francisco? That’s one of the last places they’d consider attacking.
This article (like many before it) invokes the imagery of the ‘suitcase nuke’ which first got widespread attention not quite 10 years ago when the late Alexander Lebed was talking about up to 100 of the devices being ‘unaccounted for’ in the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. The devices Lebed referred to were approximately 1 kt in yield, not 10.
Lebed stated that the ‘suitcase nukes’ were 24 x 16 x 8 inches in size, and distributed to the former Soviet GRU for use in the event of a general nuclear exchange with the U.S.
What is overlooked is the effective life span of the fissile materials that would be used in such a device. Unless freshly manufactured and maintained by nuclear weapons specialists and/or engineers who really know what they’re doing, there is no way to be sure that such a device (talking about ‘legacy’ type compact nukes) would even detonate if used 10 or 20 years after initial assembly without periodic inspection to assure the reliability of the device.
There are Freepers far smarter than I that have discussed this issue in great detail, but I’ll be damned if I can think of their screen name(s) right now.
But considering the general political sentiment in the San Francrisco Bay area, it would be my expectation that if a terrorist nuke *were* one day smuggled in and detonated, that most if not all of the leftists and America-haters would at least manage to croak out an ‘allah AKKKKbar’ before the nudet wiped their asses out.
There’s an old joke that the Russians built these things with the idea that they would be smuggled in in suitcases, planted in varius locations and detonated simultaneiously. The plan was abandoned when it was discovered that they didn’t have any suitcases.
Count on it. Even if it happens in the year 2050.
True, a small one like that might not go full-yield, but it’d be one messy-nasty little “dirty bomb”
That being said, SF would be a good target in some ways, lousy in others. Set it off offshore, and let the fallout do the dirty work (the wind is almost always onshore there). But for blast effect, SF would suck because of the hilly terrain. Half the buildings would be protected by being on reverse sides of hills and so on. A 10kT bomb would be bad, but there are better target choices, if you want a maximum casualty number.
There was a special droll quality to much Soviet era Russian humor.
“Comrade, do you know what to do when you get the warning of an American nuclear attack?”
“No, I do not know.”
“You put on your funeral shroud and walk slowly to the cemetery.”
“Why slowly?”
“To keep from starting a panic.”
LOL, I like that!
A good friend of mine told me about his late father-in-law who worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency back in the late 70’s, and was involved with the security of some our embassies, including the one in Moscow.
During a trip there, he met with his Soviet counterparts who were cordial as Russians can be, and being his first trip to the Soviet Union he was naturally paying close attention to everything.
His counterparts took him to the old ‘GUM’ Department Store and with great pride showed him their ‘newest elevator’ and the DIA man observed that this newest elevator was of the same general quality and size of the typical Montgomery Wards elevator of that era, and when he realized that the Russians were letting their vehicles run 24 hours a day during the winter because they had no antifreeze to put in the engines, he concluded that Soviet society was unlikely to prevail in the event of a general nuclear exchange.
IOW, they were so hopelessly behind us it was pathetic.
Downwind????
“Few of them have coordinated response plans for the aftermath of nuclear terrorism,”
Now that question comes up?....The damn border has been open long enough to finally start someone wandering? What a damn joke!.....
The scene: Prague Czechoslovakia 1968.
Soviet tanks are everywhere, Soviet troops have begun an occupation to put the upstart Alexander Dubcek and his followers in their places.
A television reporter has a camera crew on the street, and goes up to a Czech worker and asks “tell me Sir, do you consider the Russians your brothers, or your friends?”
The man smiles broadly and answers at once, “BROTHERS of course!!!!”
And then out of the side of his mouth whispers “you CHOOSE your friends!” ;)
“Federal officials are worried enough to have convened a National Academy of Sciences committee on medical preparedness for a nuclear attack by terrorists”
Where the hell were these worried federal officials when the wall wasn’t being built?
There's a good reason for this: the bomb would be detonated at ground level. This results in a HUGE plume of radioactive fallout blown into the air, carrying lethal amounts of fallout perhaps 20-30 miles downwind and make Ground Zero essentially unlivable for decades. (Given the experience with the Nevada Test Site with all those above-ground tests, it's small wonder why much of the test site is still a radiation hazard because the test shots were all done very close to the ground.)
People forget that both Little Boy and Fat Man were detonated several thousand feet above the city, and as such the fallout was relatively low. This made it possible for both Hiroshima and Nagasaki to start rebuilding only a few years after 1945.
If this happened and Obama tried to surrender or not respond, he would undergo a 9-mm impeachment.
I would have thought the same thing, but then again....the WTC was in Manhattan
“You sound like you’ve spent some time studying this topic”
Back in my first go-round in college, I had a class called “Human Ecology” Prof was a Moonbattus rex. We spent 4 weeks of the semester on nuclear weapons and effects. The very first lecture of that segment of class was the discussion of what would happen if a 1MT weapon was airburst over the geographic center of Fresno (where I lived). Some of the required reading was books on weapons effects, damage estimation, etc. I’ve kept up on that and read some more modern stuff, too.
Houston would be heck of a choice. Oil production and the companies that manage that, plus the Texas Medical Center and so on. Chicago would be a good one, too. Road and rail junction, plus just big, and if you suck up some water from the Lake and disperse fallout with it, so much the better (worse).
Now, if you had something a little bigger than 10kT, it improves your number of target choices, too. It isn’t a whole lot more difficult to go from 10kT to something a lot bigger, engineering-wise. The second generation of US weapons went up to the tens of kT without even boosting fission.
I have often wondered (well, maybe not often...) if someone took one of these bombs to a very high level room in a hotel or office building in a major city if the impact would be significantly different than a ground blast. The question would be whether or not being up a couple of hundred feet would increase the damage, or would it be negligible?
Chicago would be a devastating target.
(and of course Mayor Daley would be shrieking about the need to ban nuclear weapons in the aftermath, lol)
If a terrorist group were to obtain a nuke, I expect that there would be quite the division among their members as to what type of target to select, to go for maximum shock value and ‘terror’ (’duh’, that’s why they call ‘em terrorists ;) or to actually seek to do serious damage to the United States military resources within CONUS with an attack on a military base.
The most likely avenue for an attack will be across our southern unsecured border with Mexico, and that is where a nuke would be smuggled in (if it hasn’t been already), although I’ve had the disturbing thought that in an area like San Francisco, there would be a high number of recruitable traitors that would most likely be happy to assist in an attack on their own Country.
I can think of plenty of potential and unique targets but I’m not going to post anything about them in public, that’s for damn sure.
ping to #23
Fixed it.
A+Bert was one but he's gone now.
LOL, thanks for that!
Don’t you mean upwind?
thanks for the chuckle
What’s the rush? It’s only been 7 years since 9/11 and the Islamist promise to destroy us.
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