A while ago, I played out a scenario in which:
One nice afternoon, I’m sitting here in my home office near the Palos Verdes peninsula when I notice a brilliant flash of light and some of my windows break.
The power goes out, the telephones, cell phones, and computers don’t work. My backup AM/SW/SSB radio in the garage doesn’t work, and I step onto my driveway and look toward San Pedro and see a dark mushroom cloud.
We’ll skip over the fact that all the electronics in the area are kaput because of EMP, and hypothesize a working TV or radio, which informs me that it appears that a small – 5KT – nuke has just exploded on a container ship in San Pedro harbor, along with another one in Red Hook, just across from Manhattan, and another one at the container yard in Seattle.
We’ll skip over the hundred thousand or so who have just died or will die at each site in the coming week, from burns and radiation poisoning, or from one of the diseases or a lack of medical attention caused by the collapse of the public health system.
My family and I are not in immediate danger, because I’m maybe 10 miles from the blast center, and shielded by the mass of Palos Verdes hill, and the prevailing winds are onshore, meaning they blow the radioactive dust inland and away from me, but the next few days are pretty chaotic.
Well, the local paper just picked this up.
WHAT IF?
SCENARIO: Experts say the Port of Los Angeles is vulnerable to nuclear terrorism that would bring mass casualties to the area and send shock waves through the national economy. Here’s how it could unfold.
By Josh Grossberg
DAILY BREEZEIt’s a bright, clear morning in San Pedro.
A slight sea breeze blows inland and the sun glints off the Pacific. Cargo ships idle in the water, while cranes swing back and forth unloading packages. Workers driving across the Vincent Thomas Bridge pay no attention to the ship just passing beneath them.
Without warning, something hidden deep in the hull of the ship explodes. In less than a second, everything nearby is vaporized by temperatures hotter than the sun. The expanding fireball causes a shock wave of compressed air and winds strong enough to knock down or kill anything in its path. Miles away, the flash is bright enough to burn retinas. Windows shatter. Houses rock off their foundations.
The Breeze goes on to talk about some things you ought to do.
Best plan in a disaster is to have one
GUIDELINES: Considerations include food and water supplies, contacts, meeting places and sources of information.By Josh Grossberg
DAILY BREEZEDon’t panic.
During any catastrophe – man-made or natural – keep a clear head and plan ahead.
“People should not make any rash decisions,” said Brian Humphrey of the Los Angeles City Fire Department.
Humphrey urges everyone to keep a supply of food and water available, maintain an out-of-state contact for all family members to call in case local lines are not working, devise a second route home and develop alternate meeting places for loved ones.
And keep a working battery-powered radio nearby and know where the city’s two news radio stations are located on the AM dial – KFWB at 980 and KNX at 1070. That’s where officials will instruct people what to do.
Yeah, I forgot about radios…gotta pick some up. Probably inexpensive AM/ FM/ SW/SSB’s.
Take this in two ways. First, it’s mainstream acknowledgement of some of the things that I’ve been worrying about, which boosts both my ego and my anxiety level a bit. Second, it plus into the second part of my original post:
Got the picture??
So here are some questions for all parties.
For the hawks: How strong is the temptation to nuke somebody – anybody – who might have had anything to do with this, regardless of whether it gets the people who really planned it?
For the doves: How long after this happens does the first column come out in the New York Times that suggests that nuking Iraq won’t bring back our dead or rebuild our economy, and that we should pull in, buckle down, and take care of our own?
See, I see two likely outcomes from an event like this, (which I ly don’t believe would be all that hard to pull off).
One is that we go berserk, and turn the Middle East into a plain of glass.
The other is that we surrender our role as leader of the world, the economic and security benefits that come with that, and attempt to retreat into a Fortress America.
As you can imagine, I see problems with both.
What do you see as the outcome of a scenario like that? And how does it influence your thoughts on what to do today?
Well, how does it?
Too bad the press always makes things worse in order to sell papers. 😮
The realities are that the ship bound delivery system, as depicted, would have to be a thermonuclear device, which are rather beyond the capacity of any secondary source of nuclear warheads to make. Unless you want to premise your scenario on a complete Russian or Chinese meltdown. So the ship would destroy the port area and damage extensively the city. Guess what? Fallout would be minimized due to the fact that ground zero is in some depth of water, which doesn’t provide a source of dangerous radionucleides, asides from the ship. And don’t talk about dirty bombs, as their practical transport is what all the lawsuits about Yucca Mountain are about.
The contrary reality is that we can’t turn the ME into a glass plane, let alone an ersatz parking lot. The Cold War image of the US-USSR having enough warheads to destroy the world 10x or whatever assumes that everyone is going to stand out in close proximity to ground zero. What we do have is the ability to destroy any ME country’s economic and social structure above the level of the Middle Ages.
The article brings up some good points about the balance between two extremes in foreign policy, but it cloaks both extremes in masquerade costumes. But then what sells newspulp in LA?
Um, I disagree on more than a few points.
I don’t remotely see a a 5kt (my scenario) or 2kt (the Breeze’s) as a thermonuclear device. Both are well within the range of a ‘little john’ tactical warhead, which most of the materials I’ve read is the likely upper limit of a minor country or non-state effort.
I agree that the amount of fallout would be minimized by a water-based explosion. I’ll point out that a ship in port has one side to the water and one to the ground. And that ground-level explosions, as opposed to airbursts, deliver significantly more dust and debris into the smoke plume.
I don’t see this as a city-buster, as noted…I live fifteen miles away, and other than broken windows and (significant) indirect effects, I don’t see my home as being at risk.
As to the ‘plain of glass’ point; each Trident sub carries 24 missles with 5 RV’s on each. Assume these are thermonuclear, we’re talking about what…1.5mt each? So we’re taking about launching 120 1.5 mt warheads from one submarine. How would you describe the Middle east after 120 1.5 mt explosions? ‘plain of glass’ works fairly well for me.
A.L.
What is the blast effect radii for 10Mt warheads? FAS gives 15km, but the thermal radiation radii for making “glass planes” would be much less. So each of your warheads, and I seriously doubt if the US would use its whole deployed SSBM inventory on such a target list, would give a Pi * 15^2 sq km area of blast effects. Realistically this would take out the cities, and not the whole country. Which was my point in contradicting the newpaper article. Trent Telenko of local notoriety has poignantly pointed out some of the issues with this type of system’s reliability in the past, and I note that such reliability issues would imply that many priority targets would be attacked with multiple warheads, further shrinking the total area affected.
You are correct in stating that the posited size of warhead exploding in LA was undefined. Looking at the eye injury radii of nuclear explosions the author’s “miles” could translate into any warhead at all. I improperly inferred, as would many readers, that many of the blast and thermal effects would also be on the same order of propagation. Upon looking up the differences, which I am sure every other reader of the article did as well, I can now see why the author choose this particular effect to include in his article. So you are correct, he might just have been describing a small warhead going off that would neither have widespread blast or thermal effects. It may play hell with local computers which were on at the time, however. That is one effect the sources don’t cover.
A small point about SLBM in the USN. The D5 Trident is equipped with W88 warheads estimated to have a yield of 475 kt, and the C4 Trident would have W76s with a yield of 100 kt. The C4’s are nominally obsolete. FAS shows the D5 with 5 W88’s per MIRV bus, as you noted.
Armed Liberal, the D-5 Trident II missile can eight to fourteen W76 warheads, or eight W88 warheads. The W76 has a yield of 100 kt each, while the much larger W88 has a yield of 475 kt. (The W76 only weighs 360 pounds; the W88 is estimated at being more than twice that size.)
Because of the closure of the Rocky Flats facility, only about 400 W88’s were produced. Consquently, most of the boats in the US ballistic missile fleet– 16 in all now, with the USS Ohio and the USS Florida being converted to guided missile submarines from ballistic missile submarines– are believed to be equipped with W76 warheads on D-5 “Trident II” missiles.
Incidentally, the overpressure damage radius– broken windows and whatnot– for a 5 kt groundburst would probably only be around two miles. A 5 kt groundburst would punch a good-sized hole in a city, probably with a total destruction/lethality radius of about half a mile, and it would cough up quite a bit of fallout, but it would definitely not be a city-buster.
Also, due to the effect of the ground on gamma radiation from the hypocenter, the electromagnetic pulse from the explosion would probably be very limited in scope and magnitude. The current loops would be very tight around the blast point, so anything that might have been affected by the explosion would already have been destroyed by the thermal and blast effects.
Ack.
Tom, I clearly stated in my scenario that the devices were 5kt, and the Breeze story clearly stated the device was either 10kt or 2kt ,none of which remotely require a thermonuclear device.
120 RVs are from one Trident sub; while you are correct that the entire Middle East wouldn’t be covered in fused glass, I don’t think ‘plain of glass’ is an outrageous metaphor to describe the Middle East after being hit with 120 H-bombs.
Can I encourage you to respond to my point, rather than having each of us engage in semi-amateur analysis of weapons effects?
To restate, my point is that we are at some measurable risk of such an event, and that the political reaction to it would not be likely to be measured and thoughtful.
A.L.
The most likely source for a terrorist nuke is from Pakistan.
FYEO (now Strategypage.com) reported that the majority of Pakistani nukes were in the range of 15 KT.
A.L.:
My point is not that you are not making sense, except on the technical issue of the extent of ME damage, but rather that the newspaper was creating an unconstrained worse case impression of urban disaster of biblical proportions. Your estimate of US damage to the ME dovetails with the newspaper’s suggestive impression of damage to the portside areas of LA with an equally suggestive concept that a ME country supporting such an attack on LA would be attacked with a response of unrealistic extent. Incidently, my use of the FAS and associated site materials is due to my not being able to use the classified tables of nuclear weapons effects I was previously able to access in the US Army. But the principles are the same, despite the fact that in the Army we never seriously considered retinal damage radii as a figure of merit in collateral damage estimates.
So where we depart in our conclusions stems not only from the technical issues concerning US SLBM capabilities I outlined above, but also in the purposes of these weapons inventories. You seem to think that they have a preponderantly retributive purpose, and with the media obsession with MADD over the last two decades this might be a legitimate point of view. My opinion is that such an analysis fails, not only in the specifics of what a US retribution might actually achieve on a target list such as Iraq would pose, but also concerning the motives of the US in general concerning nuclear weapons use. Doctrinally, nuclear weapons are to be used when all other forms of conventional munitions would pose either unacceptable military costs or risks. Their use in WW II is the archtype, when two cities were bombed in order to prevent the need for 6-7 figure casualty lists on both sides in a conventional assault on the Home Islands. Notably, the US-UK effort to develop nuclear weapons did not envision city busting German cities, except as a second strike option if the German did so first. Events made that course of possibilities irrelevant.
This doctrinal barrier, as well as the other reasons to maintain the US stockpile of non obsolete warheads in existence, leads me to discount Rumsfeld’s addressing this subject as being diplomatic bluffery. Sure we might use them if Saddam uses WMDs. But the last thing we would want is the bill to clean up the whole central area of Iraq after all was said and done.
A.L.: One last logical point which you bring up, I was not addressing your 5kt weapon in analysis of this specific newspaper article. I was addressing the newspaper’s published scenario as it was stated, without giving it the benefit of your qualification.