Nuclear Experts Urge Return to Bomb Shelters

Harkening a return to Cold War programs to prepare U.S. residents for nuclear war, a group of high-level experts plans to urge local communities to dig underground bomb shelters to protect them from the aftermath of a terrorist nuclear weapons attack, the San Francisco Chronicle reported today (see GSN, May 8).

The 41-member group convened last month in Washington to discuss ways to improve the emergency response to such an attack, based on the premise that nuclear terror prevention efforts are inadequate.  Sponsored by Stanford and Harvard universities, the meeting included directors of U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories, Homeland Security Department officials, and current and former top military officials, according to the Chronicle.

Organizers have begun to prepare a summary paper that recommends several civil defense measures, including building bomb shelters, setting rules to strictly limit citizen movement after an attack to keep roadways open and lifting radiation safety rules for emergency responders, the Chronicle reported.

“The public at large will expect that their government had thought through this possibility and to have planned for it,” said event organizer Ashton Carter of Harvard University.  “This kind of an event would be unprecedented.  We have had glimpses of something like this with Hiroshima, and glimpses with 9/11 and with Katrina.  But those are only glimpses.”

The group discussed a scenario in which terrorists detonate a 10- to 15-kiloton nuclear weapon, comparable to the U.S. bomb dropped on Hiroshima in 1945.  Participants worked on the assumption, however, that terrorists would have more than one weapon.

“If one bomb goes off, there are likely to be more to follow,” Carter said.  “This fact, that nuclear terrorism will appear as a syndrome rather than a single episode, has major consequences.”

Some participants argued that those consequences would be so enormous that greater efforts are needed to prevent such a scenario.

“Your cities would empty and people would completely lose confidence in the ability of the government to protect them,” said University of Maryland professor Steve Fetter.  “You'd have nothing that resembles our current social order. I'm not sure any preparation can be sufficient to deal with that.”

“We have to hold current policy-makers more responsible” for preventing a nuclear attack in the first place, he added (James Sterngold, San Francisco Chronicle, May 11).

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