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Threat Assessment: Small Nuclear Bomb Would Devastate New York, Say Scientists Using an official U.S. modeling program, three scientists concluded recently that a Hiroshima-sized nuclear weapon exploding in New York City would kill hundreds of thousands of people. The consequences of such an attack are so great that nuclear weapons must be abolished to eliminate the risk, wrote Ira Helfand, Lachlan Forrow and Jaya Tiwari, last week in the British Medical Journal. All members of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, the three conducted a simulation involving a 12.5-kiloton nuclear explosion in the port area of New York City. Their simulator was the Consequences Assessment Tool Set software developed by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency and Defense Threat Reduction Agency. The simulated blast killed 52,000 people immediately, and 10,000 people died later of direct radiation exposure. Another 34,000 people had nonfatal radiation sickness from direct exposure. Radioactive fallout killed another 200,000 people and created several hundred thousand cases of radiation sickness. The ability to aid survivors was limited in the simulation because the blast destroyed 1,000 hospital beds and contaminated other facilities. Other medical facilities were overwhelmed (see GSN, Feb. 5). A terrorist attack with a “dirty bomb” — a conventional explosive that spreads radioactive material — could also be very lethal (see GSN, Feb. 7). If terrorists were to disperse a cask of spent fuel rods in Manhattan in the middle of the day, it would likely kill more than 2,000 people, according to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimate. Attacks on nuclear installations could also have severe consequences. An attack on either a nuclear reactor or a spent fuel pool “could equal or exceed the effects of the 1986 Chernoybl disaster, which led to 30 acute deaths from radiation sickness, at least 1,800 excess cases of childhood thyroid cancer” and contamination of large amounts of land, the authors wrote. Preventing Proliferation To eliminate this risk, the United States and its allies must work to prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear materials, the authors said (see GSN, Feb. 5). They mentioned several cases of attempted nuclear smuggling, including recent attempts by terrorist groups to break into Russian nuclear storage sites and the arrest of two men in Turkey for trying to sell weapon-grade uranium (see GSN, Nov. 7, 2001). Russia’s large nuclear stockpile is a potential source of tens of thousands of tactical nuclear bombs and 603 metric tons of weapon-grade nuclear material, the authors wrote. The United States is spending more than $900 million each year to safeguard the Russian stockpile, but, the authors wrote, that amount is less than a seventh of the U.S. national missile defense budget (see GSN, Jan. 10). They urged the United States and other countries to increase assistance to Russia to protect its nuclear arsenal. Only Option is to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons “As long as there are stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the world, the possibility of nuclear terrorism remains,” the authors wrote. The only conclusive way to end the threat is to eliminate nuclear weapons and implement “strict international control of all fissile materials” with potential weapons use, the authors wrote (British Medical Journal, Feb. 9).
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