U.S. Health System Said Unready for Nuclear Strike

A recent study found that the medical infrastructure of the United States could not manage the aftermath of a nuclear strike, Bloomberg News reported yesterday (see GSN, March 2).

Researchers studied the effects of 20-kiloton and 550-kiloton blasts in Atlanta, Chicago, New York or Washington, D.C.  They found that hospitals in those cities were bunched together and likely to be destroyed, and the hundreds of thousands of burn victims would overwhelm the U.S. medical system.

“The hospital system has about 1,500 burn beds in the whole country, and of these maybe 80 or 90 percent are full at any given time,” University of Virginia health scientist William Bell said in a statement.  “There’s no way of treating the burn victims from a nuclear attack with the existing medical system.”

Cities would be destroyed by fire following a nuclear detonation, and most initial survivors would suffer exposure to lethal levels of radiation.  Fallout from a 550-kiloton blast in New York could extend across Long Island and kill more than 5 million people, according to the study published this month in the International Journal of Health Geographics.

Tens of thousands of people could be saved through improved training and heightened public awareness, according to the study.  Bell and co-author Cham Dallas called for increases in mobile beds and for training both medical and nonmedical personnel on treating significant numbers of people with second-degree burns.  Hospitals should relocate medical records away from urban downtown areas to ensure they are not destroyed in an attack.

“We need to substantially increase our preparation,” Dallas, a toxicologist at the University of Georgia’s Center for Mass Destruction Defense, said in the statement.  “The likelihood of a nuclear weapon attack in an American city is steadily increasing, and the consequences will be overwhelming (Tom Randall, Bloomberg News, March 21).

U.S. lawmakers yesterday also received warnings about the potential for acts of nuclear terrorism against the United States, Voice of America reported.

“I view us on the precipice of entering a new and dangerous nuclear era with the spread of technology, which means, in particular, the enrichment of uranium, which makes it possible for more societies to enter the nuclear club,” said Stanford University arms control expert Sidney Drell.  “That raises the danger of nuclear weapons getting in the hands of terrorist groups and others unrestrained by the norms of civilized behavior as we know it and therefore these weapons become more likely to be used.”

“The most likely [nuclear threat] is that a terrorist group, al-Qaeda or an al-Qaeda cousin, would acquire a nuclear weapon and introduce it into the United States,” said Robert Gallucci, former assistant secretary of state for political-military affairs.  “It seems to me that that is a threat against which we have neither a defense nor a deterrent”

Nuclear materials around the world must be secured to ensure they are not obtained by terrorists, Gallucci said.

“If we discover that a country has purposely transferred fissile material or a nuclear weapon to a terrorist group, we ought to be telling them in advance that we will treat them as through they were the one who launched the attack and they should expect devastating retaliation” (Meredith Buel, Voice of America, March 21).

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