U.S. Rethinks Strategy for the Unthinkable

[darrels joy]

Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.

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George Alexanderson/The New York Times

Employees entered a sub-basement shelter during a Port Authority Civilian Defense Drill in 1951.

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Duck and Cover






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A mother and her children made a practice run for their $5,000 steel backyard fallout shelter in Sacramento, Calif., in 1961.

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Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times

Dr. Irwin Redlener of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness says new insights are not reaching the public.



The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

But a problem for the Obama administration is how to spread the word without seeming alarmist about a subject that few politicians care to consider, let alone discuss. So officials are proceeding gingerly in a campaign to educate the public.

“We have to get past the mental block that says it’s too terrible to think about,” W. Craig Fugate, administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said in an interview. “We have to be ready to deal with it” and help people learn how to “best protect themselves.”

Officials say they are moving aggressively to conduct drills, prepare communication guides and raise awareness among emergency planners of how to educate the public.

Over the years, Washington has sought to prevent nuclear terrorism and limit its harm, mainly by governmental means. It has spent tens of billions of dollars on everything from intelligence and securing nuclear materials to equipping local authorities with radiation detectors.

The new wave is citizen preparedness. For people who survive the initial blast, the main advice is to fight the impulse to run and instead seek shelter from lethal radioactivity. Even a few hours of protection, officials say, can greatly increase survival rates.

Administration officials argue that the cold war created an unrealistic sense of fatalism about a terrorist nuclear attack. “It’s more survivable than most people think,” said an official deeply involved in the planning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The key is avoiding nuclear fallout.”

The administration is making that argument with state and local authorities and has started to do so with the general public as well. Its Citizen Corps Web site says a nuclear detonation is “potentially survivable for thousands, especially with adequate shelter and education.” A color illustration shows which kinds of buildings and rooms offer the best protection from radiation.

In June, the administration released to emergency officials around the nation an unclassified planning guide 130 pages long on how to respond to a nuclear attack. It stressed citizen education, before any attack.

Without that knowledge, the guide added, “people will be more likely to follow the natural instinct to run from danger, potentially exposing themselves to fatal doses of radiation.”

Specialists outside of Washington are divided on the initiative. One group says the administration is overreacting to an atomic threat that is all but nonexistent.

Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation and New York University’s Center on Law and Security, recently argued that the odds of any terrorist group obtaining a nuclear weapon are “near zero for the foreseeable future.”

But another school says that the potential consequences are so high that the administration is, if anything, being too timid.

“There’s no penetration of the message coming out of the federal government,” said Irwin Redlener, a doctor and director of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University. “It’s deeply frustrating that we seem unable to bridge the gap between the new insights and using them to inform public policy.”

White House officials say they are aware of the issue’s political delicacy but are nonetheless moving ahead briskly.

The administration has sought “to enhance national resilience — to withstand disruption, adapt to change and rapidly recover,” said Brian Kamoie, senior director for preparedness policy at the National Security Council. He added, “We’re working hard to involve individuals in the effort so they become part of the team in terms of emergency management.”

A nuclear blast produces a blinding flash, burning heat and crushing wind. The fireball and mushroom cloud carry radioactive particles upward, and the wind sends them near and far.

The government initially knew little about radioactive fallout. But in the 1950s, as the cold war intensified, scientists monitoring test explosions learned that the tiny particles throbbed with fission products — fragments of split atoms, many highly radioactive and potentially lethal.

But after a burst of interest in fallout shelters, the public and even the government grew increasingly skeptical about civil defense as nuclear arsenals grew to hold thousands of warheads.

In late 2001, a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, the director of central intelligence told President George W. Bush of a secret warning that Al Qaeda had hidden an atom bomb in New York City. The report turned out to be false.

But atomic jitters soared.

“History will judge harshly those who saw this coming danger but failed to act,” Mr. Bush said in late 2002.

In dozens of programs, his administration focused on prevention but also dealt with disaster response and the acquisition of items like radiation detectors.

“Public education is key,” Daniel J. Kaniewski, a security expert at George Washington University, said in an interview. “But it’s easier for communities to buy equipment — and look for tech solutions — because there’s Homeland Security money and no shortage of contractors to supply the silver bullet.”

After Hurricane Katrina in 2005 revealed the poor state of disaster planning, public and private officials began to question national preparedness for atomic strikes. Some noted conflicting federal advice on whether survivors should seek shelter or try to evacuate.

In 2007, Congress appropriated $5.5 million for studies on atomic disaster planning, noting that “cities have little guidance available to them.”

The Department of Homeland Security financed a multiagency modeling effort led by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The scientists looked at Washington, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and other big cities, using computers to simulate details of the urban landscape and terrorist bombs.

The results were revealing. For instance, the scientists found that a bomb’s flash would blind many drivers, causing accidents and complicating evacuation.

The big surprise was how taking shelter for as little as several hours made a huge difference in survival rates.

“This has been a game changer,” Brooke Buddemeier, a Livermore health physicist, told a Los Angeles conference. He showed a slide labeled “How Many Lives Can Sheltering Save?”

If people in Los Angeles a mile or more from ground zero of an attack took no shelter, Mr. Buddemeier said, there would be 285,000 casualties from fallout in that region.

Taking shelter in a place with minimal protection, like a car, would cut that figure to 125,000 deaths or injuries, he said.

A shallow basement would further reduce it to 45,000 casualties. And the core of a big office building or an underground garage would provide the best shelter of all.

“We’d have no significant exposures,” Mr. Buddemeier told the conference, and thus virtually no casualties from fallout.

On Jan. 16, 2009 — four days before Mr. Bush left office — the White House issued a 92-page handbook lauding “pre-event preparedness.” But it was silent on the delicate issue of how to inform the public.

Soon after Mr. Obama arrived at the White House, he embarked a global campaign to fight atomic terrorism and sped up domestic planning for disaster response. A senior official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the new administration began a revision of the Bush administration’s handbook to address the issue of public communication.

“We started working on it immediately,” the official said.
“It was recognized as a key part of our response.”

The agenda hit a speed bump. Las Vegas was to star in the nation’s first live exercise meant to simulate a terrorist attack with an atom bomb, the test involving about 10,000 emergency responders. But casinos and businesses protested, as did Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. He told the federal authorities that it would scare away tourists.

Late last year, the administration backed down.

“Politics overtook preparedness,” said Mr. Kaniewski of George Washington University.

When the administration came out with its revised planning guide in June, it noted that “no significant federal response” after an attack would be likely for one to three days.

The document said that planners had an obligation to help the public “make effective decisions” and that messages for predisaster campaigns might be tailored for schools, businesses and even water bills.

“The most lives,” the handbook said, “will be saved in the first 60 minutes through sheltering in place.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/16/science/16terror.html?_r=3&partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

[darrels joy]

The Unexpected Return of 'Duck and Cover'

Jan 4 2011, 8:00 AM ET 20
Sixty years ago, in 1951, Ray Maurer and Anthony Rizzo produced a film for the federal government's Civil Defense agency in response to Soviet nuclear tests. Featuring an animated turtle named Bert and real-life schoolchildren from New York, the film,

Duck and Cover" target="_blank">Duck and Cover

, became an icon of the Cold War, seen by many as evidence of the absurdity of the government's response to the nuclear threat. Against the threat of a nuclear attack, how much good would diving under a desk really do? Originally aimed at teaching children how to respond to a surprise nuclear strike, by the 1980s Duck and Cover was a piece of 1950s kitsch, mocked in such anti-nuclear films as The Atomic Cafe.


But now "duck and cover" is back, not as kitsch but once again as serious advice from the federal government. Faced with growing concerns about a nuclear attack on one or more major cities -- this time from terrorists, or bombs smuggled instead of dropped by countries like Iran or North Korea -- authorities are once again looking to educate citizens about what to do in the event of a nuclear attack. And that advice sounds a lot like what they were saying in my grandfather's day: Duck and cover.


As outlined in a lengthy planning document developed by a federal interagency committee led by the Executive Office of the President and released last summer, national and especially local authorities should be making plans to educate people to take cover and shelter in place after a nuclear detonation.


This has inspired a certain amount of snark from the Obama Administration's critics.


So was the advice crazy back then, and is it crazy now? The answers are "probably not," and "no." The snark, though understandable, is misplaced.


Even short-term sheltering (a day or two) before attempting to evacuate the area will dramatically increase the number of survivors. The difficulty, as the planning document puts it, will be overcoming people's "natural instincts to run from danger and reunify with family members." Overcoming those instincts will require preparation and education on the part of public health and school authorities.


When Americans think about nuclear war, we tend to think about the apocalyptic scene at the end of Dr. Strangelove, a war involving thousands of megaton-yield hydrogen bombs. (A megaton is the equivalent of a million tons of TNT, or about 60-70 times the power of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, which had an explosive power of around 15 kilotons, the equivalent of 15,000 tons of TNT). But in 1951, neither the United States nor the Soviet Union had yet tested a hydrogen bomb, and the duck-and-cover era authorities were basically preparing people for a rerun of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with us on the receiving end of relatively small numbers of (relatively) small nuclear weapons. "Duck and cover" advice is particularly effective there.



An atomic explosion can blind you, burn you, crush you with explosive power, or poison you with radiation. The "duck and cover" advice, based in no small part on the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki survivors, was designed to do what could be done to minimize that.


When an atomic bomb explodes, several things happen in short order. First is a flood of "prompt" radiation created by the nuclear fission that produces the explosion. The good news -- if you can call it that -- is that if you are close enough to get a lethal dose of prompt radiation, you're close enough that you're likely to be killed by other bomb effects before it becomes an issue. Next comes the "flash," a brilliant pulse of light created as the air around the bomb is heated to millions of degrees; this starts out as ultraviolet, falls quickly into the visible light range, and then into the heat-ray infrared range within a few seconds. The flash can blind, or burn exposed skin, and start fires. Next comes the blast, as the superheated air expands outward, initially at supersonic speeds. The blast is dangerous on its own, and also because it crushes buildings and creates clouds of flying glass and debris.


Given that light travels almost instantaneously, for everyone outside the immediate vicinity of the bomb the flash will arrive before the blast. Furthermore, the fire-setting infrared part of the flash peaks a few seconds later than the initial burst of light. So those who see a brilliant flash of light -- and know what it means -- have a few seconds to get under some sort of cover to protect themselves from what comes next.


After these "prompt effects" of initial radiation, flash, and blast have passed, there is an additional hazard. A nuclear explosion sucks air, dust -- and, if it's close to the ground, vaporized soil, buildings, etc. -- up into the fireball, where some components are transformed into radioactive isotopes that then fall out of the cloud and back to earth over the next few hours, hence the term "fallout." The radiation from fallout can be severe -- the bigger the bomb, and the closer it is the the ground, the worse the fallout, generally -- but it decays according to a straightforward rule, called the 7/10 rule: Seven hours after the explosion, the radiation is 1/10 the original level; seven times that interval (49 hours, or two days) it is 1/10 of that, or 1/100 the original, and seven times that interval (roughly two weeks) it is 1/1000 the original intensity. Because it is dust, fallout travels with the wind.


A terrorist bomb is likely to be relatively small -- possibly only a fraction of the Hiroshima bomb's explosive power -- and likely exploded at ground level. This means that the area totally destroyed by the explosion is likely to be much smaller than the area exposed to lesser damage or to fallout radiation (this nuclear weapons effects calculator from the Federation of Atomic Scientists will let you see the effect of different sized bombs burst at different heights). Because of this, Homeland Security people in the Obama Administration have been encouraging a duck-and-cover approach, followed by advice to "shelter in place" against fallout rather than trying to evacuate the area.


A terrorist atomic bomb might be small by Dr. Strangelove standards, but by any other standard its effects would be catastrophic. An area composed of dozens of city blocks would be essentially destroyed; a larger area surrounding it would be heavily damaged and filled with injured people; and an even larger area surrounding that one would be somewhat damaged, with roads blocked, powerlines down, and widespread confusion.


Those few survivors -- mostly badly injured, unless they happened to be inside a bank vault at the time, or something -- in the central area are likely pretty much on their own. The chance that emergency services can get into the zone and find them before the fallout starts to settle is virtually zero. Those in the middle zone may get some help, but not right away. Those in the outer zone, however, will be tempted to flee, and that's what the authorities want to discourage.


The radiation from fallout is blocked by pretty much anything that has mass. (Here's the government's Citizen Corps guide). If you're in the basement of a typical home, you can expect to receive less than a tenth the radiation you'd receive outdoors. If you're in an interior room halfway up a tall building (fallout is dust, and settles on the ground, or on roofs), or in an underground parking garage, you may receive less than a hundredth the radiation. And you can further reduce the dosage by piling up anything heavy (books, furniture, etc.) overhead and by sealing windows and doors with duct tape and plastic to help keep the radioactive dust out. (The government used to publish pamphlets on how to improvise a fallout shelter in your basement; those will probably come back.)


In the face of a Strangelovian apocalypse, this degree of protection might only have produced a slower death, but for those facing a terrorist bomb such protection is likely to be adequate, and much safer than, say, being stuck in traffic on the Beltway when the fallout begins to settle. Also, people sheltering in place won't tie up roads, making it easier for emergency services to get where they're needed. So the Obama Administration wants to encourage people to shelter in place rather than head for the hills in the event of a nuclear attack. Even sheltering for a few hours, or a couple of days, lets radiation levels fall dramatically and avoids road tie-ups for later evacuation.


But will people follow that advice? To follow it, they've first got to hear it, and usual sources of information like radio, TV, and the Internet may not be working. (Not only will power likely go out -- because of those downed powerlines -- but one of the other prompt effects of a nuclear explosion is something called Electro-Magnetic Pulse. A nuclear burst at the edge of the atmosphere could fry electronics over hundreds of miles; a ground-level one does less damage, but makes reliance on electronics near the blast site iffy.). So if you want people to know what to do, you have to tell them in advance.


But telling them in advance has its own risks. To some, duck-and-cover may be amusing kitsch, but when I showed the film to my teenage daughter while researching this piece, she found it terrifying. (Welcome to my Cold War childhood). And, as a recent New York Times article noted, the question of how to educate people without panicking them, or creating political backlash, has generated considerable discussion within the Obama Administration. (One message, using an attack on Las Vegas as an example, was torpedoed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, of Nevada, who thought it bad publicity for a town already hit hard by the recession.)


It has also generated some criticism from those who remember how much flak Bush Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge got for similar proposals -- right down to the duct tape and plastic sheeting -- when the Department of Homeland Security was new. It's understandable that people might snark about that, but physics is no respecter of political differences. That the Obama Administration is pursuing a policy driven by science, rather than by politics, is something that should be praised, not criticized.


Of course, one question not driven -- directly, anyway -- by science is the question of how likely a nuclear attack might be. On that subject, the Obama Administration, presumably, has better intelligence than I do. But I note that the feds seem to be highly interested in an experimental new drug for treating radiation sickness. That's not encouraging.


If the likelihood of a nuclear attack is hard to judge, what's beyond dispute is that we are in many ways much less prepared to deal with one than we used to be. Fallout shelters in public buildings are no longer marked and stocked, and public knowledge about nuclear weapons and their effects isn't what it was during the Cold War era. In the course of teaching nuclear-related cases in my Administrative Law and National Security Law courses, I've observed that most of my students (military veterans and a few emergency-services types excepted) know next to nothing about A-bomb related things that were common knowledge a couple of decades ago. Replenishing that popular knowledge base seems worthwhile, as long as there are nuclear weapons on the planet.


There's something else worthy of praise in the Obama Administration's approach, something that goes well beyond the terrorist-nukes field. The Times article mentioned above includes this quote from Brian Kamoie of the National Security Council: "We're working hard to involve individuals in the effort so they become part of the team in terms of emergency management."


The feds' estimate is that it will be at least a couple of days before significant outside aid arrives at the scene of a terrorist nuclear attack. But as experience from disasters like Katrina demonstrates, outside aid always takes longer to arrive than you expect. A philosophy of empowering individuals, and encouraging preparedness on the part of ordinary citizens, will pay dividends in the event of all sorts of disasters, whether natural or "man-caused."


Encouraging people to take even modest steps to prepare themselves in advance will undoubtedly save lives, even if the terrorist attack never comes and Washington is, instead, struck by an asteroid, an earthquake, or a hurricane. As we head into a 21st century that appears to be a lot less secure than 1990s prognostications suggested, it's probably best to prepare for the worst.


http://www.theatlantic.com/national/...d-cover/68776/