What
would an actual nuclear exchange between the United States and North Korea look
like? How many civilians would be killed? How much of Pyongyang or Los Angeles
would be pulverized in a nuclear ash cloud? And how devastating would the
nuclear fallout be to the suburbs in neighborhoods five, ten, or twenty, twenty
miles away?
Notwithstanding
President Donald Trump’s rhetoric about unleashing “fire and fury” on North
Korea—rhetoric that has made lawmakers in Washington so nervous that some have
been compelled to introduce bills prohibiting a
preemptive nuclear strike—the administration understands that even a single
nuke flying in either direction would be calamitous. Defense Secretary Jim
Mattis and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top
civilian and military defense officials in the country, have tried to bring
people down from the ledge by reminding everyone of how “horrific” such a war would
be—even one that didn’t include nuclear weapons.
How horrific,
however, has been up for debate. While most agree that hundreds of thousands
and potentially millions would die, the toll could be twice or maybe three
times larger if either Washington or Pyongyang were to deploy their nuclear
arsenals in a conflict. Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute
of
Technology, has built a website that uses an algorithm
that attempts to quantify the nuclear horror that thus far we can only imagine.
So, the purveyor of doom I am, I typed in “downtown Los Angeles” as the site of
a hypothetical North Korean nuclear weapons attack with a 250 kiloton nuclear
weapon—the same estimated strength
that the analysts at John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International
Studies’ 38 North delivered after Pyongyang’s sixth nuclear test this
September.
What would an actual nuclear exchange
between the United States and North Korea look like? How many civilians would
be killed? How much of Pyongyang or Los Angeles would be pulverized in a
nuclear ash cloud? And how devastating would the nuclear fallout be to the
suburbs in neighborhoods five, ten, or twenty, twenty miles away?
Notwithstanding President Donald
Trump’s rhetoric about unleashing “fire and fury” on North Korea—rhetoric that
has made lawmakers in Washington so nervous that some have been compelled to
introduce bills prohibiting a preemptive nuclear strike—the
administration understands that even a single nuke flying in either direction
would be calamitous. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and Chairman of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford, the top civilian and military defense
officials in the country, have tried to bring people down from the ledge by
reminding everyone of how “horrific” such a war would be—even one that didn’t include
nuclear weapons.
How horrific, however, has been up for
debate. While most agree that hundreds of thousands and potentially millions
would die, the toll could be twice or maybe three times larger if either
Washington or Pyongyang were to deploy their nuclear arsenals in a conflict.
Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology, has built a
website that uses an algorithm that attempts to quantify the nuclear
horror that thus far we can only imagine. So, the purveyor of doom I am, I
typed in “downtown Los Angeles” as the site of a hypothetical North Korean
nuclear weapons attack with a 250 kiloton nuclear weapon—the same estimated strength that the analysts at John Hopkins
University’s School of Advanced International Studies’ 38 North delivered after
Pyongyang’s sixth nuclear test this September.
While the results spit out of the
algorithm certainly aren’t exact, they do provide the nuclear layman, like
myself, with some easy statistics. The results are apocalyptic for the
residents of Los Angeles County.
Downtown Los Angeles would be wiped out, eviscerated off the face of the map, never
to be seen in the same way again. Dodger Stadium would be a pile of nuclear
rubble. The campus of the University of Southern California, that prestigious
institution that used to have the good football team, would be wiped out. The
nuclear fallout of the 250 kiloton blast would cover Koreatown, with its
residents covered in third degree burns if they were fortunate enough not to be
killed first. Chinatown, closer to the downtown area, would fare even worse.
Tourists who may be visiting the
Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County for the day, southwest of USC,
would be rushed to the panicked, overworked and disorderly hospitals already
streaming with patients, covered in third-degree burns that damage the
nerves—assuming, of course, that the hospital wasn’t downtown. If you happened
to be in the northeast quadrant of the museum during the attack, however, you
might be buried underneath a pile of steel and concrete.
According to the metrics, the final
casualty toll from a single nuclear device going off: 378,800 killed and
861,210 people injured—an estimated 1.2 million casualties. To put that number
in perspective, this is more than two and a half times the casualty rate the U.S.
military suffered during World War II.
It’s a stunning number, and it would
plunge the United States into a dark new chapter in its history—beyond anything
that we as Americans have experienced before. If you thought the United States
was engaged in an intense period of fear, depression, and self-introspection in
the months and years following the September 11 terrorist attacks, then imagine
what Washington’s reaction would be if a good portion of a premier American
city were leveled to the ground.
Fortunately,
all of this doom-and-gloom is still pure fiction. Whether it stays that way
will depend on the calculations of President Donald Trump, who relishes being
unpredictable and is quick to poke his enemies in the eye with tweet barrages,
and Kim Jong-un, a paranoid sociopath whose number one fear is—and has always
been—being deposed in a U.S. military operation.
Daniel
DePetris is a fellow at Defense Priorities.
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