Chapter 12
Societal Effects of a Nuclear Attack
The societal effects of even a small nuclear attack are likely to be profound, not only
in the city that was attacked, but across society, possibly lasting for years or decades.
While the long-term effects are beyond the scope of this work (in addition to being
hard to predict with any degree of accuracy), we can draw upon the experiences of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki to guess at the short-term societal effects of a nuclear attack
today.
While a great deal of planning for response to nuclear attacks was conducted
during the Cold War much of this planning is of only partial relevance to a nuclear
terrorist attack. One reason is that Cold War weapons were typically high-yield
devices with an average yield on the order of a megaton of TNT [17], while a
terrorist device is likely to be less powerful by at least a few orders of magnitude.
This, in turn, means that the thermal and blast effects will be far less powerful and
less extensive than what Cold War planning anticipated.
In addition, Cold War nuclear arsenals were much larger than those of the present;
at their peak in 1986 the US and USSR possessed 68,317 nuclear weapons between
them with a further 1051 in the hands of the other nuclear powers [1]. Nuclear war
planning assumed multiple high-yield detonations distributed across major cities
as well as against military and industrial targets—the assumption was that there
would be extensive destruction, heavy fallout across the city, and few (if any) unaffected locations. The experiences in Japan supported these assumptions, with a single
relatively low-yield device visiting near-complete destruction on each city attacked.
A terrorist attack, however, is likely to consist of a single relatively low-yield
device used against a large city with more robust construction than the largely
wooden buildings of wartime Japan. Thus, from a societal standpoint, an act of
nuclear terrorism is likely to be less destructive of the city attacked than Cold War
planning or the experiences in Japan had led planners to expect; the former due to
lower yields and fewer weapons used in an attack, and the latter due to having a
larger city with more robust buildings.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
P. A. Karam, Radiological and Nuclear Terrorism,
Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69162-2_12
111
Societal Effects of a Nuclear Attack
The societal effects of even a small nuclear attack are likely to be profound, not only
in the city that was attacked, but across society, possibly lasting for years or decades.
While the long-term effects are beyond the scope of this work (in addition to being
hard to predict with any degree of accuracy), we can draw upon the experiences of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki to guess at the short-term societal effects of a nuclear attack
today.
While a great deal of planning for response to nuclear attacks was conducted
during the Cold War much of this planning is of only partial relevance to a nuclear
terrorist attack. One reason is that Cold War weapons were typically high-yield
devices with an average yield on the order of a megaton of TNT [17], while a
terrorist device is likely to be less powerful by at least a few orders of magnitude.
This, in turn, means that the thermal and blast effects will be far less powerful and
less extensive than what Cold War planning anticipated.
In addition, Cold War nuclear arsenals were much larger than those of the present;
at their peak in 1986 the US and USSR possessed 68,317 nuclear weapons between
them with a further 1051 in the hands of the other nuclear powers [1]. Nuclear war
planning assumed multiple high-yield detonations distributed across major cities
as well as against military and industrial targets—the assumption was that there
would be extensive destruction, heavy fallout across the city, and few (if any) unaffected locations. The experiences in Japan supported these assumptions, with a single
relatively low-yield device visiting near-complete destruction on each city attacked.
A terrorist attack, however, is likely to consist of a single relatively low-yield
device used against a large city with more robust construction than the largely
wooden buildings of wartime Japan. Thus, from a societal standpoint, an act of
nuclear terrorism is likely to be less destructive of the city attacked than Cold War
planning or the experiences in Japan had led planners to expect; the former due to
lower yields and fewer weapons used in an attack, and the latter due to having a
larger city with more robust buildings.
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
P. A. Karam, Radiological and Nuclear Terrorism,
Advanced Sciences and Technologies for Security Applications,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-69162-2_12
111