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Thoughts on that nuclear attack PSA put out by New York City.
New York City's office of Emergency Management has issued a surreal and brainless PSA about what to do if a nuclear bomb goes off in the city. Let's try a youtube embed:
Set aside the chirpy presenter and the outlandish assumption that there will still be broadcasts/phone service or internet for people to stay tuned to after a bomb goes off.
If there was an actual nuclear war, either NYC would not be targeted at all (because Russia would instead be using its nukes against naval bases, air bases, missile silos, and military command centres), or it would get one bomb, which would destroy essentially the entire city, and there wouldn't be much of anyone left alive to worry about how they were supposed to tune in (Check out the map halfway down this page, showing the area of a firestorm after a standards size Russian nuke going off above Manhattan).
The PSA seems to instead be contemplating a terrorist nuclear attack using a regular A-bomb instead of an H-bomb. Fearmongers ^H^H^H security "experts" have been beating the drum about how terrorists would love to obtain a nuke and set it off in a major american city for 20 years now. My library card let me look at this paper from 2009, written by one of those "experts," which cites 2007 congressional testimony by Richard Garwin, a "true genius" who thought there was a "20 percent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included," and also cites Matthew Bunn, who estimated in 2006 "the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent." That means over 10 years, the first expert thinks there is a 90% probability that terrorists will blow up a city, and in the two decades since 2001, the second guy thinks the odds of a city being nuked are around 50% (see formula note below). Something seems wrong with their figures. Could it be that they don't actually have any idea of the risk and are making up high numbers in order to make things sound more scary so they can continue to make money beating the drum over nuclear terrorism? Nah, couldn't be.
Regardless, I got some maps for the destruction from a very basic nuclear bomb - the Little Boy a-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which shot a chunk of purified U235 into a cavity in another chunk of U235. The simplicity of the design was such that the Manhattan project scientists never bothered to test it - they were certain it would work. It's possible to make a much smaller bomb (eg, the minimum yield on dial-a-yield H-bomb used in most American nukes), but that involves using more advanced techniques. For a bomb built in a garage by people without decades of expertise in bomb making to draw on, we can expect your basic Hiroshima or Nagasaki H-bomb of 15 or 20 kilotons. Here's the area destroyed by fire at Hiroshima. And here's a nukemap projection of the result of setting off the same bomb at the ground level of the Empire State Building. The 50% chance of 3rd degree burns circle there (1.8 km) is the same radius as the "2000 yard" circle in the Hiroshima map.
Basically, assuming the same size firestorm, a terrorist nuke set off in the street outside the Empire State Building would cause the entire width of Manhattan Island from 5th to 55th street to be destroyed by fire. And the staggering scale of that - from the most basic bomb that could plausibly be made in a garage by terrorists - is why all those "experts" have been so wrong for so many years. Because despite what American terrorism "experts" think, terrorists are not monsters intent on killing as many people as possible. They are politically savvy people using acts of violence to create a political effect. Terrorism is, basically, propaganda through violence. And even if they could get their hands on some plutonium or pure U235 (which would not be an easy or cheap undertaking), they know better than to do so. They know that the propaganda effect of setting off a nuke in a city would not help their cause. So they haven't tried.
But, the fearmongers continue to beat their drums, the Biden administration has not reversed course on Trump's baseless scapegoating if Iran, and the NYC office of emergency management has turned out a tone deaf and ludicrous PSA.
(Footnote: to calculate the odds of something with a per year chance happening over several years, this page says for the probability p, (1-p) to the N = the chance of it not happening at all over N years. The chance of it happening at least once is the inverse (subtract that result from 1 again). So, convert annual percent chance to decimal, subtract that decimal from 1, then raise that to the power of the number of years, then subtract from 1 to get the chance of it happening over the longer time interval.
Set aside the chirpy presenter and the outlandish assumption that there will still be broadcasts/phone service or internet for people to stay tuned to after a bomb goes off.
If there was an actual nuclear war, either NYC would not be targeted at all (because Russia would instead be using its nukes against naval bases, air bases, missile silos, and military command centres), or it would get one bomb, which would destroy essentially the entire city, and there wouldn't be much of anyone left alive to worry about how they were supposed to tune in (Check out the map halfway down this page, showing the area of a firestorm after a standards size Russian nuke going off above Manhattan).
The PSA seems to instead be contemplating a terrorist nuclear attack using a regular A-bomb instead of an H-bomb. Fearmongers ^H^H^H security "experts" have been beating the drum about how terrorists would love to obtain a nuke and set it off in a major american city for 20 years now. My library card let me look at this paper from 2009, written by one of those "experts," which cites 2007 congressional testimony by Richard Garwin, a "true genius" who thought there was a "20 percent per year probability of a nuclear explosion with American cities and European cities included," and also cites Matthew Bunn, who estimated in 2006 "the probability of a nuclear terrorist attack over a 10-year period to be 29 percent." That means over 10 years, the first expert thinks there is a 90% probability that terrorists will blow up a city, and in the two decades since 2001, the second guy thinks the odds of a city being nuked are around 50% (see formula note below). Something seems wrong with their figures. Could it be that they don't actually have any idea of the risk and are making up high numbers in order to make things sound more scary so they can continue to make money beating the drum over nuclear terrorism? Nah, couldn't be.
Regardless, I got some maps for the destruction from a very basic nuclear bomb - the Little Boy a-bomb dropped on Hiroshima, which shot a chunk of purified U235 into a cavity in another chunk of U235. The simplicity of the design was such that the Manhattan project scientists never bothered to test it - they were certain it would work. It's possible to make a much smaller bomb (eg, the minimum yield on dial-a-yield H-bomb used in most American nukes), but that involves using more advanced techniques. For a bomb built in a garage by people without decades of expertise in bomb making to draw on, we can expect your basic Hiroshima or Nagasaki H-bomb of 15 or 20 kilotons. Here's the area destroyed by fire at Hiroshima. And here's a nukemap projection of the result of setting off the same bomb at the ground level of the Empire State Building. The 50% chance of 3rd degree burns circle there (1.8 km) is the same radius as the "2000 yard" circle in the Hiroshima map.
Basically, assuming the same size firestorm, a terrorist nuke set off in the street outside the Empire State Building would cause the entire width of Manhattan Island from 5th to 55th street to be destroyed by fire. And the staggering scale of that - from the most basic bomb that could plausibly be made in a garage by terrorists - is why all those "experts" have been so wrong for so many years. Because despite what American terrorism "experts" think, terrorists are not monsters intent on killing as many people as possible. They are politically savvy people using acts of violence to create a political effect. Terrorism is, basically, propaganda through violence. And even if they could get their hands on some plutonium or pure U235 (which would not be an easy or cheap undertaking), they know better than to do so. They know that the propaganda effect of setting off a nuke in a city would not help their cause. So they haven't tried.
But, the fearmongers continue to beat their drums, the Biden administration has not reversed course on Trump's baseless scapegoating if Iran, and the NYC office of emergency management has turned out a tone deaf and ludicrous PSA.
(Footnote: to calculate the odds of something with a per year chance happening over several years, this page says for the probability p, (1-p) to the N = the chance of it not happening at all over N years. The chance of it happening at least once is the inverse (subtract that result from 1 again). So, convert annual percent chance to decimal, subtract that decimal from 1, then raise that to the power of the number of years, then subtract from 1 to get the chance of it happening over the longer time interval.