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For immediate release: January 14, 2025 The awful destruction from the Los Angeles fires is minuscule compared to what a single nuclear warhead would cause The timing is right to consider again what nuclear weapons can do and why we must negotiate peace with Russia Contact: Steve Starr: 573-289-6672, Greg Mello: 505-265-1200 office, 505-577-8563 cell Albuquerque, NM and Columbia, MO -- The destruction that would occur in an urban area from even a single modern nuclear weapon, let alone an attack with multiple warheads, is almost impossible to comprehend, even in abstract terms. It is however important to try to do so from time to time, as the departing Biden Administration has taken steps to begin a new nuclear arms race, and President Trump could be tempted to continue that effort (see: "Will the 2024 presidential elections alter the course of the new nuclear arms race?", Aug 15, 2024). We are among the many experts who believe the risks of nuclear war are rising, for multiple reasons that are beyond the scope of this short note. Opinions differ as to the best ways to reduce that danger, but it is timely to reflect on what even the smallest nuclear war might mean, in stark terms. We can let the Wall Street Journal speak for the timeliness, as they did yesterday: "The Bomb Is Back as the Risk of Nuclear War Enters a New Age: Fears of nuclear conflict are growing again as arsenals expand, alliances shift and treaties dissolve." The timing is right too, vis-a-vis the pending inauguration of a new President who has vowed to end the Ukraine War -- a great, if not the greatest, nexus of nuclear war danger for the U.S. right now. Negotiations could begin immediately ("Trump says he will meet Putin ‘very quickly’ after inauguration," Jan. 14, 2025). Earlier this week, former Naval War College professor Michael Vlahos laid out the political challenges the new President will face, and how they can be transcended. We all must do our part. Tomorrow morning, this organization will host a public discussion of paths to peace in Ukraine with prominent Russian and U.S. interlocutors in Los Alamos ("Peace in Ukraine -- How Do We Get There?" A discussion in Los Alamos with Scott Ritter and Dmitri Trenin, Jan 7, 2025). Absent an architecture of mutual security, beginning with peace in Ukraine, prospects for nuclear arms control and reductions of danger are dim to nonexistent. So how can we understand nuclear war dangers, in human terms? Annie Jacobsen's well-researched, rightly-praised recent book Nuclear War, A Scenario describes a plausible worst-case outcome in considerable detail, should nuclear deterrence fail. The truth is that no one knows or can predict exactly what would happen. While cities probably would not be initial targets in a war involving nuclear weapons, to believe cities would never be targeted is naive. Therefore we want, in this press advisory, to review the basics again. The terrible destruction from the fires in greater Los Angeles, which everyone can see in heart-rending detail, provides what is at least a remote comparison with the much larger, nearly instantaneous fires that would be ignited by the use of a thermonuclear weapon in an urban area. Wildfires have burned most of at least 63 square miles in the greater Los Angeles area. Not everything in the burned areas was destroyed and most importantly, these were "line fires" which spread across the landscape, allowing most people to escape. Horribly, 24 people are known to have died in these fires so far. Lynn Eden, author of the important study Whole World on Fire, offers us a clear, highly-recommended description of the effects of a 300 kt warhead detonated over the Pentagon, adapted from the first chapter of that book. Her analysis was in part based on the work of Dr. Ted Postol, a nuclear weapons and missile expert now retired from MIT, who recently provided the world with a very good lecture with visuals on nuclear weapons effects including mass fires, including vignettes of the mass fires in World War II (start at about the 13 minute point in the presentation). Steve Starr, Lynn Eden, and Ted Postol together wrote this excellent article: "What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan?" To understand the fires that would be caused by nuclear weapons, these resources are the best places to start. Mass fires ("firestorms") differ completely from line fires. The hurricane-and-beyond-force winds witnessed in mass fires were experienced first-hand by Dresden survivor Victor Gregg, who described what he saw in this BBC interview: “women and children alight, flying through the air,” and a group of firefighters getting stuck in a molten street, catching fire, and exploding. Even the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were thousands of times deadlier than the present fires in and around Los Angeles, only begin to approximate the effects of a modern nuclear warhead with 20, 50, or even more times the energy released at Hiroshima, the equivalent of 15 kilotons (kt) of TNT. U.S. Minuteman III missiles are currently equipped with warheads with yields in the range of 300-350 kt of TNT. To help visualize this, it would take at least 3,000 100-ton rail cars to carry this much conventional explosive -- a train 34 miles long. The largest deployed U.S. explosive, the B83 bomb, can deliver the equivalent of 1.2 megatons of TNT, four times this much. Recent Russian warheads can be as large as 800 kt -- and as we will see, even larger warheads may be available to Russia for use against coastal targets, if it came to that. Russia appears to have at least 340 800-kiloton nuclear warheads ready to launch at the U.S. with a few minutes warning. The U.S. and Russia each have almost 1,800 nuclear warheads deployed, with most of these available for use within minutes. On the February 4, 2026, the last remaining treaty limiting the size of deployed nuclear forces -- New START -- will expire. To help our imaginations still further, Steve Starr has briefly summarized the sequence of events that would follow a 800 kt nuclear detonation 1 mile above Los Angeles:
With this in mind, Alex Wellerstein's Nukemap can be used to understand some of these effects geographically. The area of mass fire scales linearly with the yield of the explosion, other factors being equal. In the scenario of an 800 kt airburst over downtown Los Angeles, approximately 2 million people would be killed by blast and fire alone. There may be larger warheads. In response to unilateral U.S. abrogation of the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty in 2002, Russia began developing nuclear delivery systems which could not be stopped by any current or conceivable missile defense system. One of these is the "Status-6", ("Poseidon") project, a very large underwater drone propelled by a small nuclear reactor that can travel intercontinental distances at great depths and high speeds -- so large it can carry what amounts to a somewhat arbitrarily large nuclear warhead. Speculation as to warhead yield has varied from 2 to 100 megatons. This weapon is likely to be in its initial deployment stage. In passing it is well to note that there are currently no missile defense systems capable of shooting down Russian missiles and none are likely to be ever deployed, no matter how much money is spent on the project. A very large nuclear explosion in the shallow water of a port like Long Beach would produce much the same degree of mass fire as a surface (not airburst) explosion on land, but with horrendous fallout that would reach hundreds of miles downwind. The area affected by mass fires on the land side of the explosion would likely be in the range of 1,600 square miles for a 50 megaton warhead. Perhaps 9 million people would be dead in Los Angeles and its suburbs with an hour or two from the fire alone. There is more -- much more, to the aftermath of a single nuclear explosion of this scale, let alone the employment of many warheads, which would be the most likely scenario. There would be little to no help available, either from nearby or in the event of a larger attack, from national sources. It appears that if large nuclear explosions were employed in the upper atmosphere to produce widespread electromagnetic pulse, in addition to targets on the land or at sea, survival beyond a short time would be challenging for most people in the U.S. Should nuclear weapons be targeted at many cities or at military targets within them, the specter of nuclear winter would arise. Soot and smoke from the firestorms would rapidly rise above cloud level, where it would circle the Earth and form a global stratospheric smoke layer. Because it could not be rained out, the smoke layer would last for many years. The smoke layer would block a significant amount of sunlight from reaching the surface of the Earth; the loss of warming sunlight would create Ice Age weather conditions in a matter of weeks. Temperatures in central North America and Eurasia would fall below freezing every day for up to 3 years. It would be too cold to grow food crops for many years. Most people and animals would starve to death. None of this is new information. By the time Jonathan Schell wrote the landmark Fate of the Earth in 1982, this and much more was already clear. ***ENDS*** |
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