Your First Threat In A Nuclear War

So, we’re all aware of the danger of the status quo, and – looking back over the thirty-five years since the end of the Cold War – we are in general agreement on how we got to this tipping point.  But I  don’t think most thinking people are as aware as they should be of the mechanics of nuclear war, especially of what we could call its established order of engagement.  And knowing that order will profoundly affect their efforts to help themselves and their families understand and avoid much of the danger inherent in at least the first act of that conflict.

In this essay, I will use as examples two American cities, the one where my wife Katerina and I live in western Washington state and New York City, comparing and contrasting the dangers inherent in each locale, especially as they pertain to the expected first act of a nuclear war and any potential successive acts.

Poulsbo, Washington
Nickname: “Little Norway”
Population: 13,000

Katia and I live about four miles from the highest concentration of nuclear warheads on the West Coast of the United States – maybe in the world – and about a half mile from a significant but diffuse homeless encampment.

Now, most people would think that our most immediate danger in case of nuclear war would be the huge stockpile of nukes over the next low ridge to our southwest.  Indeed, if a nuclear war were to begin with concentrated attacks on primary military targets, the ballistic missile submarine base at Bangor would probably top the list.  It would be wiped away in the first few minutes of the war, and we would share its fate, now only comforted in knowing that it would hurt an awful lot, but it wouldn’t hurt for awful long.

But standard American nuclear doctrine would say otherwise, and I assume it’s the same for our potential opponents.  Nuclear exchanges don’t begin with attacks on nuclear weapons or military stations.  They begin with a nationwide pattern of high altitude nuclear bursts that do no physical or biological damage to the local populations at all – unless you have a pacemaker, or happen to be in surgery, or flying in an airplane – but which wipe out all electronic memory and functionality in the attacked country.  If you live in the attacked country, all news coverage would have ceased, so your only inkling of your predicament would be your personal observations: such as the combination of a general power failure, telephone failure, computer failure, along with no traffic noise at all.

And I should note here that each of our primary potential adversaries in any expected nuclear war – the Russian Federation and the Peoples Republic of China – possesses exactly the right sort of missiles to deliver a nationwide pattern of high altitude nuclear bursts on the United States while generally avoiding our missile defense systems.

These bursts would generate an electromagnetic pulse (called an EMP) that would cause all electronic memory to be instantaneously and permanently wiped clean.  So, nothing would work – cars, appliances, phones, computers, et cetera – nothing at all.  And that would cause all safety, transportation, business, education, medical, and social services to stop right then too.

Our economy, locally and nationally, would instantaneously and fully fail; and all American communities – large and small, north and south, east and west – would be equally affected.

Social order would become localized, with some areas functioning relatively safely and other areas ruled by dangerous bands of marauders.  In fact, if you’d like to see a movie about post-EMP America, think about “Mad Max” and imagine the marauders as equally evil men and women, armed to the teeth, but getting around on stolen bicycles.

So, in our area, it would take the homeless at the end of the road and others like them less than a day to get hungry; begin drug, alcohol, and nicotine withdrawal; and to start marauding.  And the new fulltime jobs for us good guys would be in the twin fields of building community cohesiveness and encouraging neighborhood protection.

New York City
Nickname: “The Big Apple”
Population: 8,442,000

I included “The City” in this essay as a comparison city for a somewhat negative reason.  Early on, at the beginning of the Ukraine War, video circulated on the net of at least one New York school conducting a nuclear war drill that looked like it was straight out of the Fifties.  The children were taught to get under their desks on command and to wait there until their teacher gave them the all clear.  I suppose that the idea behind the drill was well meant, but it didn’t have anything to do with reality at all.

First, that school should have been dark and empty since the day after the EMP attack, and the New York school systems should have plans in place now – written plans, recorded with ink on paper, drawn up in consultation with the parents of the students, and distributed to each family of each student – to make sure that each of the students in each of its schools makes it safely home within a day of the attack, remembering that this plan has to be effectuated in a potentially hostile environment with limited police protection and without the benefit of any mechanical methods of transportation.  That New York schools would sponsor that hide-under-the-desk drill only shows that they don’t understand the risks and they don’t have a plan for dealing with those risks.(I bet my town’s schools don’t have a plan like that either, which I’ll check out this week.  And I should mention that Katia and are active in our local antiwar movement.  Although our activities are focused on establishing a permanent ceasefire in Gaza, plenty of our friends and associates are active in the antinuclear movement, locally called “Ground Zero”, and I think they’ll like EMP planning as a method of increasing the knowledge of nuclear risks in our community.)

Second, and not wishing to demean it, The City would not be considered a primary target, a first wave blast target, by anyone.  Remembering that New York City’s importance as a financial hub would be destroyed in the EMP phase, and the EMP also would cause its other positive attributes – in education, medicine, music, the arts, internationalism, transportation, et cetera – to lose relevance.  Its only remaining importance would be as a population concentration covering an absolutely huge area, so – from the point of view of our potential adversaries – who cares?  They would not intend to ever occupy the place, and the EMP would cause vast and continuing social damage anyway.  So, why waste the weapons on it?

Mark Warns is a former naval officer, criminal prosecutor, and investigation coordinator who retired from his last career in business eight years ago.  Since then he has been active as a writer and numerical analyst, for the last four and a half years concentrating on the Pandemic.  His overall personal website is: https://www.markwarns.com. His other websites are: https://www.seeyourkidsincollege.com and: https://www.americancollegegenerosity.com.