Someone named Graham Allison has written a book titled, “Nuclear Terrorism, the ultimate preventable tragedy.” There is a web page [archive.org] and the bio indicates that Mr. Allison is the founding dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, which means, I suppose, that he is an old white man, a parent of Baby Boomers, and a Cold Warrior. (a bland and un-informative Wikipedia entry is here .)
The premise put forth in the book, according to the promotional web site, is that we should fear nuclear weapons and that we should alleviate that fear through the pursuit of control (in the form of coerced and enforced scarcity) over fissionable material, the development of nuclear capabilities, and the achievement of nuclear-state status.
There is also an interactive widget that will impose a 10 kiloton nuclear device blast radius on a map, based on the zip code entered by a user. It is under whelming. 10Kt is smaller than Little Boy – the device used on Hiroshima – which isn’t to say it isn’t big, by way of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing was estimated to be merely 2/10ths of a kiloton. What I am saying is that a 10kt nuke doesn’t seem so scary in this age of ever present scenes of massive destruction that Hollywood has brought us. When I think “nuke” I am more inclined to think city killer, not neighborhood wrecker, but neighborhood wrecking is all that a 10kt nuclear weapon does, according to this little widget on the book’s promotional site. (2025 note: the widget doesn’t work anymore, but here is one that does )
From where I sit right now, in the 98119 zip code on the Northern edge of downtown Seattle, the blast wouldn’t even damage the Aurora Bridge or Belltown, much less the downtown business core. Yes, lots of people unfortunate enough to be within a mile of the detonation will die, some instantly, some in the firestorm, some from radiation poisoning, and there would be fallout and radiation and all the rest of what accompanies a nuclear blast, but the potency of a 10kt nuclear weapon isn’t its physical destructiveness. Nor is it its energetic compactness – the ability to deliver a big bang in a small package. Nor is it the long term effects to the environment or the threat of a chain of escalation, as was the case in the Cold War. In the Dread War, the potency of a nuclear weapon is that it gives shape to our fear. The mushroom cloud is an iconic image tailor-made for mass fear. The Dread War exists only inasmuch as we are controlled by our fears – fears of insufficiency, of inadequacy, of impotency – and it is in those fears that we become entangled, like a person thrashing about in a nightmare becomes entangled in the bed sheets.
Which brings us back to Mr. Allison and the book. This kind of fear-mongering is pointless. There are 300 million people in this country, and even the most densely populated areas aren’t so vital that we can’t go on without them. Yes, this is a cruel calculus, but the cruelty doesn’t change the results – a bad guy with a small nuke isn’t doing much harm outside of the immediate vicinity. Given the impossibility of hiding the origin of a nuclear weapon’s material, the idea that someone could anonymously use a nuclear device are low. Instead of being afraid of the possibility of asymmetric nuclear attacks, we might be better served enunciating what will happen when, not if, a nuclear weapon is detonated on American soil, to those who provided the nuclear material, to those who weaponized it, and to those who delivered the device and leave it at that.