Ahaunting Cold War map reveals a bleak outlook for the US in the aftermath of a nuclear confrontation, with forecasts indicating that up to 75% of residents in the most affected regions could perish.
The globe’s nuclear nations include the US, UK, France, Russia, and China, along with Pakistan, India, and North Korea. It is widely accepted that Israel has nuclear capabilities, although it has never officially confirmed this. Meanwhile, Iran continues advancing its significant uranium enrichment efforts.
In 1986, Institute of Medicine experts William Daugherty, Barbara Levi, and Frank Von Hippel conducted a study exploring the potential consequences of a nuclear strike on the US soil. They zeroed in on a scenario where America’s Minuteman missile sites – ground-based nuclear weapons dating back to the 1950s – would detonate onsite, resulting in widespread radioactive fallout across the country.
As depicted in the map, the fallout would be conveyed eastwards by prevailing winds, blanketing the nation. The researchers noted: “We have made the usual assumption that each of the 1,116 US missile silos and missile launch-control centers would be struck by two 0.5-megaton warheads.”
At that period, the Soviet Union possessed about 3,000 of such warheads, reports the Express US. The scientists pinpointed the most perilous areas on the map, identifying locations where radiation measures would surpass 3,500 rads. They explained, “Within this region… more than three-quarters of the population would die.” These areas are marked in black on the map.
The experts painted a grim picture of the aftermath of a nuclear disaster: “Nuclear explosions create a great deal of short-lived radioactivity – mostly associated with fission products. We have made the standard assumption in our calculations that one-half of the yield from the attacking weapons would be from fission.”
They went on to describe the horrific sequence of events: “In the case of airbursts, the fireball would carry this radioactivity into the upper atmosphere, from which it would slowly filter down as a rather diffuse distribution called ‘global fallout’ over a period of months to years.
In the case of an attack on so-called ‘hard’ targets such as missile silos, which can withstand high over-pressures, the nuclear weapons would have to be exploded so close to the ground that surface material would be sucked into the fireball, mixed with the vaporized bomb products, and carried by the buoyancy of the fireball into the upper atmosphere.”
The report from Princeton University academics, Casualties Due to the Blast, Heat, and Radioactive Fallout from Various Hypothetical Nuclear Attacks on the United States, foretells a bleak outcome for nuke strikes.
The scholars explained: “There, much of the bomb material and surface material would condense into particles, a large fraction of which would descend to the surface again within 24 hours in an intense swath of ‘local fallout’ downwind from the target.”
The research ends with a stark warning: “It is our hope that national decision-makers will develop a better understanding of the ‘collateral’ consequences of hypothetical first strikes and of the enormous destructive capacity of the weapons that would survive. That understanding should make them less likely to seek counterforce capabilities or to fear such attacks from the other side.”
