It has been decades since Americans worried about a nuclear attack, and longer since our government took seriously the issue of preparing our people to survive one, or what used to be called “civil defense.” The astronomical dollar costs of readying hundreds of American cities against a massive Russian nuclear strike during the Cold War made civil defense impractical.
Some experts and leaders even feared it provocative, signaling preparation for fighting rather than preventing nuclear war. The gradual muting of communism as a global threat followed by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 seemed to render the issue moot. But the nuclear times they are a-changin’. It’s time to rethink our assumptions about the nuclear threats we face, and action by our government on civil defense.
Russia: Throughout their war against Ukraine, senior Russian government officials have openly discussed and implicitly and explicitly threatened the possible use of nuclear weapons. With great public fanfare, Moscow is now re-deploying short-range tactical nuclear weapons that were withdrawn almost 30 years ago back to the nation of Belarus. Russian media now totally controlled by Putin seems intent on normalizing nuclear threats against NATO and the possibility of the war in Ukraine going nuclear if Russian territory, perhaps including the Crimean peninsula illegally annexed by Putin in 2014 after a sham referendum, were breached.
North Korea: Pyongyang has tested intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) designed to carry nuclear weapons as far as the U.S. East Coast. President Biden and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol issued a muscular statement underlining America’s willingness to use its nuclear deterrent to protect South Korea. For the first time since the 1980s, a U.S. navy nuclear-armed ballistic missile submarine, carrying 20 Trident II D5 missiles, is docking in South Korea as a symbol of that U.S. nuclear umbrella.
China: President Xi Jinping has increasingly prioritized China’s claim to Taiwan, openly advocating for “national reunification” as the “essence of national rejuvenation,” casting it as a historical imperative and a priority for Xi’s third term, by force if necessary. Biden has responded not with the ambiguity of past U.S. presidents, but with several clear statements that we will defend Taiwan from a Chinese assault. Meanwhile, the number of Chinese ICBM launchers reported by the Pentagon has increased from 100 to 450 in the past three years. According to U.S. Strategic Command, the number of land-based fixed and mobile ICBM launchers in China exceeds the number of ICBM launchers in the U.S.
Iran: Talks to prevent Tehran’s acquisition of nuclear weapons have broken down and show little prospect of success. U.S. officials have testified to Congress that Iran could make enough fissile material for one nuclear bomb in “about 12 days.” Some experts have estimated that Iran could have enough fissile material for five bombs within three to four weeks following a decision to do so. Iranian missiles can now strike U.S. bases in the Middle East and Israel, which the U.S. has pledged to protect. Iranian ICBMs that could strike the U.S. are likely in the near term.
Any one of those developments should be enough for U.S. government officials to take seriously the possibility of this country being attacked with a nuclear weapon. Yet, on one level, preparedness, there is little sign they do.
American diplomats are engaged on Russia and Ukraine, North Korea, China and Taiwan, and Iran and our military has contingency plans in case conflict occurs in any of those theaters. None of that will help New Yorkers or Americans in other cities that could be targeted for nuclear attack if diplomacy and deterrence fail, as they could.
Government officials, like most Americans, still recoil at the prospect of the United States being attacked with nuclear weapons. They rightly fear that if a hostile nation used a nuclear weapon on U.S. soil, Washington would retaliate in kind triggering an escalating and massive nuclear exchange. Computer models of medium to large nuclear exchanges indicate severe adverse climatic effects that could last for years and create tens of millions of deaths from starvation because of the collapse of grain crops brought on by climate change, what has been called Nuclear Winter. In those models, the sun is filtered or blocked for years.
If things were to get that bad, no planning or preparation would be helpful in mitigating the magnitude of the disaster. As former President Ronald Reagan rightly declared, “A nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Planners should not, however, assume that an escalation to general nuclear war involving hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons would be inevitable. The shock of pulling the nuclear trigger for the first time since 1945 could cause leaders of the nations involved to stop before it was too late. For that lesser case of limited nuclear use, disaster preparations could make a big difference in the outcome of millions of American lives.
A limited nuclear exchange might try to target military assets such as massed tanks on a battlefield or vital bases supporting the conflict, either in a nuclear first-strike or in retaliation for nuclear use. If, however, the attacker wanted to inflict severe harm on the economy or political leadership of the United States, New York and Washington are the obvious though by no means only targets. Even talking about that possibility, much less realistically planning for it, is still dismissed in many corridors as a waste of valuable time. Yet our government at least has a responsibility to ensure that such possibilities are seriously examined by experts and discussed candidly with the citizens it serves.
Educating the American people about today’s nuclear risks, even planning for it, could normalize the possibility of nuclear use with leaders and publics in ways that could lead some to discount the peril. Hence, we should always endeavor to underline our existential interest in preventing the horror of nuclear use. It would, however, be irresponsible for the nation’s government to disregard the risk and do little or nothing more to plan for it in light of what government and academic experts agree is an increased risk.
While the Federal Emergency Management Agency has paper plans for major disasters including nuclear attack, FEMA is not capable of developing the knowledge, readiness, and capabilities needed for our country to deal with the “unthinkable.” To begin, there are two questions the White House needs to address.
First, what irreplaceable national capabilities would we lose if New York or Washington were attacked with nuclear weapons? What essential assets exist uniquely in Washington and New York, and what social, health, economic, political, and security systems would fail without those metropolitan areas. Can we act now to mitigate those potential disruptions?
Second, what are we lacking today to stage a rescue and recovery operation if, as is more likely now than in decades, a nuclear bomb went off in lower Manhattan, or in the 15 block area that includes Congress and the White House in the District of Columbia?
The area right around the blast epicenter would be too radioactive for responders to enter, but in the second and more distant rings lives could be saved if there were first responders, hospitals, and medical and basic supplies available. Many emergency vehicles and medical devices would, however, have been electronically frozen by the electro-magnetic pulse from the blast. How long would it take to scale up a rescue involving massive medical needs, housing, food, and public order?
Unfortunately, today there is little reason to think that anything like an adequate response would be available for weeks. Many who could have been saved would die from lack of government planning and preparation.
Spending significant resources on governmental and private sector capacities that would only be useful in the event of a nuclear war is not something that anyone wants to do. In fact, most government officials shy away from doing anything about low probability/high impact problems. Nonetheless, there may be some low cost planning and preparation that could be beneficial. There may even be some response and recovery capabilities that could have some value in lesser scenarios, like the increasing probability of another Katrina-size hurricane. And systematically thinking about what a limited nuclear war would actually look like might also underline the horror and give more impetus and higher priority to the diplomacy and deterrence needed to avoid it.
In 1962 the real life “Dr. Strangelove,” nuclear war planner Herman Kahn, wrote an influential volume entitled “Thinking About the Unthinkable” in which he unemotionally and cold bloodedly analyzed how a nuclear war might be “winnable.” The problem today is that although a nuclear war now may be unthinkable, and for most of us unwinnable in the extreme, the use of a single nuclear weapon — including by a terrorist with access to nuclear materials — or a limited nuclear exchange between nations is not impossible. Were it to happen, many New Yorkers and indeed all Americans might deeply regret that our government had not thought and acted systematically about our survival and recovery before it happened.
Clarke was assistant secretary of state for politico-military affairs from 1989 to 1992 and later served 10 years in the White House. Andreasen was the National Security Council’s staff director for defense policy and arms control from 1993 to 2001 and teaches at the Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota.
