Antinuclear

What Would It Mean to ‘Absorb’ a Nuclear Attack?- nuclear missile silos as a “sponge”

Scientific American , By Ella Weber on November 22, 2023

The missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota make it a potential target for a nuclear attack. And that doesn’t come close to describing what the reality would be for those on the ground.

This podcast is Part 4 of a five-part series. Listen to Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here. The podcast series is a part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.…..

Ella Weber: Members of my tribe live with nuclear missiles on the Fort Berthold Reservation. The weapons sit in underground concrete silos that are surrounded by antennas in small, fenced-off areas. The missiles are armed and ready to launch in 60 seconds. This is one reason they are called Minutemen missiles…………………………….

Weber: After learning that the Air Force had not explained to my tribe what the new nuclear missiles were for–which the Air Force intended to deploy for another 60 years on our reservation–I decided to dig deeper.

I wanted to know what role the missiles and their silos play today in U.S. nuclear strategy and what the risks for the tribe were in hosting them—something that the tribe never agreed to in the first place………………….

I wasn’t really clear on what Secretary Jim Mattis meant by the ICBM force providing a “cost-imposing strategy,” so I talked to Leonor Tomero to get some clarity. She used to serve as deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear and missile defense policy in the Biden administration in 2021…………

Weber: Leonor explained to me that should the U.S. face a potential nuclear attack, the president would have two choices with regards to the ICBMs: launch them preventively before the missiles possibly got destroyed, or decide to absorb the attack and retaliate later.

Weber (tape): What do you mean by absorbing an attack?

Tomero: I think, you know, it’s, you know, they’re considered a sponge.

Weber (tape): So it’s kind of like making these ICBMs, like, a target ….

Tomero: Yes…

Weber (tape): …. rather than, like, these other major cities or other places…

Tomero: Right.

Weber: In case you don’t know — the role  of the ICBM is to force an adversary to use many nuclear weapons if they decided to attack the U.S. The silos are basically meant to divert and absorb the incoming nuclear missiles from important and critical areas in the country, like cities.

But what would that mean for the Fort Berthold reservation?……………………………………………………………………

Frank Von Hippel: Basically the secretary of defense had come in and testified to Congress. When one of the senators asked how many people would such an attack kill, he estimated 15,000 to 25,000. And he said, ‘Well, that would be terrible, but it would be not what you would expect from a major nuclear attack.’

That seemed low to, actually, the senator from New Jersey [Clifford Case]. And he asked for a peer review of the Defense Department calculations, and, and I was then asked to be an unpaid consultant to look into that. And, in fact, I went over to the Pentagon to talk to the people who have done the calculations.

Weber: Frank found something unexpectedly horrifying.

Von Hippel: The Defense Department had assumed that explosions of the warheads over the ICBM silos would be so high that they would not cause fallout. They pointed out they would also not damage the silos.

Weber: Basically, the Department of Defense hadn’t calculated properly. The DOD had made incorrect assumptions about the altitude of nuclear explosions aimed at destroying the silos. Initially, it had thought the nuclear explosions would need to be at an altitude. But–they actually needed to be at ground level.

Von Hippel: The DoD was forced to go back and do new calculations reflecting these points, and they came out about 1,000 times higher: 20 million—on the order of 20 million people killed.

Weber (tape): Wow.

…………………………………. Von Hippel: Well, you know, the, I don’t know who coined this term about the silos being a nuclear sponge, but the local….I think there would be annihilation of the local population around the silos. Wouldn’t just be the fallout—would also be the, the blast effects, and so on. So they would be the worst affected.

Weber (tape): My grandma only lives two and a half miles away from an ICBM silo. What would happen to her and her place?

Von Hippel: I think she would be within the blast radius … and the fire radius…. I don’t know how flammable… her house would be presumably burned after being knocked flat. And then there would be the fallout. These explosions would have to be low enough to hit the set of silos with sufficient overpressure to destroy the missiles inside. It would have to be low enough for, for the dirt to be and debris to be sucked up into the cloud. And then that would bring down some of the radioactivity in a very intense patch around the silo. So … multiple ways in which she might die. I’m sorry.

Weber (tape): I mean, she didn’t make the decision to have them there. So …

Von Hippel: Yeah, I know

Weber: Being treated as expendable isn’t new to Indigenous communities. As far as I could tell, members of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation don’t see themselves as living in a sacrifice zone. 

This designation treats certain areas and people as acceptable losses; they bear the brunt of the risks and consequences associated with nuclear weapons and decisions made by others. Maybe if members of the tribe had a better understanding of what the risks were, they could challenge the deployment of these silos on our land…………………………….

Sébastien Philippe: Now I’m going to put the whole image of the entire areas that can be impacted by the fallout, and I can walk you through the color coding, but that’s basically the worst case possible for every single person on the map.

Edmund Baker: Okay. Holy crap. Even Disneyland’s not immune. Disney World’s out. New York—there’s no safe place.

So that batch there, North Dakota, the white sort of color…?

Philippe: Yeah.

Baker: That’s 100 percent fatality in that zone?

Philippe: Times 10. Yeah, ten times what you would need to die—and that’s just from the radioactivity.

Baker: Okay, so that’s not in the EIS, I figure, or is it?

Philippe: Uh, no.

Weber: By the way, Edmund’s talking about an environmental impact statement, or EIS—a two-volume report released by the U.S. Air Force that is meant to analyze, “the potential effects on the human and natural environments from the deployment of the Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missile system.” 

This was the report that the Air Force had presented to my reservation—in a different place than it had initially advertised. And in the entire 3,000 pages of the report and its appendices— which cost $33 million to write, by the way —  Sébastien had found that the consequences of a nuclear war that could impact my tribe were kind of glossed over. 

The EIS mentioned the “casualties” and “grave implications” of such a war but they didn’t really go beyond that. 

Here’s Frank again, speaking about the military’s attitudes toward the consequences of war in general.

Von Hippel: They talk about people like your grandmother as being collateral damage. I mean…, they try to desensitize themselves to what the consequences are, what they’re talking about—and, in fact, I remember when I first went over to the Pentagon to talk to people, I learned—the first time I heard this word called “collateral damage,” that is—“We, you know, we didn’t intend to kill your grandmother…. She’s, unfortunately, collateral damage.”…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

Weber: If anyone could advise the U.S. on resilience and survivability, it would be us: the MHA Nation. And I have a feeling that keeping ICBM silos operating across our land may not be part of our preferred strategy.

In the next and final episode, I go back to the rez and report what I found to my family and members of the tribe. We sit down and discuss: What happens now?

This show was reported by me, Ella Weber, produced by Sébastien Philippe and Tulika Bose. Script editing by Tulika Bose. Post-production design and mixing by Jeff DelViscio. Thanks to special advisor Ryo Morimoto and Jessica Lambert. Music by Epidemic Sound. 

I’m Ella Weber, and this was The Missiles on Our Rez, a special podcast collaboration from Scientific American, Princeton University’s Program on Science and Global Security, Nuclear Princeton, and Columbia Journalism School.   https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/what-would-it-mean-to-absorb-a-nuclear-attack/

 

November 23, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized