St. Joseph Church
Bristol, Connecticut

Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, D. Min.
Pastoral Minister

M. Anjali Sastry, Joseph Romm, Kosta Tsipis (1)

The effects of a nuclear attack on a country's society and economy have been the subject of numerous studies based on data from the nuclear bombs used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, from nuclear tests, and from conventional bomb damage data. Even though these studies have focused on quantitative calculations of physical damage and have presented only qualitative extrapolations of the effects of this damage on the fate of the survivors, they were instrumental in establishing the fact that a nuclear exchange between two warring nations result in tremendous devastation.

This report presents the preliminary results of a study that explores the predictive capabilities of the FEMA simulation program and the degree to which computer modeling can provide reliable predictions of the behavior of the U.S. economy after a nuclear attack. The study was undertaken with several purposes in mind:

A. To determine whether the discrepancy between older status simulation models and the FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) model is significant in the context of decisions about the nuclear policy of the country.

B. To determine the minimum number of nuclear explosions that would create a perturbation severe enough to collapse the U.S. economy; that is, the number that would be an unquestionable deterrent in the hands of the Soviets (Russians).

This number, augmented to allow for certainty of delivery, could then become a guideline for future nuclear arms limitation negotiations. For instance, both sides could reduce to a number that would assure them of the ability to deliver the nuclear explosives that would collapse the other side's economy.

C. To provide a measurement for the efficiency required of a strategic defensive shield designed to permit the U.S. economy to survive a full Soviet (Russian) nuclear attack. We consider the effects of three different attack scenarios on the U.S. economy. First is an attack which destroys 60% of the population and 40% of the industry, which we call the 60/40 Attack. The smallest of the three attacks, the Counter-Energy Attack, destroys only commercial ports and the refining and storage facilities for liquid fossil fuels. The third attack destroys, in addition to the fuel facilities, some key manufacturing sectors such as electronics, primary metals production, and heavy machines. This we call the Counter-Energy Counter-Industry Attack.

The Counter-Energy Attack

The counter-energy attack consists of 85 550-kiloton (kiloton=thousand tons of TNT explosive force) weapons and 154 200-kiloton weapons, a total of 239 nuclear weapons that add up to 110 equivalent megatons ( megaton= one million tons of TNT explosive force) under 2% of the deployed equivalent megatonnage of the Soviet Union (Russia). In absolute megatons the attack is even smaller, under 1% of the total Soviet megatons.

The attack is designed to inflict the maximum economic damage while minimizing the attack size; to do this, only the facilities that refine, store and transport liquid fuels are targeted. Although urban areas are not deliberately targeted in this scenario, most of the major U.S. cities end up receiving one or more weapons. This is a by-product of the targeting strategy, which blasts every commercial dock and berth capable of bringing imports into the nations with at least 5 psi (pounds of air overpressure per square inch).

....Although industrial installations are not selected as targets, the attack also destroys 25% of the nation's primary steel manufacturing capacity and 18% of primary nonferrous-metals manufacturing (many metal-producing plants tend to be located near port and refinery facilities). In all, the U.S. loses 33% of its capacity to produce energy products, 19% of its capacity to make metals and between 5% and 10% of its capacity to manufacture other products; overall, the U.S. economy loses 8% of its manufacturing capacity.

...As expected, it is the lack of transportation adequacy that is responsible for the initial plunge of GNP...The attack destroys only 8% of the nation's manufacturing capacity, but GNP falls by over 50% in the first year after the attack.

Available transportation capital falls immediately to about 5% of its pre-attack level. Yet the assumption that transportation capacity equals demand about one year after the attack means in some sense that transportation is no longer a "bottleneck" to recovery one year after the attack. The policy of investment in energy and transportation we have assumed here brings transportation capacity to 50% of its pre-attack level in about one and a half to two years after the attack. Yet even with these exceedingly optimistic assumptions, the lack of transportation in the early months continues to influence the nation's capacity to produce for decades; for if in these early years people starve and stocks of vital supplies are exhausted, it can take many, many years to undo the harmful effects.

About 8% of the population is killed directly by weapons effects, but almost 60% die within two years of the attack. People starve to death without food, which cannot be transported from the middle of the country where it is produced to the large urban centers on the two coasts, and factories cannot produce goods without material and labor.

The mass starvation that takes place after this attack (and other attacks) should be considered a qualitative feature of this model. It seems likely to us that the highest priority for the many people in the post-attack world would be survival, rather than re-building the U.S. economy. In this case, it is very possible that the U.S. economy would be transformed dramatically after a nuclear attack, perhaps becoming far more agrarian; mass migration to areas near the crop lands of the Midwest might occur. This would allow the land to be cultivated using labor-intensive techniques that do not rely on fossil fuels and machinery. In this way, mass starvation would be avoided. On the other hand, if this occurred, GNP would stabilize at much lower levels, and recovery of the GNP to pre-attack levels could take several decades.

...The transportation reconnection rate turns out to be an important determinant of the recovery rate. Although we consider our baseline conditions optimistic, we consider a policy which results in transportation capacity exceeding demand within months of the attack and has the vast majority of transportation capital exceeding demand within months of the attack and has the vast majority of transportation capital returning after two years of the attack. As GNP is higher and recovery is faster, yet even in this very optimistic case, where the transportation bottleneck lasts less than a year, the economy is devastated and large instabilities threaten recovery.

...As we have said, our baseline conditions combine several assumptions we believe to be optimistic. If we made just two of those assumptions more realistic--adding mild psychological effects to the slower recommendation rate for transportation--the counter-energy attack collapses the economy. As before, the transportation capacity exceeds demand within two years, yet by the time the population has dwindled and incentives to increase the recovery simply do not work: the survivors are discouraged. In the second post-attack decade, as the anticipated recovery fails to materialize, public confidence plunges further and workers begin to withdraw from the organized economy, possibly to take part in fractionalized, low-level forms of economic activity. It is this migration that finally causes the complete collapse of the U.S. economy.

This is perhaps the most realistic path for the economy after the counter-energy attack.

These excerpts from the aforementioned study concludes that only 239 nuclear weapons on U.S. energy supplies could destroy the U.S. as a viable society. Knowing that both the U.S. and Russia still possess over 12,000 long-range strategic warheads in their arsenals and many more tactical nuclear weapons, the need and the possibility for deeper reductions in the most de-stabilizing systems is possible and necessary ! Furthermore, since both nations still maintain over 7,000 weapons on 15 minute Launch on Warning status in a world that no longer is characterized by the Cold War, these reductions and initiatives to de-alert forces would go a long way to creating greater stability. (2) What can you do ? Stay tuned !!!

 Footnotes

(1) Program in Science and Technology for International Security, M.I.T. 20-A-001 Cambridge, MA. 02139; Report #17, June 1987.

(2) Stansfield Turner, Caging the Nuclear Genie: An American Challenge for Global Security, Westview Press, Boulder Co., 1997, pp. 7-51.

Compiled by Deacon Robert M. Pallotti, D. Min.
Created 6/15/1998