Achilling Cold War-era map has surfaced, providing a stark outlook for the United States post-nuclear warfare, with predictions indicating that up to 75% of the population could die from radiation in the most affected states. The world’s nuclear-armed countries include the US, UK, France, Russia, and China, as well as Pakistan, India, and North Korea.
While Israel is widely believed to possess nuclear weapons, it has not officially acknowledged this. Simultaneously, Iran is progressing with its notable uranium enrichment efforts.
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According to a 1986 report by William Daugherty, Barbara Levi, and Frank Von Hippel from the Institute of Medicine, the probable outcomes of a nuclear onslaught on the US were examined. Their investigation looked at an offensive targeting America’s nuclear arsenal, including strikes on Minuteman missile silos—land-based nukes developed in the 1950s by the US—which would cause detonation at their locations, reports the Express US.
Such orchestrated hits would lead to extensive radiation spread throughout the nation. The map illustrates how radioactive fallout, carried eastwardly by prevailing winds, would engulf the country.
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The researchers said: “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 time, the Soviet Union had approximately 3,000 warheads. The scientists identified the most dangerous areas on the map, marking spots where radiation levels would exceed 3,500 rads.
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“Within this region… more than three-quarters of the population would die,” concluded the scientist. These areas are represented by the black sections on the map.
The experts described the terrifying sequence of events following 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.”
In their comprehensive description of the aftermath, the experts said: “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.”
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The report by Princeton University scholars, titled Casualties Due to the Blast, Heat, and Radioactive Fallout from Various Hypothetical Nuclear Attacks on the United States, paints a grim picture of the aftermath of a nuclear strike. They detailed: “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 study concludes with a dire caution: “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.”
