The Consequences of "Limited" Nuclear Attacks on the United States

The Consequences o f "Lhnited"Nuclear Attacks on the United States William Daugherty, Barbara Levi, and Frank von Hippel A n all-out nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union would destroy the urban areas of both countries and thereby the infrastructure that makes them modern industrial states. This fact makes the deliberate launching of such a war the ultimate act of folly. Nevertheless, military planners have felt that the U.S. should have "credible strategic nuclear options," and have worried about those credible nuclear options that the Soviets might devise.' This concern led to debates in the 1970s over the possibility of "limited" nuclear wars that might produce significant military results but minimal civilian casualties.2During this same period, according to Desmond Ball, U.S. policy was changed to exclude targeting "population per se"-presumably because "collateral" civilian casualties from the targeting of economic or military facilities were expected to be much lower than those from direct attacks on population center^.^ And recently, President Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative has provoked debates over whether strategic defenses could reduce U.S. casualties from an all-out nuclear attack to less than catastrophic levels. How much would these concepts actually buy in reduced casualties? Unfortunately , quantitative estimates of these reductions are hardly ever offered. Yet such estimates of casualties-and, just as importantly, the public disclosure of the assumptions behind them-are essential to the evaluation of these concepts. The value of such open peer review was demonstrated dramatically in a brief public debate over the consequences of nuclear war that occurred in 1974-75. The result was an order-of-magnitude increase in the Department This article is adapted from a presentation at a symposium on The Medical Implications of Nuclear War, sponsored by the Institute of Medicine-National Academy of Sciences in Washington , D.C., September 20-22, 1985. The full proceedings of this symposium will be available in early summer from the National Academy Press, 2101 Constitution Ave., NW, Washington, D.C. 20418. More details may be found in a technical report, Casualties Due to the Blast, Heat and Radioactive Fallout From Various Hypothetical Nuclear Attacks on the US (Princeton University Center for Energy and Environmental Studies Report # PU/CEES 198). William Daugherty is a student, Barbara Levi is a research staff member at the Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, and Frank von Hippel is a professor at the Woodrow Wilson School and a senior research associate at the CEES, all at Princeton University. 1. See, for example, James R. Schlesinger, Annual Defense Department Report, FY 1975 (Washington , D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974), pp. 32-41. 2. See, for example, Sidney D. Drell and Frank von Hippel, "Limited Nuclear War," Scientific American, November 1976, p. 27. 3. Desmond Ball, Targetingfor Strategic Deterrence, Adelphi Paper No. 185(London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1983),p. 19. International Security, Spring 1986 (Vol. 10, No. 4) 0 1986 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and of the MassachusettsInstitute of Technology. 3 International Security I 4 of Defense’s estimates of the civilian casualties that would result from a Sqviet ”counterforce” attack on U.S. strategic nuclear force^.^ Over the past several years, we have assembled the data bases and computer programs required to estimate the civilian casualties from the direct effects of nuclear attack^.^ To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a capability has existed in the U.S. outside of the mostly classified domain of the government and its contractors. In this paper, we describe the results of an exploration of the sensitivities of the estimates of direct casualties from limited nuclear attacks on the U.S. to various assumptions concerning the targets and the casualty models used. We have estimated the casualties from five different types of attacks: four involving approximately one hundred targets each and the fifth one being a major counterforce attack on U.S. strategic nuclear facilities. The four 100target attacks were chosen to explore sensitivities to models and to target types. We have tested the sensitivities of the results of each of these attacks to two different models of the probability of blast...