Bomb Scares - What if credible AND nuclear?

Factual Questions
1

A credible (even questionable) bomb scare can clear out a school, a government office, or an entire building complex.

Suppose we have a credible bomb scare on the nuclear scale? Suppose the FBI believes a bomb scare is potentially legit, possibley linked to a terrorist organization such as Al Qaeda (or others in Isreal or wherever), and the threat is nuclear…or even a series of dirty bombs.

What would happen? Is there an official protocol? Is the protocol to keep silent to prevent chaos?

Are there evacuation plans for major cities?

Couldn’t the scare be a terror weapon alone?

2

Most of the answers you are going to get will be conjecture so don’t be suprised if the mods need to move your thread.

  1. You’ll have to ask the officials. FEMA has plans for all kinds of contingencies but some are more fleshed out than others. Some of the disaster plans actually get put into use so there is real world experience but some are completely hypothetical.

  2. Cities are evacuated for hurricanes but that’s a different kettle of prawns. Weather is somewhat predictable in the short term and people can get out ahead of time. IMHO this would not work for a nuclear strike scare because people would all panic even in a scenario where they were told there was time to safely evacuate. Did you see The Day After?

  3. Yes, and far more cost effective than actually importing a nuclear weapon if you can get people to believe you.
    http://www.snopes.com/rumors/nukes.htm

3

I was under the impression that back in the old Cold War days, every major city was supposed to have an evacuation plan. Whether or not most American cities still have a civil defense team and an evacuation plan, I can tell you for certain that at least one city has a plan of sorts.

My city, Washington, DC, has improved its evacuation plan and now estimates that they can flush 800,000 cars out of town in under three hours. On September 11, 2001 the town more-or-less evacuated itself without a heck of a lot of planning in three and a half hours.

As cynical as I am about the closed nature of the American federal government, particularly this administration, it’s almost impossible to imagine that they would simply not tell this city’s daytime population what’s going on if they thought a nuke might have been snuck in. This is a small town and bad news travels extremely fast. In fact, an official announcement one way or the other is almost a necessity, because if the public doesn’t trust its government enough to keep them informed then the rumor-attack will be even more effective.

Going back into the shady realm of speculation, years ago a friend of mine told me that certain facilities located in the immediate area quietly keep some devices called “street sweepers,” which are enormously overpowered, EMP-resistant trucks fitted with a prow on the front end. Their job is to clear an evacuation path through stopped traffic by ramming through it. Has anyone ever seen or heard of such a fantastic machine?

4

Logic would dictate that the public not be told.

After all, when would the bomb scare end? How could you sound an effective “all clear”? If no bomb is found, how would you ever manage to convince people to return to the city?

5

I’m not sure I follow the logic of this. Clear an evacuation path for whom?

For public officials? Why not just chopper them out?

For the people? What about all the people in the stopped cars that are presumably being demolished by this fantastical machine?

Sounds like an urban legend. IMHO.

6

Well, this is probably a distracting and unsolveable hijack which doesn’t need to be flogged to death, but I’ll point out that back in the day it was thought that many important government personnel would be holed up in shelters within and around the city. A rescuing force of some size, with a lot of equipment, would be required to fish those people out, and if I-395 is turned into a solid line of dead people in cars, some way has to be devised to get in there.

Still, I tend to agree that the story is probably BS.

7

Coincidentally - it was a natural part of a wider Boulting Brothers season - the National Film Theatre here in London last week showed Seven Days to Noon, the original 1950 fictional take on this subject. A morally-striken weapons physicist steals an unfeasibly small (it fits in a Gladstone bag) warhead and sends a letter to the PM threatening to destroy London in seven days unless the government renounces nuclear bombs. The response is to evacuate the centre of the city, which then becomes the stage for the climatic manhunt. The film now works better as a glimpse of British society in the period than as a thriller - and it suffers from that strange Boulting quirk whereby you always sympathise with the character they’re demonising - but it does force you to think about these issues.

Watching it, my reaction was the cynical one: rather than coming clean immediately, the government would (indeed should) at least consider a complete cover-up of the threat. When it comes to the evacuation, the film also predicates a compliant, very deferential population who queue up to get on trains and buses. There is precisely one looter. The whole thing is very much a mild extrapolation of the “myth of the Blitz”, with characters always refering back to the war.

Having said that, I suspect that the risk of mass panic in these situations is usually overstated. Despite the expectation that aerial bombing would quickly lay waste to cities in the event of war (see Wells and Korda’s Things to Come for such a prophecy), there was no mass panic in European capitals in September 1939. Nor when the bombing started in earnest. Nor, as far as I know, anywhere at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. People are good at rationalising away risk and getting on with their daily routines.

Finally, the most credible nuclear threat is some form of “dirty bomb”. In that scenario I’d argue that silence and non-evacuation is at least a possible reaction to the threat. I suspect - and this is no substitute for the professional advice I hope the governments are getting - that there’s a fair chance a “dirty bomb” will be a dud in most hands; unless you do it right, you’re likely to be just lobbing a few chunks of radioactive stuff explosively across the street. The explosion will cause problems, but I’d expect any contemporary Western government to news manage such a story. Basically, “terrorist bomb in central London, a dozen people killed” then “well, it turns out that it was dirty, but that aspect didn’t harm anybody and it’s already sorted.” Not that I want to be proved right about this.

8

I’d don’t think there is a factual answer here, but one possible factor to consider is that if the bad guys see you start to empty the city, and the bomb is there, they may blow it right away. Maybe it is better to try and keep it quiet and find the bomb and disarm it…

Four Senarios –

Bomb Not Real / No Evacuation = No one hurt, no disruption

Bomb Not Real / Evacuation = People hurt, panic in the streets, cry wolf syndrome next time you call for the evacuation

Bomb Real / Evacuation = Bomb probably goes off. What are the terrorists going to do, sit and watch everyone leave and then blow it? Many die, less chance of finding bomb.

Bomb Real / No Evacuation = Maybe a chance to find the bomb, maybe many die, but maybe you find it too.

Looking at it this way I vote for no notice, and no evacuation.

9

If you’ll stop watching 24, you won’t have these anxieties.

10

I’ve been in two Chicago Loop evacuations. (For those of you who don’t know Chicago - the Loop is the downtown/business district with all the really tall buildings.)

The first time, someone punched a hole in the bottom of the river, which promptly started to drain into the subways, old coal tunnels, and other underground structures - including electrical substations. In order to get control the situation they had to shut power off to all those really huge buildings, which would have left a lot of people trapped. So they asked folks to leave. It was pretty orderly, nobody panicked, and took about 2 hours to evacuate 500,000 people, more or less.

The second time was September 11. All we knew was that someone was flying really big airplanes into really big buildings, and the Chicago Loop has five of the world’s ten tallest buildings. Nobody called any official evacuation that I’m aware of, it’s just that about a half a million people suddenly had the urge to leave work and go home. It took about 2 hours. Nobody panicked that time, either. Hardly any shoving, even. Though I do remember literally thousands of people pouring through the streets and down stairs to the train stations muttering to each other “Keep calm, keep calm, nobody panic, we’re OK, stay calm…”

Which leads me to the following conclusions.

  1. You CAN evacuate a city in just a couple hours.

  2. A city can also spontaneously evacuate.

  3. The evacuatees know about the danger of panic and may even exert some effort to avoid it.

Now, I wasn’t in NYC on September 11, but from what I’ve seen… the only REAL panic was when the buildings actually fell. And, frankly, I can’t think of a BETTER time to panic and run like hell than when a 100+ story building is chasing you down the street.

But I was struck by folks who, even though in a tearing hurry under life-or-death danger, actually showed some thought. I recall one video tape with storekeepers ushering people inside, then directing them to the back of the room to get away from glass windows when the debris cloud rolled by. That’s not panic.

I think, perhaps, the risk of panic is lower than many assume. Sure, it CAN happen… but as I said, people are aware that panic is a bad thing. Give someone a goal, a destination, something to DO in an emergency and they’re far less likely to panic.

Given half a chance, people will leave a danger zone of their own accord. Chicago has the advantage of mass transit - on 9/11 they just pulled the trains into the stations, loaded, and sent them out. They didn’t even bother to collect fares. Ditto for buses. Both forms of transit will move more people faster and more efficiently than cars.

So… what would happen? I don’t know. It depends on a lot of variables. How much time to detonation. Does the bomb squad think it might go off remotely? Could they give an excuse other than “nuclear bomb” or “dirty bomb” to get folks out of the city without panic? Would they have the 2-3 hours it would take to evacuate a downtown under ideal circumstances? How big is the bomb’s expected area of destruction?

If it’s a megaton bomb and you’ve got 10 minutes to detonation… would it matter if you made an announcement?

If it’s a dirty bomb… who knows?

Kinda hope we don’t ever actually find out…

11

Good points Broom I was also in Chicago on 9/11 and took a metra train out of Union Station. Considering that the Sears Tower is right there, and at the time people thought it might be a target, people were very calm. Scared, oh yeah, but there wasn’t any panic in the train station that I saw. In fact some people were standing at the bar having a drink and watching it on tv. For those of you not familiar with Chicago, Union Station is just across the river from the Sears Tower.

Anyway, I suppose it is possible to do the evacuation orderly, but of course the whole “nuclear” buzz word might do anything.