I have always been fascinated by civil defence, and more broadly the notion of “home defence as it emerged during the two world wars and into the Cold War. There is, I think something romantic about the image of those not fit to fight in the front lines banding together to protect cities and families, shore up static fortifications, and generally pitch in for the cause of one’s people. In everyone “Doing Their Bit”. In the commonwealth, this is usually summed up as the “Blitz Spirit”.
I haven’t found an equivalently all-encompassing term in the American lexicon (hence why I’m using “defence” rather than “defense”), though the concept is obviously still there. Just think of the romanticism of the Minuteman rushing to defend his home town, or of your average apocalypse story. Like all romantic images, however, I fear that this false nostalgia over Civil Defence may be out of touch with reality.
This probably wouldn’t have been an issue for one such as myself who grew up well after the age of nuclear standoffs. Except somehow, while I was off in the mountains, what should have been some minor sabre rattling from North Korea has now become a brewing crisis.
Now, there is still a chance that all of this will blow over. Indeed, the opinion of most professionals (as of writing) is that it will. Yet at the same time, numerous local governments have apparently seen fit to issue new preparedness advice for citizens living in potentially targeted areas. The peculiar thing about these new guidelines: they’re almost word for word from the civil defence films and pamphlets of the previous century.
Some areas, like Hawaii, have even gone so far as to reactivate old emergency centers. Seeing new, high definition pictures of bureaucrats working on tablets and computers amid command bunkers built in the 1950s is not just sobering, it is surreal. Hearing modern government officials suggesting on television that citizens learn how to “duck and cover” would be comical, if this weren’t honestly the reality we’re in.
Just out of morbid curiosity, I decided to follow some of the advice given and try to locate likely targets in my area so that I might have some idea of what level of apocalypse I’m looking at. The answer depends on what kind of strike occurs, and also which set of numbers we believe for the DPRK’s capabilities. Let’s start with a rather conservative view.
Most scenarios in the past have assumed that any conflict with North Korea would play out as “Korean War II: Atomic Boogaloo”. That is to say, most conventional and even nuclear strikes will remain focused within the pacific region. With as many artillery pieces as the Korean People’s Army has stationed along the DMZ, it is likely that most of the initial fighting, which would entail a Northern push towards Seoul, would be primarily conventional. That is, until the US began moving reinforcements.
Busan and other South Korean ports, as well as US bases such as Okinawa, Guam, Pearl Harbor, and Garden Island would all be major strategic targets for DPRK nuclear strikes. Most of these targets have some level of missile defense, although reports vary on how effective these might be. It seems unlikely that North Korea is capable of reliably hitting targets much further than Hawaii, though this isn’t guaranteed to stop them.
A strike on the naval base in San Diego is possible, though with the difficulty of hitting a precise target at that range, it seems equally likely that it would miss, or the North Koreans would opt for something harder to miss in the first place, like a major city. A city with major cultural importance, like Los Angeles, or a city near the edge of their range, like Chicago, would be possible targets.
While this isn’t a good outcome for me, I probably get out of this one relatively unscathed. My portfolio would take a hit, and I would probably have trouble finding things at the stores for a few months as panic set in. There’s a possibility that we would see looting and breakdown in a fashion similar to immediately after Hurricane Sandy, as panic and market shocks cause people to freak out, but that kind of speculation is outside the scope of this post.
I might end up spending some time in the basement depending on the prevailing winds, and I might have to cash in on my dual citizenship and spend some time away from the United States in order to get reliable medical treatment, as the US healthcare system would be completely overloaded, but barring some unexpected collapse, the world would go on. I give myself 80% odds of escaping unscathed.
This is a (relatively) conservative view. If we assume that the number of warheads is towards the upper bound of estimates, and that by the time judgement day comes the North Koreans have successfully miniaturized their warheads, and gotten the navigation worked out to a reasonable degree, we get a very different picture.
With only a limited number of warheads, only a handful of which will be on missiles that can reach the east coast, there will be some picking and choosing to be done on targets. Here’s the problem: Strategically, there’s not really a scenario where the DPRK can strike the US and not be annihilated by the US response. They lack the resources for a war of nuclear attrition. So unless Kim Jong Un decided his best option is to go out in a suicidal blaze of glory, a massive first strike makes no sense from a military standpoint (not that such concerns are necessarily pertinent to a madman).
There are a few places near me that would almost certainly be hit in such a scenario, namely New York City. This would almost certainly require me to hide in the basement for a while and would probably derail my posting schedule. Based on estimates of DPRK warhead size, I’m probably not in the blast radius, but I am certainly within immediate fallout distance, and quite possibly within the range of fires ignited by the flash. While I do have evacuation prospects, getting out safely would be difficult. I give myself 50% odds .
On the other hand, if the US is the aggressor, the DPRK does officially have mutual defense treaties with China. While it’s hard to say whether China’s leadership would actually be willing to go down with Pyongyang, or whether they would be willing to see the US use nuclear force to expand its hegemony in the region, if we’re considering East Asian nuclear war scenarios, China is an obvious elephant in the room that needs to be addressed.
While the US would probably still “win” a nuclear exchange with a joint PRC-DPRK force, it would be a hollow victory. US missile defenses would be unable to take down hundreds of modern rockets, and with Chinese ICBMs in play, mainland targets would be totally up for grabs. This is the doomsday scenario here.
Opinions vary on whether counter-force (i.e. Military) targets would be given preference over counter-value (i.e. civilian, leadership, and cultural) targets. While China’s military size, doctrine, and culture generally lend themselves to the kind of strategic and doctrinal conservatism that would prioritize military targets, among nations that have published their nuclear doctrine, smaller warhead arsenals such as the one maintained by the PLA generally lean towards a school of thought known of “minimal deterrence” over the “mutually assured destruction” of the US and Russia.
Minimal deterrence is a doctrine that holds that any level of nuclear exchange will lead to unacceptable casualties on both sides, and to this end, only a small arsenal is required to deter strikes (as opposed to MAD, which focuses on having a large enough arsenal to still have a fully capable force regardless of the first strike of an enemy). This sounds quite reasonable, until one considers the logical conclusions of this thinking.
First, because “any strike is unacceptable”, it means that any nuclear strike, regardless of whether it is counter-force or counter-value, will be met with a full counter-value response. Secondly, because it makes no provisions for surviving a counter-force first strike (like the US might launch against the DPRK or PRC), it calls for a policy of “launch on warning” rather than waiting for tit for tat casualty escalation. Or occasionally, for preemptive strikes as soon as it becomes apparent that the enemy is preparing an imminent attack.
This second part is important. Normally, this is where analysts look at things like political rhetoric, media reaction, and public perception to gauge whether an enemy first strike is imminent or not. This is why there has always been a certain predictable cadence to diplomatic and political rhetoric surrounding possible nuclear war scenarios. That rhythm determines the pulse of the actual military operations. And that is why what might otherwise be harmless banter can be profoundly destabilizing when it comes from people in power.
Anyways, for an attack on that kind of scale, I’m pretty well and truly hosed. The map of likely nuclear targets pretty well covers the entire northeast, and even if I manage to survive both the initial attack, and the weeks after, during which radiation would be deadly to anyone outside for more than a few seconds, the catastrophic damage to the infrastructure that keeps the global economy running, and upon which I rely to get my highly complicated, impossible-to-recreate-without-a-post-industrial-economic-base life support medication would mean that I would die as soon as my on hand stockpile ran out. There’s no future for me in that world, and so there’s nothing I can do to change that. It seems a little foolish, then, to try and prepare.
Luckily, I don’t expect that an attack will be of that scale. I don’t expect that an attack will come in any case, but I’ve more or less given up on relying on sanity and normalcy to prevail for the time being. In the meantime, I suppose I shall have to look at practicing my duck and cover skills.
