Suppose:
"...terrorists conceal a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb in a shipping container and ship it to the Port of Long Beach. Unloaded onto a pier, it explodes shortly thereafter. This is referred to as a “ground-burst” as opposed to an “airburst” explosion."
This is the sort of thing they think about at RAND: New RAND study models consequences of a nuke attack on a port. (Charles Meade and Roger Molander, August 2006)
I learned about this from the Homeland Security Watch blog
The immediate impact is:
- The infrastructure and ships in the Port of Long Beach and the adjoining Port of Los Angeles are completely destroyed by the blast and fires.
- Sixty thousand people die or will die soon because of direct blast effects and radiation poisoning.
- The radioactive fallout of water and sediment from the port exposes 150,000 people to hazardous radiation levels, requiring prompt medical attention.
- Six million people will try to evacuate the Los Angeles region to avoid the radioactive fallout.
- Gasoline is in critically short supply because of the effects on refineries in the Long Beach area. Long Beach refines approximately one-third of gasoline west of the Rockies, and there is no pipeline infrastructure to import supplies to the region.
- Radioactive fallout contaminates a 500-km region, prohibiting residence for 10–20 years. Two to three million residents will require relocation facilities.
It may not be simple to redirect incoming shipping to alternative ports - even with advance planning:
The principal challenge on this issue involves the conflict between the political desire to mitigate the risks of future attack compared with the business requirements for continued operation of the ports and the global shipping supply chain... Viewed from a national security perspective, there could be an immediate call to close all U.S. ports to incoming traffic. In contrast, parts of the business community might advocate an early opening of the ports. However, financial and real estate interests may require financial risk protection before shipping could resume, and this would be almost impossible to acquire following the Long Beach explosion. At the same time, there could be a large-scale exodus from U.S. port cities by local populations fearing the prospect of a second attack. Taken together, these results suggest there are reasonable prospects for extended closures of all U.S. ports following the Long Beach scenario, or at least for periods of substantially reduced operations. The issue is analogous to the cancellation of airline traffic following the 9/11 attacks, but the problem is much greater given the difficulties of screening 20,000 shipping containers per day originating from ports all over the world.
From a business perspective, the problems revolve around the vital economic role of U.S. ports and the global shipping supply chain. Taken together, the Ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles are the largest port of entry to America, and the third largest in the world, handling 30 percent of U.S. shipping imports by value in 2003. If all U.S. ports were closed, it would have large economic implications for almost all domestic business operations, and it would lead to severe disruptions in the availability of basic goods and petroleum in the United States. That is, there is a high probability that the Long Beach scenario would have large economic consequences at great distances from the initial nuclear explosion. It would also have important repercussions for global business activity because the value of imports and exports from all U.S. ports represents 7.5 percent of world trade activity. In the wake of these economic effects, it seems reasonable to assume that there would be large declines in world stock markets, in contrast to the relatively limited financial losses that followed the 9/11 attacks. While those attacks were unprecedented, they had only minor consequences for the economic infrastructure of the United States.
In February I posted on a relatively more upbeat assessment of an attack on a port: What do you do, when the bomber gets through? (February 26, 2006)
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