As reported by Nature, in the case of a nuclear catastrophe, the United States of America is woefully unprepared as a nation, because of the current severity of the problem and the statement of the potential response to nuclear threats by the US; this leaves the leadership with unprepared minds and the nation with an unprepared infrastructure and, potentially, will in order to combat this great threat, among the greatest alongside overpopulation and anthropogenic climate change/global warming.
We are in a lot of trouble. We do not need incompetent antics to prevent the work to reduce the risks of nuclear proliferation that increase the risks of a nuclear attack. As reported, “The United States is not prepared to deal with the aftermath of a major nuclear attack, despite North Korea’s efforts to develop nuclear weapons and the increasing tensions between nations overall.”
This was the assessment, not the judgment, of public-health experts taking part in a meeting on nuclear preparedness organized and, presumably, hosted by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. An expert in disaster nursing at John Hopkins University, Tener Veenema, described the meeting as “an acknowledgement that the threat picture has changed, and that the risk of this happening has gone up.”
Veenema was the co-chair of the conference. As the reportage notes, with the decline and fall, and collapse, of the former Soviet Union, the central concern since 1991 of the United States in terms of research and preparedness for the possibility of a nuclear strike has been on terrorist attacks. The focus there is with what is called a dirty bomb. Those 1-kilotonne weapons that can then spray radioactive material.
Nature continues, “But North Korea is thought to have advanced thermonuclear weapons — each more than 180 kilotonnes in size — that would cause many more casualties than would a dirty bomb (see ‘Damage estimates’).”
Obviously, this increases the magnitude of the concern and the risk in terms of thermonuclear devastation. With thermonuclear warheads on the development horizon, potentially, the next response, according to Cham Dallas of the University of Georgia, is simply to shrug and then act as if nothing can be done.
“The US government’s spending on nuclear-weapons research and response has dropped drastically over the past few decades — as has the number of health workers with training in radiation medicine and management,” Naturereports, “According to a 2017 study1 by Dallas, more than half of emergency medical workers in the United States and Japan have no training in treating radiation victims.”
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