America Is Not Prepared for Nuclear War, Public Health Experts Warn (Source motherboard.vice.com)

North Korea has nuclear weapons and the world is closer to nuclear war now than it has since the Cold War—and Americans are not ready for the fallout, experts say. As first reported by Nature, America’s National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine organized a meeting of health experts to discuss America’s ability to respond to the public health crisis that would follow a (hypothetical) nuclear detonation. The conclusion was grim. “Now that thermonuclear [weaponry] is back on the table, we’re back to people saying, ‘We can’t deal with this,’” Cham Dallas, a public health researcher at the University of Georgia, told Nature. Health care professionals across America need to fill in the knowledge gaps around radiological threats and burn wounds. Tener Veenema, a disaster nursing expert from Johns Hopkins, said the gathering was “an acknowledgement that the threat picture has changed, and that the risk of this happening has gone up.”

The US and its allies used to study the world’s ability to deal with an atomic blast, but that changed after the Cold War ended and tensions eased with Russia. Stategists started to think that the next nuclear attack might come from smaller bombs developed from stolen or lost fissile material.

Then North Korea changed the game in 2006 when it successfully detonated a nuclear bomb and put everyone back on Cold-War footing. To get an idea of what the fallout of a nuclear attack might look like, experts often look to past crises: how Japan dealt with the Fukushima reactor meltdown in 2011, and how Russia dealt with the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. The problems of wrecked infrastructure and millions dead are immediate, but the irradiated zones around the blast are a public health problem that lingers for years.