Talk of missiles and mayhem has found ample play in the news cycle as of late as Trump tweets and international sanctions inflame the nuclear aspirations of the North Korean government.
The San Francisco Bay Area is a rich and densely populated innovation hub within intercontinental-ballistic-missile (ICBM) striking distance of East Asia, and it’s not outside the realm of possibility that a nuclear weapon could threaten this region in the weeks and months to come. So what’s the risk? What could we expect if North Korea or another rogue state assaults San Francisco with a nuclear missile?
Public transit lines would be damaged and might stop running. Hospitals would be packed with survivors, and emergency services would be stretched to capacity. Depending on the scope of the blast, the water and power grids could quickly go offline.
The Threat: Kim Jong-un and his government claim to have ICBMs capable of carrying an atomic bomb to the continental United States, and they certainly already have the capacity to nuke their neighbors in Japan and South Korea. An analysis in August the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists suggested that the Hwasong-14 missile that North Korea tested on July 4 and 28 is probably not currently capable of carrying an atomic bomb from the DPRK all the way to the US mainland — and other commentators have pointed out that the Kim regime is shrewd enough to know its nation would not survive the decision to attack the US or its allies. That said: North Korea has only gotten better at using Soviet rocket-motor components to expand its ICBM range, and there is a very real possibility that the nation is already using its extensive global arms-dealing network to sell off portions of its nuclear arsenal to other rogue states with similar antipathy toward the United States.
The Missile: Imagine that a nuclear missile is bearing down on San Francisco. It’s been fired from a missile silo near Pyongyang — or perhaps a North Korean submarine somewhere in the middle of the Pacific. If launched from Korea, the warhead would take about 30 minutes to reach California. The missile would soar high into the atmosphere and arc briefly through the low orbit zone, at which point the rocket propulsion system would detach from the warhead payload. The warhead would then plunge from the earth’s upper atmosphere to the streets of San Francisco within a few breathless moments, reaching a terminal velocity of five or six miles per second.
San Francisco’s primary protection against a nuclear bomb is the Ground-Based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system, which, in theory, would fire interceptor missiles from central Alaska and Vandenberg Air Force Base to destroy the warhead in midair before it could reach American soil. However, the Union of Concerned Scientists and a bevy of missile-defense specialistshave argued that the system is ill equipped for the technical realities of staving off an attack because it has repeatedly failed missile-intercept tests.
Everything would be on fire; transportation infrastructure would collapse; and radioactive nuclear fallout would sow death across California for hundreds of miles in every direction.
The Impact: If a large nuclear warhead were to detonate in the middle of San Francisco, it would produce a mile-wide fireball with gale-force winds hotter than the surface of the sun. The blast would instantly incinerate tens of thousands of people — and some downtown neighborhoods are as dense as 70,000 people per square mile. The Chronicle describes the damage as “an earthquake times 1,000.” Everything would be on fire; transportation infrastructure would collapse; and radioactive nuclear fallout would sow death across California for hundreds of miles in every direction. Granted, the nukes that North Korea has tested thus far have been far smaller in size and destructive capacity — but no matter the size of the fireball, the damage would be horrific.
The Plan: San Franciscans likely wouldn’t have much warning, and most of us wouldn’t have time to evacuate before the bomb hit. Those who would try would likely get stuck in traffic. The city’s freeway infrastructure suffers heavy daily congestion already, and a flood of panicked escapees would clog all intact roads leaving the peninsula. Public transit lines would be damaged and might stop running. Hospitals would be packed with survivors, and emergency services would be stretched to capacity. Depending on the scope of the blast, the water and power grids could quickly go offline.
The San Francisco Emergency Operations Center has a nuclear-disaster plan that is updated every five years and drilled regularly by first responders — but this mostly entails training to mitigate the damage. San Francisco does not have any active fallout shelters, and there is no plan for large-scale evacuation.
The crux of the matter is that if a bomb does come, we will have to look out for ourselves. Plan to shelter in place at your home, your workplace or any enclosed space that happens to be near. The worst of the radioactive fallout would continue to fall from the sky for some 24 hours after the explosion, but a pattern of delayed fallout over the Bay Area could continue for years. The move here would be for peope to stay tuned via any working communication channels and wait for officials to either organize an evacuation or declare that radiation levels are low enough for people to venture outside.
The Conclusion: The US and North Korea are playing a dangerous game of geopolitical bravado, and we can only hope that leaders on all sides are able to broker a gradual deescalation. Yet we must not live in fear, for it is fear of the other that fuels reckless nuclear brinkmanship. Our counterparts in Pyongyang are just as anxious that we’ll shoot first — and they haven’t forgotten the devastating bombing campaign that the US carried out there during the Korean War. Point being, the risk here is nuanced and uncertain.