"The blast and searing heat
"The blast and searing heat would gut buildings for a block in every direction, incinerating pedestrians and crushing people at their desks. Let's say 20,000 dead in a matter of seconds. Beyond this, to a distance of more than a quarter mile, anyone directly exposed to the fireball would die a gruesome death from radiation sickness within a day -- anyone, that is, who survived the third-degree burns. This larger circle would be populated by about a quarter million people on a workday. Half a mile from the explosion, up at Rockefeller Center and down at Macy's, unshielded onlookers would expect a slower death from radiation. A mushroom cloud of irradiated debris would blossom more than two miles into the air, and then, 40 minutes later, highly lethal fallout would begin drifting back to earth, showering injured survivors and dooming rescue workers. The poison would ride for 5 or 10 miles on the prevailing winds, deep into the Bronx or Queens or New Jersey."
Those are the results of a one-kiloton nuclear explosion in Times Square. That's one fifteenth the size of the Hiroshima bomb. Bill Keller, who wrote this article on the true severity of the nuclear threat for yesterday's New York Times magazine, asked a scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council to run a computer model.
The short assessment: the risk of terrorists actually acquiring a nuclear device isn't as great as we fear. But it is a possibility, and it only takes one. The article is both reassuring and frightening.
