Minnesota-based KDHL radio on Dec. 3 presented a thoughtful, absolutely devastating introduction to nuclear war, and how destructive it would be today, if the war in Ukraine escalated to a nuclear level. The Faribault, Minnesota country music station is some 50 miles southwest of Minneapolis-St Paul, whose combined population is 3.7 million people.
In an article on KDHL’s website, “The Devastating Results if Minnesota Suffered a Nuclear Attack,” KDHL author David Drew first quotes Russian President Vladimir Putin enunciating his country’s newly adopted nuclear doctrine. Putin says Russia, “will consider the possibility of using nuclear weapons when receiving reliable information about a massive launch of means of aerospace attack and their crossing of our state border…. We reserve the right to use nuclear weapons in the event of aggression.… Including the case when the enemy, using conventional weapons, creates a critical threat to our sovereignty.”
Drew then employs the work of Professor Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science and nuclear technology at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, who has created an interactive map showing the results of a nuclear attack on any American city, based on several variables, including the size of the weapon used. For the sake of the exercise, Wellerstein assumed Russia attacks the U.S. using its R-36M2 missile (also known as the SS-18 Satan), which is one of the world’s most powerful ICBMs, which has an equivalent yield of 20 megatons of TNT, and has a range of 10,000 miles.
The attack would strike the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul. In the immediate impact zone shown by the map there would be an estimated 1,127,490 fatalities, with an additional 873,110 injuries. The impact zone map shows concentric circles, marked successively as Fireball Radius, Heavy Blast Damage Radius, Moderate Blast Damage Radius, Light Blast Damage Radius, and Thermal Radiation. Each concentric circle, in different coloring, has its labelling explained. In important features, the map is similar to those used by Ted Postol and Steven Starr.
