A House of Dynamite
By 
Last week I had an open day of class (immediate post-midterm) that I treated as drop-in classroom office hours. In the midst of grading I decided to throw on House of Dynamite, since it’s become a professional obligation for folks in the national security sphere. As students wandered in to ask questions or retrieve their midterms, I ordered them to pause the movie so I wouldn’t miss anything. I quite enjoyed the film; I think that some of the criticisms are well-taken and that Bigelow certainly took dramatic license in order to enhance the tension, but I had no problem whatsoever with the structure or with the ending.
I did take exception to the outcome of one plotline (spoilers ahead)…
… as the missile hurtles towards Chicago, the Secretary of Defense (played by Jared Harris, who is great in literally everything) finally gets in contact with his estranged daughter, a denizen of the Windy City. With only a few minutes left before impact, he decides that there’s no point in telling her that a missile in on the way or advising her to seek shelter. Instead, they have a friendly, emotional father-daughter chat, and he wishes her well on her walk to work.
This is, um, not a good idea.
For about eight decades we as a species have been wildly overstating the destructive impact of nuclear weapons, usually with the best of intentions. The fact is that even a relatively large by modern standards (150kt) nuclear weapon is not going to destroy all or most of Chicago. Elementary precautions that could be taken with five minutes warning, such as staying inside, finding a basement, or seeking shelter in a brick or stone building could easily and significantly reduce the chance of death, permanent injury, and significant radiation exposure. If you’re ever in a situation (God forbid) where you have the chance to advise someone living in a city that’s about to be hit by a nuclear weapon, DO NOT TELL THEM TO TAKE A WALK. Tell them to immediately seek any kind of shelter that they can, because there is an extremely high chance that a person living in a city the size of Chicago can avoid being one of the half million or so who are killed injured by the blast.
Anyway, I offer a bit more detail in my latest column at National Security Journal.
Most nuclear warheads are powerful enough that they will cause significant damage to the target if they land anywhere in their CEP or even without. But cities are big places, and it matters a great deal where the warhead detonates (assuming an airburst) when evaluating likely damage to different neighborhoods.
With respect to Chicago, according to Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP a 150 kt warhead detonated over Wrigley Field would kill some 170 thousand people and injure another 530 thousand.
A warhead detonated over Guaranteed Rate Field (home of the White Sox) would kill 120 thousand and injure 520 thousand. Crucially, there is very little overlap between those two groups.
The two stadiums are nine miles apart, well outside of the CEP of most modern missiles, but without information on the motives of the attacker there is no reason to prefer one target over the other. Only a few neighborhoods near downtown Chicago would suffer damage from both.
Photo Credit: By André Natta – Flickr: A fun night at Wrigley Field, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17171577