2023-11-16 06:46:30
The Americans call this “the great sponge”. 400 nuclear silos remain in the United States, out of the 1,000 dug during the Cold War. What would happen if these underground launchers were bombed, a sine qua non condition for any major offensive against Uncle Sam? On the board, behind Sébastien Philippe, a few equations still linger: the Frenchman, a former Defense engineer and physicist at Princeton University, has just published his estimates in the specialist magazine Scientific American. A numerical overview of the apocalypse.
L’Express: Less interesting than submarines, because they are fixed, easy to target, and aging, silos equipped with nuclear missiles would still serve as a diversion in the event of an attack, according to American strategists. They will thus be renovated at a cost estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars. Enough to protect civilians, according to the authorities. Really ?
Sébastien Philippe: Until now, we did not have a sufficiently precise point of comparison to say whether such a screen would save lives in the event of an attack, as is regularly asserted by the government and the Defense lobby. Taking into account the location of the silos still armed – most have been identified in Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, Montana and North Dakota – and the nuclear power required to destroy them, it is possible to calculate at most close to the trajectory and extent of radioactive fallout. We can then identify different scenarios, depending on the winds, based on weather data for the year 2021. This is what we did.
Radioactive exposure rate based on the worst weather conditions of 2021, in grays. From light yellow, corresponding to the limit level authorized per year in the USA, to dark purple, equal to certain death within a few hours.
© / Sébastien Philippe, Svitlana Lavrenchuk and Ivan Stepanov
According to this unprecedented modeling, possible today thanks to very detailed and complete meteorological data across the entire globe, approximately one to two million people would die in the weeks following such an attack, as a result of acute irradiation. . Depending on the winds on the day of the attack, the entire United States and a large part of Mexico and Canada could be exposed to very significant fallout. Even Europe would be affected, possibly affected by the radioactive cloud, but in much smaller proportions. Thus, these results, which for the moment have not been published in a scientific journal but are based on the same methodology that another of our studies focused on China, show that silos, sometimes built a few kilometers from homes, do not protect Americans. On the contrary, silos expose them to very significant risks in the event of an attack. Risks much higher than the hoped-for military gains.
These estimates clarify other more summary models dating from the 1980s. They are part of a file from Une de Scientific American, dedicated to the “new nuclear age” and the risks for humanity. Why establish these kinds of disaster scenarios?
Even if in 2023, the number and location of silos are generally known to Americans, after the government made public some of the information concerning them and through questions from local residents and associations, the general public has not aware of the risks it faces because of military nuclear infrastructures. Few people know if they live in the irradiation zone directly linked to the explosion of a site, or which would be in the path of the cloud. These are not issues debated in the United States. Nor in France for that matter.
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However, the nuclear threat and the arms race are regaining ground, due to the decisions of leaders elected by these same populations. It is important to be informed on these issues, to understand the subject. In the United States, the Air Force published an assessment last March of the environmental impact of the renovation of silos. However, nothing is said about the possible consequences for the populations. We must rationalize nuclear military decisions, which are often subject to numerous economic, political, bureaucratic and budgetary biases. If the United States has kept its silos, it is also and above all to promote them and avoid giving the impression of wasting…
We are getting closer to a nuclear winter again…
Yes. The renovation of American silos is part of a huge project to renew the nuclear arsenal, estimated at more than trillion dollars. This is part of a global trend of unraveling the nuclear arms control and limitation treaties signed since the Cold War, which had made it possible to reduce the size of American and Russian arsenals. Russia, also in the process of modernizing its arsenal, has paused New Start, the last bilateral strategic agreement with the United States, and broken its promise not to carry out any more tests. China is also building new silos, not far from the cities of Yumen, Hami and Ordos. According to our theoretical model, again, tens of millions of people could die in the event of a strategic nuclear strike on these infrastructures. According to our study, half of Beijing could perish depending on the weather, because the city is relatively close to these sites.
According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), a collective of American researchers, these images taken in the fields of Xinjiang in 2021 show nuclear silos under construction.
© / AFP PHOTO /PLANET LABS, INC.
France has also chosen to renovate its missiles. The country will invest around 54 billion euros in deterrence over the period from 2024 to 2030, or 13% of the military budget. In 2023, the nine official nuclear powers held around 10,000 nuclear warheads, or 135,000 times Hiroshima, according to estimates – all this information is never fully public, for strategic reasons. The world is at a crossroads. Either we continue in this new nuclear arms race and in this acceleration that began since the start of the war in Ukraine, or we return to the fundamentals: control, rationalization, limitation.
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Could such a dark scenario happen to France?
In France, we also had silos, positioned on the Albion plateau at the crossroads of Vaucluse, Drôme, and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence. But they were dismantled at the end of the 1990s. French nuclear weapons are deployed on ballistic missile submarines based on Île Longue in Brittany near Brest harbor. One of them is still at sea. In the event of an attack, if the enemy wants to avoid a response, all identified nuclear bases, as well as qualified air bases would likely be struck. Enough to cause major damage to the surrounding populations and probably significant fallout which has yet to be modeled. In this case as in the American case, the nuclear sponges, if they exist, always end up overflowing.
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