Is Boston doomed?

Part 2

by Michael Crowley

How can we be so sure? Let's begin with Supreme Truth.

Known in Japan as Aum Shinrikyo, Supreme Truth is the doomsday cult responsible for the sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway which left 12 people dead and 5000 injured. That attack, and the details that subsequently came to light about the group, put to rest two doubts about the likelihood of what some people call "superterrorism."

The first was whether acquiring, developing, and using the deadliest weapons -- nuclear, chemical, and biological -- was really within the reach of a terrorist group. Not only did Supreme Truth successfully gas the subway, it was later discovered to have been working on all three forms of weapons. The other was whether any group would have a motive to use those weapons. Most traditional political terrorists, experts believe, would be dissuaded by the retribution provoked by a mass killing. Not so Supreme Truth, a doomsday sect interested only in maximum death and destruction. (Here in the US, the Heaven's Gate cult turned out to be a group of benign, if misguided, cultists. But what if they had believed it was their divine mission to take as many of their fellow vessels as possible to the Evolutionary Level Above Human?)

Among the spectacularly alarming collection of projects pursued by Supreme Truth was the acquisition of a nuclear bomb. And the scary part is, getting a nuke hardly requires wild, Broken Arrow tactics.

For that we have mainly the Cold War's end to thank. When the Soviet Union fell apart, so did its system of accounting for and protecting its thousands of nuclear weapons and its weapons material -- 200 tons of plutonium and 1200 tons of highly enriched uranium. Not only is security around much of this stuff loose, often the guards and scientists haven't been paid for months. This in a society more or less ruled by a mafia well aware of the price a Saddam Hussein might be willing to pay to get the bomb. By 1995, the CIA had found 45 reported attempts to smuggle weapons-grade radioactive material out of the former Soviet Union.

And once bomb material gets into the wrong hands, it's not that hard to build into a weapon. The technology is 50 years old. Schoolkids have built bomb models from diagrams available in libraries, and now, inevitably, those diagrams are on the Web. Even 20 years ago, a government report concluded that "A small group of people, none of whom ever had access to the classified literature, could possibly design and build a crude nuclear explosive device. They would not necessarily require a great deal of technological equipment or have to undertake any experiments."

What if someone did set off a nuke in Boston? That scenario has been imagined by a Cambridge-based outfit called International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).

Picture this: a van pulls up on Congress Street, outside City Hall. Inside is a relatively small, 12-kiloton nuclear device, about the size of the Hiroshima bomb.

When the bomb explodes, temperatures soar to 4000 degrees, melting steel and exploding concrete. Winds from the blast approach 600 miles per hour. As one government analysis unblinkingly put it, "people and objects such as trees and utility poles are destroyed by the wind." In an instant, everything within a quarter-mile of the explosion is incinerated.

The fires ignited by the bomb shortly destroy almost everything within two or three miles. The dome of the State House blows out like an eggshell, and the building is flattened. The Prudential tower is gutted and set ablaze. Quincy Market disappears, and, if not vaporized, the FleetCenter is transformed to a massive skeleton.

Most people outdoors within a kilometer of the blast's center, from the Public Garden to Bunker Hill, would suffer severe third-degree burns, charring them badly enough to kill them instantly. This could happen to as many as 30,000 people.

As far as 2.5 kilometers away -- MIT and part of Southie, for instance -- people outside would still suffer fatal burns. Thousands of others would suffer secondary burns caused by the fires raging out of control throughout the city (don't bother calling 911 -- nobody's there to answer). And only a few thousand intensive-care burn beds exist in the entire country.

Tens of thousands might survive the bomb's immediate impact only to succumb to radiation sickness. A small nuke would likely deliver intense gamma rays to a region even larger than its blast area, and the resultant mushroom cloud would deposit radioactive fallout for miles. The worst radiation sickness, suffered by those survivors within a mile or so, starts with nausea and vomiting, and can lead to several weeks of hair loss, internal hemorrhaging, and, finally, death.

Maybe you're sighing in relief because you live outside Boston. You might get zapped by some burns, or mild radiation, you think, but someone will take care of you, right? Wrong.

Few survivors can hope for medical treatment, says Dr. Gururaj Mutalik, a physician and the director of IPPNW. "Even a minor incident," he says, "will overwhelm local hospitals."

The ultimate death toll in Boston, as imagined by IPPNW: 70,000 people.

To pull off an attack like this, a terrorist needn't even enter the country. The bomb could be detonated on a boat offshore. Either way, as IPPNW's director said last year, "Boston would be gone."

The horror of nuclear terrorism is our inability to react to or control it. One minute a city is there, and the next it's simply gone. There are plenty of serious academics, staid people who disdain sensationalism, who are convinced this will happen.

"We are living very much on borrowed time," says Graham Allison, a former dean and now a professor at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "If tomorrow a nuclear weapon exploded in Boston, or Oklahoma City, or New York, I think first we'd all be shocked, and second people would say, `This was inevitable.' "

Part 3

Michael Crowley can be reached at mcrowley[a]phx.com.