Are we prepared for a nuclear strike?

How prepared are we for a nuclear attack? And what might a response from Western leaders look like? William Alberque is the director of strategy, technology and arms control at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

William - It's like Alex was saying at the top of the programme, it really matters how the detonation takes place. If it happens very, very high up in the sky, then it's not going to make a very large ground zero, it's not going to suck thousands of tons of debris up into the atmosphere for fallout. If it is a ground burst, if it's an explosion that occurs very near the ground, then it's going to make a huge ground zero, a very radioactive zone, and it's going to put a tremendous amount of fallout up, and that's going to make it much more difficult to respond. I would say that the US is fairly well prepared for this kind of incident. I used to work for the Department of Defence and we actually exercised the nuclear accident response plan across the country. FEMA, the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, actually has a document called the planning guidance for response to a nuclear detonation online.

It's a 260 page manual for the government, local governments and federal government, to work together to respond to a nuclear detonation. It was updated actually in June of this year. That brings together a whole government response, including Homeland Security Department, defence, EPA the Environmental Protection Agency, Health and Human Services, to work together in a federal coordinated response with the local first responders. Obviously an incident where a nuclear weapon went off would be a national incident that would be run probably out of the White House as the federal command post, with a forward command post set up, an initial operating facility near the explosion site to do the assessment. The government would really be focused on measuring and monitoring and trying to figure out exactly what this explosion was, the altitude and the yield, and trying to track where the fallout may go so that they can plan where to put their responses, where to put field hospitals, where to put command centres.

There's obviously going to be a huge amount of people fleeing an urban area if it's struck with a nuclear weapon. You need to manage those flows, and you also have to really worry because some of those folks who may have survived the initial explosion may be very exposed to radiation and may themselves be giving off radiation. So you have to do all kinds of planning in terms of containment zones, treatment zones, you have to coordinate a medical response across the entire country. The federal government also has to get in front of messaging because for a lot of these folks, you don't want them to flee, you actually want them to shelter in place because if they go running15 minutes to half an hour after the bomb explodes, they may be exposing themselves to the most dangerous period of fallout.

Chris - Our plans for what could happen off the back of what's going on in Ukraine, in place for Europe, for those flanking countries and for further afield nations, because Chernobyl, the nuclear power station that exploded in 1986, we saw the fallout, the radiation landing in Cumbria in the North West of the UK. A long, long way away. So the impact is far reaching, isn't it?

William - You're absolutely right. And I think far too few countries in Europe, and I would put the UK in this category as well, have done, I think, adequate preparation for a smaller scale nuclear attack for a single nuclear explosion or for two or three nuclear explosions, because there is a tremendous amount that you can do to prepare and to mitigate the worst possible consequences. And in Europe, especially as you just pointed out, it's going to require an international response. So I think NATO would be a very natural place to go to do more of this consequence management preparation to coordinate the medical response now, to coordinate the radiation response now and communication and everything else. You need to do logistics. All the hospitals in Europe would have to be involved. There'll be more burn patients than our burn beds across all of Europe. So it's going to need to be a massive response.

Chris - With respect to the immediate aftermath medically, what do we do about that? Because there will be a range of different injurious circumstances. There'll be people like Ken, who we heard from earlier in the programme, who've been zapped, and they will be burned. They will be suffering that sort of injury. There'll be people who may have been hit by flying debris and glass, a more physical injury. There'll be emotional injury, but then there will obviously also be the radiation impact. So what sorts of plans are in place and how do we manage the medical effects?

William - In the United States, for instance, they'd be setting up field hospitals near enough to be able to help but far enough away that they wouldn't be in danger of any kind of radiation or chaos. They would also be using the hospitals across the United States. And I would imagine the same thing in the UK, the same thing in Ukraine. You're talking about 150,000 casualties potentially from a 40 kiloton burst. So that means you would need basically every hospital bed you can get your hands on, you'd have to ask medical staff to work around the clock for weeks and weeks and weeks. So you would need a really international, large scale, coordinated response in Europe or in the United States.

Chris - And what about the health of the environment where these blasts go off? Is it curtains forever with regard to using that patch of land again? Does there need to be a certain amount of time elapsed before it can be remediated? Can it ever be remediated? What's the intervention there?

William - It can be remediated. It absolutely can. I've stood at Trinity site, the ground zero for the first atomic blast. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are thriving cities today. Radiation diminishes radically with time. So the cost is enormous, it takes a lot of time, but you can remediate, you can rebuild, and you can repopulate the city. And again, Hiroshima and Nagasaki are living examples of thriving cities today despite the atomic attacks.

Chris - So if a person were to find themselves in a situation where this is going to potentially land in their neighbourhood. What can a person do to mitigate the risk if they're almost at ground zero.

William - If you know it's going to happen, then you have to make sure that you don't look anywhere near it. If you look at it, you could lose your eyesight. The advice is, if you're outside, that's the worst scenario, lie face down, wait till you feel the flash. You'll feel the winds coming off. Once that stops, you have 15 to 30 minutes to get in shelter before you run the risk of being exposed to fallout, because those radioactive dust particles that Alex was talking about, better to be inside a car, but still not good. Better to be inside a wooden house, but still not good. Even better to be in a stone building in the interior. Stay away from windows, because as you pointed out before, the windows are going to shatter and that becomes shrapnel that will kill you.

William - The best would be to be underground in a very large stone building or in the underground metro. And you shelter there and turn off your electronics because the the electromagnetic pulse is going to probably knock out your electronics. But if you're far enough away from ground zero, you can probably turn it right back on afterwards. And most nations will have an emergency network that will then communicate with your cell phones, or if you can find a radio and they'll tell you shelter in place. But you always have to weigh up the risk of being outside because of fallout vs the risk of fires, which are also going to be a huge issue. Listen to the central authorities, radio messages or cell phone messages, and then go from there.