Creating a Nuclear Detonation Scenario Handbook – Part One

With all the talk about Russia, Ukraine, and the resurgence of the thread of nuclear war – which, given the development of variable-yield nukes, is not are far-fetched as you may think (though still unlikely) – I began to put together a binder that had possible targets that Russia or China might want to hit and began to use the Nuke Map that Don Shift referred to in his recent article about Aboveground Fallout Protection. My thought process is that this is sort of a one and done project. Unlike an area study, which should be updated fairly regularly, there is a good chance that the changes you would need to make to this document are infrequent and minor. The document doesn’t have to go over ALL possible outcomes – just a middle of the road scenario you can then estimate off of depending on actual events.

To determine the potential targets, I looked at old maps of Soviet targets to determine what they wanted to hit as well as newspaper articles, expert analysis, and my own critical thinking of what infrastructure would be important to hit.

For obvious reasons, I am not going to post my own binder information as it would reveal my AO, but I did create a sample one as an example. Will you ever need this information? Probably not. Is it still an informative project you should do? Yes.

In this example, I used Fort Bragg. The model assumes a blast optimized for 5 psi, a 15mph SW wind, and other factors you can customize within the model itself. These are just the default settings. I also assumed an 800kt blast from a Russian SS-25 TOPOL. My entry would look something like this. I include a brief description of the site – units housed (if military), flight information (if an airport), generation output (if a nuclear power plant).

In Part Two, I am going to show you the resources I added to the reference section (with the original links, so you can peruse the source information yourself).

Fort Bragg – Fayetteville, North Carolina

Units Housed

• XVIII Airborne Corps:
• United States Army Special Operations Command:
• Other Army units on base:
  • United States Army Reserve Command
  • United States Army Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command
  • 1st Battalion, 313th Regiment (Logistics Support Battalion)
  • B Company, 249th Engineer Battalion (Prime Power)
  • Airborne and Special Operations Test Directorate
• Units at Simmons Army Airfield:
  • 82nd Aviation Regiment
• Units at Pope Field:
  • 18th Air Support Operations Group
  • 11th Special Operations Intelligence Squadron
  • 14th Air Support Operations Squadron
  • 24th Special Tactics Squadron
  • 43d Air Mobility Operations Group
  • Joint Special Operations Command
  • 2nd Security Force Assistance Brigade (2nd SFAB)

AIR BURST                                                                     SURFACE BURST

Fatalities: 27,720                                                             Fatalities: 18,050

Injuries: 96,320                                                                Injuries: 32,760

AVG/24hr: 289,646                                                          AVG/24hr: 113,829

Air Burst

Surface Blast