If you look hard enough, you’ll spot faded yellow signs proclaiming “Fallout shelter” around New York City. They are remnants of a cold war program that signaled spaces within ordinary buildings – from schools to banks to the Brooklyn Bridge – with adequate supplies and walls thick enough for riding out a nuclear blast safely.
Many of these windowless shelters housed little more than rats and sewage before the practice was terminated in 1979. In 2017, the city’s department of education ordered the “misleading” signs removed from its buildings, but many others remain – vestiges of nuclear fears that never materialized.
Those fears feel a little more real again amid Vladimir Putin’s repeated nuclear threats. In July, New York mayor Eric Adams’s office published a public service announcement about what to do in case of a blast. A couple of weeks ago, nuclear preparedness reentered headlines when the Department of Health and Human Services announced it was buying a supply of the anti-radiation drug Nplate, though the agency denied it was in response to any specific threat.
All of this raises the question: are we better prepared today to survive a nuclear blast than we were 60 years ago, when it seemed all we could do was head to the basement and pray?
Jeff Schlegelmilch has been trying to answer this question for years as the head of the National Center for Disaster Preparedness, a Columbia University research program that works with government agencies. But while the United States has made many advances in nuclear preparedness since the cold war, “some of those have eroded because of funding cuts and attention going elsewhere,” he said.
One of the biggest challenges is educating the public, which requires sustained communication – something that’s become nearly impossible given today’s political polarization and short attention spans, Schlegelmilch said. Because of this, disaster preparedness officials look for “teachable moments” like big news events to get their messaging through. And while we’re not currently at the level of “everybody to the bunker, grab your helmet”, this is an important opportunity to get people informed, he said.
In the event of a nuclear incident, preparedness experts agree you should shelter inside a building with thick walls and remain for at least 24 hours to avoid the worst of radioactive fallout while awaiting further instructions, or “Get inside, stay inside, stay tuned,” the phrase recited in a recent New York City public service announcement. If there is a nuclear explosion, text messages called Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEAs) will probably be sent out.
What may be of larger concern in the nuclear preparedness realm are issues likely to emerge after any initial blast. Aside from a scenario of total Armageddon, it’s likely millions of people would survive but need urgent care. And while Schlegelmilch said government agencies have been doing “very serious” behind-the-scenes work for many decades, he worries it’s not nearly enough. “When it comes to special needs, when it comes to more the social aspects, we’re still not as ready,” he said.
Two of the most important offices overseeing the US’s nuclear preparedness efforts – the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema), and the less well-known Administration of Strategic Preparedness and Response (ASPR), the disaster response division of the Department of Health and Human Services – have summed up their approach for allocating scarce resources after a nuclear disaster in two giant guidebooks. Fema’s Planning Guide for Response to a Nuclear Detonation, last updated in May, and Aspr’s 212-page A Decision Makers Guide: Medical Planning and Response for a Nuclear Detonation, last refreshed in 2017, are meant to offer expertise to officials in the event of a crisis on everything from nuclear fallout patterns to recommended messaging to triaging burn victims.
Both agencies have also invested heavily in tech tools including dashboards that aim to give decision-makers live visualizations of unfolding disasters, and Fema’s “Improvised Nuclear Device City Planner Resource Tool” – kind of an apocalyptic SimCity that lets officials visually game out what a nuclear blast might look like and how to respond.
These hi-tech investments can feel reassuring, but they aren’t nearly enough on their own. Although ASPR maintains the US’s strategic national stockpile, a cache of lifesaving drugs including anti-radiation medicine, Schlegelmilch said health resources in the aftermath of a nuclear blast, or the ability to distribute the resources it has, greatly concern him.
He is particularly worried that there won’t be sufficient mental health and social services: “Those are areas which people will always say are very important, but we don’t see the additional resources.” And in the aftermath of any potential nuclear catastrophe, there will be far more people who need those services than will be available, he said.
One of the main problems is that there have been huge cuts to disaster preparedness programs that were enacted after 9/11. A key program, ASPR’s Hospital Preparedness Program (HPP), described as the “primary source of federal funding for healthcare system preparedness and response” for large-scale emergencies and disasters, lost 62% of its funding by 2021.
There also doesn’t seem to be political will to invest more in disaster preparedness, despite the Covid pandemic. “It’s really shocking to me that we aren’t seeing a more cohesive push for preparedness in the face of what we’ve all gone just gone through,” Schlegelmilch said. “A lot of it comes down to the polarization in our politics – and that’s a very, very dangerous path to go down. It’s preventing us from taking the kinds of actions that are staring us in the face.”
Schlegelmilch said that same polarization could also cause mayhem in the aftermath of a nuclear event: if you thought Covid misinformation was bad – imagine nuclear blast deniers.
“We’re raised to think the world is very deterministic, and if we can just figure out all the variables, we can crack the code and know what we need to do. My experience is that the world is much more chaotic, with spheres of probability: we know what will make us more likely to do well in an adverse event. So I’m okay with incremental progress, as long as it’s in the right direction,” he said, adding that even without a nuclear blast, preparing for one will help us survive other disasters, like pandemics and climate change.
“When we look at the root causes of disasters as an intersection of all these different aspects of civil society, we do see common threads,” Schlegelmilch said. “There’s value in investing in resilience, there’s value in investing in the future.”
