 Think Tech Hawaii. Civil engagement lives here. We're talking about community matters today. I'm Jay Fidel. This is Think Tech and we care about the community. We care about community matters. And we care about preserving the community so it doesn't, you know, go toast one day over the kind of threat we were worried about a month ago and which, you know, logically could still happen based on diplomatic failure and based on somebody pulling the trigger or getting scared. And so we want to talk about exactly how exposed to why he is. With Sidney Higa, he's a retired U.S. Air Force major. He was involved in communications and computer development there. And with Bert Lord, who is a retired nuclear engineer, was chief machinist in the U.S. Navy and submarines. And, wow, what a combination of guys we have here today. Welcome to the show, you guys. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. So let's talk about nuclear bombs. You know, the one that blew up in Hiroshima was like 15 kilotons. We've got bombs that are much bigger now, yeah? Much, much bigger. How big? I think the largest Russian nuclear warhead that has been exploded is 100 megatons. 100 megatons? Huge. Very large. That's a lot bigger than 15 kilotons. That's like hundreds of times bigger. Absolutely. So we saw, you know, we've all seen the photographs we've read over the last 70 years. What the, I forget the name of the bomb. There was a name on the bomb. Came off the Enola Gay, right? And blew up Hiroshima. We saw what that did to Hiroshima and to the people in Hiroshima. Pretty powerful stuff and nasty business. But, you know, 800. 500 megatons. 500 megatons. 500 megatons. That would do, that would be different. That would waste any city. It would waste everything from miles around. Can you talk about it? Tens of miles around, yeah. Tens of miles around. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So we have, why don't you go ahead and... Yeah, so you've done a little research on this and you've found some figuring by a guy who works in the Department of Energy. Stephen says his name about exactly what kind of effect the bomb would have in Oahu. Can you talk about it? There's a guy named Alex Wellerstein who has put together... Wellerstein. Yeah, Wellerstein who has put together a site called Nuke Map. And what he has used, he worked for the Department of Energy and he also worked for several different institutes of technology and he's a researcher in this area. And he has put together a website where you can actually go to and put in what type of a strike it is, ground strike versus aerial strike, size of the weapon, things like that, which actually gives you a radius. It's a radius map for the actual initial blast radius, which is devastation. And then your second blast radius, which is more of a radiation, kind of like being nuked in a microwave, not as much physical destruction but definitely cellular destruction. Body cells. Body cells, yeah, melted. And fried. Yeah, as you're cooking from inside. And then your third ring is really a contamination ring. It's where everything is going to have some sort of contamination around it. And those rings are really the initial blast rings. From there, there's follow-on, catastrophe and follow-on problems that you're going to have with the migratory effect of any types of animals in those secondary rings and then move to the tertiary rings, any type of wind, any type of water, like if your water systems are going to come up through there, any kind of contaminated water, septic, backup. And then of course, those that died but weren't in the initial blastering, which was incinerated, you're going to have the biological effects of those bodies decomposing and different things like that, which are going to cause more of a biological effect than the initial nuclear effect. Happy news. Happy, very happy, happy. I should mention that Bert has a PhD in, what, tell us about your training. So, the Navy originally took me under their wing and gave me a nuclear engineering training. And then from there, I developed, I got my bachelor's degree in nuclear engineering, I got my master's degree in engineering management, and then I got my doctorate in international relations. Specifically because I was working overseas with the Navy, Department of Energy, Department of Defense, actually training our allies in their response to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear attacks. Yeah. So, talking about disaster preparedness and what to do after a disaster, I do want to talk about that here. Yes. But the Wallerstein, it's a website that's what, it's built to advise the public. It's not private, it's not confidential, it's not classified in any way. No, it's open source. Release anybody who wants to use a Nuke map. Just Google Nuke map and you can see it. You can put your own information in. And it's not, it's not 100% precise. It does concentric circle, blast radius, so it doesn't take into effect long ranges or anything. The department would change, it wouldn't be an exact circle. Exactly. Buildings will, like you mentioned Hiroshima, buildings actually had imprints of a person standing in front of a wall. You'd see the imprint of a person on the wall. So any material in the path would then restrict the past mile. So it's not an exact concentric circle that comes out. It would be affected by buildings, mountains. It would also be affected by the wind, the air, anything at the time. You're talking about a person standing in front of a wall. What happens to that person? They're vaporized. They are vaporized. It's a stain on the wall. It's a, well, he's not a stain on the wall. What actually happened is the impact of the, think of it like light, like a sunburn, a suntan, right? It's a very crude way to talk about it, but back when I was a kid, girls used to take little stickers of bunnies and put them on their stomach when they'd go get a suntan. Then they'd take it off and the skin would be lighter underneath. Same type of concept. When the initial nuclear blast hit, the body blocked the rays just for a split second. So it discolored the wall just a little bit differently. So you'd see an exact silhouette of the person who was in front of the wall. When the person in front of the wall would take the blast. And they were vaporized. The person in front of the wall vaporized. So all you see is the part that, where they, where they blocked. The radioactivity, you know, didn't, okay. So let's see the, the graph you were looking at from the ball of steam. Okay, so the first one, that's a, that's a second one. The first one is the one that has a very small circle. And that's basically, this is what they estimate would happen with 150 kiloton North Korean. This is the right one. Yes, this is the right one. So 100, 100, 150 kiloton. That's about 10 times the size of Hiroshima. Hiroshima, yes. Okay. And the little pinpoint there, that's the center. That would be like Pearl Harbor. If they were targeting Pearl Harbor, then the pinpoint would be there at Pearl Harbor. And so they have an estimate of about 20,000 deaths and about 117,000 people that would need assistance. Okay. So the people who, you know, I mean this is, it's all news already, but I think when this happened, when this alarm happened, people had that vision that they would be vaporized. Right. And they wouldn't, they wouldn't, you know, just so if you, if you look at what happened or the blast from a North Korean missile, it wouldn't be as bad as what people were kind of envisioning. Right. So there would be a lot of additional needs. It's only under 50 kilotons. That's small in comparison to some of the others that we have graphics for. But there would be a lot of assistance that's going to be needed. And how do we get to help those people that are the survivors? What do we do after the fact? Bert has some very good information in terms of all the planning and what goes into the response and how do you respond? What do you do to help those survivors? The ones at the center, you know, within, I forget the concentric diameter, but they would, they wouldn't know what hit them. They wouldn't know. It was just instant, like instantaneous. The ones who survived would have to be how far away from the blast, given 150 kilotons. How far away would they be? Looks... So the first 450 meters is your fireball radius, your immediate devastation radius. Second is a 500, the 500 rem is your one kilometers. So you're going to get 500 rems at one kilometers. And then 3.7 kilometers is your air blast radius. And then your thermal radiation radius is going to be about 5.26 kilometers. That's where you're going to have your third degree burns in your major issues. So anywhere outside of 3.7 to 5.3 kilometers is where you're really going to have the major impact of severely wounded individuals. Within that 3 kilometers, there's not going to be too many wounded individuals unless they were perfectly behind large concrete blocks or something like that. The people who were in that building in Hiroshima, there was one, there was a library building and it was really thick walls and somehow they survived. All the other buildings were... Devastated, yeah. And remember too, one of the chief differences is this an aerial attack or a ground attack. And so if it's an aerial explosion, it's a major rem explosion. It's a major irradiation explosion. If it hits the ground and has a ground impact, that's when you see buildings fall down. That's where you see a massive energy transfer into the ground, into the mass. Now the concentric rings are much smaller, but the immediate devastation is much greater. If it's an aerial attack, you'll see a lot of the third-degree burns melting and you'll see those types of issues more than you'll see... So these intercontinental ballistic missiles, you know, what are they? Are they aerial or ground? So ICBMs are a totally different thing altogether. So especially Russian and Chinese and American ICBMs. So a single ICBM missile isn't just one missile. It'll be a series of... I mean it's classified how many, but it's a series of missiles. And so when you see one ICBM takeoff, when it actually comes back down and enters into the atmosphere, it'll split into many hundreds of missiles that will attack at one time. Hundreds of nuclear bombs. And they have both ground and aerial assault capacity. Some of them would be dummies, so you wouldn't know which one to target. So it's hard to stop them. Hard to stop them. The only way to stop them is before they come back down. Correct. Well, there's two major ways to stop them. One is taking them up on their way up and the second is to take out their guidance systems. Let them go somewhere else. But when they come back down, some of the bombs in this ICBM are going to be programmed to blow up at altitude over a given city. And others, no, others just go down and what, they're set off by hitting the ground or they're set off when they hit the ground. There's several different ways that they're set off. Each country has their own. I've been put a lot of time into this. Each country has their own method of which they use, but safe to say that some are set to hit on ground, some are set to implant into the ground and detonate after, and some are set to detonate above ground. Oh, so they wouldn't all blow up at the same time. No. It's like in those terrorist scenarios where you're going to bomb that blows up, the crowd comes in to save those people who were hurt in the original blast and now a second one goes off like that. And then in those types of weapons you also have to consider the EMPs, that wipe out electronics and so there's different, there's different components of those type of weaponry. So an ICBM is a much more sophisticated, very significant event coming into, especially to an island like Hawaii where a single, just a bomb being dropped out of the Enola Gay as you mentioned or a rogue ship coming into a port and detonating or someone being able to just lob one missile in from a submarine or something like that. But actually being able to fire a missile from thousands and thousands and thousands miles away, like have it reach orbit and have it re-enter and not be burned up and have it actually have secondary tertiary and quadrary targeting capacity to be able to hit exactly where they're aiming is a very sophisticated country's capacity and capability. So do you ever hear about nuclear bombs that are mixed with germ warfare bombs or other kinds of weapons or they only come pure nuclear only? Well, one of the greatest things about a nuclear weapon is that it does eradicate any kind of biological and so if you would have some sort of a biological weapon on board a nuclear weapon, the nuclear weapon itself would have eradicated the biological weapon. Oh, okay. There's no point in having them both then. Well, there's two reasons why there's no point in having them both. Number one is the nuclear weapon would eradicate it. Number two is the nuclear weapon detonating it. So with any kind of human or organic matter that's around there that starts to decompose with a large scale of the bodies that would be decomposing, plus the fact that they're all radiated so nobody can come in and take those bodies and dispose of them properly so they don't have biological issues, they would create their own biological issues. Yeah, sure. Okay, give me a headache. Sorry about that. Let's take a break. We'll take a short break. That's Bert Lord and Sidney Heager. We'll be right back to talk about how you try to save people afterward. Yes. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. Okay, we're back. We're live. We're trying to cope with these possibilities. They are mind-blowing. This is a major, Sidney Heager, a retired major from the U.S. Air Force and Bert Lord, a retired nuclear engineer from the U.S. Navy. So one other chart we want to see is the chart with the big Russian bomb. The big Russian bomb. It has a much bigger footprint. And this would do much more damage. And if it's an ICBM, there would be more than one of them on board, yeah? This one, the graphic you're seeing right here is actually our mid-level bomb. Okay. And so in an ICBM, this type of bomb right here, it would probably, it would have several dozen of this capacity. And if you could show the next, the next larger. One with the, that's it. And then this one, there would be two to four of these in an ICBM. And so it would actually. Any one of them would just really destroy the island. For Hawaii, yeah. It would be, it would be a very significant game-changer for the island of Wahoo. So it sort of depends on who shot the thing in the air. Yes, exactly. If the Koreans did it, it would probably be one size in capability. If the North Koreans did it, yeah, it's probably a smaller. If the Russians did it, their standard is about 800 kiloton. If the Chinese were to shoot one at us, it's a five, five megaton is their standard. The biggest one is then from the. The Russians tested one at 100 megatons. Okay. That's huge. Nice to know. So you want to look at the markings as it's coming in. Okay. So we have devastation here. A lot of people are burned to a crisp immediately and a lot of others are, they're not going to last very long. Some others are going to be victims of the secondary effects. And, you know, who saves us? Who saves us and what do they do to save us? And is it worth being saved, honestly? Well, I think that the large majority of the responders to help us here on Oahu would be coming from the outer islands. But then how do you set up the communications that they can call. Transportation too. Transportation, the communications. Who's going to be responding? Where will you take them to? As Bert alluded to, you know, with the dead bodies, how do you get rid of them? Because that creates a hazard in itself. A biological hazard? Yes. A disease risk, huh? Yes. But as you mentioned earlier before the show, is the problem is you've got to handle them and they're hot. They're radioactive. So the people who are handling them are at risk now. Yes. So if there was an attack on Oahu, what the CRB basically, the chemical biological, radiological response units, what they're... Is that military or civilian or what? So it's mostly military. There's the civilian aspects of this do come in out of the CDC and there are a few civilian capabilities that exist. Mostly it's a military capability. Does it exist right now today? Yes. Can I have a certain amount of comfort from that? So the command is located in Aberdeen, Maryland at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and they have response units that are forward deployed in many different locations to be able to quickly respond. In an event like this, though, it's not often about saving who's there. It's about finding a way to move on, move forward. So one of the major impacts is wildlife, is the dead bodies, the biological effects, the fact that you don't have any electrical power at this point, so there is no septic... There's no septic systems. There's no water. There's no way to get fresh food in. And so... And the food that was there would probably be irradiated. Irradiated, yes. You do not want to eat the foods that are there. A lot of things that are really sad is that this would become an evacuation event. Which means nobody can stay behind. That's right. No one's going to stay behind. So what the military would do is they would start trying to find ways to communicate with people. They have aircraft that they use broadcast systems with. They would broadcast on AM radio. They broadcast on as many channels as they had available to them as possible. Sydney knows way more about that than I do. Yeah, but you know, we mentioned to Sydney a minute ago about coming from the Neighbor Islands, because the Neighbor Islands would have some vitality left, hopefully. Right. So long as they weren't hit as well. How would they come? There's no ferry, Sydney. They'd have to canoe it over, I guess. Taking Hawaiian air is not going to help. It's not going to help because the airport will probably be destroyed as well. So that's something that we have to look at for the long term and start to make those plans. See how we can get the supplies flown over. Dillingham might have to be expanded to, you know. Dillingham Field. Except larger aircraft and stuff. Because that's far from the predictable blast center. Correct, yes. Yeah. Or perhaps we need to have some other docking so they can bring ships with supplies and stuff and maybe towards the Coney Wayside or up towards the North Shore. Last time I looked, it took a ship, even a fast ship, even a nuclear carrier, it takes three, four days to get here from the West Coast. The West Coast. Assuming it was ready to make the trip. So that's why we would have to be dependent upon our local neighbors on the Otter Islands. Yeah. That's what it would have to be, but there's no way to make the trip on water. It's not very quickly. Commercial cargo ships, I suppose. Get on a cargo ship, come over. Some barges. Yeah. It would be pandemonium, wouldn't it? Nobody would know what to do. It would be all heck. Yeah. Yeah. And then as you said, it's an evacuation zone. It is. So the trick is to get out of town in any way you can. Yeah. It would become an evacuation event and there are several landing craft that can approach LCACs, that are able to actually approach on beaches and to do extraction points, but the military and they would pull off people as soon as they can, but they would set up decontamination centers that everyone would have to come in and go through a decontamination center and you would be, basically there would be triage at that point where even though you're walking you're beyond being able to save, these individuals we can bring in but they're contaminates that have to go to a slow decontamination center, these individuals are out of the blast range, can come in and it would only be humans. You'd have to leave because you can't ask your pet how close to the blast radius they were. So you have no idea how irradiated they are. People don't normally have geiger counters in their house so they can't really tell the contamination levels but it's really important to, after the blast go in, shower, get whatever fresh water you have. Assuming there was any water pressure. So anytime, well water pressure but anytime that you hear like if we ever get that warning the most important thing to do, just fill up your bathtub, sink, everything as much water as possible. Get people inside if someone comes in from outside comb their hair, get everything out of their hair, wash them with water, tepid water, not hot, not cold because you don't want to change your cellular structure to grass or to sweat and you just want to wash as much off as possible. Get to a safe place. There's actually a three day wait out. We call it a three day wait out. So if someone wants to prep for this, we're having three days of food that they can prepare without cooking it or something like that available at their house but there's a three day wait out. After three days after nuclear blast, the contamination half life will have gone down such that you can walk around a little bit outside and sell them. But when you're dangerous it's not only that you're dangerous to yourself, you're dangerous to those around you, right? Exactly, yes. And so that's what we want it to wash off not for just them but for anybody in their family. Anybody around them as well, yeah and no pets. And don't pet your pet. Don't bring them in. Don't pet them. Don't pet them. They might be more radioactive than you are. Yes, exactly. And any kind of and also people think like well I could just live off the land. Well you don't want to shoot a well pig. You don't want to eat anything that could potentially be contaminated because then you're going to internally contaminate yourself. It's hard, you know because a lot of people will die. Yes. And it'll take a while sometimes. That's where the preparedness comes in letting people know so that they can be prepared and avoid the things that will cause them harm in the future. Yeah. So I mean assuming you're alive and assuming you haven't ruined yourself with contaminated material what do you do? Because the city the state the island anyway the island is is really destroyed. It's not coming back till some you know further time maybe hundreds of years away. It's finished. Which means no power no water as you said no sewage no food. You can't till the soil you can't touch an animal all you can do is leave. Right. And so if you had a little box with food for three days what have you where would you go Sidney? What would you head down to the harbor I hope one of those landing craft would pick you up and who would you who would you be listening for? Who would be coming to help you? Would it be the navy would it be the you know the National Guard would it be the HPD who are you going to who has got open arms for you who will help you that's where all the planning comes in this is why we want to bring the attention out there so that we can inform the people to get ready so that the other departments can be prepared to respond to this type of of catastrophe. So it's all about communication this is your area that's my area yes so what's the optimal way to handle the communication end of it to be in charge somebody would have to be in charge and when we had the fall salon a few weeks ago there was really nobody you know my wife called HPD and they said find shelter and she said what was that it's all you got HPD do you know anything about this so who would you call well in a case like that you would have to have communications equipment that if you were to be destroyed by an EMP there would be a shelter so that you could bring out the communications and start setting it up for the first responders so that they can communicate once they're communicating now you have them go out to the different communities and have them assist people but they would be the primary core of communications this is like the Titanic you know they're not going to feel safe either they're going out into a highly irradiated area they're dealing with highly irradiated people they'd have to wear clothes and they would be at risk in their lives wouldn't they how do you get people how much do you pay those people how do you get those people to commit to do that who are they those are the people that have the heart to help other people those are the ones that are going to be those responders are they existing law enforcement or are they recruited after the fact to help I think there's some organizations like emergency management professionals I believe it is that would be a good start is for people to get involved with that organization and volunteer their services so again go back to my question do I make down for the harbor feeling that that's the only way help is going to get to me do I walk down there walk down the highway try to get to the harbor find the military maybe a ship maybe the navy maybe a carrier that would take a lot of people out is there anybody coming for me at the harbor I mean where do I go where would the first responders that's that's the key issue here in the state of Hawaii that has not been instituted so the reality of your question is everybody's question and the answer doesn't exist at this point so the answer has to be formulated it has to be prepared for and then it has to be dispersed to the public and at this point it hasn't been done and that's the United States government and the State Department and Defense Department actually and Department of Energy spend lots of money teaching other countries how to do this but we do very little of it actually inside our own country we saw that in Puerto Rico and we did see that in Puerto Rico yes absolutely the federal government was like a wall in Puerto Rico well one of the things about Puerto Rico is the federal government actually did show up but there was but Puerto Rico themselves had nothing in place to take government aid federal government aid and disperse it anywhere actually we would be exactly like Puerto Rico the federal government would respond with ships three day ships that's why three days is a good window to work with anyways because you mentioned as soon as the attack happens what should you do well the reality of it is you should stay in place for at least three days it is terrible staring staring at the windows inside your house close your windows hopefully you have a little food and water hopefully you have a little food and water I mean if you have to go and find food and water obviously but if you have the ability to stay inside stay in place for at least three days what should happen is the military and civil defense which I don't believe we really have here at least I've never heard of them if they exist I apologize but I have not heard of them the civil defense is who is supposed to get the message out of what to do where to meet and they are the ones that are supposed to coordinate the military federal government local government HPD HFD they're supposed to coordinate that response the civil defense people that everyone knows about right now is the guy who hit the trigger and put out a lot of confidence there go a step further civil defense to me was in the fifties that's when the whole civil defense thing was designed that cover against Russian missiles back when which you know that went away and I think civil defense in large part went away and in any event civil defense went away in the minds of the population it went away it doesn't exist so I mean we're about out of time to me so could you could you tell us what mindset we should have this is really very valuable news but it may be a fatal situation where you have to make peace with your maker rather than anything else so what what do we think of what do we do how do we walk around the street this afternoon and tomorrow thinking about this possibility is it a matter of just saying well okay it will be what it will be or do we have a plan in our minds a mental attitude that we should have well first off the Hawaii State Department of Defense with their Hawaii Emergency Management Agency they do have some valuable information on the website there is a the emergency management professionals of Hawaii they have a website they have good information there there are some organizations I have a friend his name is Gus Laktion and he runs 9-11 seminars so he'll do community training for what to do and how to be prepared in terms of different natural events such as tsunami, earthquake even a nuclear attack so I would start planning myself to get educated so that I could teach my family my friends my neighbors because it really everything really starts with yourself you don't want to be depending on an agency for everything because they can't do everything right government these days people don't have a lot of confidence in government that's the reality I have one last question for you guys I'd be very interested in your answer this is the last question we have to close after this but this is not an easy question it's a hard question there will be no law and order here for a lot of people so I have my little care package I have food I have water whatever to live is there a gun in my package I mean if you want to keep it if you want to keep your package fair enough Sydney great discussions thank you so much thank you very much thank you guys thank you for having us on the show