BI – It’s the disaster for which no city is prepared: A nuclear bomb strikes the US, triggering a blinding flash of light, a giant orange fireball, building-toppling shockwaves, and dangerous nuclear fallout. “There isn’t a single jurisdiction in America that has anything approaching an adequate plan to deal with a nuclear detonation,” Irwin Redlener, a public-health expert at Columbia University who specializes in disaster preparedness, told Business Insider.
The US Federal Emergency Management Agency has some simple advice for those catastrophic circumstances: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned. But Redlener said the overall federal guidelines weren’t enough. He thinks even the six most likely targets — New York, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC — wouldn’t be ready with a sufficient response. Those cities would be particularly at risk, he said, because they’re some of the largest and densest in the country. They’re also home to critical infrastructures like energy plants, financial hubs, government facilities, and wireless transmission systems. READ MORE
