(cross-posted @ SecondPageMedia)
It was a day that will be seared into the collective American conscience for generations to come – October 11, 2005 – the day that made it abundantly clear that America was at war, and there was no turning back. It was on that day that for only the third time in world history a nuclear weapon was used for offensive purposes against an enemy. The exact story of how the weapon made it to American shores and so deep into the country before anyone took notice will be one of the great mysteries of our time, but what followed is nothing short of set in stone.
Around 1:30pm local time, an 18-wheeler truck carrying a nuclear bomb exploded en-route to its final destination near the city of Amarillo, Texas. The 1.2 megaton blast instantly incinerated the city and surrounding areas, killing more than a quarter of a million people in the blink of an eye. Though the site of ground zero is still, a year and two months later, banned from public view due to radiation contamination, it is believed that the truck was roughly fifteen miles away from the center of Amarillo. That seemingly safe distance did not matter, however, as a weapon of that magnitude – 100 times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945 – was able to vaporize everything within 18 miles of ground zero.
Even though the panhandle area of Texas is sparsely populated, tens of thousands of people within a 45 mile radius of the city were injured with, at best, third-degree burns. Many others were hit by flying debris, broken glass, and hundreds of others within that radius and outside of it were made permanently blind by unfortunately happening to look in the general direction of Amarillo at the time of the blast. It was the flash-blindness that also was the main cause of the 16 passenger airlines that crashed in north Texas, western Oklahoma, and southwestern Kansas that day, some in combination with panic and the shock wave coming from the ground. Another 28 flights reported some sort of turbulence from the shock wave but were able to continue flying to their destination. They were the first to report the horrifying news to air traffic controllers in Denver that a large mushroom cloud was now rising over the otherwise peaceful Texan plains.
FEMA, recently decapitated after the firing of its leader over the utter debockle that was Hurricane Katrina just a month ago, was still spread thin by continuing efforts to help survivors in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama – not to mention pushed further to the limit by the landfall of Hurricane Rita in southeastern Texas not more than two weeks ago. With that stacked against it, the agency was pressed into action to assist – and bring order – to the central plains of the United States, which descended into states of chaos as rumors and eventual confirmation of a nuclear explosion spread like wildfire. Riots over dwindling food supplies occurred in Denver, Wichita, Kansas City, Dallas, and Oklahoma City.
Oklahoma City would have a bigger problem than bread riots, however, as a strange snow began to fall in the city around 6:00pm local time, even though temperatures were far above freezing. It was in that time that the fallout cloud from the Amarillo explosion reached the city and began to spread its radioactive dustings on the population. It is estimated that some 145,000 people were outdoors at the time that fallout began hitting the city – most of them desperately trying to stock up on anything and everything in the panic that followed the explosion. FEMA had not yet been able to reach the area to gain control and local police were overwhelmed by rioting at area supermarkets to keep the people indoors, and they became the first exposed to the fallout. 65% of those – more than 94,000 – died of radiation exposure over the next few weeks.
Martial law was declared in the states of Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas – with mandatory curfews placed in Arizona, Utah, Wyoming, Nebraska, Missouri, Arkansas, and Louisiana: all in an effort to try to calm the population. Mandatory dusk to dawn curfews were also put into place in most major American cities outside of the state-wide curfew zones. Airports around the country were shut for four days.
The nation's transportation network was brought to its knees over the next two weeks as major interstates such as Interstate 27 and 40 were closed dozens of miles away from the city of Amarillo, with medical professionals and the military streaming into the blast zones to try and help those who survived. The extent of the fallout cloud also led to the closure of Interstate 35 – a critical north-south transportation link through the central part of the country – at the Oklahoma border. Traffic jams stretched into the city of Dallas in the south and Wichita in the north. Shortages of everything from food to fuel gripped the nation from the foothills of the Dakotas to Chicago with important import routes from the Gulf of Mexico being cut off.
The reaction to the Amarillo bombing was swift and severe. On October 17, 2005, the United States declared war in the only way it could – by unleashing a nuclear assault on Iran – with the Bush Administration saying this was the smoking gun that proved the country had nuclear weapons and wanted to use them against the West. It is believed that members of the Iranian Army & intelligence were able to smuggle the bomb in through the port of Galveston, Texas, and the bomb was on its way to a major city such as Denver or Salt Lake City, when it exploded en-route. A draft was declared as Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz, and Qom were nuked by American forces, with bombs in the 1 – 5 megaton range.
The land invasion began on April 15, 2006 with a combined thrust from the south and west through Iraq and amphibious landings in the south, all totaling roughly 1.1 million soldiers. Aerial strikes took out most of Iran's defense capabilities that weren't destroyed by the initial nuclear assault. However, Iran was able to launch at least forty of its land-to-ship torpedoes, sinking an aircraft carrier, two destroyers, and causing damage to a dozen other ships. Iran also lodged a series of chemical munitions at Israel and Iraqi Kurdistan, causing the estimated death of 500 – 700,000 civilians. In the end, Iran was no match for American military might at anything close to full strength, and troops arrived in, and over threw the government based in Tehran, on September 12, 2006. Iraqi-styled revolt continues to this day, however, as the American military death toll recently surpassed 25,000. The Bush Administration has recently committed another 125,000 men to the effort who will spend Christmas in transit to the Persian Gulf region to stabilize the region.
Back home, among the continued fuel shortages and the prospects of the second year without an "American Christmas" - the result of a flattened economy and fuel prices that make it unprofitable for many to go to work, let alone spend any money on anything else – discontent continues to grow as to if we had in fact bombed the correct people. None of the claims were ever proven, no criminals brought to trial, no justice served beyond war waged. While the voices of discontent were not loud enough to stop a conservative avalanche at this year's midterm elections, it is my hope of hopes that some semblance of the truth can come out before the 2008 Presidential elections, presuming they will be allowed to occur – which seems somewhat doubtful as it constantly seems this country is only a few more bad weeks away from civil unrest of the kind not seen since our own Civil War.
One thing is for sure, however, whatever innocence we as Americans had left after the September 11 attacks was annihilated after the Amarillo bombing, and it will not be returning for the duration of my life.
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The previous was not the hypothetical what-if of the ever-threatened terrorist attack. It was inspired by an article that I happened to come across over the weekend. A government oversight group, The Project on Government Oversight, reported that experts at the Pantex facility near Amarillo, Texas, admitted that a single W-56 warhead was nearly detonated while being dismantled because of an unsafe amount of pressure being applied to the weapon during the dismantling process. Also getting an unsafe amount of pressure were the employees at the facility – allegedly working as many as 72 hours a week, which may have contributed to the potential accident.
It is scary to imagine what would have happened had there actually had been an accident and a nuclear detonation. Any indication of anything that could have gone wrong to build a case for human error instead of malicious deed would be vaporized in the blast. So left in a complete intellectual void, what would the option be then? Add in that this country happens to be run by those who would love for incidents to occur to validate previous positions and give smoking guns for future plans, and maybe it never would come out that ground zero was in fact not on the highway itself but a couple of miles to its north, where the facility was. It's not like any humans would be able to get to ground zero to take pictures for months, if not a year or more, to document what may or may not have happened. In the meantime, the floor would be wide open to irrational behavior with consequences that would last decades, if not shape the future of our current civilization indefinitely.
Probably one of our biggest mistakes as a species over the last century was the nuclear arms race. Hundreds of billions, if not more, of dollars was poured into an entire weapon system that was ultimately never used and – as this theoretical story shows – could end up causing more harm than good. We are quite lucky thus far that the only bad to come out of the arms race of yesteryear is the inconvenience of wasted money. Compare that to life after a nuclear war, and we're getting off pretty easy. Granted the chance for muck-ups will always exist so long as there are nuclear weapons to speak of, so we will never be completely out of the woods. It's just haunting when you realize how many times we as a people have been only a few bad steps away from nuclear war, but in the end it looks like we're meant to go on, at least for another day. Here's to hope that luck doesn't run out.
Link-Fu
- (previously diaried about by Six Degrees of Aaron in much shorter form here)
- original article that started this all here
- More about the W-56 nuclear bomb (completely dismantled as of 2006)
- Yes, I looked up the wind direction for the hypothetical day.