One US city is thought to be the prime target for a nuclear attack (Picture: Getty Images)
Newly declassified documents have revealed which US city will likely be wiped out first in the event of nuclear war.
Plans for General Nuclear War are among the most top-secret documents held by the US government – but these plans predict that Washington, DC, will be the first city targeted in the event of a nuclear war.
The theory makes sense – Washington is home of the Pentagon and therefore an obvious wartime target – and these newly declassified documents imagine a scenario where the city gets hit with a one megaton thermonuclear bomb.
Andrew Weber, former assistant secretary of defence for nuclear, chemical and biological defence programmes, said: ‘A “Bolt out of the Blue” attack against DC is what everyone in DC fears most.
‘Bolt out of the Blue’ is how US Nuclear Command and Control refers to an “unwarned large [nuclear] attack”.’
And it’s assumed that if a strike on Washington does hit, an Armageddon-like nuclear war will almost certainly follow – as such a blatant attack on a NATO country would unlikely be tolerated without consequences.
The Pentagon is likely to be targeted first in the event of a nuclear war (Picture: AP)
But not only would such an attack destroy Washington, it would also end life on earth as we know it, MailOnline reports.
A one megaton thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend – four or five times hotter than the centre of the sun.
In the first fraction of a milli-second after the bomb strikes the Pentagon outside Washington DC, there is light which superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour.
Within a few seconds the fireball has increased to a diameter of a little more than a mile, its heat so intense that concrete explodes, metal melts or evaporates, stone shatters, and people instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.
The five-storey, five-sided structure of the Pentagon explodes into superheated dust, all the walls shattering with the near-simultaneous arrival of a shockwave. All 27,000 employees perish instantly.
Travelling at the speed of light, the radiating heat from the fireball ignites everything flammable several miles in every direction.
Curtains, paper, books, wood fences, clothing and dry leaves explode into flames and become kindling for a great firestorm that begins to consume a 100 or more square mile area that, prior to this flash of light, was the beating heart of American governance and home to six million people.
But those incinerated are spared the horror that begins to be inflicted on the one to two million people gravely injured but not yet dead.
The horrific mushroom cloud would start to appear a mere two minutes after detonation (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense, third-degree burns. Their bodies are stripped of the outer layer of skin, exposing bloody dermis underneath.
Third-degree burns require immediate specialised care and often limb amputation to prevent death – but there are only ten specialised burn beds in the entire Washington metropolitan area.
Within seconds, the thermal radiation has deeply burned the skin on roughly one million people, and 90% of them will die.
Most won’t make it more than a few steps from where they’re standing when the bomb detonates. They become what civil defence experts referred to in the 1950s, when these grim calculations first came to be, as ‘dead when found’.
The light pulses are silent. What follows is a thunderous roar.
The intense heat generated by this nuclear explosion creates a high pressure wave that moves out from its centre point like a tsunami, a giant wall of highly compressed air travelling faster than the speed of sound.
It mows people down, hurls others into the air, bursts lungs and eardrums, sucks bodies up and spits them out.
‘In general, large buildings are destroyed by the change in air pressure, while people and objects such as trees and utility poles are destroyed by the wind,’ notes an archivist who compiles these morbid statistics for the Atomic Archive.
The shockwave bulldozes everything in its path in a three-mile radius, before the iconic mushroom cloud begins to form as the nuclear fireball starts to rise into the air.
Everyone in the Washington Metropolitan area would die instantly (Picture: Getty Images)
Next comes the deadly reverse suction effect, with objects and people sucked back towards the centre of the burning inferno and consumed by flame.
The mushroom cap and stem rises up five then ten miles from ground zero, billowing miles and miles outwards.
Eventually it reaches the troposphere, higher than commercial flights. Radioactive particles then spew across everything below as fallout, raining back down on the earth.
A nuclear bomb produces ‘a witch’s brew of radioactive products, which are also entrained in the cloud’, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned decades ago.
Less than two minutes after detonation, more than a million people have already died, and the survivors realise they are on their own as all telecom networks are knocked out by the blast.
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Former Federal Emergency Management Agency director Craig Fugate says their only hope for survival is to figure out how to ‘self-survive’, starting a ‘fight for food, water…’.
Ever since the end of World War II, the US government has been preparing and rehearsing for a nuclear war.
The grim truth is that World War III would probably leave two billion people dead – and those who survive may wish they had been instantly incinerated.
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