We assume that eight U.S. urban areas are hit: Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, New York, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Seattle, four with four warheads and four with eight warheads. We also assume that the targets have been selected according to standard military priorities: industrial, financial, and transportation sites and other components of the infrastructure that are essential for supporting or recovering from war. Since low-altitude bursts are required to ensure the destruction of …showed first 75 words of 754 total…

…showed last 75 words of 754 total…affected areas. The nearly compete destruction of local and regional transportation, communications, and energy networks would make it almost impossible to transport the severely injured to medical facilities outside the affected area. After the 1995 earthquake in Kobe, Japan, which resulted in a much lower number of casualties (6500 people died and 34, 900 were injured) and which had few of the complicating factors that would accompany a nuclear attack, there were long delays before outside medical assistance arrived.