ARE WE READY?

If North Korea launches, all we can do is get down ‘and pray.’

It’s a topic that’s been given little thought since the Cold War ended more than 25 years ago. But last month, a dozen Members of Parliament gathered in Ottawa to discuss a newly pressing question: How prepared is Canada for nuclear war?

Of primary concern is the escalating tension between North Korea and the United States. In an interview with The New York Times published Sunday, Republican Senator Bob Corker said he fears Trump is putting America “on the path to World War III.” The Nobel Committee signalled its concern last week by awarding its Peace Prize to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. "We live in a world where the risk of nuclear weapons being used is greater than it has been for a long time,” committee chair Berit Reiss-Andersen said. And that message was echoed at a conference of international experts this week in Paris, where former British prime minister Tony Blair warned of the “catastrophic consequences” if Trump were to order an attack on North Korea. Canada, which has no nuclear weapons, is generally an afterthought in these conversations, but that doesn’t mean there’s no cause for alarm. Over the four-hour briefing last month by experts from the government, the military and academia, the MPs on the Standing Committee on National Defence heard a simple but sober message: It is “only a matter of time” before North Korea develops a nuclear-armed ballistic missile capable of reaching North America, said Stephen Burt, assistant chief of defence intelligence. And Canada would be essentially defenceless should such a missile be launched.

Or as James Fergusson, director of the University of Manitoba’s Centre for Defence and Security Studies, testified in front of the Standing Committee, “We get on our knees and pray.”

He and other experts agree that the kind of global war of total annihilation feared during the 1980s is now unlikely. But a nuclear exchange would nonetheless be devastating. The Nukemap, an online tool created by science historian Alex Wellerstein, shows the projected impact of nuclear warheads on different cities. It forecasts that 728,000 people would be killed if a 150-kiloton bomb — believed to be the size of the one tested by North Korea in August — were detonated above New York City. Detonated over downtown Vancouver, the same bomb would kill an estimated 98,000 people.

How likely a Canadian city would be targeted is debatable. John Clearwater, a military analyst and author of Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada’s Cold War Arsenal, said North Korea would not want to waste one of its few warheads on Canada when its true enemy lies to the south. And even though an intercontinental ballistic missile would need to pass over Canada to reach a target in the central or eastern U.S., he doesn’t see much risk of it falling short.

“If it attained necessary altitude and angles to be a true ICBM launch, it’s not likely that 20 minutes into its 26-minute flight it’s going to accidentally fall out of space and hit Canada,” he said.

Fergusson, however, told the House of Commons committee it’s unclear how well North Korea has mastered missile guidance systems — meaning a misfire is possible. Canada could also be what he called a “demonstration target.” A North Korean regime on the verge of defeat in a conventional war might "look at Canada and say, ‘We can fire at Canada, undefended, along a path which would demonstrate our ability to hit Washington D.C.,’” he said.

If North Korea did fire an ICBM toward North America, one of the first Canadians to know would be Lt.-Gen. Pierre St-Amand, deputy commander of the North American Aerospace Defence Command.

But as he told MPs, while Canadians work alongside Americans to detect missiles at NORAD headquarters in Colorado Springs, they are not part of decisions on whether to shoot down an incoming missile. That’s because in 2005, under then prime minister Paul Martin, Canada declined to participate in the U.S. ballistic missile defence system developed to deal with the threat posed to North America by rogue nucleararmed states.

And St-Amand said the assumption that America would try to shoot down any missile, whether it was headed for Houston or Ottawa, is misguided. “We’re being told in Colorado Springs that the extant U.S. policy is not to defend Canada,” he said. In the “heat of the moment,” the U.S. command could go contrary to

the policy, but “it would be entirely a U.S. discussion and a U.S. decision,” he said.

Michael Byers, a University of British Columbia political science professor who also testified in Ottawa, disagrees. “The U.S. isn’t going to take the chance of radioactive drift coming across from Vancouver or Toronto,” he said. “Any missile coming towards North America would be targeted by the Americans. We don’t need to be part of U.S. missile defence for that to happen.” He did caution, however, that there is no guarantee that, even in the “implausible” event that Canada is targeted, the missile defence system would work.

Should a North Korean nuclear warhead evade missile defences and strike a North American city, experts in disaster preparedness fear we are not ready. Dennis Mileti, former director of the National Hazards Center at University of Colorado, said he sees no signs that authorities are educating citizens about what to do after a nuclear detonation. More was done in the 1950s and ’60s when the chances of surviving an all-out nuclear war were slim and the recommended protection was laughable.

“We trained children in schools to get under their desks and cover the backs of their necks to protect themselves from shattered glass, which does absolutely nothing to protect them from radiation,” Mileti said. Since then, a lot has been learned about how people can shield themselves from the effects of radiation. But once a nuclear detonation has gone off, “all electronic communications would be out,” he said. "A public education campaign should be going on now.”

Irwin Redlener, a public health professor at Columbia University, has been trying to get the message out for years. In a 2008 TED Talk addressing the risk of terrorists detonating a small nuclear bomb, he complained that not a single American city has effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster.

“Part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves, personally, are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe. They are paralyzed," he said in 2008. "You say ‘nuclear’ to them, and they’re thinking, ‘Oh my God, we’re all gone. What’s the point? It’s futile.’ And we’re trying to tell them, ‘It’s not futile. We can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things.’"

Nine years later, the paralysis is still there, but Redlener has not given up. He even appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show last month. His message is straightforward: A nuclear explosion would create a blast wave and thermal pulse that would kill everyone in the immediate vicinity within seconds — for that 150-kiloton warhead, a radius of several kilometres. Beyond the blast zone, the biggest risk would be the radioactive dust and debris that would fall to the ground soon after the explosion. There would be no time to outrun that (at most, people would have a 10to 15-minute warning) so people would need shelter, ideally either underground or on the middle floors of a tall building, away from windows.

“You want as much distance and as much shielding as possible between you and the detonation, and you stay in this shelter environment for somewhere between 24 and 72 hours."

Ali Asgary, associate professor of Disaster & Emergency Management at York University in Toronto, adds that in the immediate aftermath of a detonation, people would be left to fend for themselves. When authorities advise the public to have survival kits on hand, he said, they are thinking of earthquakes and tornadoes but also nuclear disaster.

“You should not expect government emergency responders to reach you, even before two weeks,” he said. “They would be exposed to radiation that might affect them. It is better even for emergency responders to wait for a few days sometimes so that radiation level goes down and they can go to help.”

During the Cold War, the Canadian government ran public education campaigns promoting civil defence and built a network of bunkers to house key government members in the event of a nuclear attack. But the largest, the “Diefenbunker” outside Ottawa, was decommissioned in 1994 and turned into a museum. Today, Canada has no specific public plan to respond to a nuclear missile attack. When asked, a spokesman for Public Safety Canada referred to the Federal Nuclear Emergency Plan — a Health Canada initiative designed to respond to a peacetime accident involving a nuclear power plant — and the 2011 Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear and Explosives Resilience Strategy, which is essentially a plan to come up with a plan to deal with a catastrophic terror attack.

If a missile hit, the extent of the dangerous fallout would depend on the size of the blast. A 2011 study by the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security looked at a scenario where a terrorist detonated a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb and found that high levels of radiation causing illness or death would extend up to 30 kilometres downwind.

Wind speed can also affect the spread of fallout, visible as sandlike grains, so although potentially fatal radiation drops off rapidly, protective measures could be required hundreds of kilometres away from the target of a bomb. A 2010 U.S. Government guide for response to a 10-kiloton nuclear detonation, for example, said fallout could “have a low-level continental impact.”

Even if nuclear war occurred primarily in Asia — if Trump “totally destroyed” North Korea, as he has threatened — radiation would drift to North America with possible long-term health effects, said Redlener. Wherever a bomb hit, and however far radioactivity spread, the psychological fallout would be far-reaching. “Just imagining this kind of incident is already impacting the general public (by causing anxiety),” said Asgary. "The closer you are, the more connection you have with the country, the higher the impacts.”

Disruption could also last generations, according to Redlener. After natural disasters like the recent hurricanes that hit the U.S., the focus is on how quickly life can get back to normal. But after a nuclear attack normal might never return.

“We would have essentially permanent loss of real estate that will not be habitable for people’s lifetimes and more," he said. He also believes there would be economic reverberations ”not just locally in the communities affected but regionally, nationally and internationally.”

Predictions beyond that enter the realm of science fiction, he said, but he does imagine any nuclear attack as a moral turning point, whether the United States struck pre-emptively or was forced to confront an attack on its soil or an ally’s.

“I hope we’re never in that position where we have to choose between not responding to an actual nuclear attack or wiping out another country, which consists of 99.9999 % of people who just want to get up in the morning and have some semblance of normalcy.”