New study shows parts of Washington D.C. could survive a nuclear blast

March 29, 2012 – WASHINGTON – The explosion would destroy everything within one-half mile. An intense flash would blind drivers on the Beltway miles away. A radioactive cloud would drift toward Baltimore. But there’s a surprising conclusion: Just a bit farther from the intersection of 16th and K streets northwest, the blast’s chosen epicenter, the explosion would be survivable. A U.S. government study explores what would happen if terrorists got their hands on enough nuclear material to explode a 10-kiloton nuclear bomb, about 5,000 times more powerful than the truck bomb that destroyed the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995. The study didn’t say why it chose the intersection it did as the epicenter for its nuclear bomb. But it did say Washington, D.C., wouldn’t disappear. “It’s not the end of the world,” said Randy Larsen, a retired Air Force colonel and founding director of the Institute for Homeland Security. “It’s not a Cold War scenario.” The biggest difference between the disaster the government studied and the nightmares of incoming ballistic missiles from the former Soviet Union is the size of the explosion. Cold War-era fears imagined massive hydrogen bombs detonated in the sky, not a smaller device exploding on the street. –Detroit FP

(c) CNN 2012