Nuclear detonation in US city -secondary effects

[Mark E.]

Would it? I'd like to see some statistics. I keep hearing about this but, every time I look, the cities have got bigger.

In America, what most of the world calls "cities" are metropolitan areas that include suburbs that are incorporated as political entities separate from the center city. One of the most extreme examples is St.Louis. The metro area has 2.5 million people but the center city itself only has about 500,000. The "inner" suburbs (closest to the center city) still have the urban character. The postal service even recognizes "St.Louis" as an address for the suburbs with the appropriate zip (postal) code.

I doubt that. Look at cities that have been destroyed by earthquakes. What happened afterwards? They were rebuilt on the exact same spot, even though it's a geological certainty that a place once hit by an earthquake will be hit again some time in the future.

Different hazards. You don't see them rebuilding at Chernobyl.

 

[Hendryk]

You don't see them rebuilding at Chernobyl.

Have you checked the deserted wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

 

[Mark E.]

Have you checked the deserted wastelands of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

1. Lower yields.
2. Wind and weather patterns that move fallout to sea.
3. Very different attitude about radiation safety in the decades following WWII.

 

[Hendryk]

1. Lower yields.
2. Wind and weather patterns that move fallout to sea.
3. Very different attitude about radiation safety in the decades following WWII.

Very well, name one large city that was abandoned after being destroyed by whichever means in the modern era.

 

[Mark E.]

Very well, name one large city that was abandoned after being destroyed by whichever means in the modern era.

I don't think any large city would be abandoned unless an enemy spread 100 megatons over the whole area to wipe it out. A single nuke, though, would create a "hole" in the metropolitan area. You would have an East St. Louis, New York for decades. (The place looks like it was nuked.)

 

[Hendryk]

I don't think any large city would be abandoned unless an enemy spread 100 megatons over the whole area to wipe it out.

Well then, we are in agreement. Quite a far cry from Aracnid's claim that a city being nuked would somehow result in a general flight from city centers.

 

[Mark E.]

I never supported Aracnid's claim that the cities would be abandoned. I do maintain, though, that the areas near enough to ground zero to be torn down would not be re-developed very soon in most cities. (New York would probably turn around the fastest because it so geographically limited.)

The pictures I posted above show how a community near the core of a metropolitan area can be nearly abandoned for decades. East St.Louis was quite prosperous into the fifties. The area had an excellent transportation infrastructure: railroads, highways, the Mississippi River. Unlike Detroit and Flint, Michigan, there was no mass industrial shutdown to empty the town. Pure political mismanagement caused the businesses, industries and 2/3 of the net population to move elsewhere. If politics can do this, think of what the stigma of a nuke might do.

 

[Dubs]

Different hazards. You don't see them rebuilding at Chernobyl.

Chernobyl was a nuclear reactor meltdown not a nuclear detonation, they are two completely different things