I have been wondering about what would happen if a nuclear explosion took place in a US city. Not in terms of the immediate death toll, counterstrikes, war and invasion etc, but the knock-on effects.
Cleaning out nuclear fallout would instantly become a growth business. How would the health care system cope with the number of injured many of them uninsured? Long term effects such as cancers? How does supplies, food and shelter get to the location? What happens to the stock markets, and housing prices in the fallout areas downwind? How far downwind?
At what point does the emergency disaster handling systems break down? How many people are going to choke up the highways in to looks for family?
Etc, etc. There must be a lot of things I have not thought about. I was going to start out by assuming that it was New York suffering a ground explosion equivalent to a W87 warhead. But how will effects change if it is cities such as Chicago, Seattle, Phoenix, or San Fransisco?
Note that for the purposes of this thread, I would like to try to keep it independent of the source of the explosion. Accident, terrorism, idiocy, smuggled device from rouge nation -beyond this thread.
Just...what would the economic consequences of the detonation and its aftereffects be?