![]() The estimated number of deaths ranged from 13 to 34 million people. Because such an attack would result in a great amount of local fallout from many ground bursts, our casualty models in this case included the effects of radioactive fallout as well as blast and thermal radiation. We assumed an attack on more than 1,200 targets with almost 3,000 attacking warheads. Next, we calculated the consequences from a major "counterforce" attack on U.S. In view of the plausibility of the conflagration model, we believe that previous estimates of the deaths due to the blast and bum effects of nuclear attacks are very uncertain and probably low by a large factor. The predicted numbers of injured are significantly smaller for the conflagration model because many of the people injured in the overpressure model die from fire effects in the conflagration model. We find, for 1-Mt airbursts, that the numbers of fatalities predicted by the conflagration model are 1.5 to 4 times higher than those predicted by the overpressure model, with the exact factor depending on the population distribution and the assumed scaling of the burnout area with yield. Higher numbers result when we use a new "conflagration" model (Postol, 1986), which postulates that much higher fatality rates might be expected in the large "burnout" areas that would be caused by modem weapons than occurred in the burnout area of the much lower yield Hiroshima bomb. ![]() Lower numbers result if we use the predictions of the traditional "overpressure" model, which assumes that the same casualty rates will occur as those that occurred at Hiroshima at given levels of peak blast overpressure. ![]() We also explored the sensitivity of these calculations to different models for predicting casualties. Estimated Deaths and Total Casualties from the "100-Megaton" Attacks. ![]()
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