So by this point it should not be a spoiler that a flashback at the beginning of episode 2 of HBO’s “The Last Of Us” has a scientist realize just what biological horror has been unleashed in Jakarta, Indonesia. In short, it’s a mutated fungus that essentially kicks off a zombie apocalypse. There is no medical treatment for this; the only response is to “bomb.” The Indonesians apparently try that, but with minimal effectiveness. And because of course: if you need to burn down a major city with millions of people, destroy everything and kill everyone, going about it with some strike fighters and maybe some cargo planes is just not gonna get the job done. Ya gotta nuke. And Indonesia doesn’t have nukes.
The same basic idea has popped up elsewhere from time to time. It was the climax to the movie “The Crazies,” where the US nukes a city in Iowa to stop the spread of an engineered war bug. A nuke would have been the right response to “The Thing.” A nuke was going to be the climax to “The Andromeda Strain” till they realized that the radiation would only make the alien disease hulk out.
These are of course science fiction situations. A zombie apocalypse is almost certainly never going to happen; aliens that can absorb terrestrial life and spread at nightmarish speeds are equally unlikely. But *some* disease outbreak that could endanger human civilization, or even human existence? Sure, that’s conceivable. Someone could try to understand an outbreak in some third world village only to realize that it’s a strain of super-smallpox, something the existing vaccine would have no effect on; one person gets away with it, and billions could die. Nuking the village – and the surrounding ones – would be a reasonable response in that situation.
The existence of an emergency protocol where some third world government could ask the US, Russia or China “could you please nuke me,” or where such a strike could be called in by WHO officials, would almost certainly never be publicly acknowledged until it happened (if even then). But would such a protocol even be diplomatically possible? Would the nuclear powers sign on? Would the non-nuclear powers sign on? If it had to be called upon, would the nuclear powers be relied upon to do it… and would those who *didn’t* set off the nuke be relied upon to not use the situation for political gain?
Assume The Plague breaks out in some backwater in the Yucatan. Mexican officials figure it out, realize the severity of the problem, and ask for some canned sunshine. Half an hour later, eight warheads come raining down, courtesy an Ohio-class boomer out in the Atlantic. Rain forest goes *foom,* tens or hundreds of thousands die, maybe millions. Does the US explain why? Do Russia and China, along with Britain and France and the rest, step up to the podium and say “We concurred, and had it been in our back yards, it would have been out nukes?”
A difficulty here is that the process would have to be *fast.* And under some situations, the response might have to be damn near apocalyptic. Let’s say instead of a jungle village, it’s Jakarta. You have a *big* city to deal with… and you have all the airplanes that left the airport in the last hour or three. You’ll need to somehow convince the pilots to immediately land, and keep everyone on board. And those that don’t, and especially those that report an outbreak, you’ll have to deal with. Simply shooting them down won’t do: they’ll spread the problem when they crash. You’ll have to nuke the planes in flight, and I’m not sure that capability even exists anymore.
One response to “A protocol right out of sci-fi: does it exist? Should it?”
Politically, it’s analogous to the Cold War question of using tactical nukes in West Germany: no secret that it was the most effective option, but even at the highest levels contentious. Hard for me to imagine that the global leadership has discussed anything like this–imagine the sh*tstorm if it were leaked–or could extemporize it in a timely manner.
There’s a similar fictional case that comes to my mind, though. There was a Japanese novel in the ’70s called “Nihon Chinbotsu”–Japan Sinks. The premise is that the Japanese government discovers a massive tectonic movement that will the destroy the archipelago in a year or two, and how it responds. It’s quite a good novel, and a good movie adaptation was also made.
Along in the ’00s they decided to remake the movie, and for various reasons decided that this time the disaster would be averted. Experts in it suggest a series of nuclear charges to perforate a tectonic plate such that it will tear away w/o taking the archipelago along for the ride. But, dear me, nuclear explosives as the SOLUTION to a problem? That’s dismissed as unthinkable, and instead they handwave a new chemical explosive somehow even more powerful than nukes and save the country with that.