It's been three quarters of a century since the first (and only) time nuclear weapons have been used in anger. So far, the world has managed to avoid both a nuclear war and a nuclear terrorist attack. But how likely is that to continue?
That's the subject of this article by British author Tom Chivers. It turns out that there has been a fair amount of research into this area.
So how likely would a real disaster be? A nuclear bomb in a city?
Interestingly, we can make a decent stab at this. Terrorist attacks, like earthquakes and meteorite strikes, follow a power-law distribution. Small ones are common, but larger ones get rapidly rarer, with (according to this 2006 paper, anyway) a scaling parameter of 2.5. That sounds complicated but it just means “a terrorist attack that’s twice as large is about 2 to the power 2.5 (about 5.5) times as unlikely”. This paper finds something similar.
If I’ve understood it correctly (quite a big if), it works out you can expect to see X terrorist attacks with Y deaths each year, where X is the total average number of attacks per year multiplied by Y^-2.5.
The 2006 paper said that between 1968 and 2005 there were about 10,000 terrorist events that killed or injured one or more victims, up to and including the 1998 Nairobi car bombs that killed at least 4,000 people. That’s about 270 a year.
So if you believe that power laws apply to human society and motivations, you can take a stab at making a prediction. I'm not so convinced myself, nor is Chivers, at least for the extreme cases.
I'm not as worried about nuclear, radiological, or chemical attacks, at least on a large scale. The thing that scares me is a biological attack, especially now that genetic manipulation tools have become common and commercially available.
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