There is an interesting article in the current issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, City on Fire by Lynn Eden, that argues that current military strategists underestimate the damage that would be caused by the explosion of a nuclear warheads. Given the present US administration's willingness to employ military force, and proposals that the use of limited nuclear weapons be reconsidered, this is an important issue. If the use of nuclear weapons is going to be seriously considered as a possible course of action, then a full understanding of the nature of the destruction it would cause is needed. In the recent Iraq War, the use of small bombs, sometimes without an explosive, were used because of the concern of limiting the damage to the intended target. Now that we have the technology to do so, minimization of collateral damage is an essential consideration in modern warfare.

As Lynn Eden, the associate director for research at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, writes,

Because fire damage has been ignored for the past half-century, high-level U.S. decision makers have been poorly informed, if informed at all, about the extent of damage that nuclear weapons would actually cause. As a result, any U.S. decision to use nuclear weapons almost certainly would be predicated on insufficient and misleading information.

The effects, she notes, not only in the physical sense, but also politically and socially, will be far greater than the White House or Pentagon had planned on. The theoretical example that she elucidates in the article, that of a near-surface explosion of a 300 kiloton warhead above the Pentagon, is sobering and frightening reading.