NYC's nuclear attack ad panned by nuclear strategy expert

Bob Brigham
July 11, 2022

Composite image of Eric Adams and a mushroom cloud. (Shutterstock images).

New York City's nuclear preparedness public service announcement (PSA) left a lot to be desired, at least for one expert on nuclear war.

NYC Emergency Management released the video which instructs New Yorkers to get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned.

The ad ends with the narrator saying, "you've got this."

NYC's nuclear attack ad panned by nuclear strategy expertNYC's nuclear attack ad panned by nuclear strategy expert

The ad was dissected on Twitter by Dr. Jeffrey Lewis, the director of the East Asia Nonproliferation Project at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.

The school notes he was previously "the director of the Nuclear Strategy and Nonproliferation Initiative at the New America Foundation. Prior to that, he was executive director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, executive director of the Association of Professional Schools of International Affairs, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and a desk officer in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy."

In a thread posted to Twitter, Lewis said, "the advice isn't wrong, it's just ... unhelpful."

"The big problem with the video is that it omits some pretty important context: If Russia, China or North Korea hit NYC with a 300 kt warhead, this advice won't help many people in the city itself," Lewis explained. "It's more useful to people in communities downwind. Even then 'stay inside' doesn't go very far: Are you even at home? If not, will others let you inside? What about children at school? Do they try to get home? What if your building collapsed? What if you were injured in the blast and need medical care? What about food? Water?"

"While 'stay inside' will help some people at the margin, it's not much more than 'thoughts and prayers," Lewis said. "A lot of civil defense advice is like that -- it's designed to make people feel better without really leveling with them. My sense is that civil defense campaigns undermine public trust, because the advice -- and by implication the authorities dispensing it -- is so obviously inadequate to the problem."

Lewis concluded, "All of which is to say that while 'stay inside' is decent advice, the scale of what we need to do is way bigger than what one person can do. In other words, you definitely do not got this."

Read the full thread below or at this link.