The Federal government’s national disaster response and planning organization, FEMA, has significantly updated its nuclear disaster plans according to a new bombshell report in Buzzfeed, which describes the new plans as “truly terrifying”.

The report is based on an exclusive interview with an unnamed US Federal Emergency Management official. Notably, the official indicated the new FEMA plan includes preparedness for a scenario involving “large nuclear detonations over the 60 largest US cities”.

The plan was discussed on Thursday at a two day National Academies of Sciences  workshop for public health and emergency response officials held on Capitol Hill, and included emergency readiness planning for large scale thermonuclear blasts by state actors, as opposed to a prior emphasis on terror organizations deploying tactical nuclear devices.

FEMA’s head of its chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear branch, Luis Garcia, told BuzzFeed News, “We are looking at 100 kiloton to 1,000 kiloton detonations”.

To put this in perspective the agency’s current protocol for disaster relief planners only considers the emergency impact of 1 to 10 kiloton blasts, similar to the power of WWII era atomic bombs.

But according to FEMA conference participants things changed when last year North Korea tested a surprisingly powerful thermonuclear bomb that had a reported blast estimate size of 250 kilotons, capable wiping out a whole US city.

One conference keynote speaker and expert, Cham Dallas, told the conference, “The North Koreans have really changed the calculus,” and concluded, “We really have to look at thermonuclear now.”

According to Buzzfeed’s report of the FEMA session:

Dallas presented “speculative” analyses of a nuclear detonations in several cities —

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