I looked at the information about surviving a nuclear attack and determined the lack of access to food, water, and healthcare afterwards aren't guaranteed. It's easier for me to just wait for the bombs to do me in.
> Continue to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not part of your household.
Somehow I think that if you are in the immediate area of a nuclear explosion, COVID-19 precautions aren't going to be on the top of the list of stuff to worry about.
Boy, that "ready.gov" page is garbage. Right before the section you quoted they state:
> Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household.
They should have used all that space about COVID-19 to better explain where to hide. I'm no expert, but I'm under the impression that if you're in a basement, it would be better to shelter against an outside wall, since all that dirt on the other side will effectively shield you from radiation coming from that direction (and you've got the rest of the mass of the building in the other direction).
Also...
> Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions.
Isn't that totally backwards? If you're dealing with fallout, don't you want to stay inside for at least 1-2 weeks unless explicitly told it's safe?
I’m assuming the “24 hours” thing is a math thing where staying inside additional time will be more harmful than getting outside and finding out what to do next.
If you can do both, yeah do that, but if you could never leave your home, and your home is a clean room, also definitely do that.
> I’m assuming the “24 hours” thing is a math thing where staying inside additional time will be more harmful than getting outside and finding out what to do next.
I don't think that's case at all. If you're dealing with fallout, the radiation decreases with time. Waiting 24 hours is better than not waiting at all, but I've seen charts and I'm under the impression that's only enough time for the radiation to decrease by ~50%, which could still be very lethal.
> What's more lethal; dying in a week because you didn't organize with the people who are left, or dying in a decade because of radiation poisoning?
IIRC, the radiation levels that soon after a nuclear war could be in the "dying within a week" range (depending on the local fallout conditions). Obviously if you have no water, you have no good options and have to move, but it seems like bad advice to say "move after 24 hours unless told not to." If you've got water (and food), you probably should stay put for longer, unless you know it's safe or you're in a totally unsuitable structure.
If you're in a house with a basement, you probably have enough water for some time (in the water heater), and food isn't as pressing of a concern.
> IIRC, the radiation levels that soon after a nuclear war could be in the "dying within a week" range (depending on the local fallout conditions).
The whole point of the advice here is that you remember incorrectly. It only takes 24 hours for the worst radiation, the kill-you-in-a-week radiation, to subside.
Don’t you think the source here would know better than you about this? What arrogance it would be to think you know better, from a vague recollection, no less…
I think they're just saying that if your needs are met and your housing is structurally sound, it's very safe and smart to just chill in an enclosed safe area. Just make sure to turn off your HVAC!
That's why I mentioned that your needs are met. There's tons of people that have a costco-sized bucket of food and water than lasts for a week up to a month. Large swaths of Americans do this. Not sure about others. Better than waiting for peanuts at a fema line.
This is the classic diagram that shows the degree of protection, although it does not get into the details per room, you are correct that IF you are below ground, then being next to the outside wall is better. IF you are on the first floor or above, the opposite is true.
> Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof.
Reminds me of the time last year when NYC had a tornado warning & a flood warning at the same time. The flood warning came with directions to head to higher parts of the dwelling, and the tornado warning directed us to head to the basement or lower levels.
Hm. Y'know what, infectious disease tends to be a big killer after any large-scale disaster. Water and sanitation services are offline, hospitals are critically overloaded, immune systems are reduced by stress and injury and malnutrition, people congregate around whatever aid is available... A simple seasonal flu can tear through a city like a wildfire, under those circumstances.
In 2022, everyone already knows how to do social distancing, and it works just fine against many diseases besides COVID. Why take the chance?
These directives are mostly common sense knowledge which anyone in modern world will know. No mention of iodine tablets for fallouts.
Besides if modern nuclear devices are detonated will they be a Hiroshima type? (Hint hint: No. Emphatic No).
The MIRVs of US are typically rated at 275KT going up to several megatons. Similar scale for Russia & China. Unless you're in reinforced bunkers with heavy steel doors, you are most likely toast. Incineration by the thermal blast is most likely outcome.
The article doesn't specifically tell these are instructions for people outside the kill zone. And severely lacking survival information.
Either the script should have added more details (instead of a commonsensical fluff piece) or added more practical information such as shelter inside well built closets, underground subway or enclosed spaces (and pay attention to emergency alarms/ alerts of a nuclear strike)
A bigger fireball also means more people affected, but not incinerated because the area of less destruction surrounding it will also be bigger.
This advice is always going to be relevant, no matter how big the bomb.
> Unless you're in reinforced bunkers with heavy steel doors, you are most likely toast.
No building in the world, not even Cheyenne mountain can survive being in a nuclear fireball or even close to one. The steel doors are also for people nearby, but not directly hit.
> No building in the world, not even Cheyenne mountain can survive being in a nuclear fireball or even close to one.
Reference? I thought those were built specifically for inhabitants to survive even an overhead blast.
Edit: My parent comment is not aimed at specifics of detonation, but rather the poor quality of instruction. The focus should not be immediately surviving the blast. If you're caught unaware, survival becomes a matter of luck rather than hurried preparedness. Its more to do with "what" and "how to" after the event. Those are way too crucial. For god's sake, even WikiHow has a better and far more detailed page on this topic:
Although it would not be difficult to locate a reference, I will back up what the post you’re replying to said. Before the concern of nuclear fallout, some thought to use nukes as “mountain movers”. Think about that. How many mountains have humans been able to make? But we have a device that can largely obliterate one.
Bunkers are all about surviving indirect blasts and protecting from radiation exposure. If you have a deep enough underground bunker, you largely protect yourself from a “direct blast,” but if a weapon burrowed anywhere near your bunker and detonated it’s good night. You’d also need nation-scale resources to build a bunker deep enough, and have air, water, vapor barriers, etc.
> Although it would not be difficult to locate a reference, I will back up what the post you’re replying to said.
Operation Plowshare. It was largely a failure in objectives.
> a weapon burrowed anywhere near your bunker and detonated it’s good night
What are the mathematical chances someone will burrow a sufficiently powerful nuclear device near a Cheyenne mountain type bunker without getting noticed by security, maintaining all the electrical supplies and fusing quietly over months/years, and at the apocalyptic moment manage to detonate it with VVIPs holed in?
I bet the same chances as carrying it inside and detonating it.
Wikipedia confirms it’s designed to survive a 30MT blast 1km away. It was designed when missiles were inaccurate and expensive so the warheads were huge and unlikely to hit it directly.
Now most of NORAD is at another, completely unsheltered facility because missiles are so accurate that no protection matters.
Cheyenne exists mainly for lesser threats than general nuclear exchanges.
30MT 1 KM away is probably similar to ~5MT directly overhead by back of the envelope calculation. Sufficiently secure still I would say.
None of the published warheads specs are 30MT & even 5MT would be the combined strength of few MIRVs. And note that most warheads are airbursts not ground penetration type. That can make a lot of difference
The point is that it's an immobile target with known protections, and missiles are accurate enough to hit it directly as many times as necessary. I'm sure it's specifically targeted by sufficient weapons to destroy it. It could survive a lot, but not enough.
And, like I said, the proof is that it doesn't actually handle much of NORAD anymore. NORAD is mostly above ground because any immobile target is hopelessly vulnerable.
The move to Peterson AFB was not a security measure, but a cost saving measure by the USAF & GAO. Lot of concerns were posted about the same by few Congressman.
Plus, THAAD is meant to speed up ABM capabilities over time. Going by experience following this area, one of the reasons why you don't hear much about it is probably because USAF is pretty serious to keep the specifics under cover as long as possible.
I don't think any active Russian missiles have single warheads anywhere near 30MT. Their big ones are about 500kT, which Cheyenne Mountain could probably withstand just fine.
The chances of breaching Cheyenne complex is near zero. Here's why:
The mountain face is pure granite atleast a quarter mile thick above the bunker reinforced with steel inside. To breach even 100-odd meters, you need a sufficiently strong impactor on top of your warhead which is made of lead or similar grade material. That drastically reduces the payload of actual weapon.
If you choose a cruise missile, none of them have sufficient range & also again weight limited in the neighborhood of 1000kgs.
If you really want to bore a hole through with multiple impacts, you would need a dozen warhead hitting the exact same spot. CEP of best missiles are still ~10-100 mtrs in the best case. You can do the math how probable is the event something will breach Cheyenne Mountain complex.
To add to another separate comment, NORAD still keeps backup operation alive inside the cave complex (source: Wikipedia). This is in the event a hostile situation disables Peterson AFB.
100% disarmament will simply never happen because the country that hides a few nukes while claiming to have none will win if push comes to shove. Best case in that scenario is every country is hiding nukes which is arguably not a lot better than the status quo.
With Russia explicitly nuclear war if other countries interfere in Ukraine, I also don't see any nuclear arms control talks occuring in the near future.
> I would argue every country hiding a few nukes is better than the current situation with over 13,000 nukes.
Not necessarily. Having "a few nukes" means they will almost certainty used against civilian population centers (coutervalue), because that results in more destruction per nuke. If you have more nukes, it may be sufficiently deterring to only attack military targets (couterforce) and kill fewer civilians.
> The first scenario that NRDC ran involved a counterforce attack against Russian nuclear forces. They believed this scenario to be close to the one fabricated by Stratcom. Using the most comprehensive levels of targeting for Russian aviation and naval sites, the total number of warheads required by the first NRDC plan was 1,289... The result of the “attack” as detailed in the report... Then the fallout would descend, creating lethal conditions over an area larger than 775,000 square kilometers... casualties would be between 11 and 17 million, of which eight to 12 million would be fatalities.
> But what would happen if the United States drastically reduced the number of weapons in its arsenal and abandoned the pretense that one kind of nuclear targeting is more morally acceptable than another? How many nuclear weapons is enough to deter a nuclear attack on the United States, which, according to the NRDC report, is arguably the only reason for continuing to possess nuclear weapons at all?
> To illustrate this, NRDC ran nuclear attack scenarios on Russian cities using either 150 single-warhead, silo-based ICBMs or 192 single-warhead, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM's), essentially the load aboard a single fully loaded Trident submarine. The results from either scenario, each using less than 3 percent of current U.S. nuclear forces, resulted in more than 50 million casualties [computed casualties totaled 52 million people, including 49 million deaths].
Humans can literally justify anything. It shouldn't be a lot of little ones or a smaller number of big ones.
It should be as close to zero as possible.
We don't need any studies to figure that out.
Replies like yours are why I believe that humans will not be in control of the earth 50 or 100 years from now. It will be much smarter robots. And that will be a good thing.
> Replies like yours are why I believe that humans will not be in control of the earth 50 or 100 years from now. It will be much smarter robots. And that will be a good thing.
Eh, I don't think so. Like it or not, it will be the same old humans in control. Science fiction won't be our salvation.
Tokyo Metropolitan government is one of the best I have seen in matters of everyday functioning. They are pretty well prepared most of the time. I think this has more to do with the ever present threat of major earthquakes. You can pick up printed copies of this guidebook for free from any local government office. (Even new apartment rentals provide this nowadays)
(Disclaimer: Lived in Charlotte, Boston, SF and now in Tokyo)
While standard disaster practice in there looks solid, the only thing I can find among the links you shared that sort of has to do with nuclear attacks is:
> Missile attack
> It would be extremely difficult to identify the target of
the attack, and it is estimated that the time to impact will
be short.
There is _a little_ more, although, not much more specific :x
> Evacuation from a nuclear explosion or radioactive
> contamination
>
> If there is a nuclear explosion, hide behind cover and
> evacuate to an underground facility or strong building.
> An explosive called a “dirty bomb” will cause radioactive
> contamination of the area. Follow the instructions of the
> authorities and consult a physician.
Just out of curiosity, how many of you have an operable AM or AM/FM radio and batteries to use it? This idea of "watch the media" is going to be really hard if you're going to rely on wireless carriers. If you have a TV, does it have an OTA antenna?
Imagine 20 of the largest oil tankers in the world in New York Harbor filled with TNT and it exploding. I don't think people are going to be logging into Youtube to see the gossip about it. Or posting selfies or hiding in the subway. NYC would evaporate.
63 comments
[ 162 ms ] story [ 1946 ms ] threadOk, but is it like that time when Chris Christie shut down the beach, and then took his family there for a private vacation?
Like, is this just to get all the people out of the way so the elites can get to where they need to go?
> Continue to practice social distancing by wearing a mask and by keeping a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who not part of your household.
Somehow I think that if you are in the immediate area of a nuclear explosion, COVID-19 precautions aren't going to be on the top of the list of stuff to worry about.
> Go to the basement or middle of the building. Stay away from the outer walls and roof. Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household.
They should have used all that space about COVID-19 to better explain where to hide. I'm no expert, but I'm under the impression that if you're in a basement, it would be better to shelter against an outside wall, since all that dirt on the other side will effectively shield you from radiation coming from that direction (and you've got the rest of the mass of the building in the other direction).
Also...
> Stay inside for 24 hours unless local authorities provide other instructions.
Isn't that totally backwards? If you're dealing with fallout, don't you want to stay inside for at least 1-2 weeks unless explicitly told it's safe?
If you can do both, yeah do that, but if you could never leave your home, and your home is a clean room, also definitely do that.
I don't think that's case at all. If you're dealing with fallout, the radiation decreases with time. Waiting 24 hours is better than not waiting at all, but I've seen charts and I'm under the impression that's only enough time for the radiation to decrease by ~50%, which could still be very lethal.
IIRC, the radiation levels that soon after a nuclear war could be in the "dying within a week" range (depending on the local fallout conditions). Obviously if you have no water, you have no good options and have to move, but it seems like bad advice to say "move after 24 hours unless told not to." If you've got water (and food), you probably should stay put for longer, unless you know it's safe or you're in a totally unsuitable structure.
If you're in a house with a basement, you probably have enough water for some time (in the water heater), and food isn't as pressing of a concern.
The whole point of the advice here is that you remember incorrectly. It only takes 24 hours for the worst radiation, the kill-you-in-a-week radiation, to subside.
Don’t you think the source here would know better than you about this? What arrogance it would be to think you know better, from a vague recollection, no less…
Putting 5 bottles of 1.5L water under the bed is not that hard...
https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...
Reminds me of the time last year when NYC had a tornado warning & a flood warning at the same time. The flood warning came with directions to head to higher parts of the dwelling, and the tornado warning directed us to head to the basement or lower levels.
Sounds absurd. Priorities have gone for a toss.
In 2022, everyone already knows how to do social distancing, and it works just fine against many diseases besides COVID. Why take the chance?
https://youtu.be/5iPH-br_eJQ
These directives are mostly common sense knowledge which anyone in modern world will know. No mention of iodine tablets for fallouts.
Besides if modern nuclear devices are detonated will they be a Hiroshima type? (Hint hint: No. Emphatic No).
The MIRVs of US are typically rated at 275KT going up to several megatons. Similar scale for Russia & China. Unless you're in reinforced bunkers with heavy steel doors, you are most likely toast. Incineration by the thermal blast is most likely outcome.
Yep, that last line in the OP video really gets me... "All right? You've got this!"
No, you don't got this
Either the script should have added more details (instead of a commonsensical fluff piece) or added more practical information such as shelter inside well built closets, underground subway or enclosed spaces (and pay attention to emergency alarms/ alerts of a nuclear strike)
This advice is always going to be relevant, no matter how big the bomb.
> Unless you're in reinforced bunkers with heavy steel doors, you are most likely toast.
No building in the world, not even Cheyenne mountain can survive being in a nuclear fireball or even close to one. The steel doors are also for people nearby, but not directly hit.
Reference? I thought those were built specifically for inhabitants to survive even an overhead blast.
Edit: My parent comment is not aimed at specifics of detonation, but rather the poor quality of instruction. The focus should not be immediately surviving the blast. If you're caught unaware, survival becomes a matter of luck rather than hurried preparedness. Its more to do with "what" and "how to" after the event. Those are way too crucial. For god's sake, even WikiHow has a better and far more detailed page on this topic:
https://www.wikihow.com/Survive-a-Nuclear-Attack
If history has taught anything, black rain a few hours after Hiroshima killed many more thousands in the coming years.
Bunkers are all about surviving indirect blasts and protecting from radiation exposure. If you have a deep enough underground bunker, you largely protect yourself from a “direct blast,” but if a weapon burrowed anywhere near your bunker and detonated it’s good night. You’d also need nation-scale resources to build a bunker deep enough, and have air, water, vapor barriers, etc.
Operation Plowshare. It was largely a failure in objectives.
> a weapon burrowed anywhere near your bunker and detonated it’s good night
What are the mathematical chances someone will burrow a sufficiently powerful nuclear device near a Cheyenne mountain type bunker without getting noticed by security, maintaining all the electrical supplies and fusing quietly over months/years, and at the apocalyptic moment manage to detonate it with VVIPs holed in?
I bet the same chances as carrying it inside and detonating it.
Now most of NORAD is at another, completely unsheltered facility because missiles are so accurate that no protection matters.
Cheyenne exists mainly for lesser threats than general nuclear exchanges.
None of the published warheads specs are 30MT & even 5MT would be the combined strength of few MIRVs. And note that most warheads are airbursts not ground penetration type. That can make a lot of difference
And, like I said, the proof is that it doesn't actually handle much of NORAD anymore. NORAD is mostly above ground because any immobile target is hopelessly vulnerable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterson_Space_Force_Base This is where NORAD is based now.
Also, I read the article wrong, it's 30MT at 2km away.
https://armedservices.house.gov/2008/7/skelton-and-hunter-ex...
Plus, THAAD is meant to speed up ABM capabilities over time. Going by experience following this area, one of the reasons why you don't hear much about it is probably because USAF is pretty serious to keep the specifics under cover as long as possible.
The chances of breaching Cheyenne complex is near zero. Here's why:
The mountain face is pure granite atleast a quarter mile thick above the bunker reinforced with steel inside. To breach even 100-odd meters, you need a sufficiently strong impactor on top of your warhead which is made of lead or similar grade material. That drastically reduces the payload of actual weapon.
If you choose a cruise missile, none of them have sufficient range & also again weight limited in the neighborhood of 1000kgs.
If you really want to bore a hole through with multiple impacts, you would need a dozen warhead hitting the exact same spot. CEP of best missiles are still ~10-100 mtrs in the best case. You can do the math how probable is the event something will breach Cheyenne Mountain complex.
To add to another separate comment, NORAD still keeps backup operation alive inside the cave complex (source: Wikipedia). This is in the event a hostile situation disables Peterson AFB.
That only works when you know _exactly_ when to take them.
I feel like the lack of progress on nuclear disarmament is a total failure of global management.
Maybe I should stock up on fresh water reserves or something.
With Russia explicitly nuclear war if other countries interfere in Ukraine, I also don't see any nuclear arms control talks occuring in the near future.
Not necessarily. Having "a few nukes" means they will almost certainty used against civilian population centers (coutervalue), because that results in more destruction per nuke. If you have more nukes, it may be sufficiently deterring to only attack military targets (couterforce) and kill fewer civilians.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2968/057004008:
> The first scenario that NRDC ran involved a counterforce attack against Russian nuclear forces. They believed this scenario to be close to the one fabricated by Stratcom. Using the most comprehensive levels of targeting for Russian aviation and naval sites, the total number of warheads required by the first NRDC plan was 1,289... The result of the “attack” as detailed in the report... Then the fallout would descend, creating lethal conditions over an area larger than 775,000 square kilometers... casualties would be between 11 and 17 million, of which eight to 12 million would be fatalities.
> But what would happen if the United States drastically reduced the number of weapons in its arsenal and abandoned the pretense that one kind of nuclear targeting is more morally acceptable than another? How many nuclear weapons is enough to deter a nuclear attack on the United States, which, according to the NRDC report, is arguably the only reason for continuing to possess nuclear weapons at all?
> To illustrate this, NRDC ran nuclear attack scenarios on Russian cities using either 150 single-warhead, silo-based ICBMs or 192 single-warhead, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBM's), essentially the load aboard a single fully loaded Trident submarine. The results from either scenario, each using less than 3 percent of current U.S. nuclear forces, resulted in more than 50 million casualties [computed casualties totaled 52 million people, including 49 million deaths].
It should be as close to zero as possible.
We don't need any studies to figure that out.
Replies like yours are why I believe that humans will not be in control of the earth 50 or 100 years from now. It will be much smarter robots. And that will be a good thing.
Eh, I don't think so. Like it or not, it will be the same old humans in control. Science fiction won't be our salvation.
https://www.bousai.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/book/pdf/en/02_Lets_Get...
https://www.bousai.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/book/pdf/en/03_Other_Di...
https://www.bousai.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/book/pdf/en/04_Survival...
https://www.metro.tokyo.lg.jp/english/guide/bosai/index.html
(Disclaimer: Lived in Charlotte, Boston, SF and now in Tokyo)
> Missile attack > It would be extremely difficult to identify the target of the attack, and it is estimated that the time to impact will be short.
And that's... not very specific. :)
> Evacuation from a nuclear explosion or radioactive > contamination > > If there is a nuclear explosion, hide behind cover and > evacuate to an underground facility or strong building. > An explosive called a “dirty bomb” will cause radioactive > contamination of the area. Follow the instructions of the > authorities and consult a physician.
Select NYC, and then select 800kt, (best case scenario)
you are looking at 1.5 million dead instantaneously, and then probably another 3.5 million over the next week.
The only parts that "wouldn't be affected" are parts of Staten Island and the Rockaways.
It's horrifying
Just out of curiosity, how many of you have an operable AM or AM/FM radio and batteries to use it? This idea of "watch the media" is going to be really hard if you're going to rely on wireless carriers. If you have a TV, does it have an OTA antenna?