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Question: If I understand this correctly, it means all one would have to do is move 30-60 mins away from the center of a suspected target city to massively incr

Question: If I understand this correctly, it means all one would have to do is move 30-60 mins away from the center of a suspected target city to massively increase one's chances of surviving an attack on said city? (From 20mt NK strike, for example)

Piskvorrr 9y ago
Yes. "Not actually being there" is very useful in this regard, and 60 minutes of commute can get you rather far away.
TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Yes - unless there are ground bursts generating fall out, and the wind is blowing in your direction. The only way to survive fall out is to stay in a shelter with good shielding for an absolute minimum of two weeks. In an all-out war in which most cities are attacked, that could easily extend to months, or even a year. Unless you have a Geiger counter or dosimeter you won't realise you've been irradiated, and it can take two to four weeks for a fatal dose to kill you. For the first part of that you may well feel absolutely fine.
- gambiting 9y ago
  Considering that there is almost zero public shelters anywhere in the western world nowadays, if a nuke goes off nearby I'd say it's a good bet you're dead even if you survive the blast.
  - arethuza 9y ago
    On the contrary - if a single nuclear weapon explodes and you survive the immediate effects not too badly injured I'd say there is a very good chance that you'd survive. Of course, for an attack with thousands of weapons there would be other problems but that's not the scale of the threat to the US from NK.
  - Markoff 9y ago
    why would you need public shelter? i have relatively big cellar in basement of my apartment building where I could squeeze my family, so does my mother, while my father's cellar is like 4x5m, he could stay there with many people only when I think of my sister who built house without basement or same goes for cousin, I guess they don't stand much chance we really need remake of Threads
    - gambiting 9y ago
      Well, for starters, I currently live in the UK and I don't know anyone who lives in a building with a basement. They are just not very common here. And second of all - even if you do have a basement - do you have any supplies in there? Air filters? Fresh water? It's cool for a day or two, but if you have to stay there for two weeks then it's just not good enough.
- lambdadmitry 9y ago
  However, if I understand correctly, you will have a golden window of opportunity of half an hour or so while the fallout is still mostly in the air. It's probably possible to escape the fallout zone on a cycle if you start moving ASAP perpendicular to the wind direction.
  - alkonaut 9y ago
    Perpendicular, not up wind? Edit: figured it out- if you are already in the plume, then you need to move perpendicular to the wind direction to leave it quickest. If you are already up wind from the blast, then I'd keep moving up wind (which is then both up wind and away from ground zero). Does that sound right?
    - lambdadmitry 9y ago
      Exactly right!
- malka 9y ago
  Given what the World after will look like it might be better to die quickly though
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
arethuza 9y ago
"20mt NK strike" I seriously doubt if anyone, least of all NK, would be throwing 20Mt bombs at cities - the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile. The Soviets did have very large missiles (SS-18s) with an option for single very large weapons (20-25Mt) but those were for deep bunkers rather than cities.
- masklinn 9y ago
  > the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile. It's the opposite. Medium warheads (100~500kT) are more efficient[0] and more flexible, the original systems were huge because they were bomber-delivered, there was therefore an assumption that few bombs would reach the target and you wanted every one of them to pack as much punch as possible (no point in putting lots of small ones in a bomber as they'd all be dropped onto the same place anyway, when your explosion has an effect diameter in kilometres multiple bombs are just going to interfere with one another). The advent of ICBM and later MIRV allowed splitting reducing the size of individual warheads as the delivery mechanism is both cheaper and more effective, thus you can have more of them and a larger fraction will reach the objective. [0] ground effects grow sub-linearly with yield, if you increase yield from 20kT to 1MT (50x) the blast range grows by ~4x (changing burst height to optimise ground effects) and the affected area grows by ~15x
  - arethuza 9y ago
    What I meant was that once they worked out staging building arbitrarily large weapons was actually fairly easy - AFAIR the team building the Tsar Bomba were criticized by their colleagues because what they were doing wasn't actually useful technically and that the real challenge was building smaller easier to deliver designs - the US W88 currently being the most advanced design that has been described in public.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  That must be a typo meaning "20kt" I don't think many believe NK have thermonuclear weapons so they are at tens of kilotons.
rainforest 9y ago
In the short term at least, but it's probably safe to assume your risks at that distance are from your neighbours fighting over supplies.
- JulianMorrison 9y ago
  Which is not a negligible threat. A major logistical crash will drop your standard of living down to what can be grown or made locally (compare the fall of the Roman empire) and a sudden one (such as a nuclear war) will for a while drop you down to what has already been stored locally - very very little, in this age of just in time delivery. Expect immediate and very violent food riots.
microwavecamera 9y ago
Assuming a single warhead and something small like NK's ICBMs which is in the 20-30kt range, yes. Now when you're dealing with modern ICBMs, like the ones the US, Russia, China and a few other countries have, the prognosis isn't as good. Modern ICBMs are MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle). For example the current Russian MIRV ICBM is the R-36M2 (NATO designation SS-18 Satan Mod 5) which carries 10 warheads each with a charge of 550-750kt. So on Nukemap punch in a single air-burst warhead in the 550-750kt range and imagine 10 of them spread over a wide area. That's what a single R-36M2 could do. Russia currently has 104 of them deployed. They also have 278 of the older R-36MUTTKh (NATO SS-18 Satan Mod 4) deployed which each carry 10 550kt warheads. Russia is in the process of deploying the successor to the R-36M, the RS-28 Sarmat (NATO designation SS-X-30 SATAN 2) which can carry a single warhead with a 50Mt charge or between 10-15 MIRV warheads or 24 hypersonic glide vehicles, depending on the configuration. A single RS-28 Sarmat in a MIRV or hypersonic glide vehicle configuration could flatten an area about the size of Texas. And if all that isn't horrific enough, it's hypersonic, which means all current missile defenses are useless against it. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-rs-28-sarmat-icbm-us-missile-defense-killer-19464 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-rs-28-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Note that the RS-28 Sarmat is still a couple years away. "Deploying" is a bit of a stretch, no? Almost finished prototyping is how I'd assess it. Though I'm not sure it matters either way, if Russia wants to end the world, they can.
  - microwavecamera 9y ago
    I should have said developing. I'm still drinking my coffee over here, just woke up.
- masklinn 9y ago
  I did the calculation for Ohio-class capabilities assuming it was only loaded with the smaller 100kT warheads (W76), as the 450kT ones (W88) are relatively rare, according to Nukemap's estimates for a 840m airburst a single sub can cover 1500sq km (~1/3rd of RH, 10x DC) in 20psi (severe damage or complete destruction of concrete buildings, ~100% fatality), 1800 in 1000 rem (~95% protracted mortality) and 7700 sq km (Delaware, half of Connecticut) in 5 psi (~universal collapse of residential buildings, widespread fatalities). MIRV are fucking terrifying.
marvin 9y ago
The site is down, so I can't tell if it models fallout. Not an expert, but I get the impression that you can get lethal fallout a hundred kilometers from the target site. But it would require very bad luck with regards to the wind direction. There is a very fascinating book detailing the immediate survival of such a scenario.
- tomjen3 9y ago
  I have played quite a lot with it - you typically don't get much fallout with an airburst (you do get more dead people), but in the case of nuclear terroism, which would probably be delivered by truck and therefore be a ground-burst, you do.
boomboomsubban 9y ago
Sort of. There are very few scenarios where I can imagine one nuclear bomb being dropped on a US target, accident by our own military seems most likely followed by terrorism then a suicidal nuclear power, and in all three of those scenarios I doubt the bomb would hit where any planning suggests it would.
- cyphar 9y ago
  A nuclear bomb (several hundred times larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima) was accidentally dropped in the US in 1961[1]. Luckily it (obviously) didn't detonate. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bo...
tomjen3 9y ago
You probably also want to be up-wind, so that you don't get any fallout. But yeah, a single nuke isn't close to an endgame, certainly not those suitcased sized nukes we were all so afraid of. To end the world you need massive numbers of nukes, or live in a small country.
deleted 9y ago
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ozim 9y ago
Better to quickly evaporate than deal with fighting for food or water. So I would rather move to the center in case nukes start flying around.
mikeash 9y ago
Pretty much. I live about 15 miles from the White House and my assumption is that I'd probably survive the initial stages of a nuclear war. Weapons have actually been getting a lot smaller in recent decades. At the peak of the Cold War, weapons with tens of megatons of yield were not uncommon. Right now, the biggest bomb in the US arsenal is 1.2 megatons, and most are much smaller. A lot of this is because of accuracy: giant bombs were needed for strategic weapons in the 1960s because you'd be lucky to get such a bomb within a couple miles of your intended target. With modern weapons able to hit a chosen city block (or a chosen room of a building if using GPS guidance) you can use much smaller weapons. The deadliness of nuclear weapons tends to be overstated at all yields. For example, look at all the ridicule that the old "duck and cover" method gets. It's actually a highly practical method that would save a lot of lives, even with the old gigantic bombs. Now, don't get me wrong. Nuclear war, or even a single nuclear strike, would kill a shitload of people, and there's some merit to the idea that "the living would envy the dead" that you see a lot of other commenters espousing here. But popular ideas like "one bomb would destroy the entire state of Texas" and "the combined nuclear arsenals of the world are enough to destroy the planet N times over" are completely wrong.
Bedon292 9y ago
It would depend. Are you talking a single nuke from NK? Then that is plausible depending on wind / fallout directions. I don't remember where the original source for this is, but https://crisisboom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nuke-targets-48.jpg https://crisisboom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nuke-targets-... is a reasonable scenario for a war with Russia. Where anything with value would be struck. The east coast is practically all destroyed from 50mi south of DC up to north of Boston. Entire metro areas would be struck and you would need to be further out.

Piskvorrr 9y ago

Yes. "Not actually being there" is very useful in this regard, and 60 minutes of commute can get you rather far away.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago

Yes - unless there are ground bursts generating fall out, and the wind is blowing in your direction. The only way to survive fall out is to stay in a shelter with good shielding for an absolute minimum of two weeks. In an all-out war in which most cities are attacked, that could easily extend to months, or even a year. Unless you have a Geiger counter or dosimeter you won't realise you've been irradiated, and it can take two to four weeks for a fatal dose to kill you. For the first part of that you may well feel absolutely fine.

gambiting 9y ago
Considering that there is almost zero public shelters anywhere in the western world nowadays, if a nuke goes off nearby I'd say it's a good bet you're dead even if you survive the blast.
- arethuza 9y ago
  On the contrary - if a single nuclear weapon explodes and you survive the immediate effects not too badly injured I'd say there is a very good chance that you'd survive. Of course, for an attack with thousands of weapons there would be other problems but that's not the scale of the threat to the US from NK.
- Markoff 9y ago
  why would you need public shelter? i have relatively big cellar in basement of my apartment building where I could squeeze my family, so does my mother, while my father's cellar is like 4x5m, he could stay there with many people only when I think of my sister who built house without basement or same goes for cousin, I guess they don't stand much chance we really need remake of Threads
  - gambiting 9y ago
    Well, for starters, I currently live in the UK and I don't know anyone who lives in a building with a basement. They are just not very common here. And second of all - even if you do have a basement - do you have any supplies in there? Air filters? Fresh water? It's cool for a day or two, but if you have to stay there for two weeks then it's just not good enough.
lambdadmitry 9y ago
However, if I understand correctly, you will have a golden window of opportunity of half an hour or so while the fallout is still mostly in the air. It's probably possible to escape the fallout zone on a cycle if you start moving ASAP perpendicular to the wind direction.
- alkonaut 9y ago
  Perpendicular, not up wind? Edit: figured it out- if you are already in the plume, then you need to move perpendicular to the wind direction to leave it quickest. If you are already up wind from the blast, then I'd keep moving up wind (which is then both up wind and away from ground zero). Does that sound right?
  - lambdadmitry 9y ago
    Exactly right!
malka 9y ago
Given what the World after will look like it might be better to die quickly though
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

arethuza 9y ago

"20mt NK strike" I seriously doubt if anyone, least of all NK, would be throwing 20Mt bombs at cities - the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile. The Soviets did have very large missiles (SS-18s) with an option for single very large weapons (20-25Mt) but those were for deep bunkers rather than cities.

masklinn 9y ago
> the trickiest bit with |H-bombs isn't so much building big bombs but building small enough weapons that are easy to deliver by a missile. It's the opposite. Medium warheads (100~500kT) are more efficient[0] and more flexible, the original systems were huge because they were bomber-delivered, there was therefore an assumption that few bombs would reach the target and you wanted every one of them to pack as much punch as possible (no point in putting lots of small ones in a bomber as they'd all be dropped onto the same place anyway, when your explosion has an effect diameter in kilometres multiple bombs are just going to interfere with one another). The advent of ICBM and later MIRV allowed splitting reducing the size of individual warheads as the delivery mechanism is both cheaper and more effective, thus you can have more of them and a larger fraction will reach the objective. [0] ground effects grow sub-linearly with yield, if you increase yield from 20kT to 1MT (50x) the blast range grows by ~4x (changing burst height to optimise ground effects) and the affected area grows by ~15x
- arethuza 9y ago
  What I meant was that once they worked out staging building arbitrarily large weapons was actually fairly easy - AFAIR the team building the Tsar Bomba were criticized by their colleagues because what they were doing wasn't actually useful technically and that the real challenge was building smaller easier to deliver designs - the US W88 currently being the most advanced design that has been described in public.
alkonaut 9y ago
That must be a typo meaning "20kt" I don't think many believe NK have thermonuclear weapons so they are at tens of kilotons.

rainforest 9y ago

In the short term at least, but it's probably safe to assume your risks at that distance are from your neighbours fighting over supplies.

JulianMorrison 9y ago
Which is not a negligible threat. A major logistical crash will drop your standard of living down to what can be grown or made locally (compare the fall of the Roman empire) and a sudden one (such as a nuclear war) will for a while drop you down to what has already been stored locally - very very little, in this age of just in time delivery. Expect immediate and very violent food riots.

microwavecamera 9y ago

Assuming a single warhead and something small like NK's ICBMs which is in the 20-30kt range, yes. Now when you're dealing with modern ICBMs, like the ones the US, Russia, China and a few other countries have, the prognosis isn't as good. Modern ICBMs are MIRVs (multiple independently targetable reentry vehicle). For example the current Russian MIRV ICBM is the R-36M2 (NATO designation SS-18 Satan Mod 5) which carries 10 warheads each with a charge of 550-750kt. So on Nukemap punch in a single air-burst warhead in the 550-750kt range and imagine 10 of them spread over a wide area. That's what a single R-36M2 could do. Russia currently has 104 of them deployed. They also have 278 of the older R-36MUTTKh (NATO SS-18 Satan Mod 4) deployed which each carry 10 550kt warheads. Russia is in the process of deploying the successor to the R-36M, the RS-28 Sarmat (NATO designation SS-X-30 SATAN 2) which can carry a single warhead with a 50Mt charge or between 10-15 MIRV warheads or 24 hypersonic glide vehicles, depending on the configuration. A single RS-28 Sarmat in a MIRV or hypersonic glide vehicle configuration could flatten an area about the size of Texas. And if all that isn't horrific enough, it's hypersonic, which means all current missile defenses are useless against it. http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-rs-28-sarmat-icbm-us-missile-defense-killer-19464 http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-buzz/russias-new-rs-28-... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-36M https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RS-28_Sarmat

3pt14159 9y ago
Note that the RS-28 Sarmat is still a couple years away. "Deploying" is a bit of a stretch, no? Almost finished prototyping is how I'd assess it. Though I'm not sure it matters either way, if Russia wants to end the world, they can.
- microwavecamera 9y ago
  I should have said developing. I'm still drinking my coffee over here, just woke up.
masklinn 9y ago
I did the calculation for Ohio-class capabilities assuming it was only loaded with the smaller 100kT warheads (W76), as the 450kT ones (W88) are relatively rare, according to Nukemap's estimates for a 840m airburst a single sub can cover 1500sq km (~1/3rd of RH, 10x DC) in 20psi (severe damage or complete destruction of concrete buildings, ~100% fatality), 1800 in 1000 rem (~95% protracted mortality) and 7700 sq km (Delaware, half of Connecticut) in 5 psi (~universal collapse of residential buildings, widespread fatalities). MIRV are fucking terrifying.

marvin 9y ago

The site is down, so I can't tell if it models fallout. Not an expert, but I get the impression that you can get lethal fallout a hundred kilometers from the target site. But it would require very bad luck with regards to the wind direction. There is a very fascinating book detailing the immediate survival of such a scenario.

tomjen3 9y ago
I have played quite a lot with it - you typically don't get much fallout with an airburst (you do get more dead people), but in the case of nuclear terroism, which would probably be delivered by truck and therefore be a ground-burst, you do.

boomboomsubban 9y ago

Sort of. There are very few scenarios where I can imagine one nuclear bomb being dropped on a US target, accident by our own military seems most likely followed by terrorism then a suicidal nuclear power, and in all three of those scenarios I doubt the bomb would hit where any planning suggests it would.

cyphar 9y ago
A nuclear bomb (several hundred times larger than the one dropped on Hiroshima) was accidentally dropped in the US in 1961[1]. Luckily it (obviously) didn't detonate. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bomb-north-carolina-1961 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/20/usaf-atomic-bo...

tomjen3 9y ago

You probably also want to be up-wind, so that you don't get any fallout. But yeah, a single nuke isn't close to an endgame, certainly not those suitcased sized nukes we were all so afraid of. To end the world you need massive numbers of nukes, or live in a small country.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ozim 9y ago

Better to quickly evaporate than deal with fighting for food or water. So I would rather move to the center in case nukes start flying around.

mikeash 9y ago

Pretty much. I live about 15 miles from the White House and my assumption is that I'd probably survive the initial stages of a nuclear war. Weapons have actually been getting a lot smaller in recent decades. At the peak of the Cold War, weapons with tens of megatons of yield were not uncommon. Right now, the biggest bomb in the US arsenal is 1.2 megatons, and most are much smaller. A lot of this is because of accuracy: giant bombs were needed for strategic weapons in the 1960s because you'd be lucky to get such a bomb within a couple miles of your intended target. With modern weapons able to hit a chosen city block (or a chosen room of a building if using GPS guidance) you can use much smaller weapons. The deadliness of nuclear weapons tends to be overstated at all yields. For example, look at all the ridicule that the old "duck and cover" method gets. It's actually a highly practical method that would save a lot of lives, even with the old gigantic bombs. Now, don't get me wrong. Nuclear war, or even a single nuclear strike, would kill a shitload of people, and there's some merit to the idea that "the living would envy the dead" that you see a lot of other commenters espousing here. But popular ideas like "one bomb would destroy the entire state of Texas" and "the combined nuclear arsenals of the world are enough to destroy the planet N times over" are completely wrong.

Bedon292 9y ago

It would depend. Are you talking a single nuke from NK? Then that is plausible depending on wind / fallout directions. I don't remember where the original source for this is, but https://crisisboom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nuke-targets-48.jpg https://crisisboom.files.wordpress.com/2011/01/nuke-targets-... is a reasonable scenario for a war with Russia. Where anything with value would be struck. The east coast is practically all destroyed from 50mi south of DC up to north of Boston. Entire metro areas would be struck and you would need to be further out.