7 ms·

I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't wo

I live in New York City and I felt a small degree of panic when the reports showed up on Twitter. However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". If someone started firing missiles at the US, the risk that we'd start shooting them back seems high, and I think NYC would be a city that would get pummeled in retaliation. This is probably true for a lot of major coastal cities, especially Seattle, Vancouver, SF/LA, NYC, Washington DC, and Boston. Fun NYC fact: the city is littered with fallout shelters: https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfrxm-hYxu_E&hl=en_US&ll=40.807352561683786%2C-73.922393&z=10 https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1Zm18xuBxp8kSysodfr...

ashleyn 9y ago
Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of an intrigue, where the door to this secret underground cavern really was and what was inside. As I got to go into more city buildings throughout my life, I noticed many of the rooms designated "fallout shelters" were just some spare room in the basement, complete with ventilation to the outside and really, not much farther than a few steps to the front door. There may be a lot of "fallout shelters" in NYC but I get the impression that the labeling wasn't very strict and that many of these "shelters" won't really protect you from "fallout".
- Retric 9y ago
  It takes far less to be an effective fallout shelter than you might think. If you look at lethal ranges on H-Bombs you see incredible destruction, but if you're protected for the first 1hour after a blast you can be surprisingly close to the blast and live.
  - macintux 9y ago
    I’m less concerned about the blast than what it would take to keep me alive and reasonably healthy after. I’d like my fallout shelter to include some food and water. Some used to: I distinctly remember boxes and boxes of crackers in some underground shelter as a child.
    - Retric 9y ago
      One way of looking at these shelters is what % of radiation can you avoid for a blast X miles away. 90% and 99% are both easy to reach and would save vast numbers of lives as many decay products have half lives under a minute making them temporary, but significant problems. 99.99% gets really expensive because of longer half lives and the need to better filter air etc. PS: Further, there is a tradeoff as unless it protects you from x% of radiation protection from the blast is basically pointless.
    - ianburrell 9y ago
      Fallout shelters only need to be used for 12-48 hours. People can survive without food or water for that long. Definitely better to have supplies, but proper shelter is more important for fallout.
  - ianburrell 9y ago
    Fallout shelters aren't about protecting from the nuclear blast but from the fallout that comes afterwards. The secret to surviving fallout is to put as much distance and stuff as possible to places where fallout collects like the ground. And then stay there for 24-48 hours. Looking for buildings with basements, or the center of multi-story buildings. The advice I have heard is if not in proper shelter, like house without basement, to shelter in place to survive blast, and then move within the first 15 minutes to better fallout shelter.
    - Retric 9y ago
      I mean blast in terms of timing. You can get a leathal radiation doses in the first seconds well outside the fireball. Moving from shelter A to B is very high risk. It might work, but you are unlikely to get far and would want someway to avoid breathing dust on the trip. If your in the center of a large office building for example you probably want to stay there for the next hour unless a great shelter is less than five minutes away or the building is on fire etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-radiation-survival-shelter-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...
- gdubs 9y ago
  Off-topic, but if the book you’re referring to was the How It Works encyclopedia set, that was how I also learned about everything. My grandpa gave the set to me, and it included an incredible amount of material - illustrated and fascinating for a wide range of ages (this was long before we had internet). It is how I also learned about nuclear weapons, though I don’t specifically recall fallout shelters.
  - wolfgang42 9y ago
    ashleyn says[0] that it was The Way Things Work[1] by David Macaulay (©1988), which indeed has (on page 177) a drawing of a fallout shelter depicted as a small concrete bunker at the end of a deep stairwell far underground (containing, of all things, a party singing Happy Birthday), along with the following description: > A future nuclear war would not only reduce cities and towns to ruins. Fallout from the nuclear explosions would spread through the atmosphere, bombarding the land with lethal amounts of radiation. The only means of escape would be to live in deep underground shelters away from the fallout. This imprisonment would have to last until the radiation decreased to an acceptable level, which could take many years. Even then, climatic changes, shortage of food and the threat of disease would make life above ground a grim business. Incidentally, the book is most memorable for lucid and well-explained diagrams involving woolly mammoths, and I highly recommend it for explanations of anything mechanical. The section on nuclear physics is a bit lackluster, however. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work
    - ddxxdd 9y ago
      ::nostalgic tears::
- JKCalhoun 9y ago
  Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and didn't see fallout shelters. It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters? I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along. It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from the fallout.
  - pwg 9y ago
    > It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters? Sometime after the nuclear bomb was developed and first used to end the second world war. The "fallout" in "fallout shelter" refers to "nuclear fallout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout) which would not have been a term that would have existed prior to the creation and first use of a nuclear bomb. So sometime circa early 1940's to mid 1950's timeframe would be a good guess.
  - ashleyn 9y ago
    It was this book: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_work.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_wo... Had pretty cool drawings of a wooly mammoth around a bunch of inventions
  - burfog 9y ago
    It's not laughable. The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people. Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.
    - ddxxdd 9y ago
      >Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy. I think it was due to the opposite, actually. The development of Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) made many small nuclear warheads more valuable than fewer large nuclear warheads. If an ICBM is a shotgun, then kiloton-level MIRVs are like birdshot, which is seen as more valuable than megaton-level buckshot.
- ataturk 9y ago
  "Growing up" those shelters were considered around smaller, kiloton and low-megaton sized weaponry. The whole civil defense project fell apart after the 1950s once 100 Megaton hydrogen bombs become the norm. There's no sheltering from a city killer inside of a city, hence the reason the US quit pretending there was. I still like Switzerland's idea of civil defense, but then nobody is going to attack the place where all the world's criminals keep their wealth anyways, so even there it's a complete sham. I only get two posts on here because HN mods hate me, so I'm going to just add this: You don't have to worry about North Korea. At. All. The threat is already over. As far as the false alarm in HI goes, maybe ask questions in the direction of "who is it that would like to embarass the current US Administration?"
herbst 9y ago
> However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". Why? What really surprises me the most is that this seems to be a common thought. Did that happen before? Do you simply misstrust your government so deeply that you can not even assume something important like this is done right? Really if i would get such a message on my phone (not even sure if my country does that) i would definitly expect the worst and act like that.
- harryh 9y ago
  Bayesian reasoning. Most positive tests for unlikely events are false positives.
  - nothrabannosir 9y ago
    (Assuming plausible alternatives, being those false positives. Which is true in this case, of course.)
- true_religion 9y ago
  I felt the same way, but its not because I distrusted the government. The situation didn't feel like one wherein nuclear missiles would start being fired (or any missiles of any kind). There's got to be some sort of build up before a conflict before it can't catch people in shock (hence the rational of actual surprise-attacks). If tomorrow you read that Canada had invaded New York City, would you believe it instantly out of trust for your news agencies and government, or think that perhaps someone somewhere screwed up or was making a silly joke?
  - herbst 9y ago
    Personally i dont think a attack to the U.S. would be to much of a surprise. But true there is currently no direct tension in that direction. Also as someone else said, Hawaii really is a unlikely target. I get it now i guess.
    - influx 9y ago
danepowell 9y ago
I wasn't in Hawaii, but I also imagine that I would assume that an alert like this is a false alarm. I've just lived through too many scenarios like this, albeit not on the same scale (think false fire alarms.) Upon reflection, however, this seems like the definition of survivor bias.
- komali2 9y ago
  I remember an occasion when I lived with a partner - the fire alarm had gone off and I immediately got out of bed and started putting my pants and shoes on. She asked why, I said "so we can go outside. What are you doing? Let's go." She said she didn't understand the point - if it was a REAL fire, wouldn't they just come get us or tell us? I don't know how prominent this thought process is, or why so many people don't take things like fire alarms seriously. Selection bias, perhaps you're right. Every fire alarm most people has ever heard was a drill. This has happened twice at work now, even my manager was teasing me for telling people they should leave. Eventually I left on my own.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    I think it makes sense to be prepared to evacuate by doing things like getting dressed or packing your bags. But you don't have to leave every time the alarm goes off. If you don't smell smoke, hear a rushing/roaring sound or feel heat coming from somewhere it probably is a false alarm.
    - Doxin 9y ago
      By the time you feel heat or hear roaring or see smoke your hallway is already on fire. In some buildings that's your only escape route. Please don't give dangerous advice.
      - komali2 9y ago
        They might not have known - a good question to ask might be "why did that user think it was ok to recommend a non-urgent action in response to a fire alarm? Why did that user think it's ok to wait for evidence of a fire outside of an alarm?" Somewhere, society is failing to instill a proper respect for emergency indicators.
blackRust 9y ago
They seem quite useless: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-removes-misleading-nuclear-fallout-shelter-signs-idUKKBN1EL0SZ https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-...
Clubber 9y ago
Depends on who was shooting them. The North Korean missiles are notoriously inaccurate and if Kim shot one off with a live warhead, there's a decent chance it would detonate within his own border.
mejari 9y ago
North Korea is really the only viable country that we'd be hit by nuclear weapons from, and they have no way of "pummeling" NYC.
- stirlo 9y ago
  An accidental launch from Russia/China/India/Packistan is more likely than North Korea waking up one day with a death wish IMO

ashleyn 9y ago

Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of an intrigue, where the door to this secret underground cavern really was and what was inside. As I got to go into more city buildings throughout my life, I noticed many of the rooms designated "fallout shelters" were just some spare room in the basement, complete with ventilation to the outside and really, not much farther than a few steps to the front door. There may be a lot of "fallout shelters" in NYC but I get the impression that the labeling wasn't very strict and that many of these "shelters" won't really protect you from "fallout".

Retric 9y ago
It takes far less to be an effective fallout shelter than you might think. If you look at lethal ranges on H-Bombs you see incredible destruction, but if you're protected for the first 1hour after a blast you can be surprisingly close to the blast and live.
- macintux 9y ago
  I’m less concerned about the blast than what it would take to keep me alive and reasonably healthy after. I’d like my fallout shelter to include some food and water. Some used to: I distinctly remember boxes and boxes of crackers in some underground shelter as a child.
  - Retric 9y ago
    One way of looking at these shelters is what % of radiation can you avoid for a blast X miles away. 90% and 99% are both easy to reach and would save vast numbers of lives as many decay products have half lives under a minute making them temporary, but significant problems. 99.99% gets really expensive because of longer half lives and the need to better filter air etc. PS: Further, there is a tradeoff as unless it protects you from x% of radiation protection from the blast is basically pointless.
  - ianburrell 9y ago
    Fallout shelters only need to be used for 12-48 hours. People can survive without food or water for that long. Definitely better to have supplies, but proper shelter is more important for fallout.
- ianburrell 9y ago
  Fallout shelters aren't about protecting from the nuclear blast but from the fallout that comes afterwards. The secret to surviving fallout is to put as much distance and stuff as possible to places where fallout collects like the ground. And then stay there for 24-48 hours. Looking for buildings with basements, or the center of multi-story buildings. The advice I have heard is if not in proper shelter, like house without basement, to shelter in place to survive blast, and then move within the first 15 minutes to better fallout shelter.
  - Retric 9y ago
    I mean blast in terms of timing. You can get a leathal radiation doses in the first seconds well outside the fireball. Moving from shelter A to B is very high risk. It might work, but you are unlikely to get far and would want someway to avoid breathing dust on the trip. If your in the center of a large office building for example you probably want to stay there for the next hour unless a great shelter is less than five minutes away or the building is on fire etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-radiation-survival-shelter-2017-3 http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...
gdubs 9y ago
Off-topic, but if the book you’re referring to was the How It Works encyclopedia set, that was how I also learned about everything. My grandpa gave the set to me, and it included an incredible amount of material - illustrated and fascinating for a wide range of ages (this was long before we had internet). It is how I also learned about nuclear weapons, though I don’t specifically recall fallout shelters.
- wolfgang42 9y ago
  ashleyn says[0] that it was The Way Things Work[1] by David Macaulay (©1988), which indeed has (on page 177) a drawing of a fallout shelter depicted as a small concrete bunker at the end of a deep stairwell far underground (containing, of all things, a party singing Happy Birthday), along with the following description: > A future nuclear war would not only reduce cities and towns to ruins. Fallout from the nuclear explosions would spread through the atmosphere, bombarding the land with lethal amounts of radiation. The only means of escape would be to live in deep underground shelters away from the fallout. This imprisonment would have to last until the radiation decreased to an acceptable level, which could take many years. Even then, climatic changes, shortage of food and the threat of disease would make life above ground a grim business. Incidentally, the book is most memorable for lucid and well-explained diagrams involving woolly mammoths, and I highly recommend it for explanations of anything mechanical. The section on nuclear physics is a bit lackluster, however. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514 [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work
  - ddxxdd 9y ago
    ::nostalgic tears::
JKCalhoun 9y ago
Looked through the index of my early German (English translated, published around the 1960's, I believe) "The Way Things Work" volumes I and II and didn't see fallout shelters. It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters? I'm guessing (after having read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb") that this would be about when the hydrogen bomb came along. It was sobering to read how dramatically more powerful the fusion bomb was compared to the first fission bombs. Suddenly the idea of going into a basement shelter to "survive" the blast became laughable. If you were far enough from the blast though your only comfort could come from a shelter from the fallout.
- pwg 9y ago
  > It occurred to me though — when did they start calling them "fallout" shelters rather than "bomb" shelters? Sometime after the nuclear bomb was developed and first used to end the second world war. The "fallout" in "fallout shelter" refers to "nuclear fallout" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fallout) which would not have been a term that would have existed prior to the creation and first use of a nuclear bomb. So sometime circa early 1940's to mid 1950's timeframe would be a good guess.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  It was this book: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_work.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/ca/Way_things_wo... Had pretty cool drawings of a wooly mammoth around a bunch of inventions
- burfog 9y ago
  It's not laughable. The building code in Switzerland specifies that residential construction must contain a shelter that withstands a 12 megaton blast at 700 meters. The country has more shelter than people. Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy.
  - ddxxdd 9y ago
    >Another thing to note is that the multi-megaton weapons aren't in style anymore, due to improved targeting accuracy. I think it was due to the opposite, actually. The development of Multiple Independent Re-entry Vehicles (MIRVs) made many small nuclear warheads more valuable than fewer large nuclear warheads. If an ICBM is a shotgun, then kiloton-level MIRVs are like birdshot, which is seen as more valuable than megaton-level buckshot.
ataturk 9y ago
"Growing up" those shelters were considered around smaller, kiloton and low-megaton sized weaponry. The whole civil defense project fell apart after the 1950s once 100 Megaton hydrogen bombs become the norm. There's no sheltering from a city killer inside of a city, hence the reason the US quit pretending there was. I still like Switzerland's idea of civil defense, but then nobody is going to attack the place where all the world's criminals keep their wealth anyways, so even there it's a complete sham. I only get two posts on here because HN mods hate me, so I'm going to just add this: You don't have to worry about North Korea. At. All. The threat is already over. As far as the false alarm in HI goes, maybe ask questions in the direction of "who is it that would like to embarass the current US Administration?"

herbst 9y ago

> However, my initial instinct was "either the system doesn't work, or someone messed up". Why? What really surprises me the most is that this seems to be a common thought. Did that happen before? Do you simply misstrust your government so deeply that you can not even assume something important like this is done right? Really if i would get such a message on my phone (not even sure if my country does that) i would definitly expect the worst and act like that.

harryh 9y ago
Bayesian reasoning. Most positive tests for unlikely events are false positives.
- nothrabannosir 9y ago
  (Assuming plausible alternatives, being those false positives. Which is true in this case, of course.)
true_religion 9y ago
I felt the same way, but its not because I distrusted the government. The situation didn't feel like one wherein nuclear missiles would start being fired (or any missiles of any kind). There's got to be some sort of build up before a conflict before it can't catch people in shock (hence the rational of actual surprise-attacks). If tomorrow you read that Canada had invaded New York City, would you believe it instantly out of trust for your news agencies and government, or think that perhaps someone somewhere screwed up or was making a silly joke?
- herbst 9y ago
  Personally i dont think a attack to the U.S. would be to much of a surprise. But true there is currently no direct tension in that direction. Also as someone else said, Hawaii really is a unlikely target. I get it now i guess.
  - influx 9y ago

danepowell 9y ago

I wasn't in Hawaii, but I also imagine that I would assume that an alert like this is a false alarm. I've just lived through too many scenarios like this, albeit not on the same scale (think false fire alarms.) Upon reflection, however, this seems like the definition of survivor bias.

komali2 9y ago
I remember an occasion when I lived with a partner - the fire alarm had gone off and I immediately got out of bed and started putting my pants and shoes on. She asked why, I said "so we can go outside. What are you doing? Let's go." She said she didn't understand the point - if it was a REAL fire, wouldn't they just come get us or tell us? I don't know how prominent this thought process is, or why so many people don't take things like fire alarms seriously. Selection bias, perhaps you're right. Every fire alarm most people has ever heard was a drill. This has happened twice at work now, even my manager was teasing me for telling people they should leave. Eventually I left on my own.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  I think it makes sense to be prepared to evacuate by doing things like getting dressed or packing your bags. But you don't have to leave every time the alarm goes off. If you don't smell smoke, hear a rushing/roaring sound or feel heat coming from somewhere it probably is a false alarm.
  - Doxin 9y ago
    By the time you feel heat or hear roaring or see smoke your hallway is already on fire. In some buildings that's your only escape route. Please don't give dangerous advice.
    - komali2 9y ago
      They might not have known - a good question to ask might be "why did that user think it was ok to recommend a non-urgent action in response to a fire alarm? Why did that user think it's ok to wait for evidence of a fire outside of an alarm?" Somewhere, society is failing to instill a proper respect for emergency indicators.

blackRust 9y ago

They seem quite useless: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-removes-misleading-nuclear-fallout-shelter-signs-idUKKBN1EL0SZ https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-new-york-nuclear/new-york-...

Clubber 9y ago

Depends on who was shooting them. The North Korean missiles are notoriously inaccurate and if Kim shot one off with a live warhead, there's a decent chance it would detonate within his own border.

mejari 9y ago

North Korea is really the only viable country that we'd be hit by nuclear weapons from, and they have no way of "pummeling" NYC.

stirlo 9y ago
An accidental launch from Russia/China/India/Packistan is more likely than North Korea waking up one day with a death wish IMO