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My personal contingency is this: once the bombs start falling I’ll be running towards the blasts not away. When it comes to an “all out” nuclear war there are n

by ricksl 5y ago

My personal contingency is this: once the bombs start falling I’ll be running towards the blasts not away. When it comes to an “all out” nuclear war there are no outcomes that leave behind a world worth living in imo. Assuming the initial blasts spare me and I don’t live somewhere that gets peppered with fallout, I’ll have starvation and societal collapse to look forward to.

Ourgon 5y ago
I never understood this attitude, not when it was professed in the 80's, nor now. If I can find a way for me and my family to survive I will do my damnedest to try. Moving out of a densely populated country to the countryside in another, sparsely populated country was a good decision not just because I like to live in the woods, it also puts some distance between us and potential targets. This was not really why I made this decision but it doesn't hurt, either. Being self-sufficient to a relatively high degree - especially when it comes to energy the which actually does seem to grow on the trees here - also helps.
- PeterWhittaker 5y ago
  Have you read On the Beach? If the exchange were sufficient, there would be no safe places, fallout would envelope the world and slowly claim us all. That’s the basic background to running blastward: die faster in less pain, than agonizingly.
  - Ourgon 5y ago
    Yes, fantastic book. Wrong premise though, fallout does not live as long as Nevil Shute makes it out to do, nor do the shifting wind patterns lead to the movement of large amounts of northern-hemisphere dust to the southern hemisphere.
- mikewarot 5y ago
  >I never understood this attitude, not when it was professed in the 80's, nor now For me, it's pretty simple. You're going to have a fallout cloud world wide. That will cut food production by at least half. Infrastructure will be down, so the masses will flee the city like a plague of locusts. 90% of the population will starve in the first year or two. We'd be lucky to emerge from this with with 1900s level technology. No new chips, tool steel, lubricants, steel, or any other of the products now produced in the millions of tons per year will be available. It's a choice between a death in seconds, verses watching society completely collapse into small tribes of hunter gatherers.

by ricksl 5y ago

Ourgon 5y ago

I never understood this attitude, not when it was professed in the 80's, nor now. If I can find a way for me and my family to survive I will do my damnedest to try. Moving out of a densely populated country to the countryside in another, sparsely populated country was a good decision not just because I like to live in the woods, it also puts some distance between us and potential targets. This was not really why I made this decision but it doesn't hurt, either. Being self-sufficient to a relatively high degree - especially when it comes to energy the which actually does seem to grow on the trees here - also helps.

PeterWhittaker 5y ago
Have you read On the Beach? If the exchange were sufficient, there would be no safe places, fallout would envelope the world and slowly claim us all. That’s the basic background to running blastward: die faster in less pain, than agonizingly.
- Ourgon 5y ago
  Yes, fantastic book. Wrong premise though, fallout does not live as long as Nevil Shute makes it out to do, nor do the shifting wind patterns lead to the movement of large amounts of northern-hemisphere dust to the southern hemisphere.
mikewarot 5y ago
>I never understood this attitude, not when it was professed in the 80's, nor now For me, it's pretty simple. You're going to have a fallout cloud world wide. That will cut food production by at least half. Infrastructure will be down, so the masses will flee the city like a plague of locusts. 90% of the population will starve in the first year or two. We'd be lucky to emerge from this with with 1900s level technology. No new chips, tool steel, lubricants, steel, or any other of the products now produced in the millions of tons per year will be available. It's a choice between a death in seconds, verses watching society completely collapse into small tribes of hunter gatherers.