Read "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson Kearny [1]. You can find a pdf online. If you live a distance from a city center and you can work from home, try

Read "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson Kearny [1]. You can find a pdf online. If you live a distance from a city center and you can work from home, try to do that when tensions are high. Nuclear bombs are not that powerful. By that I mean they still are stupendously powerful compared to conventional bombs, but in the popular imagination they are capable of erasing countries off the map. It's not quite like that. A typical Russian ICBM warhead has a yield of 150-300 kT, which means it's 10 to 20 times larger than Hiroshima. The effect of a nuclear explosion however varies with the cubic root of the yield, so such a weapon would have twice to three times the effect of Hiroshima. Actually, it appears it would be much smaller than that if the target is an urban area as per wikipedia [2]: "Advanced computer modelling of real-world conditions and how they impact on the damage to modern urban areas has found that most scaling laws are too simplistic and tend to overestimate nuclear explosion effects". So, if you go to the nukemap [3] and model a bomb, take the results with a big grain of salt. But even if you take the nukemap results at face value, you'd be surprised to see that the effects of a bomb are less than you'd expect. For example the link I provided shows the effects of an airburst of a 150 kt nuke in lower Manhattan: - fireball radius: 450 m. Everything inside is vaporized instantaneously. But the optimal height for the detonation (chosen to maximize the radius of the 5psi blast) is 1660m, so there's only air inside the 450m radius). - radiation radius: 1km; most people inside this radius die within a month. Good thing there's nobody inside this radius either, only air again. - moderate (5psi) blast radius: 3.7 km. This is quite bad: lots of buildings will collapse, either outright, or they'll catch fire and collapse eventually (not clear how effective the firefighting would be after a nuclear detonation). What's inside this radius? All lower Manhattan up to about 30th Street, a good chunk of Jersey City, and a slice of Brooklyn. But what's surprising is what's outside: about 3/4 of Manhattan and Jersey City, 90% of Brooklyn and 100% of Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island. What happens if you are in the subway? Quite likely you'll survive. Why would you be in the subway? Because the US has satellites and is able to tell that an incoming ICBM is coming at least 15 min ahead of time, and most likely all iPhones will beep really loud. The most important lesson though is this: if you are, let's say in Newark, NJ, or Greenwich, CT, or Scarsdale, NY, then you will not die from the blast. How about the radiation from the fallout? That might kill you, so you need to be careful. As a rule of thumb, after 2 weeks the radiation disappears. But will you have food and water to survive in some basement for 2 weeks? I'll stop here, I already wrote a wall of text. Read Kearney's book, and you'll get a lot of useful info. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cresson_Kearny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cresson_Kearny [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions#Summary_of_the_effects https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_nuclear_explosions#... [3] https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=150&lat=40.71427&lng=-74.00597&hob_psi=5&hob_ft=5443&ff=50&psi=20,5,1&zm=13 https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=150&lat=40.71427&lng...