I think it's useful to know and understand things. How a nuclear war would play out might not correspond to what your imagination or popular culture say they w

I think it's useful to know and understand things. How a nuclear war would play out might not correspond to what your imagination or popular culture say they will. I started reading that book about 6 months or so ago after coming across it on HN, and I thought it was pretty interesting in an abstract way. Now the idea of nuclear war is closer to the forefront of my attention, but I think it's good to know approximately what to do and why if I find myself as an involuntary participant in a nuclear war. An important thing to understand is that it's not like everyone within some radius dies and everyone outside it lives. In the event of nuclear war there will be a lot of people in marginal areas that could survive based on luck or doing the right things. Those "duck and cover" films kind of get a bad rap, but I wonder if this is a good moment in time to notify whole populations of how to survive a nuclear strike. Even something like an episode of John Oliver or Steven Colbert's show where they explain how to protect yourself from gamma radiation might save thousands or millions of lives in the (hopefully unlikely) event that things spiral out of hand. Many people will say they'd rather just die quickly, but for someone to die needlessly when they could have survived and moved to another city is kind of sad. If all of Russia and all of NATO unload all their nukes at each other, then maybe anyone in any affected country who happened to survive will have a very bad time, but you wouldn't know that on the ground. Maybe most of the nukes don't work. Maybe it was a limited exchange, and only a few cities got hit. Maybe they only targeted military targets, and most cities without military bases are fine. No one knows.