5 ms·

How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blaste

How do you prepare for the complete breakdown of society and 200 million survivors competing for resources that will support maybe 15 million people in a blasted, utterly destroyed landscape with no infrastructure or production.

ben_w 5y ago
The same way you win a gun fight when you only have a knife: be elsewhere. America isn’t the only place in this world where someone can have a good life. That said, how (200-15) million people can all simultaneously enact the same plan, that’s much harder.
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  Ha! Good point. Good time to take a lifecation to Africa.
chipsa 5y ago
Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion. ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.
  - oneoff786 5y ago
    I would be wary of any of Russia’s military capability claims.
  - chipsa 5y ago
    Russia also claims that Moskva wasn't hit by Ukrainian missiles. Evading ABM isn't easy. You need to generate delta-V to move out of the way, and then be able to get back into target, all the while not knowing if an interceptor is actually going to be coming or when. ABM is harder than it used to be, but that's because we decided we didn't want to use nukes on interceptors. And that's because we don't want to have to get the president to release nukes to be able do the intercept. Which means we can launch when we think there's an incoming missile without much of an issue, and our reaction time is decreased. There's nothing in the way our interceptors work that make 1000 harder than 10, aside from the fact that we don't have 1000. On the flipside, the 40 or so we do have, that are likely to kill about 10 incoming warheads. But the Russians don't know which 10. So every target they decide they have to kill needs 11 warheads, not 1. Which man's they can hit 10% of the targets they used to be able to. Or accept that some of the targets they think they should kill won't be dead.
    - chakalakasp 5y ago
      The people who make the claims that ABM is super hard and ineffective against large strikes are generally American experts who used to work in the field.
goatlover 5y ago
I thought the author argued there wasn’t enough nuclear weapons to utterly destroy all the infrastructure, even in major cities. No doubt it would be really bad with tens of millions dying in the aftermath. But there would still be intact smaller cities, roads, trains, smaller airports and some industry that wasn’t targeted. Plus a shot ton of farmland and ranches. Setting the Western world back a century is probably correct. The balance of power would shift to the global South.
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  The author is wrong. The people who are experts at doing this kind of thing for a living very much believe that a general nuclear war will destroy nearly all infrastructure. Don't just believe random bloggers with no expertise in the things they're bullshitting about. Even in the open source world, there is an entire body of expert information on this topic that contradicts what this guy is saying.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    Can you point to some people / papers / where these people hang out? I'd like to do some reading
    - chakalakasp 5y ago
      Sure, here are a couple of resources, both for Russia and the U.S. For the U.S. plan to attack Russia, the NRDC did an interesting hypothetical attack around 20 years ago to show the impact a U.S. attack would have on Russia. (It's hypothetical because the actual attack plans are classified to the point that even Senators on the big committees don't get to see them when they angrily ask for them.) The report on that hypothetical is here: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan-report.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan... For the Russian plan to attack the U.S., this reddit thread is a guy who did this for a living answering questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/trkfe7/three_hypothetical_scenarios_for_a_russian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/trkfe7/three_hypotheti... The submitter, https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/ https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/, has deep knowledge of the issue, and answers a lot of questions. He's kinda a hothead, though, if asked questions the wrong way. I chalk it up to the kind of stress that might come from realizing that the plans you helped to develop to kill hundreds of millions of people might actually get put to use in the foreseeable future. He also answers some questions in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/tpa3ao/openrisop_093_counterforcecountervalue_scenario/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/tpa3ao/openriso... The nuclear winter stuff is more interesting. Most recent papers are very much thinking it's a very big deal: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019JD030509 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155983 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155983 http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ChinaNWrice8inpress.pdf http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ChinaNWrice8inpress.pd... https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/OzdoganNuclearWinterMidwestPrint.pdf https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/OzdoganNuclearWinterM... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF00... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL086246 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD027331 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD02... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD030777 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD03... One paper that feels the nuclear winter risk is overstated is from LLNL: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020JD033056 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020... This paper talks a bit about the uncertainties regarding nuclear winter right now. Mainly lack of data for modelling: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1882772 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1... A lot of the questions revolve around whether nuclear detonations would create firestorms in contemporary U.S. cities, and if they did, if those fire storms would be strong enough to generate pyrocumulonimbus clouds that drew the soot into the stratosphere on a widespread scale. If firestorms do start, based on PNW fire studies, it seems that pyrocumulonimbus clouds would be a very common thing: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax1748 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax1748
NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
I'm no expert, but here are my thoughts: 1) Don't die in the initial strike. Take a working vacation to the countryside when things look tense if you live near obvious targets. 2) Have a few months' worth of food and water on hand 3) Skill with guns, ammo, and guns, in that order 4) Friends. Have friends who also have a modicum of preparedness and useful skills, or be good at making them 5) Healthcare and sanitation. Know the basics, have the basics. That's a start from some rando on the internet
- chakalakasp 5y ago
  Ok. That gets you to stay alive for a few months. Now, imagine a world in which there will no longer be any agriculture, fuel, easy access to clean water, electricity, heating, medicine, health care, communications, government, supply chains, or law enforcement. The food supply that was available at stores and in homes has now run out. Fertilizer is no longer available, contemporary farm machinery that runs on petrol won't last long as the petrol dries up (and when they break down, won't be repairable due to DRM). Wildlife might supply enough calories to feed a small fraction of one percent of all people currently still alive. This would go on indefinitely. Preppers look at surviving a nuclear war like it's an adventure where all their Eagle Scout skills will finally be put to use. It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction. Note that this wouldn't be everywhere, just in targeted countries. US, Canada, NATO and NATO leaning Europe, Japan, both Koreas, China, Russia. Those not targeted would be looking at this whole thing kinda like insert "it's free real estate" meme here And if nuclear winter is a real thing, which most contemporary modelling suggests it is (though this is not settled science and some modelling suggests it isn't), likely there won't be an environment conducive to growing crops anywhere in the world for at least 5 years. A lifetime Prepper Magazine subscription won't help you there.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
    > It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction. Yeah. People do live through those kinds of times, though. And I'd wager at least a few end up thinking it was worth it! Perhaps the Black Death was comparable in that sense, in that it killed 30-50% of Europe? I also do have some hope that we wouldn't slide back in to warlords, disease, and famine everywhere. Everyone alive will have pretty deeply inculcated norms around fairness, cooperation, and institutions. In some of the less destroyed areas perhaps we'd be able to organize and rebuild a semblance of our current life reasonably quickly (albeit much more local). P.S. fuck DRM :-)
koheripbal 5y ago
Easy. Buy a small plot of land in a remote area and stockpile 2 years worth of food and water. It's really not that hard. A human can live off of a small two acre garden. Even if you might be downwind of a major population center, you can build a simple fallout shelter for cheap. That's the point. It's entirely survivable if you prepare.

ben_w 5y ago

The same way you win a gun fight when you only have a knife: be elsewhere. America isn’t the only place in this world where someone can have a good life. That said, how (200-15) million people can all simultaneously enact the same plan, that’s much harder.

chakalakasp 5y ago
Ha! Good point. Good time to take a lifecation to Africa.

chipsa 5y ago

Besides "be somewhere else", make it harder for other people to turn your country into a blasted landscape. Support ballistic missile defense.

chakalakasp 5y ago
ABM is hard. Evading ABM is much easier. Russia has some amazing tech for space based ABM interception evasion. ABM stuff works okayish against very small numbers of incoming warheads. ABM is completely ineffective against large numbers of inbound warheads.
- oneoff786 5y ago
  I would be wary of any of Russia’s military capability claims.
- chipsa 5y ago
  Russia also claims that Moskva wasn't hit by Ukrainian missiles. Evading ABM isn't easy. You need to generate delta-V to move out of the way, and then be able to get back into target, all the while not knowing if an interceptor is actually going to be coming or when. ABM is harder than it used to be, but that's because we decided we didn't want to use nukes on interceptors. And that's because we don't want to have to get the president to release nukes to be able do the intercept. Which means we can launch when we think there's an incoming missile without much of an issue, and our reaction time is decreased. There's nothing in the way our interceptors work that make 1000 harder than 10, aside from the fact that we don't have 1000. On the flipside, the 40 or so we do have, that are likely to kill about 10 incoming warheads. But the Russians don't know which 10. So every target they decide they have to kill needs 11 warheads, not 1. Which man's they can hit 10% of the targets they used to be able to. Or accept that some of the targets they think they should kill won't be dead.
  - chakalakasp 5y ago
    The people who make the claims that ABM is super hard and ineffective against large strikes are generally American experts who used to work in the field.

goatlover 5y ago

I thought the author argued there wasn’t enough nuclear weapons to utterly destroy all the infrastructure, even in major cities. No doubt it would be really bad with tens of millions dying in the aftermath. But there would still be intact smaller cities, roads, trains, smaller airports and some industry that wasn’t targeted. Plus a shot ton of farmland and ranches. Setting the Western world back a century is probably correct. The balance of power would shift to the global South.

chakalakasp 5y ago
The author is wrong. The people who are experts at doing this kind of thing for a living very much believe that a general nuclear war will destroy nearly all infrastructure. Don't just believe random bloggers with no expertise in the things they're bullshitting about. Even in the open source world, there is an entire body of expert information on this topic that contradicts what this guy is saying.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  Can you point to some people / papers / where these people hang out? I'd like to do some reading
  - chakalakasp 5y ago
    Sure, here are a couple of resources, both for Russia and the U.S. For the U.S. plan to attack Russia, the NRDC did an interesting hypothetical attack around 20 years ago to show the impact a U.S. attack would have on Russia. (It's hypothetical because the actual attack plans are classified to the point that even Senators on the big committees don't get to see them when they angrily ask for them.) The report on that hypothetical is here: https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan-report.pdf https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/us-nuclear-war-plan... For the Russian plan to attack the U.S., this reddit thread is a guy who did this for a living answering questions: https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/trkfe7/three_hypothetical_scenarios_for_a_russian/ https://www.reddit.com/r/war/comments/trkfe7/three_hypotheti... The submitter, https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/ https://www.reddit.com/user/dmteter/, has deep knowledge of the issue, and answers a lot of questions. He's kinda a hothead, though, if asked questions the wrong way. I chalk it up to the kind of stress that might come from realizing that the plans you helped to develop to kill hundreds of millions of people might actually get put to use in the foreseeable future. He also answers some questions in this thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/tpa3ao/openrisop_093_counterforcecountervalue_scenario/ https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearwar/comments/tpa3ao/openriso... The nuclear winter stuff is more interesting. Most recent papers are very much thinking it's a very big deal: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019JD030509 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201... https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155983 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3155983 http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ChinaNWrice8inpress.pdf http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/ChinaNWrice8inpress.pd... https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/OzdoganNuclearWinterMidwestPrint.pdf https://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/OzdoganNuclearWinterM... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF000205 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013EF00... https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aay5478 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1919049117 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL086246 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD027331 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017JD02... https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD030777 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019JD03... One paper that feels the nuclear winter risk is overstated is from LLNL: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020JD033056 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1029/2020... This paper talks a bit about the uncertainties regarding nuclear winter right now. Mainly lack of data for modelling: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1882772 https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25751654.2021.1... A lot of the questions revolve around whether nuclear detonations would create firestorms in contemporary U.S. cities, and if they did, if those fire storms would be strong enough to generate pyrocumulonimbus clouds that drew the soot into the stratosphere on a widespread scale. If firestorms do start, based on PNW fire studies, it seems that pyrocumulonimbus clouds would be a very common thing: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax1748 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax1748

NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago

I'm no expert, but here are my thoughts: 1) Don't die in the initial strike. Take a working vacation to the countryside when things look tense if you live near obvious targets. 2) Have a few months' worth of food and water on hand 3) Skill with guns, ammo, and guns, in that order 4) Friends. Have friends who also have a modicum of preparedness and useful skills, or be good at making them 5) Healthcare and sanitation. Know the basics, have the basics. That's a start from some rando on the internet

chakalakasp 5y ago
Ok. That gets you to stay alive for a few months. Now, imagine a world in which there will no longer be any agriculture, fuel, easy access to clean water, electricity, heating, medicine, health care, communications, government, supply chains, or law enforcement. The food supply that was available at stores and in homes has now run out. Fertilizer is no longer available, contemporary farm machinery that runs on petrol won't last long as the petrol dries up (and when they break down, won't be repairable due to DRM). Wildlife might supply enough calories to feed a small fraction of one percent of all people currently still alive. This would go on indefinitely. Preppers look at surviving a nuclear war like it's an adventure where all their Eagle Scout skills will finally be put to use. It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction. Note that this wouldn't be everywhere, just in targeted countries. US, Canada, NATO and NATO leaning Europe, Japan, both Koreas, China, Russia. Those not targeted would be looking at this whole thing kinda like insert "it's free real estate" meme here And if nuclear winter is a real thing, which most contemporary modelling suggests it is (though this is not settled science and some modelling suggests it isn't), likely there won't be an environment conducive to growing crops anywhere in the world for at least 5 years. A lifetime Prepper Magazine subscription won't help you there.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y ago
  > It's really just slow, heartbreaking death from starvation and disease, with horrible violence from desperate people and regional warlords mixed in. Think "The Road", without the extreme environmental destruction. Yeah. People do live through those kinds of times, though. And I'd wager at least a few end up thinking it was worth it! Perhaps the Black Death was comparable in that sense, in that it killed 30-50% of Europe? I also do have some hope that we wouldn't slide back in to warlords, disease, and famine everywhere. Everyone alive will have pretty deeply inculcated norms around fairness, cooperation, and institutions. In some of the less destroyed areas perhaps we'd be able to organize and rebuild a semblance of our current life reasonably quickly (albeit much more local). P.S. fuck DRM :-)

koheripbal 5y ago

Easy. Buy a small plot of land in a remote area and stockpile 2 years worth of food and water. It's really not that hard. A human can live off of a small two acre garden. Even if you might be downwind of a major population center, you can build a simple fallout shelter for cheap. That's the point. It's entirely survivable if you prepare.