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What to Do If a Nuclear Disaster Is Imminent

101 points by wwilson 4y ago

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techdragon 4y ago
A lot of this sort of information is surprisingly US centric. For instance, you might find building codes that forbid the sort of "non-exposed" room in residential housing as a health and safety issue due to ventilation or emergency exit or other reasons. My rule of thumb is simple. - Know the nearest target. - Know who might hit it with a nuke. - Check the NukeMap ( https://nukemap.org/ https://nukemap.org/ ) based on who might nuke it and what nukes they are known to have... to estimate the if you even need to care about shelter. If you're too close to the nearest target theres not much you could hope to do without shelter. If you're far enough then you wont need to care about the immediate attack either. - Missile warning will likely create havoc with transport as people without plans try to suddenly make them. So consider where you spend most of your time during a normal day, and what transport options you have with you then depending on your personal level of paranoia make a decision about the best shelter options based on two things, travel time and level of protection. You should travel for better shelter, but not risk traveling far given the uncertainty of the situation. Just having a basic background understanding of what the suitable shelter would be in your life and this becomes more like knowing where you could hide from sudden rain without an umbrella on a walk down the street. - Shelter will depend a lot on your local environment, just keep the basic principles of radiation protection in mind. 1st is Distance, 2nd is Mass. If you cant get distance from the radiation source, put mass between you and it. Given that fallout will be dropping from the sky as heavier than air dust, you want to primarily find anything to give you protection against it being blown closer to you horizontally, and maximum distance from whatever roof is over your head. If neither of these are particularly available, prioritise the horizontal wind blown dust, settle for whatever concrete slab building you can find that would afford you some measure of protection from dust blowing in even if the windows and doors were damaged. - Think of it as extreme, unusual, but also unlikely, weather event. You don't want to get "wet" from the dry rain of fallout dust, you also want to be as far away from it as you can, and don't want it getting tracked/blown inside.
- greenn 4y ago
  Did you mean to link to https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ ?
  - 2ICofafireteam 4y ago
    Cool and depressing. I had a preview of this feeling in the 1990's: I went to a Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NERT) office at a base in Canada to pick up some radio equipment. They had a wall map in there showing the base as ground zero with concentric circles covering most of the surrounding area and each ring had notes scribbled in them. I took a quick look and didn't know what the notes meant, but my apartment was well within the annotated area....damn.
  - techdragon 4y ago
    I did indeed, I shortened https://nukemap.org/nukemap/ https://nukemap.org/nukemap/ to just https://nukemap.org/ https://nukemap.org/ and unfortunately its now too late to edit my original post.
chasil 4y ago
I don't want to read this. My memory encapsulates this, before I was born: "The most important things in this war are the machines... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc... My country sustained, and I believe it will sustain again, those who are in need. It is a dream I have.
- mathieuh 4y ago
  Countries don't do anything, people do. Recently I've been thinking a lot about people in so-called hostile countries, and the conclusion I arrived at is that the vast majority of those people are leading broadly similar lives to us in the West. They face similar struggles and yearn for similar things. This idea of us vs them and the proliferation of nationalism doesn't sit right with me. I look at the things the people in charge of the country whose nationality I possess (UK) does and I am aghast at the idea that people around the world would associate them with me. I'm sure there are many people in Russia and China etc. who feel similar.
  - watwut 4y ago
    > and the conclusion I arrived at is that the vast majority of those people are leading broadly similar lives to us in the West. Did you found that solution after actually reading up about lives, opinions or attitudes of those people or you just imagined everything being the same (and uncertainty surrounding those)? I do not mean it in the sense of being being bad or good, but in a sense that a lot is quite a lot different in many important ways.
    - nicbou 4y ago
      If you travel a bit, it's hard to ignore the similarities. Teenagers in particular are hilariously similar no matter where you go.
  - jemmyw 4y ago
hulitu 4y ago
Put a white bedsheet on your head and head slowly, to your local cemetery.
mradek 4y ago
I live pretty close to a US Navy base, and its common for me to hear and see formations of military helicopters like Ospreys, sometimes fighter jets, cargo planes, etc. I swear that I hear them more often than I used to say 4 years ago (before COVID). It is kind of scary to think about these kinds of scenarios, like if something bad happens what the hell will I do if I happen to survive? All I have are my parents who live far away, no kids or wife, not a lot of close friends here. I'm also moving pretty soon to near SF, which I hope isn't a target in such a war. I guess it is good that I've been working out. If I survive, I plan on staying alive as long as I can on my own. Damn I don't want to think about this because I don't want to die like that. Maybe all my time sunk into playing solo DayZ back in the day and surviving against Russians, Chinese, and other players who I didn't understand working together will help, heh. FFS.
- themodelplumber 4y ago
  Tough to think about. Being single and ideally relatively mobile I'd guess you'd be good to cover at least 10 miles a day which would be significant in the bay area considering the hills nearby. You'd just need to know where to go. Which, the big locations these days will be schools, especially high schools. It's a good idea to know the location of your nearest city hall and high school. From there the goal will be to collect information, list your options, and rank them. I've lived through some emergencies near you (rural north bay) and I would recommend turning on and listening to the FM & AM radio in emergencies. FM can get you stations at some distance, and there's a reasonable chance some of your local transmitters will still be up, or will be brought back up quickly. Local is fantastic for getting news that's relevant to you, at least hourly in my experience. But in the case of national/international news, AM can also help in that it can get you (especially in mornings and evenings) plenty of news stations from in and outside of California if your area is devastated. I picked up a TX/MX border station in the middle of my house one morning a couple years ago for example. If you have a shortwave radio like the PL-380 or CC Skywave, it will additionally be easy to pick up some stations like Radio New Zealand here in CA in the mornings and evenings. But be sure to practice this before the emergency. If you worry about making contact from your position, it could help to pick up an FRS radio like the Midland XT511. That way you could monitor for people on the radio and call out if needed, especially if cell towers are down. When I went through that kind of emergency up here, ham radio and FRS still worked fine, and in fact the WIN system was up and running so I was able to talk to people in Ireland, Hawaii, etc. At least in the 1990s SF had plenty of prominent targets, from what I read in books at the time. One of them (I don't remember where I read this) was the Chevron oil refinery & storage facility just off the Richmond bridge. Driving past all those oil tanks you can kind of see why. Hopefully it was just some fictive thinking though... I was also just reading a book about a POW doctor from the UK who was right in Nagasaki when the A-bomb went off there. Shortly thereafter, aboard an allied medical ship he was...probed...and announced good to go / clear of long-term effect afterward, which surprised me. The book is "A Doctor's War", pretty interesting overall.
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Cypher 4y ago
It's terrifying to see the glee in the eyes of our leaders as they take us up to the gates of hell.
- midoridensha 4y ago
  It's exactly what we deserve for choosing these leaders.
  - dmichulke 4y ago
    If I change my mind after voting for X but I can't change my vote, do I still deserve the consequences?
  - choko 4y ago
    It's not like we're allowed to choose leaders from the population at large. We are generally stuck voting for the people that run for office. Quite often, there are few choices and none of them are very good.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Not only the leaders, I'm more terrified of the amount of people on social media cheering for escalation of the war in Ukraine. Anyone mentioning anything other than "send more weapons, kill more people" gets labelled as a russian bot On reddit it's absolutely insane, 90% of commenters are cheering for ww3, asking for hits on the kremlin, preventive nuclear strikes in russia, &c. thousands upon thousands of posts calling "russians" "orcs", I feel like I'm in the lobby of an online call of duty game I used to think people were crazy, how could they slowly walk towards ww1 and ww2, now I see how it happens, deep down we're still dumb monkeys
  - rightbyte 4y ago
    Ye I got the same feeling straight from the start. I don't know where all the "war mongers" suddenly came from. Are they paid shills? In real life the amount of people I speak to that are prepared to be nuked over Ukraine border disputes is zero. Also, the discussion climate on Reddit quickly gets sick due to the downvote system and mods purging non-believers.
awslattery 4y ago
What a blast from the past seeing ki4u again. I spent hours on here as a young teen obsessed with Cold War era history.
- samwillis 4y ago
  I’m really hoping that was a subtle reference to this masterpiece with Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone and Christopher Walken: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past_(film) Christopher Walkens character was the ultimate prepper.
TekMol 4y ago
Is there any information out there, how the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine would change the war? Every news station is talking about this possibility now. But I cannot find a single analysis of how likely it is. And how likely it is seems to depend on the effect these weapons would have on the situation on the battlefield. But I cannot find any info on this.
- _kbh_ 4y ago
  > Is there any information out there, how the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine would change the war? There’s only vague assertions by the west about what will happen and that is intentional. It’s likely to lead to a heavy retaliatory strike against Russia, I believe one of the options floated was effectively sinking the entire Black Sea fleet if Russia uses a nuke. Keep in mind that any use of a nuke effectively necessitates a large reaction physically to try and avoid nuclear proliferation and use going wild.
  - epicureanideal 4y ago
    > Keep in mind that any use of a nuke effectively necessitates a large reaction physically to try and avoid nuclear proliferation and use going wild. Seems more likely that sinking their fleet would cause them to use more and bigger nukes, and/or to sink every fleet of ours within missile range.
    - _kbh_ 4y ago
      > Seems more likely that sinking their fleet would cause them to use more and bigger nukes, and/or to sink every fleet of ours within missile range. There’s no other choice, doing nothing signals to Russia that they can use nukes without repercussions and signals to the rest of the nuclear armed countries they can do the same. You also assume Russia is capable of a strike against US fleets in any decent capacity when they cannot even capture a city less then 300km from there border and lost there Black Sea flag ship to a country with no functional navy.
- mongol 4y ago
sbf501 4y ago
I went through this when I was a teenager during Reagan's first term, and my parents when through it when they were teens during Kennedy. This article tones it down to a dirty bomb, and the results closely resemble any natural disaster. Based on what I read about the 2020 fires in CA and Ore., I saw that roads were backed up, store shelves were hoarded, and infrastructure failed. And that was without contamination sticking to everything like and STI. Unless you can avoid evacuation and have done a meticulous job preparing -and- have a shelter, I don't think it is realistic to expect to survive a dirty bomb attack. I was truly, existentially scared when my Mayor announced that we should prepare for evacuation during the fires... because our freeways can't even handle rush-hour traffic. What was I supposed to do with two kids and pets and stores that were already picked clean from the pandemic? I've added more water jugs since (and a small trailer) but I have a low-level fear that no preparedness is going to work long term for something like a dirty bomb, that will eventually require relocation.
- thrown_22 4y ago
  >Unless you can avoid evacuation and have done a meticulous job preparing -and- have a shelter, I don't think it is realistic to expect to survive a dirty bomb attack. Dirty bombs are actually the least dangerous WMD. The only way to get a lethal dose is to snort the dust from the explosion for a year: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/dirtybombs.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/dirtybombs.ht...
  - sbf501 4y ago
    > The only way to get a lethal dose is to snort the dust from the explosion for a year. That's not the message I take away from that link, and in fact, based on what is describe within it, it seems rather likely if you remain in the vicinity you will be impacted over time.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  So, in case of an emergency where everyone wants to evacuate the city/populated area, your plan is to hook up a trailer? Wouldn't it make traffic worse if people did that and make it harder to maneuver? Why not just buy a small amount of rural land and just leave stuff there, like a polite prepper?
voidfunc 4y ago
1. Grab bottle of preferred liquor or wine. 2. Walk towards the bright glowing light. You (probably) don't want to live in a post-nuclear world.
- 5d8767c68926 4y ago
  The only winning move for sure. Living inside a major population center (near major military bases!) means that if bombs were really falling, I would be vaporized or fatally irritated in the opening salvo.
  - pixelpoet 4y ago
    Fatal irritation sounds absolutely excruciating, terrible way to go.
gostsamo 4y ago
Sit down, put your head between your knees, kiss your ass goodbye.
anonuser123456 4y ago
The right way to win a nuclear exchange is to use your nukes on your own population while EMP + dirty bombing your opponent. You spare your citizens the horror of what a nuclear winter + global fallout catastrophe will look like, while ensuring your enemy suffers through it.
dirtyid 4y ago
Years ago, I got randomly mailed a box of potassium iodide tablets because there was nuclear plant in the region. But in case of nuclear war, I want a suicide pill. I want several to give to others. I remember jokingly promising to be euthanasia provider for my friends who didn't want any part of the apocalypse. But if that day ever comes, I wouldn't even know how. There should be a guide out there for how to mercy off yourself and others most efficiently/painlessly/rapidly in case the world ends, but reading it will probably get one on three letter agency lists.
- Teknoman117 4y ago
  > There should be a guide out there for how to mercy off yourself and others most efficiently/painlessly/rapidly in case the world ends To be blunt, shooting yourself would seem the quickest way to end yourself. At least for those in the US, owning a firearm is quite simple. Owning "suicide pills" would seem to be far more likely to put you on someone agency's watchlist.
  - dirtyid 4y ago
    >shooting yourself TBH having a firearm in that scenario would probably entice one to behave poorly in effort to survive. Cursory research of using gun has 80-90% success rate. That said it might skew 100% in a world where emergency services stop, but those are still pretty high odds of slowly bleeding out. And ultimately, as hypothetical euthanasia executor, I don't want to mercy shoot loved ones in the head. Side note: this is morbid topic I think about every once in a while after seeing meme comparing Google vs Bing when queried "suicide methods". Google showed prevention hotline, Bing showed a table with methods and success rate. What stood out was that most popular methods were around coin flip to negligible effectiveness. Seems like it's just really hard to gracefully end someone/oneself, which is my only real anxiety in these apocalypse scenarios.
    - reducesuffering 4y ago
      There is a fairly secure, "graceful", method but I'm wary of amplifying it for obvious reasons.
Animats 4y ago
This is timely. Putin cannot afford to lose a war or to lose Russian territory. Putin is only president for life. No Russian leader has personally survived such an event, all the way back to the tsars. Faced with that history, he is more likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon than give up power.
- zeroth32 4y ago
  Yeah, we should put nuclear missiles to Ukraine, 200 miles from Moscow, that will teach him!!
- defrost 4y ago
  Putin, Putin, Putin . . . What many forget, or perhaps nver realised, is that Putin is the moderate voice of the extreme Russian nationalists. Should Putin lose his hold on power to any degree he could be usurped by anyone of several who would have absolutely used nuclear weapons three months ago already.
- hither_shores 4y ago
  > Putin cannot afford to lose a war or to lose Russian territory. Putin is only president for life. No Russian leader has personally survived such an event, all the way back to the tsars. Alexander I survived losing the wars of the third and fourth coalitions against Napoleon, Alexander II survived losing the Crimean war, Kerensky survived losing WWI, Lenin survived losing the Polish-Soviet war, Gorbachev survived losing the Soviet-Afghan war, Yeltsin survived losing the Chechen war...
alfiedotwtf 4y ago
Can NFTs solve this problem? ... I'll see myself out.
- _nhynes 4y ago
  Rust will keep us safe, right?
- emkemp 4y ago
  You misspelled "blockchain".
sbierwagen 4y ago
Funny article. Writing in the urgent present tense probably helps with virality, but I'm not sure how many people would actually 1) Print this article off without reading it and 2) In the event of a nuclear emergency remember that they had a printed copy, then sit down to read it for the first time. It mentions Geiger counters. Note that single-tube models can max out and saturate at radiation levels far below that which cause acute radiation sickness. (This was a fun contributing factor in the Chernobyl accident, "3.6 Roentgen per hour, not great, not terrible" was from reading sensitive dosimeters that were reading off-scale high, but the top of the scale was only labeled 0.001 R/s!) Dual tube models like the GQ GMC-500Plus cost much more but are more useful in the nuclear war scenario. One thing not often mentioned about nuclear war is that we might have advance warning for the first round of bombs, but we probably won't for later rounds, if SBIR satellites are targeted or if civilian communication networks are disrupted. Ballistic missile submarines have a tradeoff between stealth and communications-- a Typhoon class at minimum speed, max depth and with its trailing wire antenna retracted is hard to detect but impossible to communicate with. If it surfaces a week later then we could get another nuclear exchange out of the blue. The golden standard in long term storage food is, of course, the Mormon church. (Mormons are supposed to keep a three month supply of food.) Staple grains in big 5.5 pound cans have a claimed shelf life of 30 years. The prices are higher than they were pre-COVID, of course: https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/food-storage/home-storage-center-locations-map?lang=eng https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/food-storage... Their online store has a login wall, but there's many brick and mortar locations: https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/self-reliance/food-storage/home-storage-center-locations?lang=eng https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/self-relianc...
- dirtyid 4y ago
  This seems... bad value? Are they specifically formulated for decades of shelf life or are claims hypothetical.
  - sbierwagen 4y ago
    Some canned foods are supposed to have an "indefinite" shelf life. I would guess they're hedging their bets by just saying 30 years. I have personally eaten 20 year old rolled oats that were not sealed in a steel can, and I did not die. If you think nuclear war is going to happen this month, you don't buy prepper food. But if you want something that can hang out at the back of a pantry for decades...
NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago
Page cannot open anymore. What to do in case of nuclear disaster? What type of nuclear disaster? In case of full scale nuclear war? Nothing we will just die, if you do not have long term survival bunker that is it. The End. In all calculations of global clash everyone forget one thing, it is not nuclear weapons but that there is 450 nuclear reactors with thousands kilograms of nuclear rods far more worse than nuclear weapons combined, so just imagine 450 untended Chernobyl at the same time.
uejfiweun 4y ago
There's not going to be a nuclear war. I'm not scared in the slightest. The media seize on Putin's 'threats' as "OMG NUCLEAR WAR IMMINENT!!!!1!" but in reality a nuclear threat is a routine thing done by a nuclear armed country facing off against a more powerful nuclear armed country. It will never actually come to blows. In fact, it was the west that was making the nuclear threats towards the USSR, starting after WW2 when western forces were outnumbered 3:1 in Europe, and at least through the 70s with Nixon's madman theory. So to all those who are actually worried about a nuclear war due to the Ukraine war, I say - sleep tight. It's just the media trying to scare you to get clicks.
- Ma8ee 4y ago
  We haven't had a situation where the leader of a nuclear power is cornered like this before. And so far, he seems to double down rather than trying to deescalate the situation. I'm certainly not sleeping well at night.
  - uejfiweun 4y ago
    Honestly though, how is this situation so different? I feel that in the 1950s things were much more of a tinderbox, and we still managed to avert nuclear war then. Now it's even more remote of a possibility with the major power difference between the West and Russia, MAD, and Putin's vast wealth, none of which he would be able to spend if he is incinerated in a nuclear fireball. Literally all that Russia can do is talk trash to try and scare people into submission.
    - Ma8ee 4y ago
      I don’t think anyone in the USSR after Stalin had the same unchecked power as Putin has today, and I do think that the people in power actually cared somewhat about the Soviet Union (not necessarily about its people). There’s hard to tell if there’s any checks at all around Putin, and he only seem to care about himself. And if he thinks he’s going down it wouldn’t surprise me if he tries to take the world with him. Of course this is exactly what he wants us to fear. In the end we have no idea what actually is happening in his mind.
CTDOCodebases 4y ago
This webpage reminds of those cars you see driving around covered with signs or writings.
dmje 4y ago
"Because danger is imminent, here's a 10,000 word essay to read" Also, maybe just "pour a massive fucking drink" should be the first headline.
nix23 4y ago
Drink lots of Red Wine.
mjan22640 4y ago
Move to a non-NATO/non-Russia country sufficiently ahead of it becoming imminent.
throwawayffffas 4y ago
The site is pretty silly, in case of a dirty bomb there is probably no way to have advance warning and your best bet is to sit tight and wait. In case of a single or limited nuclear strike if you live near a target you won't have time to do anything, you will get a 5-10 minute warning all you can do is shelter and hope all the warheads are successfully intercepted. In case you live further away from a target there is no chance you can get everything you will need in the hours before the fallout reaches you while everyone else is trying to do the same, sidebar splitting up as the site suggests is terrible advice. In case of a full nuclear exchange the same applies you just can't have hope that the interceptors will work. If you really worry about a nuclear attack you have to prepare before hand, have a shelter set up and have it stocked with food and water for about 3 months, from what i have read the hard stuff breaks down in a few week and in 3 months or so you will be pretty safe to come out.
taylodl 4y ago
Nuclear warheads are incendiary weapons. The biggest danger comes from ground burst weapons (the so-called "bunker busters") due to their spreading irradiated dust everywhere. The aerial burst bombs produce a lot of heat and wind but it's short-lived. If you survive the initial blast then you'll be fine for the near term. The long-term effects will be you have an increased risk of cancer. Simply put, nuclear weapons aren't the bogeyman policymakers have made them out to be.

101 points by wwilson 4y ago

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techdragon 4y ago

A lot of this sort of information is surprisingly US centric. For instance, you might find building codes that forbid the sort of "non-exposed" room in residential housing as a health and safety issue due to ventilation or emergency exit or other reasons. My rule of thumb is simple. - Know the nearest target. - Know who might hit it with a nuke. - Check the NukeMap ( https://nukemap.org/ https://nukemap.org/ ) based on who might nuke it and what nukes they are known to have... to estimate the if you even need to care about shelter. If you're too close to the nearest target theres not much you could hope to do without shelter. If you're far enough then you wont need to care about the immediate attack either. - Missile warning will likely create havoc with transport as people without plans try to suddenly make them. So consider where you spend most of your time during a normal day, and what transport options you have with you then depending on your personal level of paranoia make a decision about the best shelter options based on two things, travel time and level of protection. You should travel for better shelter, but not risk traveling far given the uncertainty of the situation. Just having a basic background understanding of what the suitable shelter would be in your life and this becomes more like knowing where you could hide from sudden rain without an umbrella on a walk down the street. - Shelter will depend a lot on your local environment, just keep the basic principles of radiation protection in mind. 1st is Distance, 2nd is Mass. If you cant get distance from the radiation source, put mass between you and it. Given that fallout will be dropping from the sky as heavier than air dust, you want to primarily find anything to give you protection against it being blown closer to you horizontally, and maximum distance from whatever roof is over your head. If neither of these are particularly available, prioritise the horizontal wind blown dust, settle for whatever concrete slab building you can find that would afford you some measure of protection from dust blowing in even if the windows and doors were damaged. - Think of it as extreme, unusual, but also unlikely, weather event. You don't want to get "wet" from the dry rain of fallout dust, you also want to be as far away from it as you can, and don't want it getting tracked/blown inside.

greenn 4y ago
Did you mean to link to https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ ?
- 2ICofafireteam 4y ago
  Cool and depressing. I had a preview of this feeling in the 1990's: I went to a Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NERT) office at a base in Canada to pick up some radio equipment. They had a wall map in there showing the base as ground zero with concentric circles covering most of the surrounding area and each ring had notes scribbled in them. I took a quick look and didn't know what the notes meant, but my apartment was well within the annotated area....damn.
- techdragon 4y ago
  I did indeed, I shortened https://nukemap.org/nukemap/ https://nukemap.org/nukemap/ to just https://nukemap.org/ https://nukemap.org/ and unfortunately its now too late to edit my original post.

chasil 4y ago

I don't want to read this. My memory encapsulates this, before I was born: "The most important things in this war are the machines... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war." https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balance-in-soviet-fight-against-nazi-germany/30599486.html https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc... My country sustained, and I believe it will sustain again, those who are in need. It is a dream I have.

mathieuh 4y ago
Countries don't do anything, people do. Recently I've been thinking a lot about people in so-called hostile countries, and the conclusion I arrived at is that the vast majority of those people are leading broadly similar lives to us in the West. They face similar struggles and yearn for similar things. This idea of us vs them and the proliferation of nationalism doesn't sit right with me. I look at the things the people in charge of the country whose nationality I possess (UK) does and I am aghast at the idea that people around the world would associate them with me. I'm sure there are many people in Russia and China etc. who feel similar.
- watwut 4y ago
  > and the conclusion I arrived at is that the vast majority of those people are leading broadly similar lives to us in the West. Did you found that solution after actually reading up about lives, opinions or attitudes of those people or you just imagined everything being the same (and uncertainty surrounding those)? I do not mean it in the sense of being being bad or good, but in a sense that a lot is quite a lot different in many important ways.
  - nicbou 4y ago
    If you travel a bit, it's hard to ignore the similarities. Teenagers in particular are hilariously similar no matter where you go.
- jemmyw 4y ago

hulitu 4y ago

Put a white bedsheet on your head and head slowly, to your local cemetery.

mradek 4y ago

I live pretty close to a US Navy base, and its common for me to hear and see formations of military helicopters like Ospreys, sometimes fighter jets, cargo planes, etc. I swear that I hear them more often than I used to say 4 years ago (before COVID). It is kind of scary to think about these kinds of scenarios, like if something bad happens what the hell will I do if I happen to survive? All I have are my parents who live far away, no kids or wife, not a lot of close friends here. I'm also moving pretty soon to near SF, which I hope isn't a target in such a war. I guess it is good that I've been working out. If I survive, I plan on staying alive as long as I can on my own. Damn I don't want to think about this because I don't want to die like that. Maybe all my time sunk into playing solo DayZ back in the day and surviving against Russians, Chinese, and other players who I didn't understand working together will help, heh. FFS.

themodelplumber 4y ago
Tough to think about. Being single and ideally relatively mobile I'd guess you'd be good to cover at least 10 miles a day which would be significant in the bay area considering the hills nearby. You'd just need to know where to go. Which, the big locations these days will be schools, especially high schools. It's a good idea to know the location of your nearest city hall and high school. From there the goal will be to collect information, list your options, and rank them. I've lived through some emergencies near you (rural north bay) and I would recommend turning on and listening to the FM & AM radio in emergencies. FM can get you stations at some distance, and there's a reasonable chance some of your local transmitters will still be up, or will be brought back up quickly. Local is fantastic for getting news that's relevant to you, at least hourly in my experience. But in the case of national/international news, AM can also help in that it can get you (especially in mornings and evenings) plenty of news stations from in and outside of California if your area is devastated. I picked up a TX/MX border station in the middle of my house one morning a couple years ago for example. If you have a shortwave radio like the PL-380 or CC Skywave, it will additionally be easy to pick up some stations like Radio New Zealand here in CA in the mornings and evenings. But be sure to practice this before the emergency. If you worry about making contact from your position, it could help to pick up an FRS radio like the Midland XT511. That way you could monitor for people on the radio and call out if needed, especially if cell towers are down. When I went through that kind of emergency up here, ham radio and FRS still worked fine, and in fact the WIN system was up and running so I was able to talk to people in Ireland, Hawaii, etc. At least in the 1990s SF had plenty of prominent targets, from what I read in books at the time. One of them (I don't remember where I read this) was the Chevron oil refinery & storage facility just off the Richmond bridge. Driving past all those oil tanks you can kind of see why. Hopefully it was just some fictive thinking though... I was also just reading a book about a POW doctor from the UK who was right in Nagasaki when the A-bomb went off there. Shortly thereafter, aboard an allied medical ship he was...probed...and announced good to go / clear of long-term effect afterward, which surprised me. The book is "A Doctor's War", pretty interesting overall.

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Cypher 4y ago

It's terrifying to see the glee in the eyes of our leaders as they take us up to the gates of hell.

midoridensha 4y ago
It's exactly what we deserve for choosing these leaders.
- dmichulke 4y ago
  If I change my mind after voting for X but I can't change my vote, do I still deserve the consequences?
- choko 4y ago
  It's not like we're allowed to choose leaders from the population at large. We are generally stuck voting for the people that run for office. Quite often, there are few choices and none of them are very good.
lm28469 4y ago
Not only the leaders, I'm more terrified of the amount of people on social media cheering for escalation of the war in Ukraine. Anyone mentioning anything other than "send more weapons, kill more people" gets labelled as a russian bot On reddit it's absolutely insane, 90% of commenters are cheering for ww3, asking for hits on the kremlin, preventive nuclear strikes in russia, &c. thousands upon thousands of posts calling "russians" "orcs", I feel like I'm in the lobby of an online call of duty game I used to think people were crazy, how could they slowly walk towards ww1 and ww2, now I see how it happens, deep down we're still dumb monkeys
- rightbyte 4y ago
  Ye I got the same feeling straight from the start. I don't know where all the "war mongers" suddenly came from. Are they paid shills? In real life the amount of people I speak to that are prepared to be nuked over Ukraine border disputes is zero. Also, the discussion climate on Reddit quickly gets sick due to the downvote system and mods purging non-believers.

awslattery 4y ago

What a blast from the past seeing ki4u again. I spent hours on here as a young teen obsessed with Cold War era history.

samwillis 4y ago
I’m really hoping that was a subtle reference to this masterpiece with Brendan Fraser, Alicia Silverstone and Christopher Walken: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past_(film) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blast_from_the_Past_(film) Christopher Walkens character was the ultimate prepper.

TekMol 4y ago

Is there any information out there, how the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine would change the war? Every news station is talking about this possibility now. But I cannot find a single analysis of how likely it is. And how likely it is seems to depend on the effect these weapons would have on the situation on the battlefield. But I cannot find any info on this.

_kbh_ 4y ago
> Is there any information out there, how the use of tactical nuclear weapons by Russia against Ukraine would change the war? There’s only vague assertions by the west about what will happen and that is intentional. It’s likely to lead to a heavy retaliatory strike against Russia, I believe one of the options floated was effectively sinking the entire Black Sea fleet if Russia uses a nuke. Keep in mind that any use of a nuke effectively necessitates a large reaction physically to try and avoid nuclear proliferation and use going wild.
- epicureanideal 4y ago
  > Keep in mind that any use of a nuke effectively necessitates a large reaction physically to try and avoid nuclear proliferation and use going wild. Seems more likely that sinking their fleet would cause them to use more and bigger nukes, and/or to sink every fleet of ours within missile range.
  - _kbh_ 4y ago
    > Seems more likely that sinking their fleet would cause them to use more and bigger nukes, and/or to sink every fleet of ours within missile range. There’s no other choice, doing nothing signals to Russia that they can use nukes without repercussions and signals to the rest of the nuclear armed countries they can do the same. You also assume Russia is capable of a strike against US fleets in any decent capacity when they cannot even capture a city less then 300km from there border and lost there Black Sea flag ship to a country with no functional navy.
mongol 4y ago

sbf501 4y ago

I went through this when I was a teenager during Reagan's first term, and my parents when through it when they were teens during Kennedy. This article tones it down to a dirty bomb, and the results closely resemble any natural disaster. Based on what I read about the 2020 fires in CA and Ore., I saw that roads were backed up, store shelves were hoarded, and infrastructure failed. And that was without contamination sticking to everything like and STI. Unless you can avoid evacuation and have done a meticulous job preparing -and- have a shelter, I don't think it is realistic to expect to survive a dirty bomb attack. I was truly, existentially scared when my Mayor announced that we should prepare for evacuation during the fires... because our freeways can't even handle rush-hour traffic. What was I supposed to do with two kids and pets and stores that were already picked clean from the pandemic? I've added more water jugs since (and a small trailer) but I have a low-level fear that no preparedness is going to work long term for something like a dirty bomb, that will eventually require relocation.

thrown_22 4y ago
>Unless you can avoid evacuation and have done a meticulous job preparing -and- have a shelter, I don't think it is realistic to expect to survive a dirty bomb attack. Dirty bombs are actually the least dangerous WMD. The only way to get a lethal dose is to snort the dust from the explosion for a year: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/dirtybombs.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/dirtybombs.ht...
- sbf501 4y ago
  > The only way to get a lethal dose is to snort the dust from the explosion for a year. That's not the message I take away from that link, and in fact, based on what is describe within it, it seems rather likely if you remain in the vicinity you will be impacted over time.
HWR_14 4y ago
So, in case of an emergency where everyone wants to evacuate the city/populated area, your plan is to hook up a trailer? Wouldn't it make traffic worse if people did that and make it harder to maneuver? Why not just buy a small amount of rural land and just leave stuff there, like a polite prepper?

voidfunc 4y ago

1. Grab bottle of preferred liquor or wine. 2. Walk towards the bright glowing light. You (probably) don't want to live in a post-nuclear world.

5d8767c68926 4y ago
The only winning move for sure. Living inside a major population center (near major military bases!) means that if bombs were really falling, I would be vaporized or fatally irritated in the opening salvo.
- pixelpoet 4y ago
  Fatal irritation sounds absolutely excruciating, terrible way to go.

gostsamo 4y ago

Sit down, put your head between your knees, kiss your ass goodbye.

anonuser123456 4y ago

The right way to win a nuclear exchange is to use your nukes on your own population while EMP + dirty bombing your opponent. You spare your citizens the horror of what a nuclear winter + global fallout catastrophe will look like, while ensuring your enemy suffers through it.

dirtyid 4y ago

Years ago, I got randomly mailed a box of potassium iodide tablets because there was nuclear plant in the region. But in case of nuclear war, I want a suicide pill. I want several to give to others. I remember jokingly promising to be euthanasia provider for my friends who didn't want any part of the apocalypse. But if that day ever comes, I wouldn't even know how. There should be a guide out there for how to mercy off yourself and others most efficiently/painlessly/rapidly in case the world ends, but reading it will probably get one on three letter agency lists.

Teknoman117 4y ago
> There should be a guide out there for how to mercy off yourself and others most efficiently/painlessly/rapidly in case the world ends To be blunt, shooting yourself would seem the quickest way to end yourself. At least for those in the US, owning a firearm is quite simple. Owning "suicide pills" would seem to be far more likely to put you on someone agency's watchlist.
- dirtyid 4y ago
  >shooting yourself TBH having a firearm in that scenario would probably entice one to behave poorly in effort to survive. Cursory research of using gun has 80-90% success rate. That said it might skew 100% in a world where emergency services stop, but those are still pretty high odds of slowly bleeding out. And ultimately, as hypothetical euthanasia executor, I don't want to mercy shoot loved ones in the head. Side note: this is morbid topic I think about every once in a while after seeing meme comparing Google vs Bing when queried "suicide methods". Google showed prevention hotline, Bing showed a table with methods and success rate. What stood out was that most popular methods were around coin flip to negligible effectiveness. Seems like it's just really hard to gracefully end someone/oneself, which is my only real anxiety in these apocalypse scenarios.
  - reducesuffering 4y ago
    There is a fairly secure, "graceful", method but I'm wary of amplifying it for obvious reasons.

Animats 4y ago

This is timely. Putin cannot afford to lose a war or to lose Russian territory. Putin is only president for life. No Russian leader has personally survived such an event, all the way back to the tsars. Faced with that history, he is more likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon than give up power.

zeroth32 4y ago
Yeah, we should put nuclear missiles to Ukraine, 200 miles from Moscow, that will teach him!!
defrost 4y ago
Putin, Putin, Putin . . . What many forget, or perhaps nver realised, is that Putin is the moderate voice of the extreme Russian nationalists. Should Putin lose his hold on power to any degree he could be usurped by anyone of several who would have absolutely used nuclear weapons three months ago already.
hither_shores 4y ago
> Putin cannot afford to lose a war or to lose Russian territory. Putin is only president for life. No Russian leader has personally survived such an event, all the way back to the tsars. Alexander I survived losing the wars of the third and fourth coalitions against Napoleon, Alexander II survived losing the Crimean war, Kerensky survived losing WWI, Lenin survived losing the Polish-Soviet war, Gorbachev survived losing the Soviet-Afghan war, Yeltsin survived losing the Chechen war...

alfiedotwtf 4y ago

Can NFTs solve this problem? ... I'll see myself out.

_nhynes 4y ago
Rust will keep us safe, right?
emkemp 4y ago
You misspelled "blockchain".

sbierwagen 4y ago

Funny article. Writing in the urgent present tense probably helps with virality, but I'm not sure how many people would actually 1) Print this article off without reading it and 2) In the event of a nuclear emergency remember that they had a printed copy, then sit down to read it for the first time. It mentions Geiger counters. Note that single-tube models can max out and saturate at radiation levels far below that which cause acute radiation sickness. (This was a fun contributing factor in the Chernobyl accident, "3.6 Roentgen per hour, not great, not terrible" was from reading sensitive dosimeters that were reading off-scale high, but the top of the scale was only labeled 0.001 R/s!) Dual tube models like the GQ GMC-500Plus cost much more but are more useful in the nuclear war scenario. One thing not often mentioned about nuclear war is that we might have advance warning for the first round of bombs, but we probably won't for later rounds, if SBIR satellites are targeted or if civilian communication networks are disrupted. Ballistic missile submarines have a tradeoff between stealth and communications-- a Typhoon class at minimum speed, max depth and with its trailing wire antenna retracted is hard to detect but impossible to communicate with. If it surfaces a week later then we could get another nuclear exchange out of the blue. The golden standard in long term storage food is, of course, the Mormon church. (Mormons are supposed to keep a three month supply of food.) Staple grains in big 5.5 pound cans have a claimed shelf life of 30 years. The prices are higher than they were pre-COVID, of course: https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/food-storage/home-storage-center-locations-map?lang=eng https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/food-storage... Their online store has a login wall, but there's many brick and mortar locations: https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/self-reliance/food-storage/home-storage-center-locations?lang=eng https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/self-relianc...

dirtyid 4y ago
This seems... bad value? Are they specifically formulated for decades of shelf life or are claims hypothetical.
- sbierwagen 4y ago
  Some canned foods are supposed to have an "indefinite" shelf life. I would guess they're hedging their bets by just saying 30 years. I have personally eaten 20 year old rolled oats that were not sealed in a steel can, and I did not die. If you think nuclear war is going to happen this month, you don't buy prepper food. But if you want something that can hang out at the back of a pantry for decades...

NiceWayToDoIT 4y ago

Page cannot open anymore. What to do in case of nuclear disaster? What type of nuclear disaster? In case of full scale nuclear war? Nothing we will just die, if you do not have long term survival bunker that is it. The End. In all calculations of global clash everyone forget one thing, it is not nuclear weapons but that there is 450 nuclear reactors with thousands kilograms of nuclear rods far more worse than nuclear weapons combined, so just imagine 450 untended Chernobyl at the same time.

uejfiweun 4y ago

There's not going to be a nuclear war. I'm not scared in the slightest. The media seize on Putin's 'threats' as "OMG NUCLEAR WAR IMMINENT!!!!1!" but in reality a nuclear threat is a routine thing done by a nuclear armed country facing off against a more powerful nuclear armed country. It will never actually come to blows. In fact, it was the west that was making the nuclear threats towards the USSR, starting after WW2 when western forces were outnumbered 3:1 in Europe, and at least through the 70s with Nixon's madman theory. So to all those who are actually worried about a nuclear war due to the Ukraine war, I say - sleep tight. It's just the media trying to scare you to get clicks.

Ma8ee 4y ago
We haven't had a situation where the leader of a nuclear power is cornered like this before. And so far, he seems to double down rather than trying to deescalate the situation. I'm certainly not sleeping well at night.
- uejfiweun 4y ago
  Honestly though, how is this situation so different? I feel that in the 1950s things were much more of a tinderbox, and we still managed to avert nuclear war then. Now it's even more remote of a possibility with the major power difference between the West and Russia, MAD, and Putin's vast wealth, none of which he would be able to spend if he is incinerated in a nuclear fireball. Literally all that Russia can do is talk trash to try and scare people into submission.
  - Ma8ee 4y ago
    I don’t think anyone in the USSR after Stalin had the same unchecked power as Putin has today, and I do think that the people in power actually cared somewhat about the Soviet Union (not necessarily about its people). There’s hard to tell if there’s any checks at all around Putin, and he only seem to care about himself. And if he thinks he’s going down it wouldn’t surprise me if he tries to take the world with him. Of course this is exactly what he wants us to fear. In the end we have no idea what actually is happening in his mind.

CTDOCodebases 4y ago

This webpage reminds of those cars you see driving around covered with signs or writings.

dmje 4y ago

"Because danger is imminent, here's a 10,000 word essay to read" Also, maybe just "pour a massive fucking drink" should be the first headline.

nix23 4y ago

Drink lots of Red Wine.

mjan22640 4y ago

Move to a non-NATO/non-Russia country sufficiently ahead of it becoming imminent.

throwawayffffas 4y ago

The site is pretty silly, in case of a dirty bomb there is probably no way to have advance warning and your best bet is to sit tight and wait. In case of a single or limited nuclear strike if you live near a target you won't have time to do anything, you will get a 5-10 minute warning all you can do is shelter and hope all the warheads are successfully intercepted. In case you live further away from a target there is no chance you can get everything you will need in the hours before the fallout reaches you while everyone else is trying to do the same, sidebar splitting up as the site suggests is terrible advice. In case of a full nuclear exchange the same applies you just can't have hope that the interceptors will work. If you really worry about a nuclear attack you have to prepare before hand, have a shelter set up and have it stocked with food and water for about 3 months, from what i have read the hard stuff breaks down in a few week and in 3 months or so you will be pretty safe to come out.

taylodl 4y ago

Nuclear warheads are incendiary weapons. The biggest danger comes from ground burst weapons (the so-called "bunker busters") due to their spreading irradiated dust everywhere. The aerial burst bombs produce a lot of heat and wind but it's short-lived. If you survive the initial blast then you'll be fine for the near term. The long-term effects will be you have an increased risk of cancer. Simply put, nuclear weapons aren't the bogeyman policymakers have made them out to be.