this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
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yes, you too can live out the remainder of your miserable days scrambling for rat meat in the irradiated future.
of course, the desire to live, to survive, overcomes a lot, but 'want to live' I think is stretching it a bit.
I've worked briefly with civil defense stuff and got to visit and learn a whole bunch about bunkers. That cemented my "take out the long chair, open my best bottle, put on some shades, and enjoy the brief light show" approach to a hypothetical nuclear alert.
How long should the long chair be?
I suspect what they're getting at is: there are a lot of scenarios other than "all out exchange between major powers", and when the fallout starts floating, you can either just hang out at home (and die of cancer in a year or two), or shelter in a basement for a week (and emerge to a troubled but liveable world.)
give this a read sometime. https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/748264/nuclear-war-by-annie-jacobsen/
I don't think anyone's going to hold up for a week then find the world very livable. even the areas not eradicated by direct strikes will suffer terribly from the food shortages and collapsing societies.
I'm familiar with the extinction event scenarios, and agree that in some cases one may not find the world worth living in. I recommend Krepinevich's "7 Deadly Scenarios", a couple of those involve nuclear attacks. The sitations are comparable to the recent Covid pandemic: millions of people die, the world is subsequently scarred, but life goes on for most people. A bit of planning can make things less horrible and a lot of it overlaps with natural disaster.
I think you may misunderstand. <edit or I'm misreading your replies>
Jacob's book covers an all in exchange. everyone goes max. very little in the northern hemisphere would survive. a bit of planning, all the planning in the world - neither will save you when each side is maximizing the amount of fallout with ground strikes with megaton weapons.
the 'lucky' folk in the southern hemisphere will just have to wait until the after effects catch up to them.
Jacob's scenario is megadeaths to gigadeaths - literally a billion dead directly (flash/blast/etc) and multiple billions dead shortly after. Krepinevich's scenario is a few terrorists with tactical weapons.
these are wildly different things.
<edit I don't think you're meaning to downplay the seriousness of any kind of major nuclear exchange, but just underestimating how seriously civilization ending it is>
Yeah, I suspect we basically agree on things. I grew up with Threads and The Day After, and later I read up on nuclear winter and EMPs so I realize that human extinction is a very real possibility.
But apart from that, the question is: how to prepare for the "less than extinction" scenarios, the sort of thing that Krepinevich and ready.gov discuss.