If a nuclear bomb explodes nearby, never get in a car | Hacker News Reader

If a nuclear bomb explodes nearby, never get in a car

businessinsider.com

23 pointsdiminish14 comments

I would add that if a car is your only option and if it still runs, you actually should get in it before the wind brings any fallout. Most modern cars have some air filtration. It's not as good as a HEPA filter, but it's better than nothing and might get you to a nearby building faster. Unlike in the movies, the EMP won't likely harm the cars computer.

It seems like the article claims it's unlikely that you could outrun the wind-borne fallout.

There are many factors in this, such as proximity to the blast, elevation of the nuke, surface shape and soil/sand content, wind direction, ambient temp, humidity levels, your age, your pre-existing health condition.

There are way too many factors to generalize any proper response. If you are too close to the blast for the filtration in a car to be of use, you will probably be in a state of shock anyway, so just get in, drive away, go to the closest convenience store, help yourself to water, food, etc and drive away as fast as you can. Otherwise, if you are in a busy city, ya, yer pretty much out of luck.

Oh and this is just a guess, but save up on bottle caps.

If you are not already in a building then getting there by a car can be considerably faster.

If the dust lands on your car though you are out of luck.

See the move "Command and Control' on Netflix this week. They point out that the Nuke in the video, if it had exploded in DC would have killed everyone up to Philadelpha, half of NYC, and some people in Boston. That was a U.S. Nuke on U.S. soil, part of one of over 1000 Nuke-related accidents so far...

If you survive a Nuke explosion you can see then you can assume you will starve. Nobody is going to truck food in any quantity anywhere near you anytime soon.

A single modern Nuke explosion in any populated center anywhere on the earth is going to change EVERYTHING about how you live.

That is not even remotely true. A 5 megaton nuke in DC - about the upper limit of modern active-duty warheads - wouldn't directly injure anyone in Baltimore, never mind Philadelphia. If the wind was blowing the wrong way, Philadelphia might get some fallout. But that would take many hours to arrive, there'd be plenty of time to evacuate or take shelter. And even a lot of fallout wouldn't come close to killing everyone in the city.

Alex Wellerstein made an awesome map, where you can "nuke" any city with any size bomb and see all the effects: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Did you watch the movie? I'm simply quoting the analysis. They modeled their results by taking the actual plume from a test blast of similar size and overlaying it on the U.S. mainland. So they are working from recorded data, not a model.

Wellerstein does not model a lot of the effects in Nukemap, as he admits.

The fallout issue depends on the height of the blast, the material attacked, etc. A ground blast lofts huge amounts of radioactive material into the upper atmosphere. Depending on the firestorm to follow there is yet another source of uplift.

Low background steel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-background_steel) is highly valued because it is not contaminated by nuclear tests which affect all post-war, pre-1963 manufacture.

Chernoble affected Europe in detectable amounts and it wasn't even a warhead.

Just yesterday I read an article (http://investmentwatchblog.com/a-nuclear-spent-fuel-fire-at-...) pointing out that a fire in the spent fuel storage in Pennsylvania would affect millions (http://scienceandglobalsecurity.org/archive/sgs24vonhippel.p...). And that's just a fire, not a Nuke. If the Nuke hit a spent fuel pool things would get ugly fast.

I admit it might not kill everyone. But it would certainly ruin their morning coffee.

NYC? Boston? Likely hyperbole.

That said, and you address this indirectly, it's a sad state of affairs when the threat of random nuclear discharge (?) is normalized and as a matter of fact-ly consider inevidible.

"What did you do this weekend Bob?" "Well, painted the kid's bedroom, and took the car to the car wash to clean off the fallout from last week's blast. Thankful, it wasn't as bad as the Blast of 2019..."

Things happen for a reason. And sometimes that reason is because of a lack of imagination otherwise.

I think the information from "Protect and Survive" (an old UK civil defense pamphlet) is still relevant in scenarios like this. It recommends building an "inner refuge" - a sort of fort of dense objects (cans, suitcases, etc) around yourself in an inner room of your home or basement to attenuate gamma radiation. The advice is based on experiments carried out in the 1960s:

http://www.atomica.co.uk/main.htm

I suppose building an "inner refuge" gives you something to do in the roughly half hour between an ICBM launch and its arrival on target.

Pretty worrying that this article even needed to be written. In a scenario where a nuclear bomb has detonated it is rather likely many more will as well. I hope we aren't in a scenario where this becomes likely.

Also, if I'm sat home during a one-off detonation; what good is waiting for that nuclear material to rain down on my house?

Afaik after the explosion no nearby car would run, and the advice to 'tune in a radio' seems futile as the EMP would zorch the modern electronics in either device.

BTW if you want real nightmare stuff, google the casualty rates after 1 year from the EMP of a nuke detonated high above the United States.

Thanks for the nightmares.

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