My plan for a total exchange is to be under the hypocenter of the first blast. I don’t even want to be aware that humanity is finished, never mind try to scrape by with Mad Max.
Also, hungry humans will have bullets. It's America.
I was just highlighting the point that some people are exceptionally over prepared for just about any scenario, not trying to argue the merits or morality of it.
My original point was only to highlight that certain people really are almost hilariously over prepared for just about any eventuality, and any assumptions made should probably take this into account. I wasn't suggesting they were right, or wrong.
I told him my plan was to go in the flash.
I have no desire to die, certainly not in nuclear holocaust. I also don't think anyone really knows how best to survive or even prepare for such a world. "I'll go in the flash" is really just my way of saying that doesn't enter into my decision to live in a populated area or own an RV.
We don't really know what the world would look like if the bombs did drop so I don't go out of my way to avoid such a world by not surviving the first moments. I would rather avoid it by stabilizing the geopolitical landscape. That's probably going to take more than a Thursday though.
Having said all this just prepare like you would for anything else. We're much more likely to face hurricanes, earthquakes or volcanic eruptions anyway. If we look at those environments the world post-WWIII may not be so bad actually. Sure our iPhones probably wont work and the cancer rate will be high but that doesn't mean it will go full mad-max either. We have human civilization because that's our natural state, I think there is reason to be optimistic even in the face of nuclear annihilation.
One's life could still be made quite miserable by even a mid-size disaster, yet so many people are unprepared, sometimes even proudly and deliberately so.
NATO's provocation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
Soviet response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RYAN
We were rather morbid kids and I think our leading child-theory was that they made us do that so that it would be easier to count the bodies.
This would have been in the sixties. I'd later go to a boarding school that was really remote, and they didn't make us do the exercise. In hindsight, getting under the desk while being that far from any likely blast might actually have afforded us some protection from falling debris.
(Also, for nuclear bombs specifically, hiding under the desks keeps kids out of view of windows, and hence not vulnerable to being blinded/burned by a flash.)
Like the saying goes, "almost doesn't count except horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear warheads."
But most schools aren't, and they aren't going to roll out those procedures unevenly.
Growing up through the Cold War was definitely interesting. It's probably a hell of a thing growing up under the constant reminder that, at any second, we'd be gone and probably wouldn't even know it. I don't know any different though. It certainly puts the small stuff into perspective. Thankfully the Cold War was anticlimactic!
Yet, I don't think it really bothered us. I'm not a psychologist but I know that children still laugh, play, and sing while they are in a war zone. We were not in a war zone, obviously. But, we were pretty normal children and did pretty normal children things. We were just aware that we'd all die if they dropped bombs or missiles on us.
There's probably an actual psychological term for it, but I don't know it. Children are remarkably resilient. Other than the drills, the PSAs, and the silly educational videos they made us watch, we weren't that concerned. We were kids, it's not like we had the power to change anything.
I'm pretty sure there's a psych term for it.