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Comment by gdubs | Hacker News Reader

It’s interesting how people (anecdotally) don’t seem to have any plan for a nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire.

I think there’s a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do.

According to what I’ve read on the gov sites, it’s very survivable for a lot of people if you take key steps: surround yourself with as much building as you can (the middle floor of a high rise, or a basement three stories deep, etc.) Shower and dispose of any clothing that may be contaminated. Wait out the initial 24 to 48 hours until you’ve gotten official instructions (a hand crank radio is good to have.)

Generally, having a first aid kit, water, and food, is common sense for any potential outage of the infrastructure.

Sucks to consider the possibility, but worth having a conversation.

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I think many people consider nuclear war an end of the world event. Working hard to survive just to be left adrift in the ashes of civilization with likely long-term health effects seems counterproductive to some of us.

The US/Russia/France have already detonated thousands of full power nuclear weapons all across the globe, primarily for testing. Although major cities would be ash, with millions lost in the senseless conflict, life would go on. You'd likely only have health problems if you had acute exposure to the blast. If you live somewhere irrelivant, radiation exposure won't be much more of a concern than it already is currently; whatever enviromemtal impacts nuclear weapons have, have already taken place.

Though the standard of living for survivors is sure to plummet, as famine and other secondary problems start to take precedence.

End of the world? No. Set back industrialized society two centuries? Sure.

Why two centuries? Most areas of the world are extremely unlikely to be involved in a nuclear conflict and/or receive significant damage.

Two centuries is somewhat arbitrary, because there are so many assumptions in the notion of "large scale nuclear conflict" as is. Areas that aren't direct targets of nuclear weaponry will still suffer major setbacks, as supply chains for various goods and resources are disrupted. Present day problems, like hunger, access to medical care, and safe drinking water would just become magnified. For example, a nuclear conflict could potentially cascade into a much more dangerous famine, because supply for modern pesticides and agro-chemicals is temporarily destroyed. Supply chains for antibiotics could be disrupted, resulting in outbreaks of various preventable illnesses. If you total all the possibilities up, I suspect the secondary impacts of nuclear conflict would be worse than the actual warfare.

If oil production is destroyed, I assume the secondary impacts will be catastrophic.

Estimates of the loss of life in just Russia and China in the first 6 months after a nuclear exchange: 380 million. Source: RAND (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/01/18/daniel-ellsberg-n...).

"Moscow alone was targeted with at least eighty nuclear weapons, and every Russian city with a population greater than 25,000 would be hit by at least one."

And that was the December 1960 plan.

There was a great article which I can't find now about all the missiles still pointing from the US to Russia and vice versa, where after the fall of the Soviet Union a General formerly in charge of the Soviet arsenal met his British counterpart and assured him that in the Soviet nuclear war preparedness plans, the entire UK was a complete overkill zone.

Two centuries ago some of us would have been slaves. I’m not entirely sure I would want to live through that setback.

A reasonable point, but it's sad that people consider surviving a nuclear war a more practical endeavor than altering the political direction of the country. Admittedly they are somewhat orthogonal, but I'm trying to highlight the problem of equating war with natural disasters as opposed to something over which we have any sort of political control.

According to game theory, the easiest way to win a game of Chicken is to tear off your steering column and wave it out your window.

In other words, preparing for nuclear war instead of preventing a nuclear war is how you win small battles, like where to put an embassy or whether foreign countries will respect your patents.

> surround yourself with as much building as you can (the middle floor of a high rise, or a basement three stories deep, etc.)

Why would the middle floor of a high rise be better than its ground floor?

Here’s one source: https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/20130726-1622-20490-...

The idea is to get away from an area where particles can collect (like the ground). They seem to be saying that you wouldn’t want to choose a floor with a balcony, for instance.

Fires and earthquakes are orders of magnitude more probable than nuclear attacks.

I thought Nate Silver had a good take this week, which was basically that Nuclear Weapons have not been around long enough for us to draw statistical conclusions.

He continued that even if the odds were small, like a 1% chance a year, it would very much be worth being prepared for.

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