Nuclear War Survival Skills (1987) [pdf]
oism.org
oism.org
But this is not the kind of book you're going to be able to use in a crisis. The appendixes contain how-tos for:
1. building a fallout shelter
2. building a ventilation device for the shelter
3. building a dosimeter
The problem is that these instructions are mixed with commentary. Lots of it. There are half a dozen or so types of shelter you can build. Which one do you build? Go figure. What should be simple recipes are ordeals in concentration. I can only imagine the kinds of heated conversations that would take place should this guide be pulled out and used in anger as the hand crank radio crackles with terrifying reports of unthinkable events.
What the book has going for it is field testing. The methods described were tried out on regular folk who were paid to participate and paid bonuses for certain milestones. The author claims good results.
Apparently this was all done as part of a federally-sponsored program that no politician wanted to see become public policy.
One of the most useful parts of the book is a prediction of fallout zones across the US. The author notes that even at the time of publication, this was 10 years old. Imagine a map of the US with greyscale clouds running left/right. Darker means more potential for fallout. Really hard to do given uncertainties, but maybe valuable for big-picture planning. I'm not aware of a more modern map.
The real trick is not starving after.
If a bomb goes off, don't look at the blast, go to an area in your house without windows and little air access, close the doors and wait there for 24 hours.
Ideally, it's a closed basement surrounded by ground and concrete. If not, maybe a bathroom wine cellar, etc. the idea is to isolate yourself from the surrounding radiation in the air.
Hopefully, you have a shortwave radio with fresh batteries or one you can hand crank. Because cellphones and access to information will be limited, the shortwave radio is important because ideally, city officials will be broadcasting where to avoid going outside and safety instructions.
Don't go outside within the first 24 hours, as small radiation particles will fall on you and cause serious health issues.
If you do go outside get rid of all your clothes and take a shower, don't use conditioner which binds radioactive material to your body.
They say that after 24 hours, radiation levels should drop off significantly, since the winds will hopefully blow them away. But that's why a shortwave radio is important to have, so you know which directions of the city are getting the radiation.
Underground parking garages. The goal is to have lots of mass between you and the glowing stuff and a concrete monolith does that. All those 90-degree corners in the structure will then mitigate any blast damage without risk of being trapped behind any door. Just like an earthquake, you want to be far away from glass. A wet climate is also better as rain will wash the fallout out to sea. And not too cold. Fallout and snow is a bad combination. Just look at how dirty streets become when the snow melts. That's where the fallout will concentrate. So the best place to be on the day is probably a parking structure in a non-targeted city somewhere the pacific northwest.
As would be a faraday cage/box/bag to keep the radio in until it is needed. An electromagnetic pulse would render the electronics inside a modern radio useless.
Underground shelter should ideally have one meter of soil between occupants and all surface area that could contain fallout. Air should ideally be filtered, water should definitely be.
You have around 30 minutes after the blast before fallout hits the ground. Rain accelerates this. You can use the prevailing wind direction to judge whether you are downwind of a detonation. Ground detonations produce fallout, air detonations hardly do.
Lethal effects from a detonation is the initial, instantaneous flash, then pressure wave and explosive debris/structural failure that accompanies it, then radiation from fallout and radiation from ingested radioactive material.
This is a quick recap after reading this book some years ago.
"Try to maintain a distance of at least six feet between yourself and people who are not part of your household. If possible, wear a mask if you’re sheltering with people who are not a part of your household. Children under two years old, people who have trouble breathing, and those who are unable to remove masks on their own should not wear them."
Contracting COVID is the last thing you want during WW3.
For nuclear and other hazards see chapter 23/page 358 (Survival In Man-Made Hazards)
Also, make no mistake, his inner circle is full of people who know how to calculate risks and will betray their colleagues in a blink. Putin might be cornered but a collective suicide is not exactly the dream of people around him.
Brains, meanwhile, are highly plastic. Emotion, impulse, greed, fear - these are universal human drives. Now attach them to ever growing control over resources, power, to see your will be done, to cheat and get away with it, but only if you keep escalating... How could this possibly end with Putin backing down?
My belief: Putin will order a launch. This will result in either nuclear war, if his proxies are loyal to him, or his immediate loss of power, if his proxies are not.
As long as the nuclear bully refrains from this behavior, it's all good. Once he starts it though, we're in a new era of nuclear risk. I hope that all of our governments have explicit, mechanical contingencies in place to react to a limited nuclear strike, and that immediate escalation is NOT standard operating procedure. But what is the proportional response for the US if Russia nukes a small city in Western Ukraine? I have no idea. This is all really very terrible and we'll be lucky to get out of it without at least one town glowing in the dark.
(The real question is: what is the path away from nukes, entirely? It seems to me that a world in which any individual can launch nukes is a world with a very short lifetime. This gets worse the fewer human barriers there are to launch. Even if we get past this conflict, we have this fundamental problem which affects democracies and autocracies both.)
It is only a matter of time before we see some degree of nuclear weapons use.
If limited, it might cause a major shift in how humans choose to distribute themselves. Living in a city might come to be seen as an unnecessary liability.
There are ways to act that maximises the chance of surviving a nuclear attack, just like there are ways of maximising the chance of getting rid of a addiction.
I, personally, am not in control of global politics. However I am, personally, in control of building a shelter in my basement.
Maybe you'd prefer not to bother preparing because you think the probability is too low of it happening, but you cannot make that choice for the rest of us.
I’m not concerned with the bombs themselves, but more so the total collapse of civil authority in the event of a total nuclear exchange between say, the US and Russia. There are a lot of small arms in the US.
Fucked up, sure. But survivable for some.
This reads like a monty python skit
You can never break an addiction you want to have.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War_Survival_Skills
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VPFTAAAAMAAJ&printsec=fr...
https://cloudflare-ipfs.com/ipfs/bafykbzacedqk3izhcrqsk4lmne...
Also, I don't believe a nuclear war will happen because those who actually push the buttons proved in the past they are far more rational than their leaders.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/t4hyik/oc_...
Russians had about as many warheads in the 60s as they do now. In the 50s they had twice as many as China does now.
Yes.
> I would prefer to live in the city and quickly die with my friends rather than move 200 miles away from civilization and experience inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter and painful death.
I despise this attitude. Almost everyone who gets old dies painfully. Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?
And this idea that only life in a city is worth living -- what the hell? Of course life lived hand to mouth outside a city is worth living.
FWIW I agree with the parent comment, and comparing "living in a barren nuclear winter wasteland" with "living past age 45 in the country" is a strawman and not really what the comment you replied to was talking about.
I've got my "nuclear war survival plan", and it involves a big fucking bag of weed, some super expensive wine, and having sex with the person I love until the nuclear fallout gets us.
Obviously I'm being somewhat hyperbolic, but depending on the scope of a nuclear conflict I don't think it's irrational at all to decide on a comfortable end.
> I would prefer to live in the city and quickly die with my friends rather than move 200 miles away from civilization and experience inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter and painful death.
Some of those things are virtually guaranteed (inevitable sickness, painful death). Aging, culimating in death, is everyone's own personal apocalypse.
We don't know what a "nuclear winter wasteland" looks like. It has never happened. That aside, you and the parent are the wife in The Road (who kills herself rather than face life post civilization). To me it's very obvious that life stripped of almost everything is still worth living. People who don't understand that are, sorry, shallow.
The original argument was essentially "I would prefer to die quickly than go through a nuclear holocaust". Your response was to put up a much weaker form of pain or suffering (i.e. living past 45 or in a rural area) so you could bat that down: "Are you going to kill yourself at 45 to avoid aging?"
That is literally the exact definition of a strawman argument.
Aging aside, there are millions of people alive today whose lives are worse than you and the original commenter's hypothetical lives following a nuclear holocaust. Are their lives not worth living?
As far as "strawman" goes I've never seen an internet argument improved by someone calling out "logical fallacies". There's a reason people disagree over things and it's worth thinking about why rather than posting some stupid gotcha.
I don't think you need to establish the value of the lives of others to make your own self-determination, nevermind a nuclear wasteland being an altogether distinct frontier of suffering and survival than growing up in a slightly more uncomfortable place than middle class America; nevermind surviving such an environment as an actual elderly person
Many people are willing to at least declare in internet posts that they think the risk of a nuclear war is worth taking in order to better help the people of Ukraine.
Thankfully the people running countries are treating the issue more seriously. But it is still concerning that such a careless and foolish attitude is being aired. It is inarguable that there is more political pressure on leaders now to act rashly with regard to a topic that needs the most careful handling.
Here's all the places that a nuclear strike would hit: https://i0.wp.com/www.armenpogharian.com/wp-content/uploads/...
Looks like the only survival strategy is "live in the west, away from major cities and away from nuclear launch sites."
Now, ~5k warheads is certainly enough to hit the top 10 cities in every country, which might cause chaos that we can't recover from, but I doubt they would be distributed that way.
> inevitable illness, famine, nuclear winter
Each one of these myths are debunked in that section to an extent.
I do wonder how much is outdated and that there are likely newer tech and designs that could work for some things.
I also wonder how much warning the government would give the people in order to seek shelter. I guess they do an OK job of it in HI (false alarms). But I wonder if they would even bother telling the highly populated east coast in a full scale event due to the panic and subsequent issues for the survivors.
The invasion itself is a bit insane. In winter? An invasion? The preparations look slapshod, the troop morale of the invaders seems to be low to begin with. It doesn't reek of desperation, since there was no imminent threat to Moscow. It seems like insanity, or worse, dementia.
Putin is a strongman, a narcissist, a sociopath. He cares not for the fate of this world. He may have terminal cancer (speculation, a possible reason the invasion seems rushed and ill-timed). Some men just want to see the world burn.
Putin may be cornered. What is the endgame of this invasion? Humiliation is the minimum. A sign of weakness where he is deposed and likely assassinated in the process. A NATO or EU member Ukraine with a well-armed and seasoned populace (probably several million Ukrainians are training to be soldiers, and are very motivated to be good soldiers) that HATES you, and only about 300 miles of distance.
Putin has lost this war already it seems. This nutso strategy seems to only work if he assumed all of Ukraine would lay down for his forces like Crimea. That's not happening, and there will be drones, TOW missles, MANPADS, and more arms flooding in from bordering NATO countries to arm and help the Ukrainians.
Putin is paranoid of NATO/EU encroachment into his sphere. This was supposed to be his grand rebuke / riposte to the gradual incursion into his sphere of influence.
But now it has failed badly, and from Putin's standpoint, strengthens the West's hold on Ukraine, buttresses the regime, motivates the populace.
That leaves Belarus as the only buffer/border state, and they invaded Ukraine, and have a despot that likely can be easily deposed with NATO/EU allies to the north, south, and west. Belarus has invaded Ukraine too, so Ukraine has a casus belli to counterinvade them.
Yes in winter, you don't won't to go through UA wetlands when they melt.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2022/ukrain...
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/russia-tiny-window-...
Your logic only makes sense if Putin literally is Russia and that's the foreign policy mistake that most Americans always make by characterizing states strictly and only by cults of personality around their rulers and forgetting that there's other people in those countries.
At some point if Putin starts ranting that he's going to nuke NATO then he's going to get overthrown.
There's still a logic around this whole situation, and all the participants in the game, including all of Putin's generals and every powerful Russian, understands that logic.
(Also I strongly doubt anyone here is qualified to diagnose Putin as having dementia and I don't think he is -- he's making massive strategic mistakes, but that just indicates he's been smoking too much of his own information bubble for way too long)
I agree the Putin is "not Russia", but he is a strongman, and Russia has a history of very strong autocrats. I really hope you are right about the Russian military and those officers in charge of the nuclear armament.
We'll see, this will be a fascinating chapter of post-Cold-War history.
If Russia saves submarine second strike, it will be 800.
If Russia will chose to hold off land-based second strike, it goes to 550.
If Russia chose to reserve some of its most powerful ICBMs as a reserve for the "dire friend" China, I would give it to be 300 warheads.
If the nuclear command & control centre is destroyed by a pre-emptive strike, there will be no coordinated first strike, but uncoordinated launches by individual units, highly conditional on officers resolve to fight an now unwinnable war.
I get into such detail because it is my guess that Putin won't back down, and will escalate until he gives a launch order, and it will be up to these field officers to reject a first launch order (or question the veracity of a retaliatory launch order).
So far one thing is universally confirmed, launch officers get autonomy when "Contact is lost, and Moscow is confirmed destroyed." How much destroyed is counted as destroyed? Nobody knows, probably because officers themselves don't know, and don't delve into such scenario.
I find hard to believe that. Submarines are very cramped and would not have space for non-essentials. Also Russia is not know for caring for it's soldiers (or citizens).
Remember, such luxuries are for missileers only. An average Russian barrack may not have constant electricity, heating, and Running water even today.
Except Russia maintains a separate, fully automated system on a dead man’s trigger, specifically for this case scenario. This system reinforces the mutually assured destruction approach.