Nuclear War Survival Skills (1987)
archive.org
archive.org
An important thing to understand is that it's not like everyone within some radius dies and everyone outside it lives. In the event of nuclear war there will be a lot of people in marginal areas that could survive based on luck or doing the right things. Those "duck and cover" films kind of get a bad rap, but I wonder if this is a good moment in time to notify whole populations of how to survive a nuclear strike. Even something like an episode of John Oliver or Steven Colbert's show where they explain how to protect yourself from gamma radiation might save thousands or millions of lives in the (hopefully unlikely) event that things spiral out of hand.
Many people will say they'd rather just die quickly, but for someone to die needlessly when they could have survived and moved to another city is kind of sad. If all of Russia and all of NATO unload all their nukes at each other, then maybe anyone in any affected country who happened to survive will have a very bad time, but you wouldn't know that on the ground. Maybe most of the nukes don't work. Maybe it was a limited exchange, and only a few cities got hit. Maybe they only targeted military targets, and most cities without military bases are fine. No one knows.
Luck, and not being murdered for your supplies by your fellow post-nuclear wasteland survivors…
I always see people claiming surviving a nuclear holocaust is no biggie, but they never address the violence that would occur.
This is what amuses me about doomsday preppers. I'm like: what are you really preparing for? Like that's just something I'd never want to be right about to justify the time and expense of prepping. And for what? To live a little longer in a post-armageddon world?
Yeah that's a pass.
Probably also depends on the scale. There's the $x00k bunker with air/water filtration and shelves of long-life food, or there's stashing some tins and having a rough idea of where you might go if it came to it.
The TV show Last Man On Earth does make it look kind of fun (no radiation, no zombies)...
If you look at the poor state of some shelters in Ukraine (part of the USSR until the 90's), they should brush up on their survival skills.
Nevertheless, knowledge is power, and I learnt something today. Better safe than sorry.
I hope this information does not ever come in handy.
Of all the challenges I wouldn't put a working ebook in the top 10 worries.
Unfortunately, most of the things that one would be likely to die from are things you have to deal with immediately or almost immediately, so knowing about them in advance could help a lot.