NYC Releases Video Outlining Steps to Take During Nuclear Attack | Hacker News Reader

NYC Releases Video Outlining Steps to Take During Nuclear Attack

eastsidefeed.com

21 pointschazeon35 comments

Previous discussion from a couple of days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32063652

As if there’s going to be a world left living in after a nuclear war ends. In the US, the most frightening aspect of life in a nuclear war would be the rapid regression to tribalism and infighting rather than the exposure to radiation, though with the winds and weather patterns, that would make it moot for the vast majority anyway.

There will be all out panic and irrational behavior will predominate. Things will break with nobody to fix them. Services we take for granted will suddenly trap us or kill us indirectly. No communication will be easy or quick.

Moreover, the long term effects on the environment from massive nuclear detonations and debris lingering in the atmosphere would make the country live in something out of a Cormac McCarthy novel. Abandon all hope even if you are rich enough to have a bunker; life just simply won’t be worth living once there’s a first strike.

I assume things will revert to a medieval system like they did for the past millenia.

Where single kings/warlords will amass huge power and people will flock to their banner's and countries for protection from other kings/warlords.

After the dust settles in half a decade or so and power reasserts itself it might actually be pretty cool to live in a medieval depopulated society except with a lot more advanced technology.

Yeah, I'm living one of the places that would be targeted first. I considered moving, but after some pondering I arrived to the conclusion if the worst comes, I prefer to die first.

I feel like there are far more immediate and important reasons to consider moving than the infinitesimally small chance of your city being targeted by a nuclear strike.

The probability is small but the expected loss is high.

In my mind, there are 2 conclusions you could come to: 1) There is an actual plausible nuclear threat, or 2) There is some benefit to making people irrationally fearful.

There is also the more benign: 3) a group of employees whose job it is to think up and produce these videos thought it should be made.

Yeah, it's literally the NYC Office of Emergency Management. Their whole jam is being prepared for disasters. NYC has seen enough of them already that they need an agency that can respond faster and more fit to the city's needs than FEMA.

How about option 4: we unfortunately live in a world with nuclear weapons which are controlled by humans and humans are not always predictable . Its good practice to communicate the emergency plan well in advance of needing it.

Maybe but that job requires a basic understanding of public perception, so they must know how it could be perceived, yet they did nothing to account for that.

Reminding people that the sword of damocles is still hanging there is a good way to build support for solutions.

Upon review of Cold War history and the state of our media, I'd be inclined to select conclusion #2 at the moment.

I imagine it might persuade people to support Ukraine and pay attention to what's happening over there.

I really hope we don't actually have to deal with nuclear war in my lifetime. It would legit be fucking insane if any human would actually go ahead and launch a first strike.

Most important step they missed was you probably don't want to be anywhere near NYC during a nuclear confrontation.

Even discounting the broader metro, there are almost 9 million people living in NYC. It's unlikely that any meaningful fraction of them could possibly get out in the time between learning we were in a nuclear confrontation, and the first consequences of that confrontation for NYC.

> It's unlikely that any meaningful fraction of them could possibly get out in the time between learning we were in a nuclear confrontation, and the first consequences of that confrontation for NYC.

I imagine it's very likely the two would happen simultaneously.

The NYC is telling people to get inside and pray to their "neon god".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_xWCJAtz3U

If most people believe, then traffic might not be impossibly bad.

> If most people believe, then traffic might not be impossibly bad.

In that case, a meaningful fraction definitely wouldn't get out, because they wouldn't even be trying to.

I’m not sure how it could possibly be useful to anyone to hear that they shouldn’t be in the place where a nuclear explosion occurs.

As a child of the 80's - that's probably where you want to be. Right in the epicenter, if you can make it. At least it'll be over quick.

I'm fairly certain that's preferable to the scenarios survivors of a large scale nuclear exchange will face in the weeks, months, and years after.

New York is actually surprisingly uninteresting as a military target.

You'd glass it if you were trying to kill US logistical capacity of course, but if you were trying to neuter a second-strike, you wouldn't really bother.

Port Newark is a primary industrial target, and the large cluster of defense contractors in northern NJ are a primary counterforce target. Unfortunately the fallout plumes from the Jersey targets covers all 5 boroughs.

When thinking about nuclear war its worth remembering that the USA, Russia and other countries have already exploded hundreds and hundreds of nuclear weapons around the earth.

In a very real way we have already lived through a nuclear war except the bombs were not generally aimed at people.

I raise this because when I was a kid we were taught that there would be a nuclear winter, the skies would grey with fallout. It appears however that despite exploding hundreds of nuclear weapons already, there was no nuclear winter.

Hundreds of weapons spread out over decades isn't the same thing as thousands spread out over hours. (There may be reasons to doubt Cold War-era nuclear winter predictions, but “we’ve detonated much fewer bombs over a much longer period than would happen in a full-scale strategic exchange and that hasn't happened” is very much not one of them.)

You're willfully ignoring that atmospheric tests are banned since 1963, the devices weren't detonated at the same time, many had a much lower yield than what'd be used in a nuclear war, and many were detonated at altitudes preventing fallout.

But most importantly, the vast majority of them didn't cause firestorms - which means no smoke particles, which is the major issue in how severe nuclear winter would be.

It's probably also worth understanding that your misguided argument is a very deliberately placed piece of disinfo aimed at discrediting climate science. ("See, not even nuclear winter they got right")

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