What to Do If a Nuclear Disaster Is Imminent
ki4u.com
ki4u.com
This article tones it down to a dirty bomb, and the results closely resemble any natural disaster. Based on what I read about the 2020 fires in CA and Ore., I saw that roads were backed up, store shelves were hoarded, and infrastructure failed. And that was without contamination sticking to everything like and STI. Unless you can avoid evacuation and have done a meticulous job preparing -and- have a shelter, I don't think it is realistic to expect to survive a dirty bomb attack. I was truly, existentially scared when my Mayor announced that we should prepare for evacuation during the fires... because our freeways can't even handle rush-hour traffic. What was I supposed to do with two kids and pets and stores that were already picked clean from the pandemic? I've added more water jugs since (and a small trailer) but I have a low-level fear that no preparedness is going to work long term for something like a dirty bomb, that will eventually require relocation.
Dirty bombs are actually the least dangerous WMD. The only way to get a lethal dose is to snort the dust from the explosion for a year: https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/emergencies/dirtybombs.ht...
That's not the message I take away from that link, and in fact, based on what is describe within it, it seems rather likely if you remain in the vicinity you will be impacted over time.
Why not just buy a small amount of rural land and just leave stuff there, like a polite prepper?
What does 'STI' stand for in this context?
My memory encapsulates this, before I was born:
"The most important things in this war are the machines... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war."
https://www.rferl.org/a/did-us-lend-lease-aid-tip-the-balanc...
My country sustained, and I believe it will sustain again, those who are in need.
It is a dream I have.
I look at the things the people in charge of the country whose nationality I possess (UK) does and I am aghast at the idea that people around the world would associate them with me. I'm sure there are many people in Russia and China etc. who feel similar.
Did you found that solution after actually reading up about lives, opinions or attitudes of those people or you just imagined everything being the same (and uncertainty surrounding those)?
I do not mean it in the sense of being being bad or good, but in a sense that a lot is quite a lot different in many important ways.
I suppose, in retrospect, policies in the west could have been designed to try and prevent those countries creating internet firewalls that allowed so much control. Being so aggressive on it would have looked over the top at the time though. It makes sense though that if everyone on every "side" can access all information, for good or for worse no one actor can stay on top of it.
My rule of thumb is simple.
- Know the nearest target.
- Know who might hit it with a nuke.
- Check the NukeMap ( https://nukemap.org/ ) based on who might nuke it and what nukes they are known to have... to estimate the if you even need to care about shelter. If you're too close to the nearest target theres not much you could hope to do without shelter. If you're far enough then you wont need to care about the immediate attack either.
- Missile warning will likely create havoc with transport as people without plans try to suddenly make them. So consider where you spend most of your time during a normal day, and what transport options you have with you then depending on your personal level of paranoia make a decision about the best shelter options based on two things, travel time and level of protection. You should travel for better shelter, but not risk traveling far given the uncertainty of the situation. Just having a basic background understanding of what the suitable shelter would be in your life and this becomes more like knowing where you could hide from sudden rain without an umbrella on a walk down the street.
- Shelter will depend a lot on your local environment, just keep the basic principles of radiation protection in mind. 1st is Distance, 2nd is Mass. If you cant get distance from the radiation source, put mass between you and it. Given that fallout will be dropping from the sky as heavier than air dust, you want to primarily find anything to give you protection against it being blown closer to you horizontally, and maximum distance from whatever roof is over your head. If neither of these are particularly available, prioritise the horizontal wind blown dust, settle for whatever concrete slab building you can find that would afford you some measure of protection from dust blowing in even if the windows and doors were damaged.
- Think of it as extreme, unusual, but also unlikely, weather event. You don't want to get "wet" from the dry rain of fallout dust, you also want to be as far away from it as you can, and don't want it getting tracked/blown inside.
I went to a Nuclear Emergency Response Team (NERT) office at a base in Canada to pick up some radio equipment.
They had a wall map in there showing the base as ground zero with concentric circles covering most of the surrounding area and each ring had notes scribbled in them.
I took a quick look and didn't know what the notes meant, but my apartment was well within the annotated area....damn.
I swear that I hear them more often than I used to say 4 years ago (before COVID). It is kind of scary to think about these kinds of scenarios, like if something bad happens what the hell will I do if I happen to survive?
All I have are my parents who live far away, no kids or wife, not a lot of close friends here. I'm also moving pretty soon to near SF, which I hope isn't a target in such a war. I guess it is good that I've been working out. If I survive, I plan on staying alive as long as I can on my own. Damn I don't want to think about this because I don't want to die like that.
Maybe all my time sunk into playing solo DayZ back in the day and surviving against Russians, Chinese, and other players who I didn't understand working together will help, heh. FFS.
I've lived through some emergencies near you (rural north bay) and I would recommend turning on and listening to the FM & AM radio in emergencies. FM can get you stations at some distance, and there's a reasonable chance some of your local transmitters will still be up, or will be brought back up quickly. Local is fantastic for getting news that's relevant to you, at least hourly in my experience.
But in the case of national/international news, AM can also help in that it can get you (especially in mornings and evenings) plenty of news stations from in and outside of California if your area is devastated. I picked up a TX/MX border station in the middle of my house one morning a couple years ago for example.
If you have a shortwave radio like the PL-380 or CC Skywave, it will additionally be easy to pick up some stations like Radio New Zealand here in CA in the mornings and evenings. But be sure to practice this before the emergency.
If you worry about making contact from your position, it could help to pick up an FRS radio like the Midland XT511. That way you could monitor for people on the radio and call out if needed, especially if cell towers are down. When I went through that kind of emergency up here, ham radio and FRS still worked fine, and in fact the WIN system was up and running so I was able to talk to people in Ireland, Hawaii, etc.
At least in the 1990s SF had plenty of prominent targets, from what I read in books at the time. One of them (I don't remember where I read this) was the Chevron oil refinery & storage facility just off the Richmond bridge. Driving past all those oil tanks you can kind of see why. Hopefully it was just some fictive thinking though...
I was also just reading a book about a POW doctor from the UK who was right in Nagasaki when the A-bomb went off there. Shortly thereafter, aboard an allied medical ship he was...probed...and announced good to go / clear of long-term effect afterward, which surprised me. The book is "A Doctor's War", pretty interesting overall.
Prior to the 1980s or so targeting strategies were nominally divided into some mix of counterforce (i.e. targeting military installations) and countervalue (i.e. targeting civilians). The exact mix would depend on the parties involved and what sort of attacking they were either perpetrating or defending against. However, at some point infrastructure targets became a sort of third option for target lists, which chiefly means oil refineries.
Certain parts of the East Bay were effectively giant bull's eyes because of the concentration of air, naval, and army bases, as well as oil refineries. Cutbacks since the 90s have pared away much of the military in the area, and oil refineries are usually secondary targets.. the sort of thing you don't want to hit if you think you can win without it because you'd rather it still be around so you can make use of it yourself, but if not, waste it.
It's safe to assume that in any real cook off everyone is dead. Some immediately, some a little later. Those that do survive will likely starve because the land will be unusable. You wont be able to go by car, bicycle, or anything else - it'll kick up resting fallout. The panic will last weeks or months as people desperately try to escape. Supposing you survive the initial attacks you will be stuck where ever you are. Then you have to deal with your neighbors - I hope you didn't tell them you have guns/food/ammo/medicine in passing. After 3 days people begin to die of dehydration, after a week those that could stay hydrated will begin to do literally anything to eat. Your friends suddenly will turn on you, so will your family, and everyone around you. Best stash some rations for them. You'll need a team to survive. Following the guide lines of FEMA will have you underprepared by such a larger margin it's laughable. 3 days of food and water will get you to the point you can wait in a line for humanitarian aid (which won't come in a fallout zone). You'll need months of rations for each person.
The only winning move is not to play.
None of this has happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Today, the number of nukes in existence is entirely inadequate to actually render land unusable. You are doomposting without having good grasp on what exactly nuclear weapons do, their scale, and scale of the landmass.
That was not a nuclear war. If one country gets nuked today, the rest of the world nuclear arsenal will be expended.
There is an infinitesimal chance that only one nuke goes off, or only one country nukes and the other doesn't.
This is why Mutual Assured Destruction is such an effective peace time strategy, until it isn't.
The sad thing is - the madman holding the nuke button has all the control. He's crazy so he'll do anything. He's old enough not to care about dying and destroying the whole world with him.
Everything doesn't just swing into action automatically. Poland gets nuked. Congresses, UN, Nato all hold virtual summits to figure out what to do. A week later, they decide this can't stand but if we can save 5 million lives in NYC, maybe we should.
It would like play out more like chess by mail, Putin makes a move, Biden makes a move, maybe Germany makes their own move, etc.
Once the game is in motion, it can go many ways. All Russia needs to do is cut a deal with a few NATO countries to let them be 'neutral' if they keep their noses out of things, and Nato falls apart, and then it leaves USA vs them, of course the way Russia military runs things that's not a big threat.
Another thing to think about - most of Russia's military officers are corrupt. They've been embezzling funds meant for supplies/equipment etc for years and now they finally need that equipment, they're getting shown off for fraudsters.
It costs iirc something like a billion every 10 years PER nuke just to update them and keep them working. On top of that I've read there could be as high as a 60% failure rate for normal nukes in action, probably due to the fact they mostly spend their entire lives just sitting in a bunker somewhere. Quality checking may not get done as often because of the radiological risks etc.
I'm betting of all the nukes in existence, Russia's by a magnitude of 20 maybe are more likely to fail than China or USA or other countries that actually have a competent military.
Furthermore, however insane any leader of a nuclear power may be, I just got to believe there are competent, clear-headed people in the chain of command who would refuse to follow suicidal orders while not under immediate attack themselves.
The strike maps also show the fallout zones. Wind channels [1] take a large portion of fallout that will cover a significant amount of land mass. The map in [1] shows the case ONLY if strategic targets are hit. That doesn't include hitting major production centers, cities, places of national significance, etc. If 1/3 of Russia's nuclear arsenal made contact with CONUS [1] would most likely be nearly 100% red.
There's no doom posting here (other than the doom of nuclear war). I fully understand what they are capable of. 800Kt bombs may cause small immediate destruction (relative to other large Mt+ bombs) but it's the fallout that will kill majority of people.
Further, hiroshima and nagasaki were isolated events and the US was the only nuclear superpower. They were attacked with roughly 15kt bombs that had inefficient reaction designs, roughly 1/10th to 1/100th the size of the weapons in most superpowers arsenals today. ICBM lifted devices are so much larger than little boy and fat man we can only suppose the level of damage. SLBMs aren't much smaller.
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fallout_map_USA_(FEM...
Fallout is not some magic poison that kills everyone on contact. It mostly causes extra cancers. People will die from cancers, of course, but I guarantee that in case of nuclear war, more people will die to starvation due to the collapse of production and supply chains resulting from large scale infrastructure and human capital destruction.
A better example than those bombings is chernobyl which despite it's relatively small sized (compared to actual nuclear weapons) induced significant levels of radiation sickness and long term cancers due to the fallout.
Certainly fallout is less dangerous than starvation. However, it also isn't something to just hand wave as not a big deal. It hinders your travel, can cause various degrees of sickness, etc. I dont think it's a far stretch to say that the total effect of a large scale nuclear war will primarily be felt in the fallout which will cause deaths in places completely uneffected by the war.
Yes, but those won’t be the vast red marked areas on the map you posted, it will be much more localized.
> A better example than those bombings is chernobyl which despite it's relatively small sized (compared to actual nuclear weapons) induced significant levels of radiation sickness and long term cancers due to the fallout.
To the contrary, Chernobyl again provides arguments against your theory. First, the number of people who got radiation sickness is rather low (between 100 and 200), and it only affected people who actually worked directly on the site of the disaster. Second, there is in fact very little evidence of increased cancer due to Chernobyl disaster among people other than the few hundred people on site on the day of disaster. One exception is good evidence for few thousand extra thyroid cancers, These are very easily treatable (90%+ success rates) in normal circumstances, so the might cause some problems in the nuclear war scenario, but an easy way to avoid it is to not eat fresh grown food for a few weeks right after the disaster (you can store it and it eat later).
> However, it also isn't something to just hand wave as not a big deal. It hinders your travel, can cause various degrees of sickness, etc.
Of course, but observe how you are backpedaling from your original “everyone is dead” claim. Look, if you think I am arguing that nuclear war is no biggie, you are much mistaken, and you need to read more carefully. All I’m saying is that it is very much false that everyone will die, either directly from bombs or later from fallout. Plenty of people will die, but given the realities of scale, plenty will survive too.
The opposite is actually true. Airbursts maximize the damage to lightly protected targets, but do not irradiate and lift the same amount of material as a ground burst. Unfortunately hard targets such as missile silos are likely to be targeted with ground bursts resulting in large plumes of irradiated material falling anywhere remotely close to the missile silos. These silos are generally clustered in the mid-west. It's unfortunate that all sides still use nuclear tipped missiles for the purpose of striking missile silos - they only needed nuclear warheads to achieve their objective in the 60s-80s due to poor targeting.
There are going to be large swaths of Europe, Africa, South America, Asia, and North America which will be mostly unaffected by fallout or blasts. These areas for the most part don't include any industrial, or agricultural significance.
I live near a military port, and submarine base with US fleet ties. It's probably not a "priority target" but it's a pretty likely target if your goal is to deny the USA support in this region, so in its probably going to make the list should a significant number of nukes are launched/deployed, theres also a military airfield, but its no where near as valuable a target for a nuke since the USA couldn't turn any convenient highway and parking lot or field into an airfield with a couple of C5s. The only sensible place to drop a nuke near me is that port, anything else is replaceable by the forces who would value the port.
As part of evaluating my situation, using my own process ( which I outlined here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33016531 ) I ran into the airburst vs laydown attack question with respect to the port infrastructure. If you want to damage a military port, including any of the hardened, buried and underwater infrastructure... you probably need to put your nuke on the ground. But its a small island so I thought to myself ... just how much radioactive dirt could they possibly produce, surely they would end up vaporising way more water, how does this affect the fallout?... well it turns out that the fallout is different and estimating as a member of the public not party to various classified military reports that were obviously written about this and every nuke related topic under the sun... is actually pretty hard. Theres scattered notes from past research by people like https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2016/02/underwater-nuclear-exp... but its not as clear a picture as it is for a "normal" land based ground detonated nuke.
As part of the nuclear triad this is likely the highest priority target. Likewise ports useful for shipping military equipment are high priorities. For similar reasons, downtown manhattan is somewhat safer than Brooklyn due to distance from important ports which can be used to ship soldiers.
The USA has a surprisingly large number of military facilities, many of which appear to have been located at or collocated near naval facilities, around the world that would in the event of a nuclear war, be prime targets. In a way this has strategic advantages as it makes it harder to “get everything” but at the end of the day it’s a tangled geopolitical history that lead to the current status quo.
Depending on the exact planning and strategic goals it’s hard to imagine a significant nuclear war that doesn’t involve trying to eliminate at least one if not all of these three targets.
- Nuke 1 -> Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap - It’s got the CIA, it’s got the NSA and it’s got the NRO, its got 38 radomes housing antennas drawing down secret classified satellite data from the whole hemisphere of satellites and is part of the entire ECHELON/ 5 Eyes program
- Nuke 2 -> Naval Communication Station Harold E. Holt - 1 Megawatt VLF Transmitter, most powerful in the Southern Hemisphere, designed for communicating with underwater submarines from the USA, Australia and likely capable of also doing so to any cooperating NATO nations … in short its for sending the kind of signal to an underwater submarine that would be used to tell a ballistic missile submarine to follow the orders in the green yellow blue or red folders. One of the highest likely targets for a nuke on the planet (along with its sibling VLF stations around the world) if you ask me…
- Nuke 3 -> RAAF Base Edinburgh, heart and home to the coordination centre of the Jindalee Over the Horizon Radar Network, a network of linked ionospheric frequency radar transmitter and receivers as well as ionosondes to monitor the state of the ionosphere which when combined give it a claimed capability to monitor air and sea movements over 37000square kilometres, as far as “3000 kilometres away” according to the official documents, and with a sensitivity that is apparently good enough the prototype was able to pick up a rocket launch in china 5500km away during testing in 1997 (so the real thing can probably do a bit better than the claimed 3000km range)
It turns out that all that fat really is like a giant extra-length fuel tank.
And many, many Americans have enough fat on them to break 3 months without eating a calorie. It might, in a bizarre way, save some of them.
(Micronutrients might be a problem but is much easier to solve than the calorie problem.)
Also, the initial onset of ketogenesis from fasting is very rough for people who aren't used to it. Most people's bodies are not used to it, and they won't be able to think clearly, they won't have much energy, etc.
I wonder suspect this would be alleviated if survivors managed to get like 300 calories a day of various foods, which seems more likely than pure starvation.
Consider even in Sweden if your neighbor has children and a wife, they are starving, and they know you have food there's no amount of focus on social cohesion that will stop him from bashing your head with a rock for your can of beans. Social cohesion is higher on the hierarchy of needs than food and water. Humans are still animals and higher order thinking is a privilege of the well nourished.
Surely, social cohesion is important. That's why I suggested having a "team". It's often better to cooperate than not. But as the civil wars in Eastern Europe over the last 50 years have shown us none of this matters once food supplies dwindle.
Your sense of social cohesion is so poor that you’ve decided the only logical path is to murder your neighbor and steal his food rather than ask to share it.
Basically two in almost tandem, exploding in sync, one above the other.
One generates a Pressure ball above the other, forcing its explosion into a much more destructive ring. Do that with hydrogen bombs and you get weapons were one such warhead can level entire metropol areas and one icbm can carry multiple.. SF would be a circular coral reef after that
No, if the fireball does not touch the ground, which is the definition of an air burst, the fallout is much much less.
The trouble is that some targets are most efficiently destroyed with ground bursts. These targets include ICBM silos, command-and-control bunkers, telecommunications hubs and internet-cable landing stations (where submarine cables intersect with a coastline).
The other trouble is that the effects of the air bursts other than the fallout are quite destructive.
You are talking about a city right on the coast, a top-20 most populated in the country, representing the tech center of the nation. Why wouldn't it make the cut?
It mentions Geiger counters. Note that single-tube models can max out and saturate at radiation levels far below that which cause acute radiation sickness. (This was a fun contributing factor in the Chernobyl accident, "3.6 Roentgen per hour, not great, not terrible" was from reading sensitive dosimeters that were reading off-scale high, but the top of the scale was only labeled 0.001 R/s!) Dual tube models like the GQ GMC-500Plus cost much more but are more useful in the nuclear war scenario.
One thing not often mentioned about nuclear war is that we might have advance warning for the first round of bombs, but we probably won't for later rounds, if SBIR satellites are targeted or if civilian communication networks are disrupted. Ballistic missile submarines have a tradeoff between stealth and communications-- a Typhoon class at minimum speed, max depth and with its trailing wire antenna retracted is hard to detect but impossible to communicate with. If it surfaces a week later then we could get another nuclear exchange out of the blue.
The golden standard in long term storage food is, of course, the Mormon church. (Mormons are supposed to keep a three month supply of food.) Staple grains in big 5.5 pound cans have a claimed shelf life of 30 years. The prices are higher than they were pre-COVID, of course: https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/food-storage... Their online store has a login wall, but there's many brick and mortar locations: https://providentliving.churchofjesuschrist.org/self-relianc...
If you think nuclear war is going to happen this month, you don't buy prepper food. But if you want something that can hang out at the back of a pantry for decades...
You (probably) don't want to live in a post-nuclear world.
On reddit it's absolutely insane, 90% of commenters are cheering for ww3, asking for hits on the kremlin, preventive nuclear strikes in russia, &c. thousands upon thousands of posts calling "russians" "orcs", I feel like I'm in the lobby of an online call of duty game
I used to think people were crazy, how could they slowly walk towards ww1 and ww2, now I see how it happens, deep down we're still dumb monkeys
Also, the discussion climate on Reddit quickly gets sick due to the downvote system and mods purging non-believers.
Also, maybe just "pour a massive fucking drink" should be the first headline.
In case of a single or limited nuclear strike if you live near a target you won't have time to do anything, you will get a 5-10 minute warning all you can do is shelter and hope all the warheads are successfully intercepted. In case you live further away from a target there is no chance you can get everything you will need in the hours before the fallout reaches you while everyone else is trying to do the same, sidebar splitting up as the site suggests is terrible advice.
In case of a full nuclear exchange the same applies you just can't have hope that the interceptors will work.
If you really worry about a nuclear attack you have to prepare before hand, have a shelter set up and have it stocked with food and water for about 3 months, from what i have read the hard stuff breaks down in a few week and in 3 months or so you will be pretty safe to come out.
Every news station is talking about this possibility now. But I cannot find a single analysis of how likely it is.
And how likely it is seems to depend on the effect these weapons would have on the situation on the battlefield.
But I cannot find any info on this.
There’s only vague assertions by the west about what will happen and that is intentional.
It’s likely to lead to a heavy retaliatory strike against Russia, I believe one of the options floated was effectively sinking the entire Black Sea fleet if Russia uses a nuke.
Keep in mind that any use of a nuke effectively necessitates a large reaction physically to try and avoid nuclear proliferation and use going wild.
Seems more likely that sinking their fleet would cause them to use more and bigger nukes, and/or to sink every fleet of ours within missile range.
There’s no other choice, doing nothing signals to Russia that they can use nukes without repercussions and signals to the rest of the nuclear armed countries they can do the same.
You also assume Russia is capable of a strike against US fleets in any decent capacity when they cannot even capture a city less then 300km from there border and lost there Black Sea flag ship to a country with no functional navy.
Say Putin nukes Ukraine (or fires a "demonstration" shot). If NATO stood down and just abandoned Ukraine as a response, or had them do appeasement style relinquishment of territory, or lifted sanctions, what stops Putin from pulling the nukes out the next time he wants something?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4
"Will you press the button if they invade West Berlin?"
Article 5
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/9/23/little-military-sen...
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ukraine-post-12
https://www.iswresearch.org/2022/09/russian-offensive-campai...
The TL;DR is that most experts don't think Russia will use tactical nuclear weapons, but there's still a substantial non-zero chance. 10%? 25%? Much higher than anyone would like, that's for sure, and dependent on factors that are out of control of anybody but the Russian government and military. I have not found any sources saying the opposite, though some have higher degrees of confidence than others. The consensus appears to be that this sense of uncertainty is being created by Russia on purpose, and therefore, that it's probably (but not guaranteed to be) a bluff.
I have also seen very mixed opinions on whether Russia's tactical nuclear weapons are in suitable condition for use. But I think it is best to assume they are.
The odds of Russia intentionally using strategic nuclear weapons, the kind you would target at foreign cities across continents or oceans from you, remain nearly zero. Unlike tactical nuclear weapons, which have theoretical uses in ensuring one wins a conflict, strategic nuclear weapons remain a guarantee of mutual and probably worldwide destruction with no purpose except to deter would-be attackers. The only time I can see even the Putin regime considering the use of such a weapon would be a full-scale, boots on the ground invasion of the Russian homeland (not Crimea or Donbas or other annexed territories).
Edit: Another source pointed out elsewhere - https://warontherocks.com/2022/09/russias-plan-to-stay-in-th... - seems reasonable. I am not 100% sure on its credibility but it aligns broadly. (Listen from about 5 minutes to about 14 minutes in.)
I've been thinking about this possibility since the start of the Ukraine War:
* Putin fires tactical atomic weapon at some empty plot of Ukrainian land, and announces it as a "demonstration" of Russian might.
* The weapon is a dud.
I'm not sure whether this outcome might not be worse in the long run, in terms of geopolitical stability, than if the weapon performs as expected!
I mean, if you're NATO and you see that... hard to imagine you don't take the invitation and just crush the Russian military into so much melted shrapnel. Every analysis I've seen says that if NATO gets involved, and nukes are otherwise off the table (which in this case they would be, at least for long enough for it not to matter), the thing ends with total NATO victory in very little time. And the attempted use of tactical nukes is the one thing almost guaranteed to step up NATO involvement.
But maybe that's wishful thinking on my part.
In terms of geopolitical stability, it would make Russia difficult to take seriously as a nuclear power. I don't think it says much about other nuclear states, like the US or China, who are almost certainly not paper tigers like Russia would have proven to be.
Otherwise, it is MAD.
That is true. However, what's missing from this assessment in my view is the difference between strategic nukes (the kind that level a city) and tactical nukes (the kind you use for specific tactical goals, and the only kind being discussed as likely to be used here).
Russia has enough working strategic nukes that any kind of direct offense against the Russian homeland is always gonna be off the table. That is totally true. But nobody, including Russia, has suggested those are going to be used at all.
Rather, what is contemplated is using a tactical nuclear weapon to make a statement or accomplish a specific wartime goal. With regards to tactical nukes specifically, I think this claim:
> 5% still working is enough to deter NATO from directly attacking Russian forces.
is possibly not true. I think NATO might be willing to engage Russia conventionally if it is clear their tactical nukes don't work - and maybe even if they do work, because that may be among what has been threatened as a response to the use of a tactical nuke.
If Russia threatens to bomb Warsaw or DC, the situation changes again. But nobody has put that on the table... yet.
I'm not sure how that plays now based on disarmament and technological updates.
The only difference is that the US uses DU regularly so we think of it as normal instead of a nuclear weapon on par with a tactical nuke in terms of long term damage.
We don't want to imagine it, that's as simple as that, just like we didn't want to imagine the invasion in the first place. "it's too dumb nobody would do that" is what most people were saying, even like a week before the invasion only the US were seriously warning people.
War on the Rocks[1] generally, and any content featuring Michael Kofman[2] specifically, are great sources on the conflict generally. The ~weekly podcast is great.
Just about every twit from McFaul about Russia is so deranged, that I'm not even surprised anymore, I read him as a good comedy.
McFaul is considered an expert on Russia, he even lived here for some time. Still, when he says something about the way we live or the way we think, or anything like that, it's usually so delusional, that I can't understand what was he doing here for two years. Has he even stepped outside of US embassy a single time?..
But on the other hand, I think it's beneficial for us, that all the West lives in a dream that they know everything about Russia.
Why don’t you check out the source I mentioned in my original comment - any recent WotR or Geopolitics Decanted podcast with Michael Kofman, Director of Russia Studies at CNA. Then please do come back and let us know whether you think he’s full of shit. Will be waiting for your considered thoughts with baited breath.
> with bated breath: in a nervous and excited state anticipating what will happen
> bate: To flap the wings wildly or frantically - used of a falcon; To lessen the force or intensity of; moderate.To take away; subtract.
And it considers Ukraine ethnically related. Many Russians have relatives in Kiev etc.. Using nukes on Ukraine would be huge political problem.
It is FUD spread by trigger happy westerners, who want to normalize nuclear war!
What to do in case of nuclear disaster? What type of nuclear disaster? In case of full scale nuclear war? Nothing we will just die, if you do not have long term survival bunker that is it. The End.
In all calculations of global clash everyone forget one thing, it is not nuclear weapons but that there is 450 nuclear reactors with thousands kilograms of nuclear rods far more worse than nuclear weapons combined, so just imagine 450 untended Chernobyl at the same time.
To be blunt, shooting yourself would seem the quickest way to end yourself. At least for those in the US, owning a firearm is quite simple. Owning "suicide pills" would seem to be far more likely to put you on someone agency's watchlist.
TBH having a firearm in that scenario would probably entice one to behave poorly in effort to survive.
Cursory research of using gun has 80-90% success rate. That said it might skew 100% in a world where emergency services stop, but those are still pretty high odds of slowly bleeding out. And ultimately, as hypothetical euthanasia executor, I don't want to mercy shoot loved ones in the head.
Side note: this is morbid topic I think about every once in a while after seeing meme comparing Google vs Bing when queried "suicide methods". Google showed prevention hotline, Bing showed a table with methods and success rate. What stood out was that most popular methods were around coin flip to negligible effectiveness. Seems like it's just really hard to gracefully end someone/oneself, which is my only real anxiety in these apocalypse scenarios.
... I'll see myself out.
Christopher Walkens character was the ultimate prepper.
So to all those who are actually worried about a nuclear war due to the Ukraine war, I say - sleep tight. It's just the media trying to scare you to get clicks.
Of course this is exactly what he wants us to fear. In the end we have no idea what actually is happening in his mind.
Putin cannot afford to lose a war or to lose Russian territory. Putin is only president for life. No Russian leader has personally survived such an event, all the way back to the tsars. Faced with that history, he is more likely to use a tactical nuclear weapon than give up power.
What many forget, or perhaps nver realised, is that Putin is the moderate voice of the extreme Russian nationalists.
Should Putin lose his hold on power to any degree he could be usurped by anyone of several who would have absolutely used nuclear weapons three months ago already.
Alexander I survived losing the wars of the third and fourth coalitions against Napoleon, Alexander II survived losing the Crimean war, Kerensky survived losing WWI, Lenin survived losing the Polish-Soviet war, Gorbachev survived losing the Soviet-Afghan war, Yeltsin survived losing the Chechen war...
You spare your citizens the horror of what a nuclear winter + global fallout catastrophe will look like, while ensuring your enemy suffers through it.