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Comment by mradek | Hacker News Reader

I live pretty close to a US Navy base, and its common for me to hear and see formations of military helicopters like Ospreys, sometimes fighter jets, cargo planes, etc.

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.

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The big fear isn't being a target. There are very few areas that would not be completed irradiated by substantial fallout taken by the winds. Airbursts would magnify this effect.

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.

> The big fear isn't being a target. There are very few areas that would not be completed irradiated by substantial fallout taken by the winds. Airbursts would magnify this effect. 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.

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.

> Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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.

No one knows what would happen if one nuke goes off. It’s not even a given that there would be retaliation. MAD is a very useful piece of propaganda to deter that first nuke, but it is not a given.

If Russia sent one Nuke to warsaw, and threatened that New York City, would be the next target followed by Barcelona, Paris, etc. If Putin then says: if you stand down. I will not nuke any other cities. Don't give me more reasons to send Nukes.

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.

This is nonsense. Poland is a NATO member state. If Warsaw was attacked by Russia, it would trigger article 5 of the treaty, effectively declaring war on all member states. If the attack was carried out with a nuclear weapon, there would likely be a retaliatory strike. Voila, WW3.

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 FEMA simulated strike maps from the 70s show common targets. Mostly in the midwest, large concentrations in the coasts. This of course assumes civilians are mostly left alone, which is unlikely in a large scale nuclear war.

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...

Your theory is that fallout will kill more people than the explosions themselves. Let’s test it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki explosions, each of which causes immediate casualties on the order of 100 000 people. Did the fallout from each of them kill millions of people? No. Did it rendered any part of Japan uninhabitable wasteland? No, in fact both cities were continuously inhabited from immediately after the bombing to the present day.

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.

In locations of significant fall out the Sv./hr could be high enough to induce radiation poisoning. Inhalation of fallout allows alpha particles to bypass your skin and cause cancers faster (or again, radiation poisoning).

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.

> In locations of significant fall out the Sv./hr could be high enough to induce radiation poisoning.

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.

> Airbursts would magnify this effect.

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.

Theres also a lot of ambiguity regarding the effect of non-dirt fallout...

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.

> and submarine base with US fleet ties.

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.

Okinawa, Atsugi, Sasebo, Yokosuka, Sydney, Perth, Exmouth, Pine Gap, Diego Garcia, Souda Bay, Naples, and many more …

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.

This is also one reason why it would be virtually impossible to contain a nuclear exchange. Any submarine base, or location where the US stores or can operate nukes becomes a target. This set includes most of the G7.

One of the interesting titbits of all this is that even if the nearby port is considered not worth the nuke for whatever strategic planning reasons, it’s almost a certainty that, outside of a weird “you nuked once, so we’re going to nuke just once too” scenario, Australia (where I live) has at least one if not two or three nukes coming it’s way in all but the most limited nuclear war scenarios involving nuclear powers. (for instance India and Pakistan exchanging nukes could potentially remain a very regionally limited conflict despite the catastrophic death toll)

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's interesting to observe the different perspectives of different national backgrounds. Here in Sweden a lot of the preparation that has become much more common is about social cohesion and working together (see https://www.dw.com/en/swedish-preppers-a-nation-rehearsing-d...). In contrast a lot of US prepping seems to be about protecting yourself from your neighbors, because they are after you (you express a similar sentiment so I assume you are a US American). This was also discussed in a recent post about an article in the guardian (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32711413).

I don't think the perspective is uniquely American though you correctly identified my nationality. Protecting yourself from your neighbor is to protect yourself from human nature. It's not to say so much that you should hate your neighbor, but you also shouldn't be overly forthcoming with information, nor should you be expecting help when they themselves are in a worse situation.

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.

> 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.

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.

My biggest fear are shaped charge airburst nukes.

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

I thought most overweight Americans (I have sympathy, I'm one too) could fast for 3 weeks or a little more? People who fast usually say they're starting to feel good and energetic about day 3.

Rule of threes: three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. I feel like this rule is dated from a thinner time, so feel free to adjust for BMI.

There are lots of cases of obese individuals fasting for months with no ill health effects. Some even have gone over a year without food.

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.)

I personally have fasted for 28 days. The dangerous part isn't micronutrients, it's electrolytes. Fasting for an extended period can put you at a dangerously low level of certain electrolytes like phosphorus, which upon refeeding, are taken into the cells, which results in levels low enough to cause death. This is why extended fasting regimens should only be done with medical supervision.

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 believe the definition of micronutrient covers electrolytes (including phosphorus), but I see what you're saying. There would definitely be challenges!

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.

>Airbursts would magnify this effect.

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.

Eh, I imagine the protocols in place all around the world limit any initial response to only match the incoming threat’s size and scope, with a framework in place to allow politics to decide whether or not to escalate with more force. So if Russia nuked a small village along the Rocky Mountains just to show ‘we can’, I don’t see the US sending anything huge to a populous area or Russia.

If the last few years have showed us anything it’s that there are not protocols in place or a grand plan to save us all.

Are we no longer doing MAD? Where you promise to turn kill everything no matter how small the attack was?

MAD is more for large scale counter value exchanges. Nonstrategic / theatre level / tactical nuclear use was always on the table and IMO probable when nuclear states become cornered. Here's a CRS report on it from this year.

https://sgp.fas.org/crs/nuke/RL32572.pdf

>...near SF, which I hope isn't a target in such a war

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?

And Oakland is a major port.

And there's Military Ocean Terminal Concord, the primary ammunition port for the Pacific area of operation.

Tough to think about. Being single and ideally relatively mobile I'd guess you'd be good to cover at least 10 miles a day which would be significant in the bay area considering the hills nearby. You'd just need to know where to go. Which, the big locations these days will be schools, especially high schools. It's a good idea to know the location of your nearest city hall and high school. From there the goal will be to collect information, list your options, and rank them.

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.

> 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...

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.

You're assuming that missiles have been retargetted since the 1990s. It would be plausible to me that a bunch of Soviet era missiles have their original targets still loaded.

It would be absurd to not have re-evaluated the targeting lists given the rise of the internet, fall of the iron curtain and the ability of “tourists“ to travel from Russia to the USA for over 20 years… while many targets are likely still valid and thus unchanged, much has changed, best example I can think of while waking and on my phone is Cheyenne Mountain, famed Cold War bunker veteran of many movies and tv shows and now a less important target than it used to be, it’s still a valuable target but perhaps one not worth the size of nuke necessary to crack it open given the damage a much smaller weapon could do at Air Force and Space Force assets stationed at Peterson and Vandenberg

Oh, I agree they have better information and that things have changed since the early 1990s. And I'm sure the desired targets by the division in charge of planning that have changed. I wouldn't be surprised if Russian ICBM #X (aimed at SF) hasn't been updated since 1991 because it has to be done by swapping out a chip with the location burned into it instead of doing it over the internet or someone whose work was never checked was assigned to do it and it's cold out that day or 100 other reasons.

Well, if we're going to play the game of assumptions, then you're assuming Russians have bothered to maintain their warheads properly. Given the very plausible theory that Nord Stream 1 and 2 were taken out as a result of the Russians trying to clear a methane hydrate plug from their side alone and wound up rupturing both pipelines (which, just so we're clear, they've done before)... I'd be a little skeptical of anything involving Russian nukes and the viability of their warheads.

SF has air strips, military installations, technology, and is a massive economic center for the US at-large. It is a ripe target for any enemy that thinks about these things.

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