After reading the book, its pretty clear why most world leaders abandoned the idea of thermonuclear war as anything but a culpable strategy.
Nuclear weapons with a twenty (or more) mile radius of fallout have the immediate ability to bridge the class divide. Whereas traditional munitions disproportionately interact with the poor (soldiers and combatants) a nuclear detonation could thrust an opulent family into fallout bunker squalor in mere minutes, and pin them there for half a decade. the prospect of survival contingent not on your wealth as in a traditional war, but on your interpersonal and improvisational survival skill was certainly looked upon with scorn.
Pretty much and especially if you live in a city - really no survival is possible.
However, some in rural areas would survive - the odds would not be good but some would so humanity would survive the "eye of the needle" this would cause. Just not most people individually.
This isn't necessarily the case anymore. At least not universally.
Big bombs and mirvs weren't necessarily for more damage, but primarily to ensure smaller, high priority targets got destroyed. (Because accuracy of ballistic profiles and fusing abilities meant pretty bad accuracy in the downrange direction, which is an incredibly interesting and far-reaching topic itself).
Point being, more accurate weapons means (for the US, at least) about 2/3s fewer, smaller bombs are needed to take out the same target list. (The math works out to be approx 4th-root required power needed proportional to radius CEP reduction.)
And fewer, smaller, more accurate warhead targeting plus upgraded variable fusing means a target near a city doesn't automatically doom the city itself.
At least for whoever's getting nuked by the US.
There's obviously still debate on if the cities themselves would be targets, but the treaty numbers are designed to make the opportunity-cost of bombing a city relatively high, meaning not enough warheads to hit other high-value military targets.
Counterpoint: Who really knows what Russia and China are actually doing?
I have absolutely no doubt human race would survive. We are distributed enough and there is plenty of still developing areas. Now modern civilization very much less so.
We'd survive the first few months after nukes start to fly, after that I'm not so sure. The vast majority of humans live in areas where the climate and environment makes survival without a lot of cultural knowledge very hard. Add to that fallout, possible climate effects from the nukes, I can easily see a non-zero probability of total extinction within a couple of years.
Living in Seattle, I've thought about the odds of surviving a nuclear attack here. I figured surviving the blast is very possible. But after that, things look pretty grim. Long term survival in the city itself is improbable, and due to terrain there are only 3 ways out of the city. Consider that all the survivors would be clogging those routes to get to a farm, it looks like succeeding would also be improbable.
Your only hope would be to leave before the attack.
"It is the home base for the Navy’s fleet throughout West Puget Sound, provides base operating services, support for both surface ships and fleet ballistic missile and other nuclear submarines as one of the U.S. Navy's four nuclear shipyards, one of two strategic nuclear weapons facilities, and the only West Coast dry dock capable of handling a Nimitz-class aircraft carrier and the Navy's largest fuel depot. Naval Base Kitsap is the third-largest Navy base in the U.S."
The entire Western WA metro area would be completely 100% screwed. You ain't getting over the cascades in a car. You can barely get over it on a regular US holiday. Going north? Yeah good luck fighting with the 10+ million Canadians trying to come south after their own inland routes are taken over by chaos. You could maybe go South and then inland up the Columbia, but then you'd have to pass through the radioactive wasteland that would be the bombed out Hanford reservation
I'm thinking of current subsistence farmers, specially in Africa and South America. Nuclear war has some impact, but I don't think all areas in world are heavily affected. I doubt absolutely all of these will be hit to extinction level. Developed countries on other hand surely massive starvation to boot.
I don’t believe there are any Southern Hemisphere nuclear powers currently. Would northern hemisphere powers deliberately target folks in the Southern Hemisphere? If not, I expect most of them would survive.
Pretty close approximation for cities, although it depends on the city geography & wind, the yield & number of denotations, etc.
The most common first impression does seem to be that "of course it's not survivable, why even think about it?".
However, a quick look at any map of effects shows that the zone of survivable effects extends far beyond the reach of lethal effects, to the extent that 90%+ of the total affected zone is quite survivable for those who manage to avoid the initial thermal radiation and flying debris from the shock wave. Of course there are many who wouldn't want to live in the aftermath, but that is a different question.
> Of course there are many who wouldn't want to live in the aftermath, but that is a different question.
A pretty important one, I think. Paramount to, "Would you like to live in hell?" And especially having children - you'd need to be extremely stupid or sadist to have a child in such a world, especially knowing the high chances of them being born malformed etc.
Birth defects are not the problem here. Even cities which were bombed in wwii didn’t have extreme levels of birth defects. The numbers I have seen estimate an increase from the current 6% to something like 6.1% after nuclear war. The completely breakdown of power generation and supply chains would be a much bigger threat.
Supply chain and food production/preservation would be the biggest issue. Not having antibiotics would have a huge impact. I find it interesting that survivalist literature goes into so much detail on so many topics never seems to cover medical stuff. What do you do for birth control after the apocalypse? How can you make an antibiotic? How can you make an anesthetic? I’ve seen YouTube videos for making chloroform but never details how to use it.
> I find it interesting that survivalist literature goes into so much detail on so many topics never seems to cover medical stuff. What do you do for birth control after the apocalypse? How can you make an antibiotic? How can you make an anesthetic?
I mean, you don't? One dude, a family, or even a small community cannot hope replicate all the stuff that comes from modern supply chains. Surviving a civilization-ending catastrophe would basically mean navigating the glide path down to a poor subsistence lifestyle that lacks a huge amount of technology we take for granted. People got by without that stuff for pretty much all of human history.
The best survivalist could probably do is compile traditional/herbal remedies that are at least somewhat effective, but there would still be huge gaps.
So
birth control: abstinence, keeping an unplanned baby, infanticide, or some herbal abortifacient.
antibiotics: hope you can fight off that infection or we'll have to amputate
Lucky if you stashed or found some leftovers. We'd be back to some available herbal remedies.
And birth control? You'll want the opposite if you want your clan to survive. Without antibiotics & other modern medicine, or even soaps (anyone in your group know how to make that?), you'll be back to having a dozen children and being lucky if one or two survive to adulthood.
- even if partially nuked, a city would be unsustainable once its roads and pathways are destroyed. Cities live by concentrating massive amounts of food and resources from outside cities, once the chain is broken a city falls.
>> the prospect of survival contingent not on your wealth as in a traditional war, but on your interpersonal and improvisational survival skill was certainly looked upon with scorn.
Why wouldn't wealth come into play?
The wealthy have more resources to prepare for any kind of contingency to include nuclear war:
Granted, the reaction time needed to get into a protective bunker is greatly reduced in a thermonuclear first strike, but the poor don't even have a survival bunker to escape to.
On the other hand the replacement of existing hierarchies with meritocracy seems to be one of the appealing things of post-apocalyptic scenarios for average people.
It is an interesting question how various countries would turn out after a big civilization reset like a nuclear war. Seems like it would likely go the feudal route with the cruelest warlords rising to the top in various locales (pretty much like narco-lord ruled Mexico). How would the United States turn out? Would the Ohio valley turn into its own kingdom? Texas its own? All of Northeast probably. I wish there was historical fiction along these lines.
Just finished reading One {second,year} after. It was entertaining but a lot of the story revolves around military inspired heroics and battles. You can tell the author is into military fiction.
Ah, thank you so much for linking "One Second After." I had seen someone recommend this book on HN previously but had lost track of the comment and the title of the book.
Not strictly nuclear war but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucifer%27s_Hammer is a great read about if a comet nucleus hits the earth, immediate aftermath/ survival and ends with society just beginning to reform.
A lot probably depends on the amount of infrastructure left standing. In most of history kingdoms/empires would grow to roughly a week's travel time from the capital, since that's an area that can be effectively governed. Anything larger than that needs a strong local government, which eventually causes a separatist movement.
If a nuclear war destroys a large portion of highways and communication equipment, you probably end up with Houston being ruled by one group, Dallas by another and San Antonio forming a government with Austin.
I think in any scenario where "nuclear war destroys a large portion of highways and communication equipment" then Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin will all be smoking craters.
I wouldn't call it "historical fiction" since that takes "what really happened" as its starting point. On DDG, a query of "post apocalyptic fiction" finds over 1,000 books.
I don't think all of them (e.g. The Hunger Games) are what you're after, but some of them surely are.
In that sort of survival situation, meritocracy would mean survival of the fittest. But not necessarily the person with the most/best survival skills. You will have different groups lead by what they perceive is the "best" person.
Your local groups will probably consist of:
Religious groups
Groups centered around politicians
Scouting groups
Survivalists
Law enforcement groups
Military groups
Gangs
Each of those groups will be vying for control of limited resources with varying degrees of violence.
For the average person, all they will see is a rapid decrease of the average lifespan. The leaders who make it to the top will do everything in their power to keep themselves and those who they favor at the top.
I think a good example of this is North Korea, Afghanistan or any of the other Middle East countries where the government collapsed and there was not a single clear leader.
Group's can succeed because they are communal. The survivalist idea of an isolated compound does not work. Because the larger group of people who can work together will out man you. The best survival strategy is to make friends with your neighbors. And to be in a town and city with less territory to control. Ethnic communities can do this kind of thing really well.
I was thinking about the sort of people who tend to create small communities out in Montana, not the modern preper movement. But a quick search shows me that the prepers have several forums and communities and the advice I saw was that you should form a close group of diverse talents and that there is safety in numbers, just be choosy of who you count in your number.
Meritocracy is economically efficient but often congeals into an ideological dogma justifying a plutocracy of the talented, even though talent is - to a very great extent - an undeserved function of genes and environment outwith one's control.
Personal hot take on meritocracy:
I think that "talent" is a tricky thing. Meritocracy (which I might define as "how much you get/are paid/are given access to is based on your talent and/or contribution to society") based on talent sounds maybe sort-of fair if "talent" is either innate or purely self-driven.
If instead "talent" is (primarily) about the quality and extent of your training/schooling (and there's a lot of research to suggest that in most domains, it is) than even a very effective meritocracy is going to (IMO) perpetuate wealth and class disparities (5-year-olds don't decide to go to a great preschool and pay for it themselves, their parents do).
If I were a wizard trying to make a society with lots of upwards mobility I'd make it a lot harder to transmit generational wealth/privilege and try a lot harder to make sure everyone has the same resources/opportunities. I'm sure that would come with a ton of its own problems (even outside of just pissing people off), but it does seem worth at least acknowledging that any kind of merit-based assessment of people is going to be super biased towards those with wealth and privilege.
It seems very unlikely to me that an apocalypse scenario would lead to a _more_ merit-based society - rather that it would wipe out a lot of social protections & aids that _do_ exist (both from the government and civil society at large) for those currently at the bottom of the economic ladder. Whether we'd go feudal or just kinda-worse-than-we-are-now I certainly have no idea.
That only bothers people who want to make life "fair" at the expense of what is practical.
There is a reason we let people keep the wealth they build. It's not because it's "fair." It's because taking it away, and having the brutes or demagogues decide how to distribute it, makes the society a hellhole.
"Demagogues decide how to distribute it, makes the society a hellhole"
Fortunately corporate management and promotions are so different frin politics, no way would a demagogue or someine incompetent be in position of power and decide how to distribute wealth
Wouldn't work in the Americas, which have a far lower average level of human capital. You can't redistribute what has not been produced. There are lots of examples of this in history.
By the way, the US health system crisis is caused by regulatory capture. There is no way to regulate the regulators to prevent this. At least, not in a failed democracy such as the US.
Probably the only way to regulate the regulators in a society as complex as the US and most other countries (contra Scandinavia) is with strict constitutional principles. That's the only way I know. Once you put "people" in charge, corruption and other dysfunctions eventually reign.
Are there any “not failed” democracies in your estimation? If so, what are they doing right that the US is doing wrong? Or is the whole Democratic experiment a failure?
One might look at Switzerland. A big difference between there and the U.S. seems to be that the people can petition for a vote on adding or removing any law or amendment they don't like, at any of their three levels of government. Contrast that to the U.S., where this ability doesn't exist in most places, including the federal government which was designed to be responsive to the states and not the people.
The Swiss also have a tradition of local power where possible, to the point that most of their social programs such as health care are handled by cantons (states) that average a third of a million people each. While in the U.S. we have literally a thousand times that many people arguing over health care at the federal level.
Looking back at ancient cultures, how many millenia would it take for Grecian democratic ideals to re-evolve from a hoard of gun toting MAGAs? Let alone Descartes level introspection?
There are, first of all, some basic things that need to be established: what is merit? how do you rank people based on their merit? can this ranking be objective and absolute? are the people with most "merit" also the most moral or capable to lead? are differences in merit meaningful in any way? why would the most "meritorious" end up on top after the apocalypse?
Aside from this, I'm pretty sure that life after a nuclear holocaust will be much worse for the average survivor than their life before the event. At best people would revert to some pre-modern self-governing communes (which are not necessarily a bad thing, it's just that they would lack a lot of things in terms of healthcare, nutrition etc.). At worst we would get Mad Max or Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" or smth along those lines.
> the prospect of survival contingent not on your wealth as in a traditional war
This hadn't occurred to me. And it makes perfect sense. See: all the rich techbros buying up land in New Zealand [1], or the Bush family buying up aquifer land in Paraguay[2]: get away from the blast zones!
Did you read this from a book? I'd be interested in it.
What i was trying to get at I think was the supreme irony of the apex of the cold war...that a nation so bent on the destruction of class through marxist leninism forged in turn the perfect sword to obliterate it, and that its capitalist enemy at the time seemed to have no choice but to pursue an utterly nihilist brinksmanship it knew it was forbidden to pursue in any spirit other than rote patriotism.
the history of the bay of pigs comes to mind. Fidel Castro, in my opinion, may have been the only communist to have the outright conviction to use nuclear arms, save Leonid Brezhnevs legendary temper and the Brezhnev doctrines closed fisted threat to glass the soviet states who fell out of line.
Universal conscription, 'total war' efforts, etc, have crossed class divides for the better part of a couple of centuries and are still in wide use so that theory doesn't seem to have quite the explanatory power you're suggesting.
Snipers in the Civil War were a major factor, as their primary targets were officers. Militaries have long understood the value of decapitation of the enemy's leadership.
The French conquered England in the battle of Hastings when they managed to kill the king.
There were so many assassination attempts against Hitler that he spent the last couple years of the war in a bunker, and the war ended the day he died.
True. But in Vietnam, Afghanistan (both Soviet and US conflict), and other environments, targeted assassination of civilian targets became a much bigger thing.
The (proper) strategic idea was as a deterrent, not _wanting_ to use them in an offensive manner. The strategy was in making an attack on "us" carry the high probability of annihilation of the attacker, thereby discouraging it -- it wasn't about "hey, let's nuke that country, then we'll gain an advantage".
That came later iirc - initially they were thinking of using them prior to running infantry in.
I think there are old public test videos where they actually did this kind of thing.
I also recall a group of scientists trying to elevate the understanding of the e-risk (pugwash conference?).
Basically people were becoming too comfortable with the idea of nuclear war because they knew how to “duck and cover” and had a little bomb shelter in the yard.
>> The (proper) strategic idea was as a deterrent, not _wanting_ to use them in an offensive manner. The strategy was in making an attack on "us" carry the high probability of annihilation for the attacker, thereby discouraging it -- it wasn't about "hey, let's nuke that country, then we'll gain an advantage".
> That came later iirc - initially they were thinking of using them prior to running infantry in.
I think you have to differentiate strategic and battlefield usages. IIRC, some people considered using them strategically when the opponent couldn't retaliate in kind. However, the Soviets had them within five years and the Chinese had them by 1965, I think.
I think tactical battlefield uses were on the table for much longer, because NATO felt like it could not win a conventional war in Europe, but that may have taken the form a nuking a corn field on your border (maybe even in your territory) that the invading army is passing through. It sounds like Russia may still have similar plans ("escalate to de-escalate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon).
It's impossible to know what would have happened if they hadn't, but if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg helping the Soviets achieve nuclear parity prevented the US from "using them when the opponent couldn't retaliate in kind" then they should be thought of like Snowdens or Assanges.
> It's impossible to know what would have happened if they hadn't, but if Julius and Ethel Rosenberg helping the Soviets achieve nuclear parity prevented the US from "using them when the opponent couldn't retaliate in kind" then they should be thought of like Snowdens or Assanges.
Eh, no. The Rosenbergs were consciously acting as spies for a foreign power, which is treasonous conduct no matter how you look at it.
Putting them next to Snowden makes Snowden look bad. At least publicly, he made every effort to avoid doing anything like what they did.
Also, IIRC, MacArthur was relieved of command in Korea because he wanted to nuke the Chinese, and that was decades before they even had an atomic weapon to retaliate with. That means you can't point to nuclear parity as the only reason the US didn't use them after the end of WWII.
The degree to which our ethics should be consequentialist, or they should evaluate intent is worth discussing, but as consequences become more significant intent becomes more insignificant. I don't care if someone 'looks bad', or breaks any law if they prevent nuclear war.
Stanislav Petrov disobeyed orders in the face of "30 layers of verification" telling him to report 5 incoming nuclear missiles.
Eh, they sent the USSR a couple of drawings of circles, and Ethel Rosenberg apparently did some typing. They were, loosely, spies for a foreign power, but their impact was absolutely negligible and their execution was essentially a lynching.
> Eh, they sent the USSR a couple of drawings of circles, and Ethel Rosenberg apparently did some typing.
And all Snowden did was copy some files to some flash drives. Describing significant acts in a mundane way doesn't make them less significant, it just omits all the important facts.
> They were, loosely, spies for a foreign power, but their impact was absolutely negligible
> In 1942 Semyonov persuaded Vasily Zarubin to transfer Julius Rosenberg and his contacts from the CPUSA-Jacob Golos channel to the direct control of the Rezidentura, with himself as the assigned case officer. The actual transfer occurred on Labor Day weekend, 7 September 1942, at a meeting in Central Park. Bernard Schuster brought Rosenberg to the meeting. Rosenberg was then subjected to a thorough vetting and recruitment process to include training in tradecraft and a probationary period. Alexander Feklisov was assigned to assist in managing Rosenberg. Once the formal recruitment of Rosenberg was completed Semyonov used Rosenberg to conduct formal recruitments of two of Rosenberg's friends from City College of New York, Joel Barr and William Perl.
Impact is also irrelevant. If someone robs a bank, but does it incompetently and only makes off with $50, they're still guilty of robbery.
They were a young couple with infant children and they were both electrocuted to death, in Ethel's case, for typing out her husband's letters.
There's no collection of acronyms and russian names you can add to that that makes it any less of a crime. Prison would have been extreme. The electric chair was pure barbarism.
> They were a young couple with infant children and they were both electrocuted to death,
The appropriateness of the punishment is an entirely separate issue.
> in Ethel's case, for typing out her husband's letters.
You're describing things in a misleadingly mundane way again.
The relevant question there is "did she know what was participating in?" If Julius robbed a bank and Ethel knew about the plan, willingly drove the getaway car, and went to jail for it; then it's misleading to say she went to jail for "driving her husband around." She went to jail for being an accomplice to a crime.
> You're describing things in a misleadingly mundane way again.
I take your point, but why don't we turn this framing on its head? 'Two soviet spies sentenced to the death penalty for espionage', is less mundane, but it's also correspondingly far less close to what objectively happened. It's worth keeping in mind here that legal language, especially around penal methods, has justification and euphemism baked in. Legal language is a way of framing mundane and often dimly connected events so they make sense from the perspective of basic legal categories: defendants, guilt, etc.
The actual concrete facts- they knew and stole nothing of value, they died in excruciating agony, especially Ethel, who was repeatedly electrocuted until she caught on fire, and they left two children orphans, are all raw facts, no framing needed. The legal dimension, the manners in which we understand culpability, crime, and punishment is all a structure that is used to describe, rationalize, and interpret right and wrong in our society. The actual penal system, the incarceration or execution of criminals, is the concrete, real body of criminal law. You can argue about the merits of really-existing-criminal-justice all you like, but you can't exclude it from the discussion.
> The actual concrete facts- they knew and stole nothing of value
Even if true, I don't think that matters.
Also, I'm not really interested in arguing about their punishment, capital punishment is a tangent from a tangent, but that seems like that's all you want to talk about.
Looks like a similar idea to the Desert Rock tests [1]. Though I don't think any of the Desert Rock soldiers galloped onto an atomic battlefield on horseback while wearing a gas mask and wielding a sword like one of the guys in your video did.
> Though I don't think any of the Desert Rock soldiers galloped onto an atomic battlefield on horseback while wearing a gas mask and wielding a sword like one of the guys in your video did.
I should note the horses are wearing gas masks too.
Well it was at first. Even after Japan, the US Airforce considered nuking Korea, but were eventually convinced not to by the Marines and Army who argued that deploying nuclear weapons risked a similar move by the Soviets on the battlefield where soldiers were centralized. Remember that the nukes back then were much, much smaller.
Also, a bit of a nitpick, but we do use nuclear weapons. We have for the past 70+ years. We haven't deployed them since Japan, but their role as a deterrent is a form of use.
> we do use nuclear weapons [in] their role as a deterrent
Yeah, I first heard this idea as the main point of Daniel Ellsberg's (also known for his first book, 'The Pentagon Papers' on Vietnam strategy) recent book 'The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner' [0] which documents the USA's 'use' of nuclear weapons, based on his work at RAND. It was a really interesting read, would recommend.
> it wasn't about "hey, let's nuke that country, then we'll gain an advantage".
Initially LeMay wanted to strike the Soviets first with nukes while the US had the monopoly on that technology, because his reasoning was that when the Soviets would have it, they would not hesitate one second to strike the US with it.
I can see his point, in the context of the time. Glad that nobody followed his recommendations, though!
I know we're not supposed to question why a link was posted here, but... why? ;)
I mean I thought about a lot of bad scenarios and how to prepare for them, but a nuclear war is probably not survivable, you're just going to prolong the pain a few more days / months.
To have any chance you probably would have to stay at least 5 years in an underground bunker. The guys on the TV shows Alone (I'm watching the first season now) are getting crazy just after a couple weeks of isolation.
The Germans have an excellent saying for these kind of situations: better an horrible end than an horror without end (sorry if my translation isn't accurate).
This is addressed right up front in the book, interestingly enough.
> "While working with hundreds of Americans building expedient shelters and life-support equipment, I have found that many people at first see no sense in talking about details of survival skills. Those who hold exaggerated beliefs about the dangers from nuclear weapons must first be convinced that nuclear war would not inevitably be the end of them and everything worthwhile. Only after they have begun to question the truth of these myths do they become interested, under normal peacetime conditions, in acquiring nuclear war survival skills. Therefore, before giving detailed instructions for making and using survival equipment, we will examine the most harmful of the myths about nuclear war dangers, along with some of the grim facts."
For me the lack of urgency in “prepping” for existential disasters is that I have far more pressing concerns, like avoiding bankruptcy and homelessness.
If I were sitting on a mountain of cash and hard assets, I would be more willing to invest in prepping. But until then, I’ve got little to protect anyway, and I’m not about to drop $800 on filling a bag with some supplies to last me a week in the apocalypse.
Surviving post-collapse would be an adventure for everyone, but an unpleasant one for most. I’ve found the best way to resolve any existential concern is to continue working on long term goals of wealth acquisition and self improvement. Come the apocalypse, I’d rather be the guy with the army than the ex-programmer begging for food in exchange for repairing a home owner’s smart fridge.
(old) Shoes, underwear, toilet paper, bottles of water, travel hand sanitizer, marine rations, first aid kit, u.s. army field survival guide (book).
Basically as much water as you can carry and 2-3 packets/pouches/bricks of emergency shortbread/fake-cake.
My threat models are 1) 3-day general disruption in services (water, electricity)... 2) immediate local disruption (fire, tornado), 3) "let's go camping!"
Basically pack a "let's go camping" backpack (heavy on bottled water and a few extra of those emergency bricks), and throw it in the car whenever you go "out" for like a hike or a weekend road trip or whatever.
The more you actually pick it up, use it, handle it, and travel with it... the more you'll figure some useful adjustments to it.
It doesn't have to really cost much money in any case, just don't throw away your next pair of shoes... grab your ugliest "TechBro" free backpack, and stuff 5 liters of water in there. You'd already be way ahead of the game in case of a widespread disruption of services.
I tend to keep my "dopp kit" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toiletry_bag ) in there when I'm not traveling which has my spare razor, q-tips, etc. ...again, total cost is nearing zero to get started, it's usually about making sure you've gathered useful things you already have into the same place.
This is good advice, but see, my problem is that I’d eat the marine rations when I run out of food next week, and I’d reach for the toilet paper as soon as it was out of stock at the shop. So now every time I go shopping I’ve got to refill the buffer. And next time I switch landlords, I have another bag to move!
Maybe it’s a bit more like the old bear quote. You just need someone else to be prepared…
Perfect! It's actually better if you interact with it regularly... which reminds me it's time to rotate the rations in my kit. Dessert for the week! :-D
Technically you should have multiple bags. One in the car, one by the bed, one in the shop. Again, it's more of a mindset, and what's the cheapest, comfiest buffer you can get away with. For me: water, shoes, toilet paper, marine rations. Sanitizer b/c it's not the earthquake that gets you, it's the diarrhea caused by poor hygiene afterwards.
You generally can get a large fraction of the benefits of preparing for a rare risk of very bad events with minimal time investment. See for instance Rob Wiblin's nuclear war cheatsheet, which takes about 60 seconds to read:
That's nice if you are in a rural part of the US - less so if you are in densely populated and heavily targetted (at least during the Cold War) locations like the UK.
Edit: Optimistic estimates by the UK government predicted 65% of population killed (53%) or seriously wounded (12%) in the short term - a real attack is likely to have been much worse:
Why try to survive? That's something people have to ask themselves individually really.
I took a wilderness survival course in college. We were usually out in a park practicing skills, but one day we just stayed in the classroom and our teacher talked about what drives people to survive extreme situations, even when they have little experience or training to do so. He brought up cases of parents going the extra mile to save the child they were lost with. He mentioned Hugh Glass and his drive for revenge after being left for dead from a bear mauling. Viktor Frankl observed a concentration camp prisoner who was always optimistic until the day he saw his family brought into the camp, and then he died soon after. For some people it could be a biological urge to keep living. Or maybe their religious beliefs drive them.
One of the best authors for these kinds of stories (about hard-core survival) is Jack London. You can even select a theme: Tropical islands and storms, ships and the ocean, or ice-cold Yukon and gold rush? Animal centric (Call of the Wild, White Fang)?
I don't question trying to survive bad scenarios in general but nuclear in particular.
People seem to say a nuke isn't as bad as we think, but the problem is that in case of a nuclear war, there won't be only one nuke, so the amount of radioactivity will be very high and a nuclear winter mean that even if you survive radioactivity nothing will grow for at least 5 years so you'll end up starving.
I could see myself try to take on a "Mad Max" like scenario, not a nuclear one.
'Better an end with horror than horror without an end.'
A saying attributed to Ferdinand von Schill, shortly before his death fighting in the streets of Stralsund.
Von Schill is a, in the wider population, mostly forgotten 'German' or better Prussian hero of an uprising against french occupation in Napoleonic times.
Stolen from Reddit:
A slight correction: the fixed phrase in German is
"Lieber ein Ende mit Schrecken als ein Schrecken ohne Ende",
which translates as
"Better a horrifying ending than a horror without end"
The Germans have an excellent saying for these kind of situations: better an horrible end than an horror without end (sorry if my translation isn't accurate).
You are the reason I come to HN. Sometimes we know, but few can say it. Thanks.
Because it is interesting? Because it is one of those things which fits in the frame of mind of many a hacker-type? For the same reason that some of us wear hiking boots in the server hall, just in case a mountain might spring up there?
> a nuclear war is probably not survivable
Of course it is, just look at how Japan came out of one. Would it be a pleasant experience? No, of course not, but the same was true for Hamburg, Tokyo and Dresden during the fire bombings, London during the Blitz, Stalingrad during the beleaguerment, the northern part of the Netherlands during the "hunger" winter of '44-'45. We like to read about war, watch movies about war, sing songs about war, create and look at art about war but few people actually want to experience war.
> at least 5 years in an underground bunker
As long as only "normal" nuclear weapons are used a few weeks would probably be enough, long enough for the fallout to be washed away by rain. The next step would be to leave the area and head for "the hills" - or any other area which was not directly attacked nor in the fallout plume of an attack.
I read somewhere that some nuclear ware strategists considered a 30-40% global fatality rate an acceptable outcome of nuclear war, which lead to the idea of strike first being ok. I hate to think what an advanced AI would do if it thinks the best things for humanity is less humans. An anti-natalist AI with nukes is not a good thing.
There is no need for an AI to come up with such a sentiment, there are plenty of people who see humans as a plague on the earth which it is better off without. The chance of some of these people triggering a nuclear exchange far exceeds the change of some future W.O.P.R. [1] getting the world into a conflict.
I think you're just taking general feelings of frustration for humanity's short-sightnedness a tad too seriously, I've yet to see any group wanting to organize the demise of humanity based on what usually drives those sentiments, like the destruction of nature or cruelty towards animals and humans, in comparison to, say...
Religious people making decisions with far-reaching consequences based on their religion's eschatology.
I'm not so much thinking of people who want to totally eradicate humanity - these do exist [1] but they'll find it hard to gain enough adherents to get themselves in the position to trigger a nuclear exchange. The people I'm thinking of are those who'd like to see the world population reduced to what they consider to be a 'sustainable' level - neo-Malthusianists, radical Ecrocritics, etc. As you mentioned above there are also those who'd like to 'immanentise the eschaton' driven by religious zeal, e.g. Islamic State awaited the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, would initiate the countdown to the apocalypse [2]. They did not succeed but the recent fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban might spell trouble for neighbouring Pakistan - a nuclear power - where the intelligence service ISI is suspected of being more loyal to extremists than to the Pakistani government [3].
"The total death toll as calculated by the Joint
Chiefs, from a U.S. first strike aimed primarily
at the Soviet Union and China, would be
roughly 600 million dead. A hundred
Holocausts"
600 million was known at the time to be an underestimate and then add in what the Soviets would have done then over a billion is probably realistic. World population at the time was about 3 billion.
Edit: Worth noting that this US strike would have killed about 100 million in Western Europe.
The nuclear weapons we have now are WAY more powerful than the ones used on Japan, and only two were dropped. An all out modern nuclear war would be a lot more devastating.
If you read the linked book, it covers this point. Yes, the tech exists to build bombs with multi-megaton yields and has existed for decades However, those super-big explosions are actually less tactically and strategically useful. More useful are smaller explosions that can be placed with more precision, and the tech needed to hit with precision has only improved over time. It is more likely that deployed weapons would have yields measured in kilotons. While bigger than Nagasaki, probably still closer to Nagasaki than Tsar Bomba
Yeah radioactive decay from fallout is exponential. The hottest isotopes decay rapidly. It might be 5 years in the worst locations, but not everywhere.
I'll do, but I'm pretty sure the author is assuming one nuke detonating in your area. If this is a nuclear war there's a good chance thousands of nukes will be detonated.
When I think about it I certainly wouldn't want to have my family live through it.
But I would like to ... see what happens. Maybe try some effort to record observations and such, bury it in the hopes someone finds it. It might be horrible, but I can of course end it at anytime if I wish. I would not expect any kind of comfortable long term survival.
What it really comes down to is that with or without this info you most likely live your life mostly the same until a catastrophe strikes. When it does you’re either dead or need to make a new life. Now based on your saying, are you going to really off yourself voluntarily, or will you make the best of a bad situation? And if you are going to make the best of it, it would’ve been real nice to study about what supplies to have prepared and what you’re going to do now, rather than go blind, and without the internet resources to help you anymore.
Either you take a massive dose of radioactivity (nuclear war means several nukes) and suffer horribly 'till death or you starve because nuclear winter.
I have read about it a long time ago so don't quote me on this, but a nuclear winter is supposed to last at least 5 years.
Do you have the financial means and space to store that much food and rotate it regularly? I don't and frankly I'd rather not bother.
Once nuclear winter is over, do you know how to grow your own food? You might not be able to hunt because all animals will either be dead or killed by other hunters.
This scenario is very very hard to overcome. Not impossible, but only a few very prepared and or very lucky individuals would survive.
You're overestimating the cost to store years of food (dense portions of dried beans, rice, chocolate, liquor, etc; rough estimate $120 / twelve 20-lb bags of rice per person per year) and the basic educational precautions that can mean a world of quality of life; the kind of precautions you won't be able to educate yourself on if something does happen, you'll have to rely on previous gathered knowledge. Things like how to best shelter at impact and prevent exposure to radioactivity after the fact.
I have really considered same. Why bother. The surviving part is harsh, but what comes after that? Most modern nice things will be gone for years. Would that really be even worth living?
About what comes after: Our ancestors lived with a lot worse than that. The people who walked across the US on the Oregon trail did it. I’m sure we could do it too.
Have you forgotten the Great Toilet Paper Riots of 2020?
We're having trouble surviving a (reasonably mild by comparison) pandemic as a species that has killed millions! Now multiply what we've seen by several orders of magnitude. With all the greed and guns in the USA... oof.
I live in an affluent area that gets hurricanes. You know when a storm is coming because certain shelves of goods are wiped out — non-perishable items, bread, water.
When the pandemic hit, these were the same items people hoarded (in addition to toilet paper). Why? The pandemic wasn’t going to shut off a fridge/freezer. It wasn’t going to disable the water system. People reacted in the only way they knew for a crisis they experience often — not what the actual situation was.
It served as a reminder that when a major, acute crisis hits, most people are not going to be thinking rationally. They’re going to rely on whatever instincts have been developed.
I can’t even imagine what extremes would result from a fast-moving crisis like a nuclear explosion.
Early in the pandemic we didn't know the degree to which the supply chains would be shut down. I mean, you had footage from Wuhan where things really were seriously locked down and people basically didn't leave their houses. I'm not surprised all the beans and rice and pasta and oats vanished from the shelves.
In the end our version of "shutdown" was much milder, but we didn't know that at the beginning. We were rather fortunate that delta variant didn't come along until our vaccination program was well on its way.
When the book was first authored 6 or 7 states had nuclear weapons, but only 2 had the means to deliver those weapons intercontinentally. Today 8 or 9 states are nuclear capable and most have intercontinental delivery systems.
Setting aside intentional use, the probability of accidental or forced launch has increased significantly. The difference between an industrial accident & military accidents are only semantic after the fact; and some of these states have accident rates that are deeply troubling.
One might reasonably expect Japan, S. Korea, Saudi Arabia and others to join the nuclear club soon, particularly as/if the US conventional deterrent fades & its nuclear umbrella deterrent grows more uncertain.
Still, only 2 states have the power to unleash universal destruction - all the others have delivery systems but they don't have much quantity, so their weapons are essentially a deterrent force that can be used to either retaliate for a nuclear attack (thus, hopefully, preventing one) or used in an ultimatum to prevent invasion of their homeland or capitulation, but that's it, they can do extreme harm to the target, killing millions of civilians, but they can't eliminate an opponent state the way USA or Russia can.
>Petrov was the duty officer at the command center for the Oko nuclear early-warning system when the system reported that a missile had been launched from the United States, followed by up to five more. Petrov judged the reports to be a false alarm, and his decision to disobey orders, against Soviet military protocol, is credited with having prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its NATO allies that could have resulted in a large-scale nuclear war. An investigation later confirmed that the Soviet satellite warning system had indeed malfunctioned.
>Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system's indication a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds above North Dakota and the Molniya orbits of the satellites, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite.
>Petrov later indicated that the influences on his decision included that he had been told a US strike would be all-out, so five missiles seemed an illogical start; that the launch detection system was new and, in his view, not yet wholly trustworthy; that the message passed through 30 layers of verification too quickly; and that ground radar failed to pick up corroborative evidence, even after minutes of delay. However, in a 2013 interview, Petrov said at the time he was never sure that the alarm was erroneous. He felt that his civilian training helped him make the right decision. He said that his colleagues were all professional soldiers with purely military training and, following instructions, would have reported a missile launch if they had been on his shift.
>But nuclear security expert Bruce G. Blair has said that at that time, the U.S.–Soviet relationship had deteriorated to the point where "the Soviet Union as a system—not just the Kremlin, not just Andropov, not just the KGB—but as a system, was geared to expect an attack and to retaliate very quickly to it. It was on hair-trigger alert. It was very nervous and prone to mistakes and accidents. The false alarm that happened on Petrov's watch could not have come at a more dangerous, intense phase in US–Soviet relations."[23] At that time, according to Oleg Kalugin, a former KGB chief of foreign counterintelligence, "The danger was in the Soviet leadership thinking, 'The Americans may attack, so we better attack first.'"
My Dad's strategy for survival was: buy lots of canned goods. At the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis he was an RAF V-bomber captain, and when he wasn't on QRA he would rush into our flat in Doncaster, dump tins of beans and rush out again. I was about 9 years old at the time, and didn't really grasp what might be about to happen.
It was all a bit futile really - the base he flew from (Finningley) was then one of the RAF's biggest bases, and would have been smeared as a prime target. Doncaster, around five miles from the base would have been incinerated.
As someone that spent most of his young life living in nuclear bulls-eyes, I do sometimes feel a bit lucky!
Are you american? I'm just curious because that's the impression I get from "Massive respect".
The V-Bombers are very cool, of course, highly recommend Mark Felton's YouTube channel as he has some very niche stories about them e.g. simulated bombing missions of the east coast.
Pah! You call those niche! How about flying a booster for the UK's crappy space programme in the Vulcan's bomb-bay from Lincolnshire to the Woomera rocket site, Australia, illegally crossing Indonesian airspace on the way, because they figured out that the Indonesians would probably not detect the Vulcan (early stealth) and if they did they had nothing that could intercept it. And then the whole Vulcan crew fell asleep for about an hour, while the plane carried on on autopilot.
We need to be more aware that there are many submarines in the ocean with 200 long range nuclear warheads each. One sub can pretty much hit every city within a 4,000 mile radius. It’s a terrifying constant threat that the vast majority of people are oblivious to.
Actually this is quite interesting. Some propose that the US should get rid of all land based deterrence, since the “enemy” whoever they are, would use bunker Busters against land based missiles, causing much more damage than if they only used air bursts against cities. I’m inclined to think they are right.
True. Watching that movie was a mistake. I just felt bad the entire time. Just felt like absolute ass. There is something to be said about art that just makes you feel awful the entire time.
I thought the picture Threads painted was silly at the later parts. After the nuclear war, the next generation loses grammar and ability to speak coherent sentences?
Just because it is gritty, doesn't mean it is realistic. WW1 and WW2 both managed to be horrifying in unanticipated ways.
IMO not. Large-enough scale nuclear war would indicate to me a colossal failure as a species. It might be best to leave behind the fellow apes for good.
...don't. This movie was horror on an existential level, and left me with a firm conviction that surviving a nuclear war would be the worst of all outcomes.
In 1970's the doctrine of Finnish Army was very much post-nuclear prolonged guerrilla/revenge war. We learned that fresh birch-leaves are nukular-free nourishment unlike berries and mushrooms or small animals. Also you must dust yourself with fir branches frequently for fall-out particles.
To feed any meaningful number of men who move a lot, that's not enough.
Instead of hunting, you visit local farms that have stored hay safe from the fallout and have cattle kept indoors. You take what you need and leave receipt.
Actually birch leaves have nourishment value close potatoes to 400 kcal/100 grams as I recall. And lots of vitamin C. But they taste very bad. We tested that too, with prolonged boiling and Tabasco, birch leaves are at least semi-edible.
This scene we were presented was a wasteland, no farmers left. The purpose of this operation was too keep the wasteland wasted. Some Estonian "Forest Brothers" survived 40 years to see their country free again. That was the doctrine at that time.
Product: Birch leaves minced - Bulk
Characteristic
Look and color: Green
Flavor: Bitter herbal
Nutrition 100 g: kJ 66 / Kcal 16,
total fat 0,2 g of which saturated fat 0 g,
Carbohydrate 3 g, of which sugar 1,8 g,
protein 7 g
Something is off with that calculation. Carbs and protein = 4kcal per gramm, fat is 9kcal per gramm.
0.2*9 + 7*4 + 3*4 = 41.8kcal
Not going to make you fat but not too shabby either, especially the protein content. Seems you run into protein toxicity issues pretty fast around 1000kcal, but if you enter ketosis it might be a good way to protein so your muscles don't waste.
Yes. "Luonnonmuonaohje" suggested eating exactly 1.1 kg of birch leaves producing 5 MegaJoules (1000 kcal). Some army egghead has calculated all the issues.
Tuon mukaan koivunlehtiä pitää syödä 1.1 kiloa elinvoimat ylläpitävan (5 MJ) energian saamiseksi, eli olisi hieman parempi kuin pettu. Ei hullumpi (108 kcal/100g) Noin suurta määrää ei suositella.
Yes. "Luonnonmuonaohje" is the word. On this particular kayaking trip I was totally obsessed with post-holocaust living on the Baltic sea. Macaroni/BirchLeaves/Tabasco was the menu. You can get used to it. https://youtu.be/0P-wd3qzCBA
My personal strategy has been to find a body of water not in the direction of the prevailing winds and steal a sailboat to live on for at least 2 weeks as the more radioactive isotopes decay.
If there was a risk of a nuclear war, I'd not be surprised if the UK sent some level of force down there as a 'back up'.
Besides that idle thought- there's quite a lot of materiel down there already, so unless the UK withdrew war machines to help in the global annihilation, Argentina would still face some stiff opposition.
I've been fascinated with the place since my father worked there after the war, and as a Northern Brit I'm comfortable in and like rugged, remote landscapes.
More to the point, most of the bad shit to happen after a significant nuclear exchange will hit the Northern hemisphere and wind currents being what they are will mostly keep the fallout up there. Well, here.
My father's one piece of advice, having spent a lot of time flying out to take photos of the landscape and penguin colonies and such was - "Whatever you do, never go downwind of a penguin colony". Cute little buggers stink!
I think the Falklands reached a milestone in mine clearance, wherein they believe most of them are dealt with now.
Still, 'most' implies an unnerving possibility of chance.
- ed: I realise, belatedly, that this circles back to the original conceit - staying out of the way of noxious winds :)
Reminds me about a game where you grab all your belongings as quickly as you can, jump into your fallout shelter, and survive for as many days as possible with your family. It's pretty morbid.
Kelly: People think that if you have a technological edge, that you can vanquish your enemy, but obviously you have to keep your technological edge sharp.
Dyson: It’s the same with civil defense. The Germans were being heavily bombed for about three years, so they got very good at civil defense. Whereas in Britain we were only bombed for six months, we never really got the hang of it. It was a huge difference. It actually took ten times as many bombs to kill one person in Germany as it did to kill one person in London. That was one of the reasons why the campaign failed, that the German civil defense was just very good. You can actually save people with civil defense. Most people are unaware of that. Civil defense does work. It would also work against nuclear bombs. Of course, that is a politically unpopular view, but it happens to be true.
Kelly: Can you explain that?
Dyson: Well, most of the people who are killed in nuclear bombing are killed by blast and fire, which is sort of old-fashioned, it has nothing to do nuclear radiation. Some people die of nuclear radiation, but that’s a small number by comparison. If you are five feet underground, you are very well shielded from all of that. So most people, even in a nuclear bombing, would survive, if they are five feet underground. Of course, in Hiroshima, they didn’t have that. If the Japanese had had a couple of years, they would have learned, and probably faster than that. It’s quite unrealistic to imagine that, with good civil defense, that Hiroshima would have been so devastating.
I’ve read this book a few times now. It is quite interesting. I am pretty sure if there was a nuclear war I would just be screwed. I live about 15 miles from a naval base. My entire survival strategy starts with “hope that Russian ICBMs are accurate so I don’t die instantly…”. Not sure anything in the book would help me after that point, but worth a shot I guess.
Pretty sure significant targets - larger cities and significant facilities - would get a barrage instead of a single weapon.
Multiple relatively small warheads spread across an area are far more damaging than a single super-nuke, which is why Tsar Bombas fell out of fashion.
At one point it was rumoured there were hundreds of warheads aimed at Moscow. Even Dick Cheney was shocked when he found out. It's a reasonable guess Washington and London would have had the same treatment.
I'm not sure anyone even knows what that would do to an area, except possibly turn it into a pool of radioactive lava.
> Pretty sure significant targets - larger cities and significant facilities - would get a barrage instead of a single weapon.
Yup, this was already discussed (I forgot where, sorry) before, I think the US back in the 70s or 80s had plans for example to send at least 5 or 6 nukes on each target, just to be sure they would be completely destroyed. And if I remember correctly they had several dozens of thousands of targets, meaning that everything apart from small villages would be nuked to the ground. Even smaller cities, relatively speaking.
I took a class on strategic deterrence and game theory as an undergraduate in the early 80s. Even then I took it in part for its weirdness — in my entire life I was not able to take the threat of global nuclear war seriously.
Basically I figured that it wouldn’t really happen because the consequences were too extreme; in the case of accidental discharge the ability to survive was a crapshoot at best Ly under my control (e,g. I live across the street from Draper Labs).
In fact the preparations for fallout shelters and the like always seemed like a failure of imagination.
I'm not sure why this was posted, although the nuclear risk does currently seem higher than in the last couple of decades, with China eyeing Taiwan, etc.
OTOH, nuclear war might halt the climate crisis, over-population, etc.
A number of diagrams in the print edition are 1:1 scale and won’t work at any other size. If you want this book be sure to get a correct print edition.
No. They protect your thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine. You still have to protect yourself from other forms of fallout. The linked book goes into extreme detail on all aspects of this.
Disaster/collapse/conspiracy fantasies are a product of those who were impacted by something that caused deep hurt in their life.
You imagine the abstraction of your pain via these fantasies. However simple it was, or serious, you recollect through the conduit of the world ending, for that’s what it felt like to you.
I'm the first in four generations of my family to not (yet) experience war firsthand, so at least in my case it's more about being aware how prone to conflict the area I live in is.
Nuclear weapons with a twenty (or more) mile radius of fallout have the immediate ability to bridge the class divide. Whereas traditional munitions disproportionately interact with the poor (soldiers and combatants) a nuclear detonation could thrust an opulent family into fallout bunker squalor in mere minutes, and pin them there for half a decade. the prospect of survival contingent not on your wealth as in a traditional war, but on your interpersonal and improvisational survival skill was certainly looked upon with scorn.