How does it work again? If the fireball is above your thumb, you’re dead?
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Yeah, I’d really rather it hadn’t come around again, I’m kind of done with living in these interesting times. I’m ready for a bit of boredom, you know?
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That would be a most welcome change.
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I was just thinking of “Lucifer’s Hammer” today.
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If we are going to barter, I heard that the most valuable barter items at Burning Man are condoms and batteries. So have some of those on hand 
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Everyone makes fun of that - but assuming you are outside the ‘hurt by the fireball’ area which is the smallest area of damage - duck and cover at the flash has a decent chance of saving you from serious injury. Most of the injuries from people who survive the actual bomb, will be shrapnel - and duck and cover helps with that.
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Yep. They would. So many automatic systems are in play now that they would activate them regardless of the intensity of the exchange, because any survivors are necessary to go forward and if there’s a small chance there’s a small chance.
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You do have a cellphone, don’t you? It’ll come over that fully. There are a few alert styles that cannot be overridden or shut down on cellphones in the US, and EAS/Presidential Alert is one of them. It basically can not only send the message, it can also freeze the phone locked onto the message, contain payloads, etc.
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Somewhere between “close enough to be vaporized” and “far away enough to read about it in the next day’s paper,” there is a range where duck and cover would help you survive a nuclear explosion. And that made sense at a time when we were talking about ~100 Hiroshima-sized bombs, But even after the end of cold war, we’re talking about enough destruction to ensure the complete collapse of industrial society. Without a long supply chain continually moving food to population centers, most people will starve within a month, even if they aren’t affected directly by the bombs personally.
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So kind of what happened when people couldn’t but seeds at the beginning of the pandemic.
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One of the many things that makes this threat especially horrifying is that one of the few solaces we as humans have surrounding our mortality is the notion that “Well, at least it will go on after me.” That the cycle of things will continue on as we’ve known it during our time here.
I fear nuclear war for the obvious reasons; but I’m also deeply sickened & affronted by the idea that any human being would condemn this whole planet to such a thing, an act that would not only end our species but corrupt the very earth for a long time to come. When really, the universe could do that to us anyway at a moment’s notice–be it asteroid, supervolcano, gamma burst, etc.
Why can we not seem to stop making pain for ourselves? I think that’s the endless question.
Update: After writing this last night, had my first stress dream that war had started. Lights went out and the information arrived that missles were coming. 
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Now that you mention it - I lived just outside Washington DC as a kid in the 80s. I don’t recall ever doing drills…
I do recall the general tenseness caused by the nuclear threat though. (And movies like “The Day After” didn’t help!)
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We didn’t do them in the 70s either.
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I’m waiting to see someone who doesn’t want recordings of them to go viral, to play this tone intentionally in the near future.
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Move to Britain.
The predicted targets all overlap to some extent, so unless you are living in the Highlands of Scotland you are probably going to be in a firestorm and overpressure combination. The south-east of England will be flattened and glassed because there are so many targets there.
The downside to this is that you will be stuck in Britain, and maybe we won’t get nuked.
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Sorry, can’t risk that.
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On the UK in a nuclear war: I’ll just leave this oldie right here
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