Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/09/22/nuclear-war-survival-skills-p.html
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have been field-tested repeatedly tinder simulated crisis condition
Yeah, I’ve had a couple of tinder crisis conditions too. Non of them went nuclear, though…
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I will stick with playing the odds that say I will be in the 95% that die off right away. Now where is my whiskey?
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Does it cover mine shafts?
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Only the large format edition.
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I know we’re all feeling a mix of dread and horror about tragedy on an unprecedented scale, and (depending on where you are in the world) the chance of being caught up in it. But for those of us here in the U.S., it’s pretty safe that we will not experience “forthcoming nuclear devastation of America and the radioactive immolation of the last and greatest of human dreams”.
North Korea is not the Soviet Union. They’re not even China. Odds are very good that they’re not even Israel. It is a relatively small target, and the U.S. is a large, spread-out, heavily armed target. This is not the typical case we’ve planned for where nuclear war means mutually assured destruction.
The chance of them getting off a shot and hitting the continental U.S. are pretty slim. The odds of them doing it more than once are even slimmer. They cannot survive a conventional war. They sure as hell can’t survive a nuclear way. If the unthinkable does happen, there will still be people in America to wring their hands over what an unprecedented environmental, human, economic, and political disaster we’ve created.
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Boo! I say booooooo!
Um, what you mean ‘we’, white man? A chunk of the northern Pacific basin is still within range of North Korea, albeit in a shaky fashion, and no one who is likes the thought that we might be shelled because of a couple of nutbars in chief having an e-peen fight.
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We cannot allow a mine shaft gap!
Similar to the book in the original Boing Boing post: Fallout Protection published by the Department of Defense’s Office of Civil Defense in 1961.
That pamphlet and a few other pamphlets on the same subject are available from the Nifty from the Last Fifty Initiative page on the Washington State Department of Archeology and Historic Preservation website under the heading Fallout Shelter.
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I get the sense that the reason they don’t announce missile tests before hand is because they don’t want to obviously miss what they are aiming at.
One of these times, they are going to accidentally hit land…
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Not sure that any of that is really relevant other than from a completely cynical, western-centric point of view. Any use of nuclear weaponry will be a global tragedy, period. We aren’t talking about a nation of dictators, we are talking about a nation of famine stricken and opressed farmers who will inevitably bear an even greater proportion of the ensuing turmoil than they do already. Plus, they are a peninsula adjacent to the world’s largest body of water. There is no way that toxic cloud doesn’t drift toward every other nation bordering the Pacific.
The two most ignorant, privileged, and belligerent humans on this entire planet have their fingers on the button(s). The craziest part is that there’s no actual escalation, just these two playground bullies trading what they think are very clever barbs. Barring some miracle, there is no way this resolves without a situation that should give the entire surviving world cause for generations of mourning.
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Those of us who live in the parts of America closest to Asia somehow fail to find this reassuring.
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Thank you for saying what so many people in this world seem to have forgotten. North Korea is a place where millions of innocent, suffering people live. Locked in the compound with their David Koresh/Jim Jones leadership. This isn’t a face off between nations, it’s a hostage situation and Trump is on a path of getting them, and many others in South Korea and Japan killed.
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Any atomic/nuclear blast in North Korea or over the Pacific from an airborne missile test will spread high levels of radiation to the Canadian Western and Northern areas plus Alaska, then spread the cloud to all of the most Northerly areas of the planet. An ugly scenario that scares the crap out of me, especially since The Cheeto would do his best to drop a couple of nukes on NK and add to the mess.
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When Germany was reunited, it was a global cause célèbre (well, except in Moscow, I guess). I am very fearful what the global, especially Western, response will be post-Kim.
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Nuclear War Survival Skills (PDF)
Don’t forget that your pesky neighbors will be on the menu, the grocery store won’t be open any longer. My personal tastes lean towards the crock pot for full flavor.
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Best equipment to have on hand in case of nuclear war
"“Those of you who will stay alive will envy the dead”
-Nikita Khrushchev
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So if I am engaging in cannibalism now, can it be seen as premptive planning for nuclear war?
…Just asking…for a …friend.
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Gosh, bummer city dude.
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Although a nuke blast is bad, especially for the folks right near it, it’s still quite limited. It’s definitely not a globally catastrophic thing. Chernobyl was orders of magnitude worse caused by a burning nuclear reactor on fire for days/weeks. But that still only contaminated a swath of Scandinavia. Let me reiterate that this is still way way bad. Even a ground burst nuke would keep the worst of it right there. If they somehow lobbed one on Alaska, pray for those in Anchorage, but the rest of North America would have barely detectable radiation.
The effects you are describing are more with a WWIII with Russia where they launch thousands of missiles at every major city which would then burn as huge radioactive craters for years. That is Mutually Assured Destruction…
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The nuke problem is really a small piece of it. More than a nuke blast or the radiation it would be the trigger that kills millions of people in Korea and Japan.
We can destroy N Korea with conventional weapons. If they even fired a missile with a nuke it would be all over. But the problem then is we would retaliate, but there is no way we would be able to take out all the artillery and missiles aimed at Seoul. All of those would be launched immediately and millions of people in a huge modern city would be killed. And who knows what other targets in Japan and other areas would be hit.
With most military actions there would be a huge buildup of soldiers and weapons, we would have some time to evacuate or secure civilians, increase defenses. But that isn’t happening.
The scariest thing for me is that one of these two crazy idiots would pull that trigger. And I’m most afraid that idiot would be Trump acting preemptively. By hyping up the nuclear threat to the US he’s getting the support from his base to do it. And this could happen any day.
But the removal of Kim Jong Un or his nuke program would be at the cost of millions of our friends and allies.
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