Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.
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Not joking here. Find a way to finish dying.
I live at the edge of a city but near a major airport. my biggest nuke fear is a bomb hits the city center that leaves me alive and the airport ones take awhile to arrive.
Assuming your home isn't on fire. Seal everything, do not go outside! If possible, stay inside for as long as possible. Fill everything with water your bathtub, every cup, bucket, etc. Monitor the radio for emergency broadcasts for what to do next. AM stations are more likely to work. If you have a CB radio handy, (depending on your country) you can talk to authorities on Channel 9.
Tip regarding radio: 2182kHz SSB near the coast. That frequency is monitored by authorities globally. It's the MF equivalent of maritime VHF ch16.
Technically, the same goes for 2187.5kHz, but that's for digital transmission only, and unless you have the required hardware to encode/decode it, you won't be able to make sense of it.
Source: I have a GOC
CB radio has really short range and there's little likelihood that authorities would be monitoring it.
2182 kHz is long range marine radio and only good if you're on a boat. I don't know that anyone you talk to would care about a person on land while they're handling their own maritime emergencies.
If someone really wants emergency radio I'd suggest ham radio or GMRS.
There is also amateur radio (aka ham radio), which can legally and practically operate at higher output powers if necessary, and on far more frequencies than CB. Although doomsday people often say to just buy a ham radio and use it without a license, I don't advise that, simply because having the radio is only half the challenge.
The other half is the ability to competently operate the radio to effectively communicate and organize aid. And this only comes with practice by talking to others, in the form of regular participation in radio nets and/or emcomm activities. Emergency radio isn't even limited to voice transmissions, with digital modes and even fax modes being an option that can transmit quicker and farther. Having a legit call sign will make it easier for rescuers to identify your transmissions, as well as figuring out if you've been located.
While some people will make ham radio a lifelong hobby, others obtain their license simply for small-talk, or for a SHTF scenario, or as longer-distance walkie-talkies when camping in heavily wooded forests. The possibilities are endless, but it all starts with a first radio and some basic training on radio handling.
Ham radio clubs across the USA and the world are generally very welcoming of new folks, so it's worth looking up your nearby club or dropping in on an in-person club meeting.
Great questions, and you need to familiarize yourself with the correct answers. Generally memorize the protocols. I'm going to regurgitate what I have internalized & point you to online resources to educate yourself further.
Preparations made well in advance really give an advantage to survival.
As soon as a nuke is dropped, go the fuck home. Turn on your faucets & fill all sinks & bathtubs, as this may be the last of your easy, clean, potable water you'll get from the grid for who knows how long.
One of the biggest & best things you can do is shelter in place, I think for a week. Radioactive fallout & the heavy alpha particles will be everywhere, and blow everywhere. Cover all windows & doors with Visqueen sheeting & duct tape, control & eliminate the travel of random-ass particulates. After 1 week, the radioactive potency of the dust particles should be reduced by 85-90%. That's huge. So shut your windows & doors, seal everything up, and sit your ass down. It could save your life.
Shelter in place requires food, water, preps. I think it's overkill, but overkill is also kind of what you need/want, 1 gallon of water per person per day. When Russia started getting on their shit, people were buying up iodine tabs. This harmless substance negates the harmful effects of potential radioactive exposure via your food & drink. The trick is you have to take this stuff a set amount of time..before...exposure to radioactive particles. It protects your thyroid gland, IIRC. Have water, have food, maybe have a container or two of those fancy tablets.
Especially in the earlier days, you help others by being able to help yourself. If there are assistance efforts, you can turn them down & the help can go to others in more dire need.
We can, and do, talk about prepping things for years on end. I would recommend you tune in to Canadian Prepper (hey,I watched some of the video after & I didn't do too badly!)
Yes, Canadian Prepper touches on this. In my words: information is good. But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know. Good advice in general.
But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know.
You'd think that lesson would still be fresh from the pandemic, when at the very beginning the CDC tried to get the public not to hoard masks so the actual medical professionals could have them, then that got twisted and metastisized into "masks don't work" and the ant-masker/anti-vaxxer bullshit.
Probably a stupid question, but during that week, going outside to fire up my whole house generator would probably be a death sentence. Right? So I should just live without electricity for a week? That reality has me thinking that I need to get one of those generators that turns itself on when power goes out. It would be really convenient during the winter anyways, since we lose power a lot when it snows around here.
Kurzgesagt has a video on it.
Excellent Video! And important call for nuclear disarmament.
The only time a nuke has ever been used in war was when only one country had them. Disarmament destroys MAD and makes it possible for only one country to have (and therefore use) nukes again.
have (and therefore use) nukes again
nukes, or anything else.
just look how great nuclear disarmament worked for ukraine. you can bet your right hand that no country will give their nukes up ever again.
This brings to mind something David Mitchell said once on Would I Lie To You (British panel show):
In response to Kelvin MacKenzie's claim that the "This Is My" guest had built him a nuclear bunker:
David Mitchell: If there's a nuclear war, I don't want to live. I don't want to come out of a shelter and try to rebuild society. I have no skills. Okay, society is destroyed by a nuclear war, we're basically - we're back to the bronze age...how long is it gonna be before people start pitching panel shows again? It's gonna be at least 2000 years!
Watch it here if you want, it was annoyingly hard to find.
However I don't think David - who is a comedian - is precisely right about how such a war would affect the state of technology. If there are survivors, I don't think we'd really be back to the bronze age. Even if all technology was destroyed (which it wouldn't be), give humans a few decades, we'll have some sort of modern technology back up and running. Maybe not computers, but some certainly some analogue electronics - the knowledge isn't lost. Communications would be one of the first points of focus, so television would follow closely behind.
The longest stretch would likely be chip fabs. You need precision electronics and hazardous chemicals and plenty of power.
But considering that some form of electronics will survive, and it wouldnt take long for people to get rudimentary electricity going, I don't see why we couldn't have world Internet within a decade.
Counterpoint:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
The thing is, people inherently want to live. It’s instinctual. Secondly, everybody - regardless of skill level - can learn to be handy and useful. If everything is destroyed, and society is to be rebuilt, a lot of manual labor will be needed for cleanup and rebuilding. Even the “I pick things up and put them down” guy is perfectly suited for this type of work.
KYAGB
"Kiss your ass goodbye" for those who left their Ovaltine decoder ring at home.
No time like the present to get involved with something like a Community Emergency Response Team or its local equivalent. FEMA has manuals and other training materials available online which address the matter of chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and explosive (CBRNE; sometimes just CBRN or NBC depending on agency or publication date) incidents. Won't make you an expert on yield estimation or fallout mapping but there is information which may be useful for improving individual and community resilience.
Personally, I think the likelihood of getting nuked is low and it's much more likely that a CERT volunteer will be called upon to assist in natural disasters or major accidents to relieve the burden on professional crews. Where I live, teams have been employed to assist in redirecting traffic around areas with downed power lines or, in one case somewhat recently, a significant natural gas leak. Firefighters and other specialists establish a safe perimeter before handing off the site to volunteers so they can respond to other incidents throughout the city while repair crews work down their list of priorities.
Long comment short: building useful skills and relationships before shit meets fan means less scrambling to figure it out on that day and there are real, practical applications for that knowledge beyond LARPing with Jim-Bob's moron militia.
If a blast happens in your city and you live...it's probably best to just suicide rather then deal with the literal fallout and radiation poisoning.
In Short, you will not survive..go painless
Attention all Fallout gamers!
BackOnMyBS is in trouble and they need your help to survive a nuclear explosion in their city. To do this, they need a Vault and a trusty canteen. To help them, all they need is your credit card number, the three numbers on the back and the expiration month and year. But you gotta be quick so that BackOnMyBS can build a Vault and survive nuclear annihilation!
Make sure my PC is ok and all GOG games downloaded. If needed, transfer the battlestation to a safer or better location, with a generator/solar panels & a decent battery.
Profit.
My life won't change, I just won't go to work.
if you're gonna die in nuclear strike, it'll be most likely because a building you're in collapses. unless you're very close to a target that might get a ground burst or small nuke, like airport, large transit node like cargo railroad terminal, high level military command hq or such, you shouldn't worry too hard about radiation either. in any other case, if you're within fatal radiation dose range, then you're also deep within overpressure-that-will-collapse-any-building range and instant-third-degree-burn-and-beyond range. at smaller yields you'll see fireball range greater than fatal radiation range. play around with https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to get the idea
if you're outside, you'll get thermal burns and might be thrown around but as long as nothing falls on you, and ignoring burns, you should be mostly fine. there won't be utilities, no power, no water, no communications, so you better have some batteries. if you have shelter, then if you have water and food to weather it out, and if you're upwind of groundbursts if any, then you'll probably survive
...long enough to be drafted, because in space of day we went from peace to total war
The first rule in rescue is don't become another casualty.
Hunker down for a few days, iirc the most dangerous radiation will decay in the first few days. You don't want the ash on your body. Fill your bathtub/whatever else with water to drink and ration your food.
Become a Brahmin rancher.
Everybody is acting like its the apocalypse, just put on one off those N95 masks we all have from covid, get in your car and fuck off. Or walk, you can easily cover 30 km in a few hours to the next not destroyed city.
Edit: I meant kilometers.
you can easily cover 30 miles in a few hours to the next not destroyed city.
Dude......how fast do you walk???
A very fit athletic person who has done endurance training can do 30 miles in a day, but that's not typical. Most people could do around 10+ if their life literally depended on it like in the aftermath of a nuke
Source: a brief web search
I live in Pentagon City VA, I'm not surviving shit. ☺
I'll bet you an upvote that there's several bunkers damn close to you. All you need to do is figure out who'll let you use one.
Man I'll probably die but I'm just gonna walk north. Idk. good as any other direction.
If you are exposed to particulate dust or debris, once you are inside an area that is enclosed, be mindful of everywhere you go and everything you touch, and consider them contaminated. The way radioactive contamination like dust particles are removed from people in places like nuclear power plants is with shaving cream. The way shaving cream expands on the skin lifts hair by design, but also lifts particulates so that they may be rinsed off.
The most dangerous radioactive elements have the shortest half lives. The quantity of particles is still important. Like the elephants foot at Chernobyl is still deadly to a human standing in the same room for only a few minutes due to quantity. However, just after a nuclear mass murder event by a subhuman psychopath, staying away from the earliest byproducts of the nuclear reaction is critical. These are extremely harmful even in the fine dust on the outskirts.
Nuclear technology is our most irresponsible atrocity we lack the time perspective to clearly understand. Imagine if the wars of the crusaders 1000 years ago were causing people to die directly as a result of their weapons, not because of geopolitical fallout. Nuclear is an atrocity for any use because of our incompetent governments, but it is a far greater crime on all future generations for thousands of years to come. History will make us the most despised humans in the entire lineage of the species. This is the only legacy any of us will be remembered for.
staying away from the earliest byproducts of the nuclear reaction is critical.
How would I know if something is a dangerous byproduct?
It's there, near the blast zone. Everything will be irradiated. Everything.
People act like this will be survivable. It isn't, not with current nuclear weapons. If the blast and shock wave don't kill you, the radiation will. Or if you were lucky enough to be in a bunker, and you don't have enough food and water, you will starve before it's safe to leave.
The best case scenario is to die instantly in the blast. Second best is a bullet before your body literally falls apart from radiation poisoning.
Meaning anything that could fall from the sky or get blown around in the air. The particles themselves are heavier than lead, but ash can act like a parachute, and the massive explosion created enormous heat sending everything upwards into the higher layers of the atmosphere.
Any time you see a mushroom cloud, the expanding top stops when it hits a layer of atmosphere that is the same temperature as the rising column. This is true of volcanic eruptions and enormous bombs. The atmosphere gets colder with height, but only for a limited amount of time before the density is too low. Once the density is low enough with elevation, the temperature goes back up from solar radiation. When a plume is powerful enough to punch through the cold and back out into the hot on the other side, that is what can carry heavy particulates quite a long distance. There are winds across these layers that are different and the winds play a role in keeping the layers divided. Think of it like the way Jupiter looks with the cloud layers but in miniature scale that is not easy for human eyes to see. The entire Earth has a similar wind banding structure in the atmosphere. If you ever see wind diagrams for the southern hemisphere the effect is more clearly seen. The northern is a bit less banded due to continuous landmass heating, the Himalayas, and the shallowness of the Gulf of Mexico causing enormous evaporation with an impact stretching all the way into Europe.
The wind patterns carry the little parachutes with heavy radioactive junk and it settles like dust. So like, when we say sealed inside your home, that means duck tape on every door seal, and nothing that could pull air into or out of the space. The pro hazmat setup is a positive pressure bunker where there is a complex filter or recycled air scrubbing system that maintains a higher pressure inside the enclosure so that any leaks present force material out instead of in.
My understanding is the thing you most need is community. No one is likely to make it on their own, but if you can band together, your chances increase.
Don't use certain cleaning products when bathing; I forget if it's shampoo or conditioner, but one will bind radiation to you hair and scalp.
Nuclear? In your city? You're dead in a matter of days... maybe months at best.
Thanks for the reminder, I have too look up where my designated bunker is.