I’m normally the worrying type, but given the totality of what I know about this whole thing and the players involved (which may or may not be “enough” or even substantial), I just can’t get worked up about the idea of the Russian invasion ending in a global atomic holocaust. I acknowledge on an intellectual level that it’s a possibility, but a lot of other things are possible, and it seems that some part of my brain has concluded that the odds are sufficiently low enough to ignore in everyday life.
When President Biden was asked this very question today his answer was “No”, and he knows a lot more about the risk of nuclear war than most people.
I think it comes down to how worried Putin is about a first strike from the West given the problems he will be facing at home. If his entire world is crumbling around him he might be crazy enough to do something stupid preemptively, but there are people around him who would have to go along with that and most sane and rational people don’t want to destroy the world. I don’t think the West has any interest in nuking Russia, but what I don’t know is whether Putin is a sane, rational person.
I’d say it’s always a possibility, but you shouldn’t live in abject fear of it happening. Live your life as you do, cherish every moment, and hope it never comes to that. I’m just happy Biden is in charge and not someone else I could mention.
Nope. It’s not very likely, and, just as importantly, there’s not really much you can do about it. Worrying about things you don’t have control over doesn’t really help. Sure, sometimes we wind up doing it anyways, but, if you can avoid worrying, that’s a good thing, not a bad one.
There is some argument for being prepared for the worst, and so it might be good to inform yourself about what would likely happen, so you could prepare to at least handle the initial fallout before you can get help. But that was just as true before all this, as a nuclear bomb was always a remote possibility.
Though, personally, I live so far away from where one would hit that it isn’t really that useful for me. Mostly I can just tell other people, but it’s easier just to link the video where I learned it:
A quick summary: we’ll get a bit of a warning, and if you can get to better shelter before 15 minutes after it hits, great. If not, get as secure as you can, away from windows (maybe even blocking them) and ideally in the basement. And then wait. The radiation will drop to 85% in a few hours, 50% in 24 hours, and down to 1% in two weeks. You’ll need to be tuned in with a radio that has battery power, in case the power goes out. (But it might not.) And it seems to me it would be good if you had supplies to help you weather it out.
Beyond that, there’s not much you can plan for or anything you can do in this current situation. Life had to go on with the nuclear threat of the last cold war, and it will need to do so for this one.
BigT, I saw that too. Back in my very young-adult days, I was involved in the nuclear-freeze movement, and one evening, they wanted a bunch of us to come to the headquarters to do phone surveys. We were handed index cards with names, phone numbers, and a space for the results, and one thing I noticed was that the older people were, the less priority they placed on the issue (numbered from 1, most important, to 5, least important).
The most emphatic “1” I got was from a young man who said, “It’s the most important issue we’ve ever had! I’m in the reserves, and spend my training going to classes about how to survive this, and we all know it’s bogus” (paraphrasing).
Nowadays, I’m far more worried about terrorists getting access to this technology, and using it, than I am a nation’s military firing them off, even by accident (which has almost happened, more than once).
Yeah, this. The more likely he becomes to start a nuclear war, the more likely it becomes that at least one of the people around him decides to take a chance at killing him. After all, if the nukes fly, they’re dead anyways, and if they pull it off, they’re the greatest hero in the world.
We, on the other hand, live within spitting distance of one near-certain target if any nukes do head out.
I’ve often said that if The Big One ever hits, and we survive the initial impact (not sure how big a fireball would be involved), I’d get outside and just start walking toward it, in the hope that I simply died as quickly as possible. In reality, I suppose I would not do that - especially since we have kids (both of whom are adults, neither of whom is independent).
One of whom lives in an area that’s about as “safe” as you can get in our time zone (100+ miles from any real target). While we are not immediately planning to bolt to her town, we have talked about the possibility of doing so if we get twitchy enough, and gone so far as to put serious thought into the best road route to get away from population centers / heavy traffic corridors as quickly as possible.
Of course, since both of our cars were built in this century, we’d need to leave well before anything happened, as neither one would run after an EMP hit.
I don’t seriously think it’ll come to this, of course, but it’s a thought exercise at least.
I’m too young to have done the duck and cover drills, but I remember buildings having nuclear fallout shelter signs. I was in the military for 12 years and live in where I would be in the first wave of missiles. I can honestly say I’ve never even given a serious thought about a nuclear war. Nobody is going to consult me about the decision. There is nothing I could do to stop it if it’s going to happen. It’s like worrying about an asteroid strike.
You and me both. I seem to remember a lot of stories after the end of the cold war about how awful the state of Russian nuclear silos were. Collapsing on themselves, flooded, abandoned. With any luck, that has continued.
yeah as I live in an area that’s been a known “first wave” target *(since about '58) to the point that the government didn’t even allow nationals or immigrants from 50 or 60 countries even enter our valley until the mid-80s early 90s we seem not to be too concerned
but if the actual military gets involved it might the atmosphere a bit
If your late-model cars aren’t plugged into anything, there’s a decent chance they’d be OK. EMP has its worst effects on devices with large length scales, so the electrical grid and anything connected to it would take the biggest hit. But cars aren’t so large, and the electronic parts are somewhat shielded from electromagnetic effects by the metal body of the car.
The scene in The Day After in which a high-altitude nuclear airburst causes an EMP that disables every car on the highway is implausible, as most of the cars in operation at the time (1983) would have used carburetors rather than electronic fuel injection.
This is exactly the right place to be. Right now a nuclear exchange is remotely possible, but unlikely. You can’t do anything about this, so why let the worry eat at you? Be worried when leaders start getting worried.
But one thing you can do is push back on idiot ideas like “NATO should institute a no-fly zone over Ukraine”. This is better restated as “let’s get in a shooting war with Russian aircraft”. Although I agree it sure would help Ukraine and would be very satisfying to see, it would rapidly raise the risk of nuclear conflict to a very worrying level. So denounce this idea wherever you see it.
