I recall back in my civil engineering days, reading a copy of a book my boss had from the 60s about engineering for nuclear war. It was very technical and gave all sorts of stats and figures about stuff like overpressure at so many yards from so many kilotons at such and such altitudes and the effects on various types of construction.
I think most people have a notion that a nuclear war would essentially be a bunch of bombs simultaneously going off at once and vaporizing the planet’s surface in a series of blinding flashes. It doesn’t really work that way. Five or six miles out from a typical 1 megaton airburst, being inside a reinforced concrete structure hiding under your desk would actually afford a fair amount of protection from blast and thermal effects.
I think the whole Duck and Cover philosophy became pointless with the adoption of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). Essentially, that the best civil defense was the shared belief in the futility of nuclear war, rather than hunkering the civilian population down in hardened shelters and school desks.
The Day After was also very good. I also liked the short-lived series Jericho about the aftermath of a nuclear attack that destroys a number of major cities. It’s interesting in that the town itself didn’t suffer any effects of the attacks, but the attacks and destruction of the cities has far reaching economic and political effects.
I have to disagree with SenorBeef. Sure, nuclear war might be survivable in the near term if you don’t live near a city, military base, airport, rail junction, power plant or any other target. But then what? Assuming you aren’t killed by fallout, you are now living in a country where most major infrastructure has been demolished. Any “civil defense” plan would be immediately overwhelmed by mass causalities and disruption of logistics and communications. Basically imagine a thousand 9/11s or Hurricanes Sandy or Katrina happening around the country at the same time.
I think there is a number X such that if X warheads detonate in the US, then life for those that don’t die immediately will be so miserable that they wish that they had. Suppose you live say 100 miles from the nearest nukeworthy target. You survive the attack. But you won’t have any power, you won’t have any fuel, when your stores empty out you will have no food, health care will be spotty at best- in short you’re going to be living in the 1700s with no food and unless you’re a farmer, you’re going to die of starvation.
Now what is X? As a wild guess, I think if more than 50 warheads go off, it’s going to be hell. Maybe you have a bigger number, which is just as valid. Personally, if the bombs fall I want to be at ground zero and be vaporized instantly.
I would guess that the figure is more like 800 or 1,200 warheads. But also don’t underestimate human will to live. Even if the United States returned to life in the 1700s, entire generations of people lived in the 1700s (and for millenia before that,) and human instinct to keep on living and make a life out of circumstances, is very powerful. I think it’s all too easy to assume that “If we can’t live a good life, then no life is worth living.”
Exactly. Saying that “Civil defense is unnecessary because everyone will die quickly” is like saying that “A skyscraper doesn’t need sprinklers, fire suppression or escape stairwells because if a hijacked Boeing 767 rams into the building, everyone will die.”
It’s not true that everyone will die. Plenty will survive, just like in the WTC on 9/11.
It’s not true that a hijacked airliner ramming into the building is the only fear. What about smaller fires, or other things that could happen to a building? (Just like civil defense also helps with hurricanes, earthquakes, etc.)
It’s rife with false assumptions.
Let’s say you were a farmer in 1750. You began the year with a plan, you knew where you’d get your seeds from, you had the tools and the expertise to get by. Now it’s October 2020 and the bombs have dropped all around you. You can’t plant a damned thing for six months, much less eat what you plant. You might have a small town plot of land, not enough to grow. The real farmers can’t get fuel for their equipment. There is no power to refrigerate what meat there is. It’s going to be tough as nails to survive to the spring.
Just to be clear, are you asserting that Civil Defense measures are mostly or entirely pointless?
Or are you just arguing the smaller (and different) point about the survival rates of populations suddenly without the massive infrastructure we have now?
Understood - a modern-day person would no doubt have it harder in a 1700s world than a 1700s person accustomed to a 1700s world.
But the will to live and survive, remains a very powerful instinct. I still think the majority of America, after a devastating nuclear attack, would still try to live on. I know The Walking Dead is fiction, but if people really had the “The only life worth living is a comfortable modern one” attitude, every character in that TV series would have committed suicide at the beginning. Throughout human history, people have kept on living or tried to keep on living even in very dystopic situations. Sure, some committed suicide, but plenty others kept on living.
And in fact this kind of attack is significantly more likely. The USA and Russia aren’t likely to go all-out MAD on each other, whereas a North Korean ICBM launch on the US, or a terrorist smuggling a nuke aboard a cargo ship into Los Angeles harbor or the Hudson River in NYC, is more probable.
The ‘duck and cover’ cartoon was released in 1952. There were no usable ICBMs and the Soviet Union did not obtain over 50 nuclear weapons until after 1957. The “sneering tone” is apparently based on unfamiliarity with history.
In 1952 a nuclear exchange would be a slowly-evolving bomber-based affair using a fairly limited number of small fission weapons. That was the era when ‘duck and cover’ was devised and promoted. This was a rational procedure in that era and it was based on good data: Duck and Cover (film) - Wikipedia
By the peak of the nuclear arms race in 1986, there were 70,000 weapons total, with the majority on ICBM and submarine-based launchers, some of which could probably reach their target in 7-8 minutes for an off-shore SLBM using a depressed trajectory. Nobody credibly proposed that “duck and cover” would protect you an all-out nuclear exchange in 1986. Every major city was targeted with several MIRV warheads. The inverse cube law (for blast) and inverse square law (for heat) means multiple smaller warheads are vastly more destructive than a single large one of similar throw weight. It would have been truly apocalyptic, but that was not the era when “duck and cover” was proposed or promoted.
The TED Talk speaker said for all the years from 1949 to 1991, mankind was on the brink of an “apocalyptic planetary calamity”. This is obviously not true – this came long after 1949.
He then mocked the “duck and cover” and Civil Defense measures, implying this was naively conceived and intended to magically protect people against a direct nuclear strike on their location. He used the term “delusional”.
He then showed a weapon effects simulation of a terrorist 10 kiloton bomb surface-detonated in New York. He said (and showed graphically) that within a two mile radius, there would be “almost total destruction of buildings”. This is not what happened at Hiroshima, and in fact some people survived essentially at ground zero. This building was 300 yards from ground zero hypocenter, and several people inside survived. One woman, Akiko Takakura, had few injuries – because she was sheltered: http://media.gettyimages.com/photos/teikoku-bank-hiroshima-branch-is-destroyed-by-the-atomic-bomb-in-in-picture-id534162274?s=594x594
The “NukeMap” nuclear weapons effects simulator shows radically different results from what the TED talk speaker showed for a 10 kiloton surface detonation: NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein
Ironically in the later part of his talk he demonstrates how “duck and cover” and immediately seeking the proper shelter after a 10 kiloton terrorist nuclear detonation would hugely improve survival probability. He strongly advocated the benefit of taking these protective steps.
What he did not seem to understand is the early 1950s “duck and cover” video and similar “take shelter” advice was devised and promoted during an era when a nuclear exchange was not too different from a low-yield terrorist bomb being detonated in multiple cities today. Just as he today advocates “duck and cover” and taking shelter after a nuclear detonation, in 1952 this was practical advice.
If an EF5 tornado directly hits your house, you will probably be dead unless you are underground. If it hits a school, there would probably be significant casualties. However schools still practice “duck and cover” drills today – because most tornadoes are not EF5 and most will not directly hit your house or school. We don’t laugh and sneer at schools for taking these measures:http://web.dps.k12.va.us/schools/woodberry/Events/2011-12/tornado1.jpg
I suggest that the answer to the question is best found, by looking at what Civil Defense was ACTUALLY targeting.
It wasn’t about preparing the American population to deal with nuclear war. It was primarily set up to answer the PERCEPTION of the American public, that the government was thinking about dealing with such a war.
It ceased to be a point of emphasis, when one or two things happened: when the bulk of the voting public no longer thought that the USSR was about to launch an attack at any moment "just because," and when the bulk of the same group, realized that most Civil Defense exercises were fairly pointless.
Ironically, we are now in the middle of a different, but similar period. The fear now is not of nuclear Armageddon, but of magical Islamic terrorist war, and/or financial warfare between great nations. We are seeing the very same entirely useless ideas being pushed (the Mexican Wall, barring all Muslims from the country, etc), and calls to spend billions of dollars on them, rather than on more immediately useful things such as infrastructure.
This mess is also likely to continue, until again, the American People either lose their fear of imminent Islamic Jihad from across the seas, or they get a good close look at the Wall and other things, and realize that they wont accomplish a damn thing either. Just like ducking in cover from an atomic bomb.
Unfortunately believe it or not, not the entire country has the civil defense warning systems.
When i was a kid, i just took it for granted that the whole country had the air raid sirens
and powerful AM radio stations, like WLW.
That be it an enemy attack, or a tornado attack by nature, that people would be warned by sirens and radio broadcast.
I thought that was the normal entire USA.
When i moved where i live now, i realized it is not.
There are no sirens anyplace, maybe the whole state as far as i know.
No powerful AM radio station that can reach out to everyone with emergency info.
Closest AM station just does not have the output, and the OTA TV is in the same boat.
You have to get directional antennas up out of the tree lines, but that isnt something the average person can do, i doubt anyone would grant that many tower permits.
So yea, here it would not surprise me at all for something like what you mention to just appear here without warning, no one here that was not perhaps watching a cable or satellite broadcast would know.
In fact, it happens here a lot every year.
Know how you get a tornado touchdown, and all the sirens go off and people know one is coming someplace?
Yea, not here. They touch down, if the dont go near people, they might not get noticed at all except perhaps by weather radar.
And on the flip side, when one runs into people, it’s an unpleasant surprise.
Amazing how you take all that stuff for granted, until you find your self someplace devoid of all of it.
One of the key things that aided civilian defense is one of the things we rail against today: Urban Sprawl. A Hiroshima sized bomb would not destroy our modern cities, because they are too spread out. Of course, it was one factor in the increasing size of nuclear weapons, as a multi-megaton bomb would do significant damage.
I agree about The Day After, it gets a lot of hate for apparently sanitising the results of a nuclear strike on the US but I’m not really sure that’s fair given the standards of what was acceptable to show on television at the time.
I’ve never seen Jericho but I’ll keep an eye out for it, thank you.
Thank you Joema, I looked up Irwin Redlener’s wikipedia page:
He appears to have no particular expertise in nuclear issues at all and going from his video very little knowledge, so he’s basically spreading ignorance on a very important subject. It doesn’t fill me with confidence regarding his competence.
As well as what you pointed I also raised an eyebrow at his making fun of the idea that there would be a three or four day warning before an attack, he seems to be unaware of the idea of rising international tension and visible build-up towards war, a ‘bolt-from-the-blue’ attack was always possible but unlikely, there would most likely have been signs that something was up, giving time for preperation.
Will to live, a horribly overrated zombie show and a buck fifty will get you a cup of coffee. There would be plenty of very good reasons to commit suicide after surviving a full-scale nuclear strike, the primary one being that you are very likely to die anyway. It isn’t a question of having to live a 1700s lifestyle, its a matter of the complete destruction of all the infrastructure that makes 21st century life possible. Millions will be dying from radiation poisoning; outside of what immediate food, water and fuel is available there will be no more coming. There’s going to be no electricity, no refrigeration, no basic sanitation or medical care, rampant starvation, and a perfect environment for dysentery, cholera and typhoid. There is going to be no help coming from the outside, ever. This isn’t a natural disaster with FEMA coming to the rescue (or to bungle coming to the rescue). The situation everywhere else ‘outside’ is going to be just as bad.
As for farming, outside of actual farmers how many people in modern society have a clue about farming? For the actual farmers, once the gas is gone to operate farming machinery, that’s all she wrote, there won’t be any more coming. Better hope you’ve got some beasts of burden and archaic farming equipment lying around. Oh, and your topsoil is going to be irradiated from the fallout, and have fun dealing with all of the armed starving refugees showing up.
Well as awful as it would be (and it would) people have different standards of what they consider intolerable, some people and perhaps plenty of them would be willing to keep trying to survive rather than giving in and killing themselves.
I question that things elsewhere in the world would be just as bad though and there is no possibility of help ever coming, not every nation was targeted equally even at the height of the Cold War and the concept of nuclear winter has been questioned, I guess its a question of what the global affects of such a war would be, something we would need to have more knowledge of exactly who was targeted by who, on what scale, and a clear idea of subsequent effects. An experiment we would probably only know the true answer to after running it, but unless we’re positing the use of something like Cobalt Bombs the radioactive effects even in the targeted areas drop to manageable levels quite quickly.
I think the last gasp of mass civil defense was in the early 1960s, when it was realized that the former plan of evacuation would not be fast enough for a missile attack. So studies were done on what it would take to shelter city populations in place in deep underground mass shelters:
You see reflections of these proposals in 1960s fiction: The subterranean mutants from the Planet of the Apes movies, the emptied streets of New York City during a bomb drill in The Mouse That Roared, the novel Level Seven, the 1960s scenes from the movie The Time Machine, and others.
These plans were ultimately defeated by the unimaginable cost such mass shelters would require, questions about their effectiveness, and even whether considering a thermonuclear war “survivable” was destabilizing under the MAD scenerio.
Whether they choose to kill themselves or not isn’t really the point and is a rather moot question: they are going to die anyway. Mass starvation and disease don’t care about your will to survive. It isn’t a question of people’s unwillingness to adapt to a 17th century lifestyle that is going to cause them to die.
In a full-scale exchange, the US, Canada, all of Europe, the USSR, both Chinas, Japan, Australia and the Koreas would all have had nearly every major population center destroyed. Add to that most likely any US military base on foreign soil would be hit, so goodbye Panama City, Subic Bay, etc. The nations least directly effected by the exchange would be in Africa and South America, the very same nations with the least ability to send relief aid to normal act of god disasters, much less the apocalyptic nuclear conflagration that we’re talking about which would have destroyed every major population center and effectively destroyed the countries hit as nations in any sense or form.
Even if you want to question nuclear winter, aside from the nuclear fallout, the economic fallout of those nations in Africa and South America would be devastating with the sudden and complete vaporization of most of the world’s economic market. Given their extremely limited ability to even send any kind of ‘help’ that would be remotely meaningful in the first place, now factor in that they’ve got huge additional problems of their own, why would they bother even trying to send aid to the First World which has just blown itself up when such aid would be utterly insignificant and beyond their abilities even before said nuclear exchange occurred?
Are you not forgetting the sheer size of the USA? Even if every American city were nuked, Lower Bumfuck in Kansas is likely to be entirely unscathed, at least in the short term. I expect that the Amish would be much in demand to teach the older ways.
