I live far enough away from any target of any value to pretty much assure my survival. I just hope it wouldn’t effect the price of beer at the local supermarket. 
Hmm. I went to a Baptist Elementary School and we knelt under the desks with our arms crossed over out heads. Instead of being asked to pray, we were supposed to keep quiet.
Thanks for the link to the effects map, txtumbleweed. I tried a big NK nuke on Rough and Ready Island (there’s some Naval communications there). Got 710 dead, 1.520 injured and a plume of radiation that missed my house and City Hall. But that depends on the wind direction and I don’t know if they have an accurate average wind direction.
Hmm. Found the average wind direction for today. I’m still OK, but City Hall is getting 1 rad/hr. And South Stockton is getting screwed.
I could…if I were a cockroach.
Well, we have a bug out plan, as well as a shelter in place plan and we’ve rehearsed it a couple of times. Not for a nuclear strike, but simply disaster planning. We have about a weeks worth of food and water at our house, and my folks have about the same at theirs, so assuming we didn’t get wiped out in the strike (something fairly unlikely unless it was a full out nuclear attack from Russia…no other country could really do anything here unless they were going to drive the nuke in a truck to take out Albuquerque for some odd reason :p). I’m guessing that if it was a limited strike by any other country except Russia we’d be fine until help arrived, assuming it did in less than a month. If it goes longer than that, well…I know some of the states disaster centers and have been involved in some exercises, so know some of the people, and I could perhaps get my family into shelter…I’d most likely be one of the guys trying to address the disaster, so I’d probably be screwed if it went longer than a month before the Federal Government could or would step in.
I hope I would get some warning so I have time to warm up with a few sets of hand grenades and move up to a gas line explosion. That should get me loose and ready for a nuke. And if I could carbo-load the night before that would be grand.
I don’t live in a - let’s say “target rich environment” so I’d make the immediate survival of the explosions. I have the equipment and knowledge and stubbornness and experience to live through the immediate aftermath of the infrastructure being screwed to hell.
I’d either make it through (hating my life the whole while, mind you), get shot by some asshole who wants my stuff and is meaner or quicker than I am, or die from something stupid that would normally take a doctors’ visit and a pharmacy stop. It’s a crapshoot.
Is this for a nuclear bomb or many. Even a limited, but not single strike, could be very bad.
For the US, for example, I’ve seen various maps:
This one is more recent, but completely unofficial and speculative, as far as I know.
This is more official, but is a fallout map from 1990.
But really are we talking one tiny nuke from NK (very survivable) or a fairly limited number from subs, or a full-out nuclear war with the US, Russia, and every other nuclear capable country lobbing nukes at each other?
I live within 25 miles of Boston. I’m hoping to die in the immediate flash-boom, rather than surviving and waiting for all of my skin and hair to fall off and then die a few days later.
By the way, that movie The Day After scared the crap out of me as kid.
And what you saw was the heavily censored version, because the Network didn’t want people to become really really upset over a nuclear war.
The footage can be found in later versions released, including people being set on fire from the blast, flesh carbonizing, people being burned to the bone, eyes melting, faceless heads, skin hanging, deaths from flying glass and debris, limbs torn off, being crushed, blown from buildings by the shockwave, and people in fallout shelters suffocating during the firestorm.
Can you imagine what that would have done for the ant-nuke movement at the time?
The censors removed the radiation sickness, and awesome graphic violence from survivors after the bombs, the food riots, looting, and complete breakdown of social order and authority.
What the movie completely overlooked, even in the uncensored version, was what would happen after the bombs, to all the unmanned and damaged reactors worldwide, or even just in the US. That’s the real threat, no matter the number of initial bombs (20, or 500, or 10,000, it won’t matter at all), the disaster that will happen soon after, or right away, is the vast amount of spent fuel stored next to reactors. Just one old multi reactor power plant would release more radiation, and the really bad kind, that 10,000 bombs would. Multiple plants cascading in a radioactive catastrophe, after even a limited war, would mean they would all go, meaning almost nobody in the Northern hemisphere would survive for long.
Now that’s a scary movie.
Don’t expect to ever see it made.
To answer the OP, I would survive the initial strike, but not the disaster that it would cause. (I live near four reactors, and a shit ton of spent fuel rods) There’s enough radioactive material 10 miles away to poison the entire world, if it burns and the wind is right. (not likely)
But certainly enough to kill several million people as they try to evacuate, which would be very hard to do after a nuclear strike. Now with even a little warming, I could survive by fleeing the area, but an unexpected bomb? Of any size?
Dead and gone.
But then, if it was even a limited nuclear war, so would most everyone else in the Northern Hemisphere. And quite possibly, eventually the southern as well.
I live about 40 km from Seattle (25 miles) so I’d be fine as far as the initial blast goes. Prevailing winds are mostly away from me, so fallout will be minimal.
I have a solid set of camping gear, and quite a bit of food on hand. I would first cook everything that might spoil in my freezers. Assuming no power or gas, I actually have about 80 lbs of charcoal on hand (that’s high, but I just stocked up after a sale; 30 lbs would be more normal). So, I’d be able to make something like 40 lbs of beef/turkey jerky, and I have dozens of cans in the pantry that are ready to eat. We have a water cooler at home, and right now I have about 6 gallons of drinkable water for two people. I’d have to boil it for safety, but my property has a year-round creek and a 4500-gallon koi pond for backup water.
When it comes to actual survival skills… I’m not much of an outdoorsman. So I won’t be catching my own game or foraging for more than berries. However, assuming that we are not nuked back to the stone age, I have water for a few days and food for a few weeks. I can comfortably wait while emergency crews get power and roads going again.
Wait…you seriously think that, in the wake of a nuclear war that the biggest threat are the nuclear power plants??
Yeah, I considered mentioning that. But it’s still relevant to the extent that you shouldn’t look towards the explosion if possible, e.g. if you have advance warning or if you’re facing elsewhere when the bomb explodes.
In the wake of any horrific huge disaster, nuclear blasts being the least likely, the spent fuel is the number one danger. Just one multi-reactor plant would release far more radiation than a large nuclear strike. A hundred burning fuel ponds would be by far the worst part of a nuclear war.
It was estimated during the early cold war period that 10,000 atomic bombs would be enough to spread enough material to destroy all human life on the planet, and most the animal and plant life as well. That’s around 500 metric tons of material. A thirty year old reactor has around 3000 tons of spent fuel stored next to it, or nearby. That’s just one reactor. While that is only 150 tons of plutonium, the short lived material, cesium is much more dangerous when released into the world. When you realize there is around 200,000 tons of dangerous spent fuel in the US alone, yes, the reactors and fuel ponds are a much bigger danger than the bombs that would cause them to fail as well.
10 bombs would cause massive physical destruction, but only around 500 kilos of material from the bombs, and several thousand tons of much less dangerous material from the neutron capture during the explosions, assuming they were ground bursts. In any case, it’s a short term minor radioactive disaster. Fuel ponds going, even just one of them, would be a worldwide disaster for a much longer period.
Survival doesn’t just mean surviving the blast, it means surviving the strike, and all that happens after it. If civilization is destroyed, so that the power plants can’t be kept safe, or far worse, if they hit the plants, it’s game over. The cascade of disasters that would happen from just one nuclear plant burning out of control, would be a worst case scenario, far worse that the strike.
Because once there is that much radiation in the wind, vast areas become impossible to enter. If that area includes an undamaged plant, then that one goes, and it spreads, a truly hard to imagine worst case scenario. Because physics
Nuclear reactors don’t ever make vast areas impossible to enter. Worst-case scenario (for vast areas, not just localized hotspots) is that you get cancer in thirty years. That’s bad enough that we might choose not to enter those areas, but the human race reproduces quickly enough that you could irradiate the entire Earth to that level and not stop us from surviving. Nuked back to the Stone Age, childbirth would still be more dangerous than radiation.
You seriously have issues understanding relative risk as well as actual threat probability. Your fear of nuclear power and nuclear reactors seemingly has only gotten worse from your days of amusing everyone in the Pit Fukushima threads, but surely you realize the difference between what happened at Fukushima and what happened at Hiroshima or Nagasaki…right? Or, hell, what happened at Chernobyl and what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki…don’t you?
If a modern day multistage nuclear blast goes off over a nuclear plant, you are going to have far more people killed from the blast than from the nuclear power plant, even assuming a 100% loss of containment (which is very unlikely). Since most nuclear power plants aren’t going to be directly targeted by nuclear strikes, those plants will simply go into standby and shut down. The containment pools, if drained would certainly be cause for alarm, no doubt, but not anything like the damage caused from a large multistage nuclear weapons going off over a major city. Seriously…you need to get a grip.
Total ignorance. Since there has never actually been a full spent fuel pond disaster, (for which we are all quite thankful), nobody knows exactly what would happen. But there is little doubt that it would make everything downwind not just “impossible to enter”, it would make almost everything dead. Chernobyl only had a small amount of it’s core land on the red forest, and it killed everything dead. The amount of radiation released from one reactor was 40 times more than an atomic blast. And the core hadn’t been running that long, it was actually “clean” compared to spent fuel. Spent fuel is far more dangerous, with huge amounts of very deadly radioactive material.
Surviving a nuclear strike means surviving what happens after. If this topic is about a single blast, that’s another issue.
Not really. It depends on the size of the bomb, and what kind of building you are in. If you are talking about a massive H-bomb, with a low air or ground burst, yeah, unless you are deep underground, you are going to die.
But an old fashioned A-bomb with a low altitude air burst, many people will survive at ground zero, especially if shielded by large structures. It’s really quite surprising how little damage an A-bomb will even do to military ships. Something the atoll tests showed. It didn’t even sink a single ship.
Your link says:
Since I’m so ignorant, I’ll let you do your own math, but you’ll see that this is not “impossible to enter.” In fact, even the peak readings don’t rise to the standard of “impossible to walk through to the other side.”
This. O’Hare is a secondary target ten miles away, which means I live outside the blast radius of a proper Russkie nuke, but not enough. I’ll be dead shortly. Li’l Kim sends one of his ladyfinger firecrackers over and it goes off in the same place, and I’ll duck out of town for a few weeks, AFTER the traffic dies down. [/false bravado]