I would try but no real thought on what I would do or my final chances. I got land in the mountains and well-armed kinfolk all around who like me and the Old Wench, I know some back ways there, a couple methods of transportation to pick from. And a fair amount of ammo for my own stuff.
The question is; depending on the level strikes and/or terrorist actions against nuclear facilities and our response ------ how much do I want to survive?
yeah considering I live in the us’s number 1 aerospace and flight building testing area I was always told wed be one of the first places hit in the cold war "(supposedly this had been veriied by intelligence for decades) we had drills 3-4 times a year in school
so I don’t think wed be here very long …
The good news is that most modern nukes are only a few hundred kilotons. The bad news is that I think it’s safe to assume that in a full exchange with Russia or China they would blanket the area with multiple warheads. I mean, it’s full of targets. The White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, NSA, NRO, numerous defense contractors, Andrews Air Force Base, Quantico, plus you would want to target everyone in order to kill all the top civilian and military leadership in their beds.
I think you are overestimating the power of modern nuclear weapons by a substantial degree.
On the other hand, I think my house probably has about a 20% chance of being demolished, but a 100% chance of being so soaked with radiation that I could set up a plutonium slip and slide in my front yard and invite the kids over. Preparation seems like a fantasy.
At work, I’d probably never see it coming.
Cleveland is probably on the list for a full-out kill-them-all war with Russia or likely China, but probably not with any other plausible adversary. And I can see the downtown skyscrapers out my window, so I’m likely dead in the initial attack, if Cleveland is attacked.
But if I have enough advance warning to get out of town, I have a couple of aunts in rural areas fairly nearby, both of whom are very self-sufficient and have a lot of land. And enough other members of my extended family, with a diverse enough set of skills, are probably converging on those locations to form a pretty reliable and well-defended community. Yeah, we’d have guns and folks who know how to use them, but more importantly, we have folks who are good at growing and preserving food, and who are good at repairing and rebuilding machinery, and at making household items from scrap materials, and so on.
I live in northern Calvert County, and if the nukes rained down while we’re at home, we’d survive the initial onslaught. Then we’d wish we hadn’t.
At work, my wife and I are in between downtown DC and Joint Base Andrews. Our son, at school out near where we live, would survive the initial attack if it came while we were at work. But even if we survived the initial attack, we’d be lucky to ever make it home. That would be the truly awful thing, if I lived long enough to think about it: that he’d have to deal with survival in the aftermath without me and my wife.
That would be an extremely common scenario if the nukes rained down during the work day: lots of kids at school and day care in suburbs and exurbs that wouldn’t be directly targeted, with their parents at their jobs in more dense areas, and more likely to be closer to targets. Millions of kids alive with their parents dead. A nightmare.
My wife and I are an elderly couple living in the suburbs 15 miles from the outskirts of Philadelphia.
If we survived an initial blast, I rather expect that we would not survive the next couple of weeks of folks needing food and supplies and noticing easy pickings.
All in all, not surviving an initial blast might be preferable to hiding out waiting for the second situation.
So we’re living our lives assuming that there won’t be an initial blast and not preparing for it. It’s a good life…
Me? Why, I’d simply play my Skippy the Super-Virus card-I win!
That’s not as complete as you might think. Warheads aren’t self-guiding towards population density or city cores. There can be prime targets away from those areas.
I grew up in the suburbs of the Toledo metro area. Late in the Cold War there was an open source document for civil defense planning that got picked up by the local paper. It was a pre-internet story and I’ve not been able to find the story when I looked before. Toledo, OH didn’t make the top category for priority. We were in the next one down IIRC and still a pretty likely target in a full exchange. (Take that John Denver!) The reason was three specific targets:
Being far out in the suburbs, or even in a rural area, doesn’t necessarily make you safe from immediate effects in a full exchange. It’s what’s nearby that’s important. A lot of economically important stuff gets located away from city centers.
Most importantly avoid any salespeople from a company called Vault-tec. Also don’t live near any major cities or military bases.
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I’m close enough to Chicago that I expect I’d either die immediately or very soon thereafter due to fallout, fire storms, etc. If that didn’t happen, with the collapse of the infrastructure, I’m sure I’d die soon after that. It’s not as though the Chicago metro area is going to survive off squirrels, raccoon and some forests full of white-tailed deer for very long. Oh well. Price of modern urban living. I guess.
+1 Radroach Meat
I don’t know, for the sheer amount of rats I see, I might be set. Then again I live about 5 miles from downtown, I’m screwed.
Back in the day, I took a fairly extensive Chemical, Biological and Radiological Warfare class . It had some cool toys to play with.
The general lesson of the neculear portion was ‘if you survive long enough to say “what the hell was that?”, you can survive’.
Find shelter from the blast (yeah, duck and cover), and hide from the fallout.
The blast take time for it to get to you - maybe not long, maybe 30 to 40 seconds or more. You might have time to hide. Keep your head down for a while - let things settle down.
Fallout isn’t a gas, it particles, and they are heavy. Get as much distance as you can from the outside for a day or two (longer if you can). Half-lives matter (sorry, terrible joke). When you do go out, stay away from anywhere snow or leaves collect when the wind blows. Most fallout will emit alpha particles, and those are easy to stop. If you are exposed to fallout, it will wash off. The danger comes if you breathe it in, so don’t do that. Fashion a mask as best you can, and don’t stick your fingers in your eyes and ears. Wash your hands and your food before you eat.
Now, a chemical attack - that scares me.
All out nuke exchange with Russia?
That would be very hard to survive. And very very unlikely.
Yes, we are in the foothills and not a target, and even fallout not a big issue, but the aftermath would be very iffy.
Kim going crazy and launching all at America with one or two getting thru? Or Iran?
Then, other than those in the direct blast radius, we would all be OK.
I’m personally not too concerned since I live in a very rural area hundreds of miles from anything likely to be the target of any major power. Sure not having access to Walmart will be a pain but there are enough potatoes around to live for quite a while.
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Although it is being shut down now, Rancho Cordova, a suburb of Sacramento, was home to Aerojet General (now Aerojet Rocketdyne) which build motors for both the LGM-30 A/B/F/G ‘Minuteman’ and LGM-118A ‘Peacekeeper’ ICBMs. During the Cold War and even after it was most certainly a target, quite aside from being the capital of the world’s sixth largest economy. Sac is burnt toast, as is San Francisco (major port city and financial hub), Los Angeles (also a port and strategic center for the aerospace industry), and Vandenberg AFB (home of 614th Space Operations Group, base for ~20 Ground-Based Midcourse Defense interceptors). If you want to survive in California, head north of Santa Rosa and Yuba City where there is nothing of strategic, industrial, or political value.
In any long term survival strategy, building a community of people who have skills to actually survive and build is far more important than guns, guts, or even supplies. You’ll run out of all three eventually, and then you are essentially left with whatever materials you can pull together and what you can do with them in the absence of power, manufactured goods, and outside support. The country in the Northern Hemisphere best poised to survive a global nuclear war is likely Cuba, because they have had so little for so long they’ve actually built a subsistence economy, and even if the island’s facilities and population centers are attacked there will remain enough resources and population to recover.
But surviving a full nuclear exchange is as much luck as anything. Even if you aren’t directly impacted by the blast and the immediate fallout, the pestilence, desperate survivors, and lack of perishable resources will make it challenging for even the best prepared. And as recent storms have shown, FEMA is not constituted to deal with even a devastating regional crisis; destruction on a national scale would make federal aid a rare and likely inconsequential thing for the vast majority of the surviving population.
Stranger
I am within a ten mile radius of Atlantic City, an Atlantic City Expressway/Garden State Parkway interchange, and a New Jersey Air National Command unit operating out of Atlantic City International Airport. Not Good.
The prevailing wind pattern puts me directly downwind of targets in Baltimore, Washington D.C., and The Naval Academy in Annapolis.
We live just outside the Washington Beltway. Obviously DC itself is a prime target, and there is a large Army base quite near our house.
We might not go up in the initial blast but if they started hitting any secondary targets, I would think that Army base would be on that list, in which case I don’t think we’d need to worry about our retirement savings running out.
My stated plan, should this happen, is to go out of the house and start walking north along I-95 toward the city, breathing deeply the whole time. No point in stretching things out. More practically I suppose I’d try some at-home method of speeding things along.
As far as actually surviving: I would think it would require:
Nice to have: a source of power, even if just enough to power a radio. Ideally, enough solar to power at least some tools, though in the case of a nuclear winter that might not work that well. Maybe a small steam-powered generator that I could run by burning wood.
For longer-term survival, a good library of technical books, on paper. Ebooks are great but if you have no battery power, they’re not useful.
I barely have the will to survive now. I’d hope to die in the fireball.
