Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.
I truly, really, forcefully recommend reading the novel "Warday" by Witley Strieber and James Kunetka It takes place in the early 90s, several years after an accidentally limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the USSR. The story traces the journey of two reporters crossing the devastated country and chronicling the stories of survivors and how they got by, while also slowly developing the journalists' own survival narratives.
In a very well written, visceral way, this novel showcases the barbarities that even such a limited nuclear can unleash on a society, like few others I've read. On the other hand it also underscores the hopeful recovery efforts that people are capable of.
For anyone who appreciated those films, I can't imagine them disliking Warday. It's also delivers an unusually powerful emotional punch with its character development, well above the average for apocalypse literature.
One of the frighteningly realistic elements of the storyline is how it describes the nuclear bombardment as "moderate", at least compared to what was intended by the Soviets. However, because a large part of the fallout completely ruins the agricultural capacity of the country, the resulting development of widespread malnutrition turns a later flu epidemic into something truly murderous, causing far more death on top of what the bombs produced.
It's really good. And as far as I can tell, as a layman who reads way too much about this stuff, quite accurate in terms of what the sort of limited strike depicted in the book would do in the short and long term. (I have quibbles, such as what happens to San Antonio and Manhattan, but nothing major.)
I thought the book was both harrowing as hell, grim to the point of being close to a horror novel in some parts with its descriptions of what people went through, and also extremely moving. The scene where Streiber manages to visit the wreck of his Manhattan apartment was enough to bring tears.
I'm curious, What were your quibbles with Manhattan and San Antonio?
Edit, and yes, I've read that it was highly praised for realism. The authors really put their effort into making it as close to what things might really be like as possible. No hyperbole or dramatics, just the stark inevitable horror of even limited nuclear war and its effects
It didn’t make sense that San Antonio would be targeted in the limited Soviet strike. It would be pretty far down the list, definitely not in the top 3. I believe Streiber has said as much, and that it was included because of the personal connection, and the reason given in the book (some military headquarters there?) was a weak excuse.
I can’t quite explain it, but it doesn’t feel right to me that Manhattan would be abandoned and salvaged like that. Seems like it would either be too dangerous for people to be there, or it would still be an actual city even if diminished. It seems like another thing done for the narrative and personal connection, to allow him to “return home” while also giving a reason he didn’t still live there.
But again, these are both minor points and really don’t detract from the work at all. San Antonio is little more than a bit of background flavor, and the story makes Manhattan well worth it.
Hmm, good points, but for the first one at least, the way I saw it was that the intended Soviet nuclear strike was supposed to be total, meaning hundreds of warheads for hundreds of targets, maybe even thousands for thousands.
That only a few actually landed was because of problems with Soviet strike capacity and of those few that got through, which ones actually did was mostly a question of random bad luck, so I just assumed that by said bad luck, one of them happened to be for San Antonio, which in a full, thousand-warhead strike, would almost certainly be one of the many targets chosen.
To elaborate a bit on that last point btw, I once saw a predictive map of all likely Soviet nuclear strike targets for a full-blown nuclear war in a military strategy book from the 80s (at the height of both countries' arsenals) that I used to have. It had hundreds of US cities and military installations with little dots over them, often just because they had even modest military or industrial significance. Apparently, if you're going to launch everything and have a lot to launch, might as well be generous with your delivery....
That's how I saw it at least, and at least it seemed like a fairly plausible justification for including San Antonio even though really, he just wanted to.
As for Manhattan, I also had a hard time believing it would be abandoned so totally, but the claim was that the bomb detonated especially dirty if I remember right, and bombs like that really can leave a place too contaminated to live in for many decades. There are atolls in the pacific where this happened from "mismanaged" tests in the 50s.
Either way, glad you (obviously) loved the book as much as it deserves!
I checked and it seems like the reason for San Antonio was a mix of your view and mine (assuming we can believe the narrator here):
“At that time I got a look at the condition of San Antonio. I remember being astonished that this little city had been so terribly devastated on Warday. People had hardly even heard of it in Britain. One would have expected Los Angeles or even Houston before San Antonio. Of course, it has since come out that a good part of the planned Soviet attack didn't go off, so in a sense San Antonio was simply unlucky. The Soviets had given it first-strike priority because of the extensive U.S. Air Force repair and refitting facilities there, and the huge complex of military hospitals, the atomic supplies dump at Medina Base, and the presence of a mechanized army that could have been used to preserve order across the whole of the Southwest as well as seal the Mexican border.”
So the first strike was those three cities, and then the followup total strike didn’t happen, presumably stopped by the US counterstrike.
For Manhattan, it says that the biggest hazard is from chemical pollution from abandoned storage facilities, particularly nearby in New Jersey. Which seems kind of plausible, although I imagine people would be a lot more tolerant of such health hazards in this world. I guess everyone evacuated, and then the fact that you can’t just walk back to Manhattan might keep people from returning.
That sounds like a good idea but the physics mean you have a far greater likelihood of painfully regretting that choice; "It seemed like a good idea at the time" will be no solace.
Using an example of a 350kt airburst on NukeMap[0], the fireball radius is 700m with an area of 1.53 km². The Thermal Radiation Radius with 3rd degree burns is 7.67 km with an area of 185 km². The Light Blast Damage Radius is 13.9 km with an area of 610 km². While the numbers will be different for different yields, the basic ratios will be the same.
This means that your person in the lawn chair is highly unlikely to get to unconscious bliss in 20ms. They are 120 times more likely to enjoy the full experience of 3rd degree burns and ~400 times more likely to get significant injury while still being alive.
It seems far better to take shelter and do all you can to survive intact, and help others. If the situation on the other side is intolerably bad, you'll likely be able to find ways to end your situation far less painfully vs being naked against a nuke blast.
I think you have to be pretty close to the actual fireball to die within 20ms, and most fireballs would be air bursts 1km altitude or higher.
As I understand it the main reason there isn't instant disintegration out to hundreds or thousands of meters is that as soon as enough initial gamma and X-rays turn surrounding material into plasma most of the energy released goes into fireball formation because the plasma is virtually opaque to all EM and the fireball grows in volume as a plasma until expansion reaches equilibrium with compressed surrounding air, everything at the plasma/gas interface is incandescent and radiates as a black body of ~10,000C which transfers a lot of heat but not sufficient to atomize many centimeters thick objects unless they are very close.
Portions of the towers that suspended initial nuclear tests survived, for example.
If there is a chance at survival, no matter how slim I would take it. Even if it brings me suffering at least I tried to escape death. Whether my end was peaceful or dignified is of no relevance to me, because I won't be around to regret my end.
Its like working out in the gym - if you see it as a chore and a must, it is or becomes painful very quickly. If you make it fun and self-motivating (and ie get into hiking and camping in the wilderness, or practice shooting on targets, or training martial arts, some people really enjoy gardening and so on), the time is not wasted but enjoyed.
But I agree thats hardly a mindset of typical US redneck prepper. Although most of them live in rural areas and at least some hunting skills are sort of essential to cut costs.
This discussion reminds me a beautiful sentence I read in 'The Power and the Glory' by Graham Greene: "Hope is an instinct that only the reasoning human mind can kill."
>Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.
If Sarah Connor's dreams taught me anything, it's that there's an optimal middle ground to be had here.
You don't want to be exposed to the flash nor the heat pulse seconds later, because it's pretty much instant blindness followed by your skin melting off.
What you do want is the blast wave that sends large objects plus the pulverized debris with it in your direction, so you probably just get crushed instantly.
I'd only recommend the lawn chair part if you've got a protective suit and flash blinders, in which case the real question is what you're drinking and/or smoking at the time.
The problem with this strategy is that the "instant death zone" is much much smaller than the "3rd degree burns over 100% of your body" zone.
I don't share your fatalism, but I can't criticize it. It is an understandable position. With that said, if your desire is truly to remove yourself from existence in the aftermath of such an event it is better to have some plan to do so already laid in. The majority of immediate casualties will not be deaths, you are very likely to regret relying on the weapons.
That would also grant you the chance to reconsider whether the resulting world is actually not worth living it -- or at very least to confirm that it is in fact so bleak.
> Yeah, what I've learned from films like "Threads" and "The Day After" is that you very much want to die in the first 20ms of a nuclear war. Don't dig a hole to hide in, put your lawn chair on the roof and hope you're close enough to ground zero to get a peaceful and dignified end.
That's all fine and dandy if you only have yourself to think about...
Yes, I joked, but mostly just to soften the discomfort of the idea.
I think the argument a few posts up was that this is the humane way out, rather than dragging themselves or their loved ones through the burns, trauma, radiation poisoning, starvation, and/or depredation that they assume comes next. Having loved ones is not a counterpoint to this sort of thinking.
I can't necessarily imagine making these decisions, but it is not unprecedented that parents would do so for themselves and their children. It's happened with much less trigger than a nuclear holocaust.
> I think the argument a few posts up was that this is the humane way out, rather than dragging themselves or their loved ones through the burns, trauma, radiation poisoning, starvation, and/or depredation that they assume comes next.
Another problem with that argument is that you'd actually be able to position yourself to be vaporized, when I don't think anyone could know what would be targeted with that level of certainty (beyond a couple things like the White House, Pentagon, etc).
Like maybe by setting up some lawn chairs on a roof, you just signed you and your family up for extra burns and trauma because you assumed they'd target downtown, but they actually only targeted the airport so you're miles away from the vaporization zone.
I think it’s important to understand fictional stories, even reasonable speculative ones, will usually have very little to do with actual reality. Don’t base your choices on what you saw in a movie.
I have a nice view of the skyscrapers of a large city some 70 km to the North. Looking at it from my lawn chair probably won't kill me but it could make me blind.
nuclear war is a lot more survivable than people make it out to be. if you can get your hands on enough clean water to hide in a basement for a week you'll basically be ok
Surviving will be a miserable ordeal. That being said, all of my ancestors have survived every major calamity in the history of life on earth. The way I see it, I owe it to them to try surviving whatever comes next. A few select generations lived through much, much worse.
It may sound bizarre, but I don’t believe in an afterlife so I might as well lean into something to give me inspiration. The idea that I exist because my extremely distant ancestors survived every mass extinction gives me a sense of wonder.
It is a well understood phenomena of human nature to say that "I would rather die then go through X" and then when you go through X (or worse) you don't want to die. This is well understood because it happens a lot with illness or accident. Also its a very adaptive trait that we want to avoid terrible situations but most of us don't quit.
Funny that you mention "The Day After", I watched that movie in high school then went to lunch in a school that overlooks the Kansas City skyline.
No chance that had anything to do with the panic attack I had when Putin put his nuclear troops on high alert after invading Ukraine. No sir, not at all.
As we saw puttin' is just empty talk, he is too smart and paranoid to fuck up his mafia empire be built so hard, his survival in some deep shelter with few bodyguards would be very short, person like him doesn't have any reliable true friends.
The problem is the person coming after him - if he will be an extremist nutjob, everything is possible even if only 5% or 10% of soviet missiles still work.
One has to recognize the genre of "Threads" and "The Day After" - they represent suffering porn that has little to do with how actual disasters play out. In "Threads", the way people suddenly lose the ability to speak and rapidly turn into cavemen after a nuclear strike is comical. Kids grunt instead of talk, everyone shuffles around like zombies, and basic things like farming or using tools just vanish. How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild.
South America and Africa would probably get off pretty lightly. And then they'd experience the worst economic depression that has ever been seen due to the complete collapse of global trade. They're not going to be up for the job of rescuing entire continents.
No, but they’ll go on living as they have for 300,000 years.
I spent time in 35 African countries getting as remote as possible. The vast major Of remote peoples lives would not change at all if entire continents were completely destroyed (unless they cop the fallout, or the ash causes crops to fail).
The discussion here isn’t about whether the lives of remote people would be upended, but whether those countries would help to rebuild the ones hit by the war, the way devastated cities were rebuilt after WWII.
"How is anyone supposed to take that seriously? Is that how Cologne, Dresden, Würzburg and Pforzheim, or Hiroshima and Nagasaki looked a decade after they had been destroyed in Allied bombing raids? The truth is that even after infrastructure gets bombed back to the Middle Ages, life remains surprisingly normal, and people quickly rebuild."
The nukes that would fall today are a few orders of magnitude bigger than those that fell in Japan, and there would be many orders of magnitude more of them, and close together.
The world has never seen destruction and fallout that is even remotely comparable to what we’d get.
If the risk was a war involving bombs like Little Boy then there wouldn't be much to worry about beyond localised disaster. The issue is the weapons that are 2-3 orders of magnitude more powerful.
And you're referring to Germany, which that took casualties approaching something close to 10% of its population during WWII - so you're eyeballing a scenario where a country just lost 10% [0] of its population and saying it looks fine to you. That seems a weak argument that the damage is nothing we need to worry about. We can argue over whether nukes are going to kill 100%, 50%, 10%, etc of the population but frankly I don't see where you would want to go with that.
[0] Not from bombing, obviously, but the situation you're talking about is nonetheless one where Germany just suffered massive losses and you're saying you can't see that in a photograph after the cities were rebuilt so no worries if something worse happens.
Not all uses of nuclear weapons necessarily escalate to the doomsday maximum exchange scenarios. There are many interesting points of equilibrium in between.
For example - if far right extremists took over Turkey and attacked Russia, then Russia nuked a Turkish airbase, what would the US/UK/France do? It's not actually that obvious.
The USA did it against Japan. Of course those were special circumstances, but all wars have their own set of special circumstances to some extent.
There’s also the argument that using nuclear weapons make sense when a nuclear state has a weaker conventional force that its opponent. Russia still has a pretty strong conventional force, but for example North Korea is in this position against most likely adversaries.
Which is actually quite unfortunate, given that China, our closest rival, has an avowed "no first use" policy. Sanctity of human life and fundamental reciprocity would behoove us to at least, with respect to them, adopt an equivalent posture.
One might counterargue that in a fair fight (i.e. all-conventional), China might clean our clocks. And they certainly have lots of domestic political reasons to start a wholly unnecessary war.
The irony is that if your defenses consist of, on the one hand, nuclear weapons, and on the other hand, pitchforks brandished by several farmers... You are going to be very, very respected.
Until someone calls your bluff, perhaps accidentally, and realizes much of the nuclear saber-rattling was just that. Of course, since it wasn't entirely a bluff, this is the easiest way to get a nuclear war going. (Get a country with nukes but limited conventional capabilities into a brinksmanship contest.)
More than that, Turkey is a member of NATO that participates in US nuclear sharing and has substantial US forces (aside from the nuclear weapons) deployed.
A nuclear attack by Russia on Turkey would not be merely legally and abstractly an attack on the US under Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty which it would do massive irreparable damage to US credibility to ignore, but would almost certainly be a nuclear attack on US forces in the direct and literal sense.
The text of article 5 doesn’t distinguish whether the attack on the NATO state was justified or even whether the NATO state attacked first.
This lack of blaming is partly why Turkey and Greece had to sign at exactly the same time, so that neither could take advantage of being able to attack the other whilst being themselves shielded by NATO.
“The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all…” -
> The text of article 5 doesn’t distinguish whether the attack on the NATO state was justified or even whether the NATO state attacked first.
Arguably, the text of Article 5 doesn't have to, since an act of aggression breaches the obligations of Articles 1 and 2, as well as the pre-existing obligations which the Treaty explicitly does not alter under Article 7.
I see what you mean - although articles 1 & 2 seem to be treated more like guidelines rather than rules.
Otherwise I struggle to understand how any NATO member could’ve engaged in any of the overt or covert expressions of military force in Iraq 2003, Vietnam, Cuba, Iran, Guatemala, Chile, Egypt, or Algeria to name but a few.
That’s the point. In theory Turkey is covered by the NATO nuclear umbrella.
But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.
> But in practice how many Americans would be willing to go nuclear in support of a Turkish war against the Russians? In circumstances where Turkey was considered the aggressor state.
The question is how many would be willing to go nuclear in response to Russia nuking US forces in Türkiye in response to a conventional attack by Türkiye, which any plausible "Russia nukes Türkiye" scenario would involve.
It’s not obvious how many casualties the US itself would tolerate before going nuclear.
In circumstances where there were only a couple thousand American casualties, and those were incurred as collateral damage rather than as primary targets, it might make sense for the US to respond with conventional airstrikes and for Russia accept those and not escalate further.
This would depend a lot on the individual president though, like I could imagine Trump/Obama being much more risk averse than personalities like Bush 2 or JFK.
But I don't live in any of those places. Also I believe India-Pakistan has nukes too. And possibly Israel-Iran. North Korea too? The peace loving nations are well within fallout range.
My biggest fear with MAD is that it only takes a single irrational leader, and we've seen so many of them lately.
I don't want to jinx it, but even the most deranged leaders don't want to rule over a nuclear wasteland. And they especially don't want to go down in their history as the worst person who ruined everything for their party.
I agree about not worrying about it, but one should be aware -- awareness about something is not equal to worrying about something.
Awareness of something is the first step in adapting. One can adapt beforehand, or, one can adapt afterwards; with more limited resources, necessitated by circumstances, under more time pressure, with more suboptimal tools, and so on.
It is unquestionable that an EMP would have an extreme impact in all aspects of society and the lives of people. Preparations on macro and micro level can mitigate some of the problems that would follow. And preparations require awareness.
I mean, the article is about the EMP wave following a nuclear detonation, I'm not sure there are bigger problems after that, we're already pretty deep into "shit has hit the fan" at that point.
From the first paragraph:
> maybe it's time to look at the damaging effects of the electromagnetic pulse that follows a nuclear detonation.
> I mean, the article is about the EMP wave following a nuclear detonation, I'm not sure there are bigger problems after that, we're already pretty deep into "shit has hit the fan" at that point.
Sure we are in deep trouble, but at that point, but I disagree with your “not sure there are bigger problems after that”: the following problem would be a nuke exploding in your direct vicinity (instead of in high altitude/space where it caused an EMP).
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