I recently saw a comment chain about nuclear bombs, and that led me to thinking about this. Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city. I survive relatively fine, but obviously the main part of the city has been destroyed, while major zones extending from the center were also badly damaged. What would be a good response to (a) survive and (b) help out the recovery effort?
Go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.
Assuming your home isn’t on fire. Seal everything, do not go outside! If possible, stay inside for as long as possible. Fill everything with water your bathtub, every cup, bucket, etc. Monitor the radio for emergency broadcasts for what to do next. AM stations are more likely to work. If you have a CB radio handy, (depending on your country) you can talk to authorities on Channel 9.
Tip regarding radio: 2182kHz SSB near the coast. That frequency is monitored by authorities globally. It’s the MF equivalent of maritime VHF ch16.
Technically, the same goes for 2187.5kHz, but that’s for digital transmission only, and unless you have the required hardware to encode/decode it, you won’t be able to make sense of it.
Source: I have a GOC
CB radio has really short range and there’s little likelihood that authorities would be monitoring it.
2182 kHz is long range marine radio and only good if you’re on a boat. I don’t know that anyone you talk to would care about a person on land while they’re handling their own maritime emergencies.
If someone really wants emergency radio I’d suggest ham radio or GMRS.
There is also amateur radio (aka ham radio), which can legally and practically operate at higher output powers if necessary, and on far more frequencies than CB. Although doomsday people often say to just buy a ham radio and use it without a license, I don’t advise that, simply because having the radio is only half the challenge.
The other half is the ability to competently operate the radio to effectively communicate and organize aid. And this only comes with practice by talking to others, in the form of regular participation in radio nets and/or emcomm activities. Emergency radio isn’t even limited to voice transmissions, with digital modes and even fax modes being an option that can transmit quicker and farther. Having a legit call sign will make it easier for rescuers to identify your transmissions, as well as figuring out if you’ve been located.
While some people will make ham radio a lifelong hobby, others obtain their license simply for small-talk, or for a SHTF scenario, or as longer-distance walkie-talkies when camping in heavily wooded forests. The possibilities are endless, but it all starts with a first radio and some basic training on radio handling.
Ham radio clubs across the USA and the world are generally very welcoming of new folks, so it’s worth looking up your nearby club or dropping in on an in-person club meeting.
The CB radio thing is going to be very location specific, I work in 911 dispatch, I think the state police around me theoretically monitor channel 9 on the highways, but in practice I wouldn’t have a lot of confidence in that, they barely look at info we send them over the computer, CB also has a somewhat limited range, so you’re counting on them having an officer somewhat nearby or you being close to their station.
As for local police, around me I suspect a few of them probably still have a CB antenna on the roof of their station and maybe even an old radio stashed somewhere in a closet but not hooked up and not being monitored, and the officers definitely don’t have them in their vehicles.
I’m in a pretty dense suburban area outside of a major city, they might still get some use in more rural areas where cell signals aren’t as reliable, though you’re probably going to run into the same issues with range limitations, in normal ideal conditions, you might get a range of about 20 miles or so, depending on atmospheric conditions, geography, etc. you might get only a fraction of that.
EDIT: FWIW, I keep a CB in my car, decent amount of chatter still happens on 19 around me, and a few other channels, and somehow channel 9 seems to have become essentially the Spanish language channel.
Great questions, and you need to familiarize yourself with the correct answers. Generally memorize the protocols. I’m going to regurgitate what I have internalized & point you to online resources to educate yourself further.
Preparations made well in advance really give an advantage to survival.
As soon as a nuke is dropped, go the fuck home. Turn on your faucets & fill all sinks & bathtubs, as this may be the last of your easy, clean, potable water you’ll get from the grid for who knows how long.
One of the biggest & best things you can do is shelter in place, I think for a week. Radioactive fallout & the heavy alpha particles will be everywhere, and blow everywhere. Cover all windows & doors with Visqueen sheeting & duct tape, control & eliminate the travel of random-ass particulates. After 1 week, the radioactive potency of the dust particles should be reduced by 85-90%. That’s huge. So shut your windows & doors, seal everything up, and sit your ass down. It could save your life.
Shelter in place requires food, water, preps. I think it’s overkill, but overkill is also kind of what you need/want, 1 gallon of water per person per day. When Russia started getting on their shit, people were buying up iodine tabs. This harmless substance negates the harmful effects of potential radioactive exposure via your food & drink. The trick is you have to take this stuff a set amount of time…before…exposure to radioactive particles. It protects your thyroid gland, IIRC. Have water, have food, maybe have a container or two of those fancy tablets.
Especially in the earlier days, you help others by being able to help yourself. If there are assistance efforts, you can turn them down & the help can go to others in more dire need.
We can, and do, talk about prepping things for years on end. I would recommend you tune in to Canadian Prepper (hey,I watched some of the video after & I didn’t do too badly!)
Yes, Canadian Prepper touches on this. In my words: information is good. But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know. Good advice in general.
But the authorities, and other people, may lie or not tell the entire truth. They tell you what they want you to know.
You’d think that lesson would still be fresh from the pandemic, when at the very beginning the CDC tried to get the public not to hoard masks so the actual medical professionals could have them, then that got twisted and metastisized into “masks don’t work” and the ant-masker/anti-vaxxer bullshit.
The frustrating thing is that masks don’t protect you particularly well. What they do is protect others from any infection you are carrying. This is why it was more important to provide them to those interacting with infected or vulnerable people. It limited the risk of spreading it further.
Probably a stupid question, but during that week, going outside to fire up my whole house generator would probably be a death sentence. Right? So I should just live without electricity for a week? That reality has me thinking that I need to get one of those generators that turns itself on when power goes out. It would be really convenient during the winter anyways, since we lose power a lot when it snows around here.
Yes going outside in the first week is a very bad idea. However not because the radiation outside will instantly drop you. Much of the radiation will be coming from radioactive dust, known as fallout that’ll be comprised of all kinds of isotopes. The isotopes that decay quickly release a lot of radiation over a short period and if you go outside you will come back covered in them. This will bring radiation into wherever you are using as your shelter. This would not just harm the person who went outside but everyone else sheltering with them. So do not go outside for any reason. You can make do without power for a while.
On a related note; keep water and food covered. Skin is a surprisingly good defense against radiation but breathing in this dust or letting it get into the food you eat or the water you drink is very dangerous. After a week has passed you should for your own safety keep the time spent outside your shelter as low as possible. Short trips outside will become safer as time goes on but activities that kick up dust will still be dangerous for a long time.
I think that I might rather get caught in the blast zone than deal with the fallout.
Kurzgesagt has a video on it.
The only time a nuke has ever been used in war was when only one country had them. Disarmament destroys MAD and makes it possible for only one country to have (and therefore use) nukes again.
I suspect you are at least as old as I am, from the MAD comment.
Why Mutually Assured Destruction Can No Longer Keep the World from Annihilation https://bigthink.com/politics-current-affairs/why-mutually-assured-destruction-can-no-longer-keep-the-world-from-annihilation/
Why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) Is No Longer Reassuring https://www.fdd.org/podcasts/2022/04/01/mutually-assured-destruction-no-longer-reassuring/
The Diminishing Reassurance Of Mutually-Assured Destruction https://theowp.org/reports/the-diminishing-reassurance-of-mutually-assured-destruction/
This brings to mind something David Mitchell said once on Would I Lie To You (British panel show):
In response to Kelvin MacKenzie’s claim that the “This Is My” guest had built him a nuclear bunker:
David Mitchell: If there’s a nuclear war, I don’t want to live. I don’t want to come out of a shelter and try to rebuild society. I have no skills. Okay, society is destroyed by a nuclear war, we’re basically - we’re back to the bronze age…how long is it gonna be before people start pitching panel shows again? It’s gonna be at least 2000 years!
Watch it here if you want, it was annoyingly hard to find.
However I don’t think David - who is a comedian - is precisely right about how such a war would affect the state of technology. If there are survivors, I don’t think we’d really be back to the bronze age. Even if all technology was destroyed (which it wouldn’t be), give humans a few decades, we’ll have some sort of modern technology back up and running. Maybe not computers, but some certainly some analogue electronics - the knowledge isn’t lost. Communications would be one of the first points of focus, so television would follow closely behind.
The longest stretch would likely be chip fabs. You need precision electronics and hazardous chemicals and plenty of power.
But considering that some form of electronics will survive, and it wouldnt take long for people to get rudimentary electricity going, I don’t see why we couldn’t have world Internet within a decade.
Yeah, chip fabs are exactly why I think computers would need more time. I’m not super familiar with this, but I’d wager such a factory can only be built using tools and machines that come from other specialized factories, and so on maybe 3 levels down before you get to a relatively rudimentary manufacturing process that can be reasonably achieved within a few years. It would take a lot to get that back up and running.
However… Just think about how many chips are currently just sitting around… Between scrapping and searching you would likely be just fine for a few decades.
By the time nuclear war happens, most chip manufacturing capability will be underground or in hidden sites and therefore not targeted.
Counterpoint:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
-Robert A. Heinlein
When you’re functionally immortal like Lazarus Long you’ll have time to learn all that. Most people only live long enough to master one profession.
The thing is, people inherently want to live. It’s instinctual. Secondly, everybody - regardless of skill level - can learn to be handy and useful. If everything is destroyed, and society is to be rebuilt, a lot of manual labor will be needed for cleanup and rebuilding. Even the “I pick things up and put them down” guy is perfectly suited for this type of work.
Thank you for the clip! I once found the show on youtube by accident, it is such a gem. It all started with the cabbage feud. (But I have come to notice that James Acaster only tells true stories, alas.)
I absolutely don’t get the point system though but nevermind.
I never tried to keep track, but I always assumed each correctly identified lie/truth gets a point, and each mistake gives a point to the other team. Keep in mind that the show gets edited down and you don’t see everything that the audience did, while the score probably includes those things you didn’t see.
But like, absolutely no one watches this show for the score, so who cares? It might as well be QI’s scoring system :)
