Nuclear Preparedness Guide
Author: Finan Adamson
Last Updated 03/2022
Overview
This doc is to help you prepare for the tail risk of nuclear war. Estimates vary, but an EA Forum survey put the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war at 0.24%. This doc will go into some detail on threat models of nuclear war and then go over preparations you could make to survive being near a nuclear event.
Threat Models
Nuclear Bombs
To get a sense of how a nuclear bomb damages an area, the distance of radioactive fallout, etc. you can check out NukeMap. The damage caused by a nuclear bomb or missile being detonated is going to depend on many factors including bomb size, detonated on ground or in air, weather, etc. This chart includes some distances and effects for different yields and detonation heights. Yield can vary a lot and is difficult to estimate because yields are often secret and can be changed in similar sizes of missiles because the nuclear material is not a heavy part of the missile. Historically, ICBMs in the Russian Arsenal include a range from ~40 kilotons to ~6 megatons. The largest bomb ever tested was Tsar Bomba, which had a yield of about 50 megatons.
States generally keep modern yields secret, but common yields of ICBMs in the US and Russian arsenal would almost certainly include warheads with yields in the 100-500 kiloton range and might include weapons of 1 to 6 megatons. I’m basing this guess off of Wikipedia’s list of nuclear weapons.
Nuclear War
Estimates vary, but an EA Forum survey put the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war at 0.24%. Living in the US, Russia, Canada, and Northern Europe this is the most concerning nuclear threat. 9 countries possess nuclear weapons.
Nuclear Winter
Nuclear winter is a controversial risk. During the cold war the security community and the scientific community disagreed about how bad a nuclear winter would be or even if it was possible. The cooling effect depends on a lot of things. How much smoke is created, how much of it is black carbon, how high is that lofted in the atmosphere, what is the weather, were there firestorms, what materials were burned, etc. Looking through the scientific literature, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but in an all out nuclear war between Russia and the US, a nuclear winter lasting months to years seems plausible. If there were a nuclear war between, say, India/Pakistan (about 100 nukes each) there would likely be global climate effects, but probably not nuclear winter. If you were prepping for nuclear winter you’d want months of stored food and water in a place away from potential targets. In the case of nuclear winter, you’d likely want to evacuate to somewhere in the southern hemisphere.
EMP
The probability of large scale damage from EMP could be higher than other kinds of damage from nuclear weapons because it takes fewer weapons to affect a large area. A single nuclear weapon detonated high enough in the atmosphere could affect an area about the size of the US. What we know about EMP comes from tests done by the US and Russia during the cold war. The US test took out all known satellites at the time and the russian test irreparably damaged several miles of power lines. The major concern from EMP is damaging the electrical grid. The US electric grid depends on Large Power Transformers. If the large power transformers were damaged it could take a long time to replace them. They depend on a lot of custom parts and rare materials. Large Power transformer production takes 1 to 2 years. Perhaps that would be sped up in an emergency or it could take longer if critical resources or supply chains are damaged. I could also imagine transitioning to more localized grids in that situation, but that would still result in unreliable electricity for long amounts of time.
Nuclear Power Plant Meltdown
Nuclear power plants could melt down or be the target of terrorist or state action. The radiation from a power plant meltdown is much worse than from a nuclear bomb because a nuclear bomb contains far less radioactive material. If there is a meltdown in your area you should evacuate or shelter in place depending on what emergency authorities say, what level of radiation is currently in your area, and how adequate your shelter is. The WHO estimates 4,000 direct deaths from the Chernobyl Disaster, but that number is fairly controversial. Contaminated food sources could also be concerning. Contamination occurred from the Fukushima Daiichi disaster, but this article suggests the risk from that contamination was fairly low.
Radiation
Here’s a handy visual on radiation dosage. Risk of harm from radiation depends on both the dose and the dose rate. 1,000 microsieverts over an hour is much more damaging than 1,000 microsieverts over a year.
Some of the relevant numbers from the infographic. . .
| Microsieverts | Over what time period? | Effects |
| 100,000 | 1 Year | Lowest annual dose where we have solid studies on increased cancer risk |
| 500,000 | 1 Day | Decrease in blood cell counts, returning to normal after a few days if exposure stops. |
| 1,000,000 | Hours | Temporary radiation sickness, low blood cell count, not fatal. |
| 4,000,000 | Hours | Bleeding, hair loss, possible death within 6 weeks, death more likely if untreated. |
| 6,000,000 | Hours | Usually fatal within 2-4 weeks if untreated |
| 10,000,000 | Hours | Fatal Dose, Death within 2 weeks |
Prepare Before
Sign up for Emergency Alerts
The government may send out emergency alerts via text. In order to receive these, the alerts will need to be turned on in your phone. In theory these alerts should only be about disasters in your geographic region or imminent threats to your safety. Amber alerts are different and you can choose to turn those on or off separately.
The alerts are tied geographically to your phone. So you should get an alert even if you are not at your home zip code.
These Emergency alerts don’t work on all older phones.
There is a setting in your phone that needs to be turned on in order to receive the alerts. It is the emergency and public safety alerts. It was unclear the difference between “Emergency Alerts” and “Public Safety Alerts”. Probably best to leave both on.
Consider subscribing to local emergency alert systems.
Sign up for Ben Landau Taylor’s Evacuation Email
Ben Landau Taylor wrote up a blog post on evacuating if a nuclear war seems imminent. You can sign up to receive an email if he decides to evacuate here.
Consider Evacuation Triggers
Your evacuation trigger could just be receiving the email from Ben. You might also consider . . .
Threats from leaders of nuclear countries
Non-nuclear war between nuclear powers
Coup or collapse of the government of a nuclear power
Plan an Evacuation Route
For leaving before a nuclear event
If you’re leaving before a nuclear war, places in the southern hemisphere are better. Most nuclear powers and their potential targets are in the northern hemisphere and nuclear winter models show most effects in the northern hemisphere.
You probably already know that New Zealand and Australia are good bets. Here’s a list of countries that are mostly food exporters and have typically been easy to get visas to if you live in the US or EU.
If you have to stay in the US, get away from major population centers and military bases.
For Missiles Inbound
You would shelter in place or go to the nearest available shelter. See the Survive During section for detailed information on sheltering.
Plan ahead on where you could run to whether it’s your home or a group shelter. Generally you want to be behind thick/dense material. Being able to seal off your room from the outside world is valuable as is good air filtration.
Since I live in Berkeley I would run to the Bart tunnel if I knew a nuclear missile was incoming. It’s just a couple minutes from where I live, and it’s underground with cement walls for shielding.
Store Nuclear Specific Items
Potassium iodide thyroid tablets—Avoid radiation buildup in your thyroid
Geiger Counter—Test radiation levels in your shelter and outside to aid decision making
Follow the instructions that come with it
You could also buy one time use personal radiation detectors
Emergency Radio—Stay up to date on emergency recommendations during the disaster
Shield the electronics—The effects of EMP on personal electronics are not well studied. To ensure your electronics are protected, wrap them in one layer of plastic (could be a ziploc) and then 5 layers of aluminium foil.
Plastic Sheeting and Tape—Seal off your shelter for the first few hours of fallout.
N95 or P100 - An N95 or P100 can reduce the amount of radioactive particulate you breathe in if it’s in the air.
You should already be storing some food and water for a variety of disasters.
Prepare for a world without electricity
In addition to the things in Preparing for Power Outages in Disasters, you’d need to shield your personal electronics to be sure they’d survive an EMP. You can do this cheaply by wrapping electronics in plastic wrap(or a ziploc), then 5 layers of tin foil.
For a HEMP(High-altitude Electro-Magnetic Pulse) the electrical grid could be out for months, so having alternate electricity would be more important than other disasters. Solar panels or gas storage might be options if you’re willing to put in a lot of effort for the tail risk here.
Store Water
As with other disasters you’ll want to store water for sheltering and evacuating. In a nuclear emergency, avoid tap water as it could have picked up radioactive particulate.
Water Preparedness for Disasters
Store Food
As with other disasters you’ll want to store food for sheltering and evacuating.
Food Preparedness for Disasters
Make a Bugout Bag
You’ll want to be able to evacuate elsewhere. In a nuclear emergency be sure to bring your geiger counter and masks as well (masks can help filter out radioactive particulate).
Survive During
What if a missile is inbound?
Take Shelter
You’ll need a place as close by as possible with as many layers of material between you and the outside world as possible. If you’re in the blast radius you’re probably just dead, so this is for if you’re outside the blast radius and preparing to avoid radiation.
If you’re in a home, a basement would probably be your best bet. Unless there were more adequate shelter within a couple minutes run of your home. If you were in a basement you’d also want to cover up any exits or floor level windows with as much material as you could (boards, books, etc.).
Once the radiation has died down(FEMA recommends waiting 24 hours) you should evacuate. Evacuate in a direction not downwind if possible. On the California Coast wind often travels from west to east, so it would make sense to evacuate north or south.
You may want to use a public shelter if it’s close enough. To find the nearest open shelter in your area, text SHELTER + your ZIP code to 43362 (4FEMA).
Decontaminate
If you think you’ve been through an area with radioactive particles on your way to shelter, you should decontaminate.
Perform decontamination in a room that you will not shelter in
Remove all clothing
Wash yourself with tepid/lukewarm water (cold water might trap radioactive material in your pores, hot water increases absorption rate through increased skin blood flow).
Repeat step 3
Ensure contaminated clothing and water does not go into rooms you’ll be staying in. If you have extra cloths/blankets, cover the contaminated material.
Seal off your shelter
Close all windows and doors. Turn off all fans, air conditioners, and anything else bringing air into the house. Seal off the room with plastic sheeting(anything you can do to seal off airflow; garbage bags, plywood, etc.) and duct tape. Remove the seal after a few hours. You don’t want to suffocate, you just want to keep the radioactive particulate from getting in, which will settle out of the air over time.
You can also wear your N95s/P100s.
Be sure to run a mask fit test.
Take Iodine Tablets
FDA instructions on taking iodine tablets
Directions for Making the Potassium Iodide (“KI”) Solution:
Step 1. Soften the KI tablet:
Put one 130 mg KI tablet into a small bowl. Add four teaspoons of water. Soak the tablet for one minute.
Step 2. Crush the softened KI tablet:
Use the back of the teaspoon to crush the tablet in the water. At the end of this step, there should not be any large pieces of KI. This makes the KI and water mixture.
Step 3. Add a drink to the KI and water mixture:
Mix four teaspoons of juice(you can use water, but juice will make it taste better) mixture made in Step 2. Now you have the final KI solution.
Step 4. Give the right amount of the final KI solution, using the chart below.
How Much of the Final Potassium Iodide (“KI”) Solution to Give Each Day
Age | Once Daily Dose of KI Solution |
| 19 years and older | 8 teaspoons |
| 13 to 18 years (150 pounds or more) | 8 teaspoons |
| 13 to 18 years (149 pounds or less) | 4 teaspoons |
| 4 to 12 years | 4 teaspoons |
| Older than 1 month to 3 years | 2 teaspoons |
| Birth to 1 month | 1 teaspoon |
What do I do after the explosion?
Some of this will be redundant with what to do if a missile is inbound. Feel free to ignore the advice you’ve already taken.
Take Shelter
Something you can get to as quickly as possible that will be as safe as possible. To find the nearest open shelter in your area, text SHELTER + your ZIP code to 43362 (4FEMA), example: shelter 12345.
Use the visual from the earlier take sheltersection to choose a shelter location.
Take Iodine Tablets
Evacuate the area if safe
What Direction should I evacuate?
Evacuate Perpendicular to downwind of the blast
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
How long should I wait inside?
In reality this depends on where you are relative to the bomb went off, how big the bomb was, whether it was air or ground burst, and which way the wind is blowing. You probably won’t know all of those things so here are some heuristics.
FEMA and ready.gov suggest 24 hours. This is when the radiation will be at it’s worst. If you suspect you are in a zone of radiation or downwind you should stay inside for at least 24 hours if you have reasonable shelter.
Several prepper blogs suggest 48 or 72 hours.
From Britannica.com “A nuclear explosion produces a complex mix of more than 300 different isotopes of dozens of elements, with half-lifes from fractions of a second to millions of years. The total radioactivity of the fission products is extremely large at first, but it falls off at a fairly rapid rate as a result of radioactive decay. Seven hours after a nuclear explosion, residual radioactivity will have decreased to about 10 percent of its amount at 1 hour, and after another 48 hours it will have decreased to 1 percent. (The rule of thumb is that for every sevenfold increase in time after the explosion, the radiation dose rate decreases by a factor of 10.)”
Using radiation measuring devices:
If you have a geiger counter or dosimeter, you might use that to determine when to leave your shelter to evacuate the area. The threshold is up to you, there’s not official recommendations about what geiger reading you should evacuate at. Finan would consider the current radioactivity inside the shelter, the radioactivity outside the shelter, and how long to get to a safer place if evacuating.
Example:
If the radiation inside was 400,000 microsieverts and outside it was 1,000,000 microsieverts. Finan would evacuate immediately if he thought it was 2 hours to safety, but not if he thought it was 10 hours.
How will I evacuate if cars aren’t working?
You may think cars would be shut down making it difficult to evacuate, but mostly cars are fine after EMP, especially if they’re turned off.
If your car is not working, consider the time it would take to walk in your decision making.
Seek Medical Attention
If you’ve been near a nuclear explosion or accident you could have radiation sickness. Seek medical attention if available.
What if a nuclear power plant melts down?
In the case of a nuclear power plant meltdown almost all of the advice above applies.
The differences . . .
Because a power plant meltdown doesn’t have the same kind of explosive power as a nuclear bomb, you might be able to evacuate immediately rather than sheltering in place. Evacuate immediately if . . .
Emergency authorities tell you to.
The radiation has not yet reached you (as checked by emergency authorities or geiger counter).
The radiation is not yet very bad outside and you expect it to get worse.
In all cases you want to evacuate perpendicular to downwind of the nuclear plant.
If you do end up sheltering in place because you were close to the power plant or did not get word of the meltdown before radioactive particulate in the air reached you, you may have to shelter in place for longer(because there is more radioactive material in a power plant than in a nuclear bomb). Listen to emergency authorities and use a geiger counter if you have one to determine if it’s safe to evacuate. If your shelter is not very good (eg. a wood framed house), consider evacuating immediately if you can get to safety relatively quickly. Refer to the sections on radiation and taking shelter to determine what seems the safest course of action.
Just reposting this good resource for people on places potentially hit in the US. The one I linked is his version for a full countervalue attack with 2000 warheads but he has scenarios for counterforce/mixed etc too.
I don’t think anything similar exists for China yet but in the meantime a good assumption is just cities ordered by descending population. So, possibly similar to the linked one but with fewer smaller cities hit for now, until China has reached a similar quantity of warheads as Russia later this decade.
ETA: An interesting thing I found on US target lists, from a NYT article. Relevant for people who’ve claimed the US doesn’t target civilians in nuclear policy.
This recommendation assumes the explosion was caused by a terrorist group, not Russia. If Russia decides to attack the US, it will probably aim to do as much damage as possible: i.e., it will attack with thousands of nukes. In contrast, once a terrorist group obtains one nuke, it will probably choose to use it rather than try to obtain a second nuke. after a massive nuclear attack, if you were lucky or prepared enough to end up with water, some protection from fallout and some reason to hope that your position will not become overcrowded with desperate refugees lacking one of those 2 things, it is almost certainly a mistake to travel. Food of course is also very nice to have and ventilation (to remove heat and CO2) can become the critical factor when you are underground and the electrical grid is down.
The priority in the first 3 weeks after the attack is to avoid getting a fatal dose of radiation from the fallout, which basically means staying underground or in the center of a massive building. Fallout will coat every horizontal outdoor surface. (Well, more precisely, only about half of the area of the US will be coated with fallout, but it will be impossible to predict the distribution pattern.) You do not want to be out walking around or riding in a vehicle.
A nuclear explosion can be heard for many hundreds of miles. Here is what one sounds like from about 25 miles away.. If you hear more than one nuclear explosion, then sadly you are probably being attacked by Russia, not a terrorist group.
Also, nowhere in Kearny’s book Nuclear War Survival Skills does it mention masks as a way to protect against radiation or fallout. In fact, he explicitly says that the dust in the outdoor air is not a danger because although it will enter your underground shelter, it will remain suspended in the air till it leaves your shelter. It will not accumulate in the shelter, and the dust suspended in the air does not have enough collective mass to hurt you. Yes, some of the fallout consists of dust that stays in the air for days, but the vast majority of the fallout’s mass (at least near the ground) is in the form of particles between the size of grains of sand and the size of marbles. Ventilation is important while underground, and the only time it is desirable to stop ventilating your shelter according to the book is while the fallout is actively falling out of the sky (like hail). I don’t want to look it up right now, but ISTR that the book says that that will persist for only a few hours at the most.
One thing I realized is that it’ll likely be near impossible to travel long distances by car in the post-attack aftermath as everyone with a gun who runs out of gas would be setting up roadblocks to rob travellers of the gas in their cars + other supplies. Interstates would probably thus quickly become unusable. So you probably shouldn’t expect to reach some cross-country rendezvous after the fact if you didn’t get there beforehand.
Also x-posting my more lengthy comment on this post from EAF.
And if you travel for hours by car during the first 2 or 3 weeks after a massive attack, you’ll get a fatal dose of radiation.
I don’t know that that’s true everywhere. Airbursts (detonation mode for cities) generally don’t produce much fallout. Probably good advice if you’re downwind of hardened targets like the 3 clusters of Minuteman silos in the Midwest though which will produce a fuckton of fallout as they’re all hit with surface detonations. But the Russians/Chinese may not hit them at all if they know all those silos have been fired already.
Are the black or the red supposed to be the minuteman silos on that map?
Huh, I thought the fallout from airbursts would (eventually) kill more unprepared people than the immediate effects of the bursts would. Here is why I believe that.
The book Nuclear War Survival Skills says repeatedly and forcefully that everyone in the continental US should have fallout protection during the 2 or 3 weeks after an attack (and that for most American families, making your own shelter by digging in the dirt is their best bet). A large fraction of the book explains how to build and operate such a shelter.
Nothing has changed since the publication of that book in 1987 that I know of that would make ground bursts more likely. I always thought that ground bursts make sense (and made sense in the 1980s) only when attacking targets that the defender has tried to make proof against nuclear attack. I doubt there are more of those now than then. Since 1987 the Air Force headquarters that used to be in Cheyenne mountain (a hardened target) for example is now in a non-hardened building in nearby Colorado Springs.