Once the radiation has died down (FEMA recommends waiting 24 hours) you should evacuate.
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.
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.
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.
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.