How do you plan to survive a nuclear war?

I think the chance of nuclear war still remains very low (but not zero, it will never be zero as long as nukes exist), and I'm not sure I would want to survive if it happened. So I don't really do much of anything. Plus, I live in Manhattan, so I seriously doubt I would survive a full on MAD scenario, no matter what I did to prepare.

Oh yeah, also I'm a type 1 diabetic, so even if I lived far away from any targets, I would be screwed so quickly. All the prepping in the world would do me no good in the event of civilization collapse, and the inability to synthesize and store insulin. (Insulin has a limited shelf life, and also has to be kept cold. So you can't just horde 5 years worth of it or anything like that.) That would be a slow and agonizing death, even if I managed to dodge radiation or starvation.

IMO the fear of nuclear disaster is overrated. I say this as a child of the sixties, who was subjected to endless frightening propaganda during the Cold War.

If you can find the publication "Nuclear War Survival Skills" by Cresson H. Kearny, published by Oak Ridge National Laboratory — it was posted in an HN thread the other day — look to page 23: "Unsurvivable 'nuclear winter' is a discredited theory that, since its conception in 1982, has been used to frighten additional millions..." The document has quite a few "Myth/Facts" items for one's consideration.

Reading Wikipedia regarding the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki should provide some amount of comfort. About a third of their populations died immediately/very soon after the blast. Of those surviving: "the average lifespan of survivors was reduced by only a few months compared to those not exposed to radiation."

So if you live in a big city, the odds are already in your favour. If you live in a smaller city or town, you're probably not going to be nuked anyway.

Radiation falls off exponentially quickly. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both re-occupied within a year of the bombing.

More than 2000 nuclear bomb tests have taken place. In 1961 alone, 140 tests were conducted. For decades after, forty to sixty nukes a year were detonated. And yet more radiation was sent up into the atmosphere via a few nuclear power plant incidents. And yet we've continued ticking along just fine. The detonation of a few hundred bombs will not have a big global impact. It certainly wouldn't cause anything like a nuclear winter.

Finally, it seems very likely that Russian corruption is so pervasive that it's unlikely that their missiles have been well-maintained. You don't get to be a billionaire oligarch by spending government funding appropriately: you steal it and tell the bosses that, sure, those warheads you never plan to use are in great condition. IMO if the command comes down the line, the missiles will largely fail to launch; and of those that do successfully launch, few will make it to their target, and fewer yet will successfully detonate.

Be an activist for nuclear disarmament.

Look at the 2019 paper on nuclear winter temp. drops:

https://web.archive.org/web/20210430022658mp_/http://climate...

Whatcha going to eat? From where, when nothing grows?

Also - get to the southern hemisphere

It depends on what sort of nuclear war.

If its N Korea or Iran detonating a few high over the US to knock out the grid with EMP, then it will be mostly about trying to avoid/outlast all the people who don't have a few months of food and water.

If it's the "big one", then that's another thing.

The kind you see in the movies with thousands of missiles in the air all at once is probably not how it would go down. It would be volleys back and forth for months on end. Modern nukes are very powerful. You can't send too many to the same area at the same time. Probably not survivable.

The US has a very old nuclear missile fleet, but Russia has a brand new one, including the RS-28, which can haul 50 megatons of mirved warheads. That's probably enough to obliterate France or Texas in one go.

I don't, at least not in the sense that most people think of.

Our science does not understand consciousness yet. It may yet prove to be a mistake to think that those obliterated by nuclear weapons suffer the same thing that victims of conventional attacks do.

--

Read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Do not skip the chapter containing the testimony of Japanese children the survived the attack. If you skip that, you will not learn what you need from it. It is agonizing.

Embrace the fact that what the scientists did out of fear led inexorably to that horrific outcome, and that this very same choice between fear and love exists before you.

Know that good and evil are teaching tools.

The worse things get, the more vital it is to confront your own fear with love.

I don’t. Which is why I like living near strategic target areas. Ups my odds of dying in the initial blast vs. the slow death of radiation poisoning or starving :)

Edit: fixed a word

Years ago I got a tour of one of the Bunkers attached to the German Uban system along with the rest of my High School class. It was an absolute hell to see and we all agreed that we would prefer to stay outside should it come to that.

Move as far away as possible is about all I can think of. Punta Arens, Cape Town (my first option), maybe Christchurch or Dunedin...

I plan not to but I'm afraid I might.