Imagine a situation

Imagine a situation.

At the moment of reading this post, exactly at the place you are and with whatever items you currently have, you hear an air raid alarm that announces that you have 20 minutes until the nuclear missiles' impact.

What is your plan of action, to survive both short- and long-term?

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=jlPEBROvR9w
state.gov/t/avc/rls/240062.htm
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Drive to that FEMA bunker I live 10 minutes away from

I mean I'm fucked either way, but I don't really imagine anything else nearby that has much of a chance

Step 1: Grab blankets, foods, my copy of Nuclear War Survival skills by Cresson H. Kearny, and my gun and head down to the basement. All the other stuff I need is already down there.
Step 2: Murder my housemates.
Step 3: Prep the basement as quickly as I can

I don't live in the middle of a city, so just getting warm cloths and then travel out of harms way would be pretty easy. Then I have to figure out what have happened, is my whole country fucked; the whole world, or was it just an isolated event?

For the most part, I'm fucked.

I'm currently staying at my mom's apartment till I can get the lease settled for my own.

The only plan I can come up with really quick is to head to the storm drains that are located behind the apartment complex and take food, water, and the camping supplies I have packed in my car, which are currently all contained in a box.

Short term would be to survive the blast, long term would be to head out to the country side where my grandparents live. I repaired their generators last winter along with fixing up their storage and canning rooms.

>all these people who don't answer "head into subway"
Plebeians, all of you.

I'm at my girlfriend's dad's house while she's getting her car fixed. I don't live in this town, state, or country. I have nothing on me but my phone and wallet, and I've got no clue about the landmarks or terrain.

I don't know what kind of blast shelter glass doors give you.

Well, I guess I am fucked.
The only thing I maybe do, is to find a woman to fuck with, so I won't die as a virgin...

I take my entire allotment of medicines in one go and then go to bed happy and don't wake up.

Strange question to ask on Veeky Forums

Assuming we're talking about real life, hope for a quick death or a quick exit and nothing in-between.
There is fucking nothing worth staying alive for in a nuclear apocalypse, unless you somehow manage to find an area which will be minimally affected, if you are unlucky enough to still be alive it's a one way ticket to one of many slow and painful deaths only made better by the fact everyone around you is also dying a slow and painful death and civilization as a whole is now dying a slow and painful death. Any freedom you might hope for from the breakdown of society will be engulfed by the sheer fucking misery of living on irradiated and limited supplies which dwindle by the day, agriculture won't be an option in a poisoned world, and the list of leisure activities you could do to take your mind off it all would be far and few between all losing their luster save for self destructive habits which don't look so bad now their side effects won't kill you half as fast as the world around you will. Assuming you can reach a bunker or the like in which you have enough supplies to last until it's safe to try and rebuild you'll be spending most of your life in a concrete room eating canned food only to emerge on a dead world where your efforts will feel entirely pointless, though if you're lucky you'll be the first generation of humans in the second worst period of human history, the first being what you avoided when you holed up in a bunker.

If you're talking about fiction, well floopdee poopdee woo lemme just get my scrap iron studded leather bdsm gear and motorbike and we can go on adventures through the wild wasteland.

Watch Threads, British documentary/story about life after the bomb goes off.

>Watch Threads, British documentary
I hadn't realized that there was a nuclear war with the USSR I'd forgotten about

I'd do nothing.
No one would drop nukes where I live.
Maybe 70km away.

Yeah it's weird how quickly people forgot about the Cold War.

Grab a baseball bat and climb up on the roof, then try to take a photo of myself winding up for a swing as the warhead comes in.

I'll die pointlessly, but maybe someone in the radioactive wasteland will find a cool picture of my last moments and decide it's worth a few bottlecaps.

It's called a "Cold" War for a reason.

Most people do not live anywhere near a subway.

Still, if it went hot it would have went hot like the inside of the sun, a genuine 'fate of the world in the balance' situation.

Sewers, subway, even a fucking basement - anything works, if it's underground and can be sealed.

Same. Don't have no air raid sirens here either, too far off the grid. Still, got my guns, my hunting/survival skills and live in a place with few people (who mostly know/trust each other).

I'd probably do better than most. If someone targeted us with a nuke we'd be gone before we knew it struck. However I don't know that anyone would be that interested in killing a shitload of reindeer and a handful of people.

Man, just look at all these "resign myself to death, because I am fucked" responses. What a bunch of milksops.

Head down to the basement if you have one. Your apartment building probably has one. Take dried food, water, and blankets.
Plug all your sinks and tubs upstairs and start filling them with water. Does your basement have a sink or a basin of some sort with a working faucet? (Mine has a working bathtub for some reason.) Fill it up with water! Does your basement have a washing machine? Turn the washing machine on so it fills with water (but don't put any clothes in.) Stop the wash before the water drains. You need a reservoir of water. If you have buckets, fill them up!

If your basement has windows, cover them up. The concrete will block out gamma rays, but you still need to do something about the windows.

How thoroughly pessimistic.
A single nuclear exchange, is not the end of the world, far from it. Even a fully-fledged nuclear war between every single country with nuclear capabilities, while undoubtedly horrifyingly destructive, would not be enough to bring about the Nuclear Apocalypse the Cold War has conditioned us to fear. Life will continue somewhere on the globe no matter where the nukes land.
Lay off the Fallouts and the Metro 2033's.

Wonder how they know they have 20 minutes. Missiles take 10, 5 minutes to cross the globe, right; and it'll be a minute or two before the radar confirms it and around a minute more for the notifications to go around.
Seriously, what kinda slow missiles are those?

It's not a documentary; it's just a movie, one of those scary 80s movies to push public opinion against the sword rattling politicians of the time. Fun fact: I think it ends on the year 2000, if I counted it right; making the THING that happened at the end of the movie a bit more hard hitting in a way.

>Live a few miles from a major military base
Fuck.

The "20 minutes" time period was chosen for the sake of the argument, because if it was more realistic and used a 10 minutes time period, then too many people would say something along the lines "that too little time to do anything" (even though it's not true, but whatever).

>Man, just look at all these "resign myself to death, because I am fucked" responses.
Maybe.
I live in an area that would get hit with multiple warheads. I've never planned for surviving a nuclear exchange, because in my situation it isn't survivable (20 min warning, isn't enough to get far enough away). I mean if I did somehow survive the blast, I'd be in the middle of a irradiated wasteland. So I'd rather just get killed in the initial exchange honestly.

He sourced Threads. Threads was pessimistic - though it too had agriculture in the UK, and there was still a government, they just got blasted back to the edwardian era and mostly everyone lives like a peasant.

Still, it's not something to laugh at; most of us here are in the nations that'll be raked over by nukes; their effect WILL hurt the world beyond the nuke zones. Agriculture will be cut by at least a half or so; and the first world still provides a lot of food to the other regions, so they'll dwindle down - it's no fun for anybody.

Leap in my car and drive away from the suburbs at top speed. At the 15 minute mark, I get out, park on the roadside and crawl into a ditch or underneath a car to stay out of LOS, wrapping myself in my aluminized survival blanket to reflect any stray waste heat.

I'll probably survive, but I'll have a car with a survival kit in the trunk. Living post-apoc ain't gonna be easy without potassium iodide.

Indeed. Nuclear winter was deliberate pro-peace propaganda from the cold war scientific community, based on initial values from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings. It presumed firestorms that don't occur in concrete and brick cities.

The duration soot would stay in the atmosphere was also explicitly disproved in the Gulf War oil fires.

A nucelar war would destroy governments an wreck countries, but civilization wouldn't be set back more than 20 years.

What can you do in ten minutes? Twenty minutes?

Ten minutes won't get me out of the city. Twenty minutes won't. An hour won't. In either direction for most of the population, surrounded by cities, airports, infill, bases, harbors, and then another city with the same, the whole area will be raked over.

You can basically scratch off anyone who lives in any major population center as gone unless they're in the real suburbs and away from anything even remotely important, and in the case of a full nuclear exchange anything 'remotely important' could be as little as the town's airstrip that MIGHT be capable of holding a bomber for a second wave, so better nuke it anyway.

>Missiles take 10, 5 minutes to cross the globe

More like 35+ for continent-to-continent; tho suppressed trajectories from off-shore sub launches could be that fast. Detection is instant these days thanks to IR surveillance satellites.

>A nucelar war would destroy governments an wreck countries, but civilization wouldn't be set back more than 20 years.
Can we set it back about 44 years, so we can have a serious manned space program again?

Seriously though, I think you are rather underestimating the effect all the first world nations suddenly collapsing would have on the world, even leaving aside any possible environmental effects. Given how much more interconnected the world was now, than in WW1&2, and the fact that there'd be no power left to help rebuild, it is one of those events that could easily become the new "year zero".

I've only seen numbers in the 10-8 minute range for ICBMs and 5-3 minutes for sub launches.

Time enough to get into my 15th C plate armour.

Not going to help me at all, but at least I can hope the city's levelled for 1000 years. That way, if my remains are found, they're really going to fuck up future archaeologists' textbooks.

An all-out nuclear war wouldn't destroy more than two-thirds of power plants in the US. The grid would be crippled, but we wouldn't be thrust into the stone age - more like the 1980s.

I really enjoy hypotheticals like this. I live in Louisville KY and always wonder if the rest of the world even knows this city exists. Like, would people even bother to drop a bomb on us? I mean, Fort Knox, definitely, but we're far enough away that it shouldn't matter much.

On top of that, I'm near the South south side of the metro area, I can probably drive far enough away from the city center that I'll be okay, even with taking back roads.

Go to /k/, look for a tripfag named OPpenheimer, and get educated.

Eh, Argentina, Chile, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Sweden, Norway, Australia, New Zealand would make it, they're not really aligned with anyone. Ghana, Nigeria, Botswana, Costa Rica as well would be middle-ish powers.

The real problem isn't about rebuilding the world. Most likely the nuked countries would be left to rot. The problem is the capabilities of those who are left and what they can do.

Assuming no nuclear winter, ala 1983 doomsday, then someone else steps up to fill in the plate. Assuming a small setback in temperatures, then maybe humanity is pushed back two generations as stabilization and regrowth tackles the nations left over and the best survive. Either case, someone else rises, just not where the nukes landed.

End game: humanity survives; moves on. Better though if the non aligned nations were more developed, but that tends to make them less non aligned, so they drift into crosshairs - see China, India, Pakistan. Etc, etc.

I actually based a whole alt history on a world where the Japanese military kidnaps the emperor, so the war continues until 1946 with a soviet push into Korea and a siege of Kyushu until the Japanese surrender. End result: the powers are exhausted, decolonization spurs onward, they don't intervene as much. Third world grows; no PRC but Korea and Manchuria are communist hotspots. Space Race, spurred by more missile development, gets serious, but kennedy also manages to join hands with the Soviets until the late 70s were Nixon comes in after LBJ and brings back anti-sovietism in the USA and followed by Reagan which doesn't back down from 'evil empire' stuff, SDI goes ahead, bombs drop under Bush's first year in 1989.

Third world, more developed and connected, is fine; though India (which aligned with the USSR) and the RoC against the Manchurians and Koreans are wiped out. World suffers for the turn of the century but by 2020 goes back to basically normal and whamo, Mars and so on. Lots of dead earth, though.

Well, I live in London.

...so.. yeah. Let's face it, no matter what pretty much all of England is going to get irradiated to fuck if anyone's firing nukes at us. At least I'll die quickly, any modern nuke hitting the capital is going to get me quickly. Though if it doesn't... guess I'll kill myself, because I'd definitely be in the lethal radiation area and that is a horrible way to go.

Finish my beer, bask in Atom's Glow.

>Not wanting Fallout
>Not wanting the even better Metro 2033

As an Emergency Manager, I would:
Lock myself in my house as best as I can with my 72 hour survival kit and stockpiled canned food.
Take out some lightbulbs, remove the bottoms, fill them with crushed glass and ghost pepper extract I have lying around.
Grab my cats, lock them in a single room.
Take my spare gas cans for my lawn tractor, fill up two ancient super soakers I have.
Spray invaders with gas the second they try to confront me, followed by light bulb fuckery, and only actually setting them on fire if they breach my house.
Put all incapacitated people on display to warn off any other invaders.
Assuming I survive until my supplies run out, immediately join the most ruthless gang I can find, install myself as a designated no-nonsense diplomat/problem solver, and make sure there is always someone more expendable/important than I am.

I don't know how long I'd last, but assuming I make it through the first couple days, I'd probably be pretty successful until someone with a vendetta assassinates me for overkilling their friend/child/family member as a necessary display of force.

Each of us shall give birth to a billion stars formed from the mass of our wretched and filthy bodies. Each of us shall be mother and father to a trillion civilizations.

To bad Fallout 3 was subpar, Fallout NV has been played to death, 4 was meh, and betting on whenever 5 comes seems to be a good waste of cash....

>The grid would be crippled, but we wouldn't be thrust into the stone age - more like the 1980s.
You pretty clearly have no idea what you are talking about. Loosing 60%+ of the power generating capacity of the US would be a lot bigger set back than just the 80s (which I assume you picked because it seems like a long time ago to you). Modern life and society is wholly dependent on a functioning power grid.

>Live right between two maximum priority targets in Everette, Washington.

They won't even start the sirens. There's nothing anyone could do to survive.

I'm still waiting for Fallout 4 to come out with the Game of the Year edition and make it super cheap before playing it. Everything about it says "Skip me" but I figure I'll get some entertainment out of it for $10 or so.

There are a small amount of nuclear weapons, compared to conventional ones, and only a minority of those are strategic weapons. Current estimates of Russian Strategic Rocket Forces strength is 525 launchers and 1800 nuclear weapons of which 299 and 902 are currently operational, respectively.

Nuclear weapons usage is divided into counterforce and countervalue. Countervalue is attacking non-directly military targets. Countervalue has limited benefit outside of specific scenarios and as such is relegated to second-strike capacity. To put it into perspective, Russia using four nuclear bombs on countervalue targets per state would eat up 11% of it's total strategic arsenal.

>Live at a University, no car
Get anally fucked by missiles or find the deepest basement I can hide in, I guess. My chosen profession doesn't do me a lot of help, so I guess I either become one of the only tech savants in the hell future, get killed in a fight, or get too sick to live through radiation.

The houses in my neighbourhood do not have basements.
I am fucked.

I live in a 3km from an european capital center. I'm doomed.

Is twenty minutes even enough to time to escape the fallout? Even if you already had the perfect survival kit prepped and got a solid 18-20 min of driving at max speed down a highway I'd think you'd still experience some serious radiation health risks assuming you escaped the blast zone.

It wouldn't be physically possible to have enough non-irradiated food ready in twenty minutes seriously consider survival unless you already had a shelter set up.

Oh, nevermind, I checked and the closest bombing target would be Houston. Feel bad for my parents, though, who probably wouldn't be able to break the imp[act zone in time.

The danger of fallout is overstated. The radiation from fallout decreases by a factor of 10 per every factor of seven increase in the time period.

I'll give you the african and south american nations you listed, but Norway is a member of NATO, Sweden is simply in the way (why list sweden and not their fellow netural neighbour finland too?) and if I were on team evil freedom hating commies I'd destroy Australia for being too close to America, maybe the kiwis too just to be sure.

Huh. I checked again, and they might be able to get out of the main blast zone if Dad put the pedal to the metal.

Assuming your house survives the blast, you can avoid most of the fallout by staying indoors for a week.

>unless you somehow manage to find an area which will be minimally affected
Everything that isn't a super major city or a military super bunker is going to be safe. Thats the irony of nuclear war.
And even something like Tsar Bomba only has a 8km fireball, and said bomb is too heavy for intercontinental missile. Tsar only destroys civilizations for a radius of about 40km, where underground bunkers further than 20km away from the blast point will survive fine.
Remember: Tsar Bomba is the strongest nuke that is tested, and its too large for missile. Meaning you are only looking at a destruction zone of 10-15km of city/base glassing per intercontinental missile.

Heck, the major cities might not even be nuked, because they will assume the military bases will be close enough to infastructure to cripple the lifeline of the city.

The worst part about Nuclear Warfare isn't going to be nukes, but the successor military campaign, because chain of command isn't going to collapse.
They literally prepared since the 50s to actually go trough a Nuclear war, even with the theoretical fears of nuclear fallout, accidentally engulfing forests, and worse.

briefly wonder where the where the sirens are coming from then turn on the tv to enjoy a healthy dose schadenfreude as I watch the list of cities that were glassed.

>traditional games

What else will people play once the power grid goes down?

War is the most traditional game.
Except maybe sex.

Norway has the problem where if you where to nuke it, the only thing of value is going to be some isolated military based in the middle, or the capital.
Most of its army is setup so that the idea is that Finmark to down to Tronderlag is expandable in terms of a Soviet invasion.

Second problem: Norway is bigger than Japan. A missle isn't really going to do anything but hit where it hits. The rest is just space, where everything is fine.
Sweden and Finland have the same issue.

Tsar Bomba, if dropped in a flat area, would have far larger effects than dropping it in a city. Not that it matters, several smaller bombs is always better than one large one.

What does that mean for a non mathfag like me? Like, after seven seconds it's 10 times less bad as second 1, then after 49 seconds it's 10 times less bad as second 7, etc?

I live between a set of 4 nuclear targets.

North, 1 hours drive.
South 45 min
East / North East 45 min
West/South West 45 min

Average wind currents ensure I'll get fallout from one to the South West.

>What is your plan of action, to survive both short- and long-term?
I spent years on /k/ so I have a fully written out guide on what actions to take first based on time of day, weather conditions and warning time.

Its probably out of date since I wrote it a decade ago and I've forgotten most of the minor steps.

This

Embrace the glow.

Probably make some popcorn, I am no place near a first strike target (in the US).

Shouldn't have issues with fallout either, though I'll take some basic precautions just the same.

The real challenge comes over the following period of time as society shakes itself out and apart.

After seven hours the dose rate of radiation from fallout is reduced to 1/10th, after 49 hours it's reduced to 1/100th, after two weeks it's reduced to 1/1000th.

Take up stereotypical fantasy nerd appearance, construct a bunker in your backyard under the auspices of building yourself a hobbit-hole.

I'm probably not going to live. Assuming a modern Russian missile hits the nearest military target, then there's nowhere I can get to in 20 minutes that would be outside of the blast radius.

What targets? What state?

7 hours: 1/10 radiation
49 hours: 1/100 radiation
343 hours: 1/1000 radiation

This is why you hear people talk about 2 days and two weeks after a strike as far as 'safe' for limited fallout exposure - depending on where you are of course. In some spots the two week mark won't even be close, in most no time at all will be needed.

>Missiles take 10, 5 minutes to cross the globe, right; and it'll be a minute or two before the radar confirms it and around a minute more for the notifications to go around.

Depends on the 'military target'. For the most part, people vastly over estimate what would be a first strike target.

What is the target you are concerned about? What state?

Most people will be fine if they simply stay inside their house. Tape/plastic cover the doors and windows. Stay in the middle of the house.

Depending on where you are, that should cover it. If you are in a heavy dose area (say Seattle), you will fry. But in most areas that should be plenty.

Houston would not be a target. The only likely target in a First Strike in Texas is:

REGION VI - AR, LA, NM, OK, TX
Federal Regional Center
800 North Loop 288
Denton, TX 76201-3698

...

Not a good map. It makes a number of horrible false assumptions. For one, it does not recognize that there are only about 1600 deliverable warheads in the Russian (slightly more in the US) arsenal right now. Heck, 200 of those are on bombers that would never make it to the US and nobody is going to use all of their warheads - you always retain a number.

The basic strategy is to eliminate your opponents capability. If you can eliminate enough of that capability such that they cannot retaliate - then you can force surrender on your terms.

This is true even IF you do not destroy ALL of his capability. Because if you draw it down low enough you can basically 'yeah, if you hit me with what little you have I will destroy you with the much larger force I retain'. This however becomes a false threat IF the person you are attacking already believes that you are targeting his cities. At that point, there is nothing to lose.

Take ten minutes and watch: youtube.com/watch?v=jlPEBROvR9w

Dated, and many of the specific points no longer apply at this time. But the basic idea is a good explanation as to how a First Strike would work.

Attached is a map that OP put together. It is missing a few things because he did it off his head and has a few things targeted that are actually no longer targets. But it should get most people closer to an actual possible scenario. I can answer specifics on most of the points of the map.

Thanks my dudes

Just lie down on the floor and wait, who cares, man.

Unless you live on top of something that launches a nuclear weapon or tells a nuclear weapon to launch you will likely be laying there for a very long time. Likely until you die of dehydration because you wouldn't get up and get a drink.

Pretty sad.

Laugh because as everyone with nukes forgot where my country is and nukes guatemala.

I tell my girlfriend I love her.

suicide at the earliest opprotunity

...Why #2?

find some way to get high and then sit and wait for it. because i'd probably die immediately. maybe go grab some food.
if i was gonna survive then i'd wing it, honestly.

>Current location
Short term: I fap harder
Long term: I edge for months and survive on little Debbies, taking out my sexual frustration on looters with my halberd.

I'm in Canada, the target was CFB Esquimalt. Home of the Canadian pacific fleet. Probably low priority, but it's also specialized in ASW, which might make it more attractive, and it's on the Juan De Fuca straight, regularly hosts American ships. Probably wouldn't but maybe.

>2000 warhead scenario
>When Soviet would still have to spend 1/3 just to attempt to also disable US satellite states Nuclear strike potential

Not a target. Even if we went from 'probable' to 'possible' it would not be a target.

The basic rule is 'if it does not launch a nuke or tell a nuke to launch it is not a target'. In a nuclear war nothing that is a conventional weapon system is likely to be a target. There just are not enough warheads to go around.

Keep in mind that nearly any target that is attacked is likely to get at a minimum two warheads targeting it and almost certainly at least three. That eats up your nuke rations pretty fast.

Canada has some possible fallout issues from some of the US nuke fields, but that is about it and even then it isn't a certain threat - certainly not for all of Canada.

>In a dorm in Northern Colorado

Yeah, I think I am maximally fucked, unless my Campus has a giant nuclear bunker they aren't telling anybody about.

It's entirely possible they'd see limited command-and-control strikes.

Interesting. Would the NWS be a target? It'd be kind of black humor if the only people who were targeted were the ones on the ass end of nowhere.

Considering state.gov/t/avc/rls/240062.htm it really isn't very likely at all.

Nations besides the US would get bomber love from Russia (if anything at all). Figure they could possibly have a budget of maybe 150 warheads.

Maybe, just maybe, the total budget for a strike on the US that retained enough force to deter retaliation (assuming the First Strike was successful for the most part - huge 'if' there) is around 1000 warheads. Maybe stretch it to 1200.

drive into the wetlands, if I can get out there in time.

But I do live immediately next to a USAF "totally not a spot where we hide bombers", so I'm likely fucked either way.

No, not really. Unless Canada has a nuclear arsenal they can command to launch.

Such a war is going to likely be over in a few hours.

>Such a war is going to likely be over in a few hours.
Ignorance.
The initial phase of war is nukes.
Then deployment for the actual war.
Then renukes.
Possibly even more phases if the war is long.

The 'long war' is a possibility. But really is beyond that of a First Strike scenario - since the entire point is to avoid that.

However, even given that, striking a Canadian base is just not something that is going to happen.

Beyond that, you got the likely sequence wrong. It would most likely be
'deploy for conventional war'
'execute conventional war'
'go beyond what X country is willing to accept'
'ignore warning signals'

Then tit for tat nuke strikes begin. Where each side is trying to bring the situation back under control, while fearing it is about to get completely out of hand and fall in to a 'use it or lose it' situation.

Regardless, deployment of conventional forces after nukes strike is probably not going to happen outside of a discussion where one nations strategic forces haven't been neutralized or were never fully a threat to CONUS.

If you want to look at some playout of a limited nuclear strike option and how that might work with conventional forces there are some war college papers floating around that talked about wargames that were conducted where that was played out.

But, regardless, in a First Strike scenario the war is almost certainly going to be over in a few hours tops. Conventional forces will play no part.

Because fuck my housemates.
I can't even rely on those guys to take out their McDonald's garbage, and I will not share my food with them!

Figure one surface burst (possibly 2) and one airburst for each target. Likely in the 250kt range.

Might be more in Alaska, it isn't a location I cared that much about researching.

Well I'm on a highway in an armored van right now, I suppose the group I'm with would go in whatever direction the nukes aren't and hope our guns and food don't get destroyed/looted by the time it's safe to come home.

>lol quietly to myself because I live in NZ

>if any nukes are aimed at NZ, the whole country will probably simply disappear

>nothing to do, nothing to worry about

Only like, thirty feet underground.

Honestly, I'd probably jerk it one last time and then get cozy for inevitable incineration. Yay, major metropolitan areas.