If you need your family to drive far away quickly, letting everyone else know they should be doing the same thing is a bad idea. You want your family ahead of the inevitable wave of knowledge.

Even if they’re at home and you have a bunker, you don’t want the neighbors inviting themselves over. You want them locked safely inside before anyone else knows.

I think that's a pretty terrible stance to take, for a short term event like this there is no disadvantage to sharing the structural security of the bunker with others. The only time locking yourself in is really important is if it's a long term disaster, either something nuclear (where this is most valid) or a natural disaster, like a hurricane (where your bunker is essentially just a really secure fridge/food storage device and the structural soundness of the bunker is _less_ relevant (but not irrelevant))

> I think that's a pretty terrible stance to take, for a short term event like this...

> The only time locking yourself in is really important is if it's a long term disaster, either something nuclear (where this is most valid)...

A nuclear ICBM striking DC is the scenario. Even though the strike is short term, that's a long term event with a lot of unknown variables.

In any case, I suspect it's a probable stance people will take regardless of the merits.

I think the ethical damage an act like that would cause psychologically makes even that semi-rational action a bad one to take. Thinking it in the abstract is different from having to spend weeks locked away in isolation underground pondering the neighbors or just human lives that your actions ended - even accepting the fact that you didn't initiate the ICBM and that if you didn't live where you did there'd be no bunker to possibly save people... I'm pretty sure everyone would be coming out of the bunker severely damaged with survivor's guilt and constantly second guess if maybe it would've been okay to let one or two in...

Basically, in the abstract, and in pop culture according to video games and movies... your approach is the way to "win", but the human psyche is a fragile thing.

(I'd clarify, this isn't meant as any sort of criticism, I just think that considering these sorts of scenarios in a abstract sterile setting is very different from how you'd experience them as they happened - and that's interesting to me.)