If you are worried, maybe you should move. Closer to a primary target. You don't want to be alive for the aftermath.

And yes, it's been on all of our minds and we all worry to some extent. But this is the one thing that none of us can preempt with the means of our small lives. There's nowhere to hide from it.

Watch a nice movie and let others worry about it. Oh and welcome to the 80s.

My wife and I have talked about this before. How would we feel and what would we do if we knew nukes were incoming to our urban area dotted with military and government targets. We tentatively agreed we'd be in our backyard eating crepes and reading psalms, rather than hiding in the basement with respirators. But maybe that's just big talk. Reality might not be so clear cut.

> No one seems to recognize what a massive shift this is.

It is recognized loud and clear all over Europe.

I think the reality is that where exactly you were when the nukes started flying wouldn't matter - you'd be very likely to die of starvation or other causes in the days and weeks afterwords unless you were already prepared with a clean source of water and stockpiled food in a remote location.

That said, I think it's extremely unlikely this will escalate to a nuclear exchange. Nobody wants that, and I think it's likelier that Putin is deposed before he (successfully) orders a nuclear launch. The rumor is that Putin has given the order to take Kyiv by the end of Monday, and that's going to involve use of artillery and rockets indiscriminately against an urban environment, resulting in tons of civilian deaths. The nuclear readiness alert is to signal to the west not to interfere even amidst the carnage.

Nuclear war is surprisingly survivable if you aren't unlucky and know what you're doing. See Nuclear War Survival Skills, a free PDF put out by Oak Ridge National Laboratory:

http://oism.org/nwss/nwss.pdf

Basically - you're only toast if you're within the fireball, radiation, and moderate blast damage radius. If you're inside the thermal radiation or light blast damage radius, you should immediately take shelter away from windows and face away from the flash, much as you would in an earthquake. Hiroshima is filled with anecdotes of people being vaporized and casting shadows on the wall behind them, while people in the next room over survived with only minor cuts and burns. You have about 5-20 seconds between seeing the flash and the blast wave getting to you; the thermal pulse itself can last for up to 40 seconds, so the less time you spend in it the less badly you'll be burned.

You can view the blast radius for common warheads on NukeMap:

https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Topol ICBMs are 800kt and Bulava SLBMs are 100-150kt; you can expect Russia to use SLBMs on strategic military targets and ICBMs on cities. A hypothetical attack on the Bay Area that targets SFO, OAK, Moffett, Alameda NAS, and the Port of Oakland with Bulavas and downtown San Francisco and San Jose with Topols would leave basically all of the East Bay intact, along with the Sunset/Richmond, San Jose south of 280, and the Peninsula from Mountain View to Hillsborough. It's survivable at the Googleplex, despite being basically in sight of Moffett, as long as you're not near an east-facing window when the blast hits.

In NYC, assuming a Topol on Manhattan and Bulavas on JFK/LGA/EWR, it'd take out most of lower Manhattan but large portions of Queens and virtually all of the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Staten Island would survive.

You do need to prep for an interruption of utilities, but you should do that anyway for hurricane/earthquake/etc preparedness. If you've got ~3 days of water and ~2 weeks of food and are outside a blast radius, there's a good chance of you being fine. Given the large amounts of suburbia that are not in the blast radius of a likely target, food supply chains likely wouldn't be more damaged than they were in the pandemic, and you could go to a local Walmart for food. Depending on how centralized your local water supply is and whether they have backup generators (the electrical grid is a likely casualty), you may keep municipal water as well.

>You do need to prep for an interruption of utilities, but you should do that anyway for hurricane/earthquake/etc preparedness. If you've got ~3 days of water and ~2 weeks of food and are outside a blast radius, there's a good chance of you being fine. Given the large amounts of suburbia that are not in the blast radius of a likely target, food supply chains likely wouldn't be more damaged than they were in the pandemic, and you could go to a local Walmart for food. Depending on how centralized your local water supply is and whether they have backup generators (the electrical grid is a likely casualty), you may keep municipal water as well.

I think you're incredibly optimistic about the robustness of logistic networks in the aftermath of the complete destruction of all of the major cities in the United States. You think people are going to bother coming into work to stock food on shelves, deliver it, etc in the immediate aftermath of a large-scale nuclear exchange? This isn't even getting into the immediate effects of say, all of the forests in the western US turning into firestorms.

Again, this is dramatically overestimating the initial effects of a nuclear blasts. There will be no major wildfires from nuclear war, for the simple reasons that a.) you don't aim a nuke at the wilderness and b.) the blast wave of a nuclear explosion tends to put out the fires that the thermal pulse ignites. Nukes have specific strategic purposes: the vast majority of them will be aimed at U.S. missile silos, airports or airbases with long runways, ports, refineries, and military shipyards. Those left over will likely be aimed at areas of high population density, specifically the downtown cores of cities.

It's not 1945 anymore, when there was a sharp divide between urban areas and rural areas. The majority of the U.S. population lives in suburbs, and many only go into cities for cultural events. The suburbs are already wired into the U.S. logistic network - that's where are Walmarts and Amazon warehouses are - and are decentralized enough that they're not likely to get taken out by an initial strike.

Coronavirus (particularly Omicron) was much more devastating to our logistic network than nuclear war would be, because it affected essentially all truckers and port workers at once.

I'd encourage you to read the pamphlet; it's put out by scientists whose full-time job was to plan for the continuation American society in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

There is a terribly scary drama called Threads depicting the outcome of a nuclear attack on the UK. I did not stand to see the full length of it. I don't think it is worthwhile to speculate about the survivability of the blast, there is no future to look forward to in case it happens.

I watched it; there was a time in high school where I wanted to write a novel about the aftermath of nuclear war, and did a bunch of research on the topic.

It's terribly scientifically inaccurate, though. Airburst nukes (the type that would generally be used on cities) do not generally spread large amounts of fallout into the atmosphere; they do not generally spread large amounts of fallout at all, because the fireball doesn't reach the ground. We'd likely get the sort of massive urban blast damage from the first half of the movie, but wouldn't get the nuclear winter, collapse of crop harvests, and widespread starvation from the second half of the movie. And we should expect to see local government spring up in areas undamaged by the blast - if the national government falls, state/provincial or local government will step into that void, because power abhors a vacuum.

Humans have survived on Earth without infrastructure or farming for most of our existence, so even if the worst happens I can see some people surviving if there are enough natural resources left. It would of course depend on hunter / gatherer skills, which most people do not have, but are totally learnable.

In the book Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari - he even suggested that hunter gatherers had a far better quality of life compared to someone living in a farming society. Obviously what we have now is far better than either.

Russia could nuke some deserted island to show business without triggering a nuclear war.

I don't think they are desperate enought yet though? Supposedly they argue they are winning.

That would accomplish nothing other than making Russia even more of an international pariah than it already is. They don't need to demonstrate that they can use nuclear weapons if they want to - the world already knows that.

The launch would almost certainly trigger a nuclear war.

The most likely use that wouldn't is to employ tactical nukes in Ukraine itself. On the other hand what would that achieve? There's no logistic hub or massed armour formation.

Nuke Kiev and Lviv for unconditional surrender. Worked in WW2 for the US. Personally not sure if it would work this time.

> That said, I think it's extremely unlikely this will escalate to a nuclear exchange.

Tail risk is real. No one thought Trump would be president. No one saw the pandemic changing the world. No one thought there’d be conventional land war in Europe again. I hope nothing happens but I’ll withhold assigning likelihood for now.

> No one thought Trump would be president.

Anyone who thought through the whole thing saw it as obvious he was. Republicans were thinking Democrats were going to show up in droves. Democrats thought no one would vote for Trump, so why vote?

s/No one/most people/

I'm relying on the fact that even though Putin seems to be completely unhinged and detached from reality, the people responsible for keeping Russian nukes working and managing their launch aren't.

That depends on how the system is organized. If there is a briefcase with a large red button, and the people in the silos don't know whether the launch is real or training, Putin's decision is literally the only factor.

Well basically it just means Germany is meeting its obligations under NATO to spend 2% on military - which they haven’t done for a very long time.

Yes, so that they now choose to follow that guideline still constitutes a considerable shift.

You really think that he would launch a nuclear strike? Have you not heard of Mutually Assured Destruction? Sure, the consequences for the rest of us would be terrible but the moment he launches a strike then he's going to be on the receiving end of one too, and that would be disastrous for his country. The chance of this actually turning nuclear is infinitesimally small.

If he cares only about himself, and knows that he hasn't got that much time left on this earth, then he won't care about a possible atomic war.

He's already said that he's trying to build a legacy; it won't be much of a legacy if Russia is a nuclear wasteland. He's clearly living in an alternate reality to the rest of us, but I very much doubt that's how he wants to be remembered.

In my opinion "infinitesimal" is too small. I think at this point a nuke strike is a bigger risk than covid, for most.

As long as nuclear weapons exist then there's always going to be an infinitesimally small chance that they will be used, so you must live your life in perpetual fear.

> or maybe even the US or Canada for 6 months and work from there.

As an American in the EU, my entire family has been calling me for days to move back. Personally, I think its unlikely that Russia would nuke anyone in the EU. If anything, they would nuke the US. Plus, it's much more likely to die from some random shooting in the US than by a nuke any day of the week.

They have enough nukes to nuke every city in NATO. Under no situation would they just nuke the US.

Russian first strike capability with land + sea based missiles is at most 1000 warheads. Clearly not enough.

And that is assuming they work, which estimates are very much varied about. Obviously Russia isn't going to help with verification here.

> I personally expect a smaller nuclear warning shot over the ocean from Putin next week.

That would be an escalation so phenomenal it would completely overshadow everything that has happened in the past week. By a huge margin.

The amount of nonsense in these comments is genuinely astounding. The change in nuclear readiness from Putin is posturing; it's light years away from him actually pulling the trigger on MAD.

Not if it's framed as a training excercise.

It would put Putin squarely in Kim Jong-Un territory, which seems like an odd choice on his part. Nobody doubts that he has functional nukes.

> So Putin is so angry and feels threatend that he wants to overthrough Ukraine, and the answer is to make them a member of the EU? This screams like more aggressives answers from Putin. I personally expect a smaller nuclear warning shot over the ocean from Putin next week.

There is an option: attack first. If Russian nuclear C&C is taken down, I doubt any of officers in the bunker would dare to launch. Even if they will, these would be uncoordinated launches, and nowhere near the size of a coordinated attack.

Pretty sure the Perimeter is still alive & well, quietly waiting for this exact situation. Don’t think it’s a bluff.

> Something you would just do if immediate and long-term danger is next door.

Yep, it's called Russia, at least as long as Putin rules it.