Nuclear attack? Stay put
There’s a sense of deja vu for us boomers in reports such as this one that reflect a renewed government interest in telling people what to do in the case of a nuclear blast. Those of us who go back a ways remember a youth punctuated by warnings and drills that fired the imagination and were the stuff of nightmares.
In fourth or fifth grade I made a project for the science fair that involved getting information on how to build a fallout shelter, and constructing a little model. It seemed both futile and strange even then, and I knew no family planning to actually build one. We figured that, living in New York, we’d be goners anyway as a result of the blast, and many of us fully expected that the event would happen before we reached adulthood.
Well, it can be argued that many of us never did reach adulthood. But now that we’re not just middle-aged, but bordering on old, it must be admitted that the expected attack has never—very fortunately—occurred. And now, with the Cold War over, it is unlikely to come at the hands of Russia, the old enemy of our childhood nightmares.
But terrorists exist, as do rogue countries going nuclear that might someday supply them, and the Obama administration has decided to revisit the question of how a person might best survive the fallout if he/she is fortunate enough to survive the blast. And, just as in the 50s, the answer is to take shelter, although specialized buildings with ultra-thick walls need not be built:
The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.
And we’re not talking the many weeks that were suggested for fallout shelters of the past. Even a few hours of shelter afterward confers benefit—at least, according to computer simulations, on which the entire set of recommendations is based.
At any rate, what’s the alternative? I suppose that some people will be unable to resist the urge to go out rubbernecking and viewing the damage. But I’ve always felt that those evacuation plans, whereby it seems inevitable that cars would jam the streets and highways in a massive and unprecedented traffic jam, would be worse than useless.
Here is (pardon the pun) a blast from the past:
With Obama driving headlong towards unilateral nuclear disarmement, and both Russia (I still call it the USSR for all the obvious reasons) and China rapidly increasing and modernising their arsenals, the point will soon be reached where one or the other may well think it a good idea to try that first strike to remove what few US nuclear weapons remain and use the rest as a shield under which to start a large scale war of agression with impunity.
Though I don’t see either mounting an armed invasion of the USA (yet?), they lack the transportation to land enough troops in the initial assault to be successful over the distances involved, both have interest in countries the US likes to call its allies closer to home.
Western Europe, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. all more or less depend on the US nuclear deterrent capability to prevent a Chinese or Soviet invasion and have for the last 60 or so years.
And all those are major trading partners to the US…
The best bunker against a nuclear attack: a missile defense system. The START treaty will reverse our star wars advantage and re-instate the mutually assured destruction strategy as well as make us more vulnerable to the rouge nations of Iran, Syria and North Korea.
Contact your senators and tell them the Senate should be given the records of the treaty negotiations for START. The Obama administration, through Hillary, refuses to release the records. Previous records were released to the Senate for the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with the Soviet Union.
Rod Serlings “The shelter”…
http://www.cbs.com/classics/the_twilight_zone/video/?pid=TNoLJX6Td_02JaG54UUZ2q_u9sED7D18&vs=Default&play=true
Guess we know how Barry thinks his Iranian policy is going to work out.
Over the decades at the Capitol Hill think tank I worked at I spent a hell of a lot of time researching civil defense/NBC war survival issues, and this new “narrative” about how much more survivable a nuclear attack would be than we thought it would be in the past, with its crack-brained (perhaps in both senses) advice about how taking shelter in a car would be a great way to substantially reduce radiation exposure, sounds like a crock to me.
It also sounds to me like Obama & Co. are indulging in a little CYA, just in case our Muslim brothers manage to smuggle in an old rehabbed Russian “suitcase nuke” *, or to sail a ship with, say, a well shielded nuclear warhead “salvaged” from an ICBM in its cargo hold into one of our harbors, and succeed in killing, maiming, contaminating and sickening tens of thousands of us, and perhaps destroying/contaminating part or all of one of our cities.
Rather than offering beforehand advice to possible survivors and refugees and cleaning up afterward, I prefer that we take every possible step to make as sure as we possibly can that such an attack cannot take place.
I would much prefer that we first clearly and loudly identify who our enemies are, as they themselves do, as Muslims, and that we–also as they do–identify and name the ideology that they are fighting for as Islam–not “fundamentalist Islam,” nor “Islamism,” nor “extremist Islam,” but just plain old Islam, of which there is only one.**
Then, I would prefer that we fight and destroy our enemies on every battlefield we can and however long it takes, so that they will not have anywhere near the capability or opportunity to be able to destroy one of our cites or kill anymore of us “unbelievers.”
– Yes, I happen to believe that it is possible that the Russians (who a Russian General testified to Congress had several hundred such “suitcase nukes” in their inventory, and that some went missing during the turmoil of the fall of Communism (see http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/News/Lebedbomb.html ) were able to miniaturize small gun-type nuclear weapons into heavy suitcase size, because, after all, we ourselves had somewhat bigger, heavier “atomic demolition munitions” –named MADM (400 pounds) and SADM (163 pounds)–in our nuclear inventory which have since been withdrawn, see http://www.brookings.edu/projects/archive/nucweapons/madm.aspx )
** A quote from the Ayatollah Khomeini:
“Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled or incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of [other] countries so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. . . . But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. . . . Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all! Does this mean that Muslims should sit back until they are devoured by [the unbelievers]? Islam says: Kill them [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter [their armies]. Does this mean sitting back until [non-Muslims] overcome us? Islam says: Kill in the service of Allah those who may want to kill you! Does this mean that we should surrender [to the enemy]? Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to Paradise, which can be opened only for the Holy Warriors! There are hundreds of other [Qur’anic] psalms and Hadiths [sayings of the Prophet] urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all this mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim.”
An instant change of the kind of state we have…
I recall around 1961 my wife and I traveled to Dallas to meet some dear Navy friends and visit the Texas state fair. One of the more popular and bizarre exhibits was the backyard bomb shelters, with a wealth of information on surviving a nuclear attack.
The irony was that my buddy and I had just finished a tour in a carrier based “nuclear delivery” squadron.
While deployed, we did not talk much about the nature of our mission. I remember one short conversation on the subject of “would you really go?”. The consensus was that we wouldn’t be launched unless the homeland had been attacked; so there was really no question. It was also a given, considering what we were flying, where we were headed, and what we were carrying, that it would be a one-way trip. But, no one thought that really mattered, as we didn’t expect there would be anything to come back to anyway.
Sometimes when I hear/read about how stressful life is in the 21st century, I just smile.
Well, I’ll take this opportunity to link Donald Fagen’s song and video “New Frontier”. It’s one of my all-time favorite music videos. It mostly takes place in a fallout shelter. The song is pretty damn catchy too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVy0ZVQcl7E
Wolla Dalbo Says:
December 16th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
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Well stated, but we lack one ingredient for this scenario to ripen and that being leadership. Shrub Jr. showed flashes of leadership, similar to a flatulent elephant – and the world responded in kind. True leadership, a rare commodity
” its crack-brained (perhaps in both senses) advice about how taking shelter in a car would be a great way to substantially reduce radiation exposure, sounds like a crock to me.”
It is. It will stop alpha and a good part of beta particles, but as a reward you get the gamma rays unimpeded and a good dose of backscatter and excited high energy particles released from the car material into its interior by the radiation bombardment.
And after that, if you’re still alive and not suffering from severe radiation poisoning, you’re in for the heatshock, which will turn that car into a nice little oven, followed by the blastwave that will blow it around like a cat. 5 hurricane, followed by being burried in the rubble of buildings collapsing all around it.
Yah, very good advice to get into your car. Great way to ensure the maximum death toll among the US population when the big one gets dropped.
“Yah, very good advice to get into your car. Great way to ensure the maximum death toll among the US population when the big one gets dropped.”
Yes, indeed it is. Recently, Evacuation Route signs began popping up in my area, pointing the way to safety in case of evacuation. Somewhere around 200,000 people are to hop in their cars, drive along a two lane highway, then a one lane ramp, then a one lane road to some amorphous land of deliverance.
Not gonna happen.
I think I will take the advice of the cynics of that bygone cold war age – put your head between your legs and kiss your arse goodbye.
If for some reason our gifted leadership are unable to stop or block a nuclear attack in the United States, why should we heed their advice after the fact?
These fools won’t even recognize the enemies we have.
How to assure a good chance of survival for the bulk of the population in a nuclear attack has always been an almost insoluble problem.
In the WWII era and for a few decades after–what we might call the “duck and cover” era–the idea was to take shelter in somewhat reinforced areas where we worked and went to school and to build actual shelters. I well remember the duck and cover drills and huddling with my classmates in a strongly built brick stairwell of my elementary school when I was a child.
But, from what I gathered there were never enough shelters, and they were not sufficiently deep or strong enough to withstand the kind of huge “city buster” warheads that the Soviets had developed (today there is still even a shelter sign pointing down a few steps to a shelter in one of the corridors under the Capitol Hill complex, but if you take refuge in this close to the surface “shelter” in a real nuclear attack it may only insure that instead of “extra crispy” you are just “crispy”). Moreover, stocking such shelters as were built and keeping them in good repair and stocked, the perishable items in them periodically replaced, the narcotics in their medical kits in date and safe from theft, and their dosimeters periodically recalibrated and certified was a daunting, time consuming, and expensive task and the whole approach just petered out, in large part for lack of funds and also, I suspect, from lack of enthusiasm. I believe we were just not up to facing the possibility of a nuclear war, and these shelters were a constant reminder of that possibility, so I guess for some people it was, no more shelters, no possibility of a nuclear war.
Meanwhile, the Russians were building massive underground shelters in Moscow and many other locations for their leadership and large shelters for the general population too. I suspect that their hard won experience in surviving WWII and the horrendous number of casualties they suffered had given them a rather different view of the necessity for building and maintaining shelters and facing up to the possibility of a nuclear war, and thereafter, year after year, decade after decade–no matter what earthshaking events were happening in the Soviet Union or, later, Russia–I would periodically come across an article or report saying that they were still excavating and building shelters. They probably still are.
As for the evacuation scenario, I cannot imagine one that would not become utter chaos and gridlock.
So, for my money–and as a citizen it is–a very proactive, robust and ruthless program of both defense and prevention would be my preference–i.e. ABM defenses as effective, robust and extensive as we can manage–and the hell with treaty considerations or hurt feelings at the UN or in Russia, China, North Korea or Iran, a huge deterrent arsenal of nuclear weapons, and a declarative policy that if we are attacked we will immediately find and obliterate the attackers and any who aided them, down to the last nation, organization, and man (I note here that Obama has recently announced that in his Presidency our policy on retaliation if we are attacked by WMDs is now a much more forbearing and “nuanced” one (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/06/world/06arms.html?_r=1 ), plus strong and effective intelligence capabilities, backed up by special forces to eliminate threats anywhere in the world they might occur.
Obviously above it should have been “attacked using WMDs,” not “attacked by WMDs.”
I would periodically come across an article or report saying that they were still excavating and building shelters. They probably still are.
see Yamentau Mountain