To start with, roughly one-fifth of the US population would be killed instantly in that war, with another 30% receiving serious enough doses of radiation and heat as to make their survival questionable.
Surviving the aftermath starting tips windows#
There would be windows broken and other minor damage, but buildings would survive, along with their occupants.īut just what sort of world would those who survived be living in? Much of the rest of the city would remain intact. Basically, any city hit by nuclear warheads would have the downtown area destroyed, along with any military installations around the city. In reality, it would take quite a few nuclear bombs to destroy even one city. We all tend to look at nuclear bombs as almost magical devices that can wipe entire cities off the map. You might find it a bit surprising, if you take the time to look at the damage a nuclear warhead would do to your city. Most of the targets are military bases, government installations, and major cities, giving us a pretty good idea if we live in the “instant vaporization” zone from a nuclear explosion. All we’ve got to work with is conjecture.Įven so, there are a number of different “target maps” available online, showing the most likely targets, as well as some very interesting apps that can give us a good idea of the destructive radius of different-sized nuclear weapons. Nor does the DOD post our own nuclear war plans on theirs. Even if our government does know anything about Russian nuclear strategy, the CIA doesn’t post that information on its website. We don’t actually know Russia’s nuclear war strategy, other than that their nuclear doctrine allows for the use of tactical nukes on the battlefield, something that our own strategy doesn’t include for humanitarian reasons.
There are three separate but interlocking, parts of surviving any nuclear war: While I don’t actually think that Putin’s threats and posturing are about doing that, but rather about using some tactical nukes within Europe, we can’t dismiss the possibility. Those would be aimed at the most important targets.īut there’s no way that the US is going to launch a preemptive attack on Russia, so that scenario is basically out, leaving us with the 2,000-warhead preemptive strike from Russia. The theory is that if we, the United States, launched the first attack, Russia would only be able to retaliate with about 500 warheads. There are two basic scenarios that are talked about in nuclear war strategy: a 500-warhead attack and a 2,000-warhead attack. What if there weren’t any fuses like that, or what if those fuses didn’t work right? We’d be looking at a conventional nuclear war without the EMP taking out the grid. Granted, if Russia let loose a full-blown nuclear attack against the United States, there would probably be at least a few missiles fused for a high-altitude burst, generating an EMP.
Our “friend” (cough, cough) Vladimir Putin has reminded us that such a possibility is quite real. But somewhere along the way, we’ve managed to lose track of the fact that conventional nuclear war is still a very real possibility. Here in the prepping community, we’re accustomed to talking about EMP as a TEOTWAWKI event, perhaps even our “favorite” such event, at least from the viewpoint of planning for it.
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