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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   2940 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 6, 2022

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Is there something like Nukemap that tells you if your home is at risk of destruction or irradiation in the event of a nuclear war? I read something a while ago that said that, realistically, most nukes won't be Tsar Bomba-levels of powerful and not all places are at risk of getting hit with overpressure (e.g. cities won't be hit in the exact center), assuming the enemy isn't going for sheer casualty numbers.

Nukes would not be evenly spread; the majority would be targeted at the enemy's strike and counter-strike capabilities. So that means missile silos, airbases, naval yards, bomber-capable airstrips, etc. get first, second, and third priority. After that you start hitting other strategic sites: military bases, marshalling yards, road junctions, communication hubs, oil fields. Now because you're shooting 500kt+ nuclear warheads at these targets this ends up killing lots of civilians anyways. But ostensibly only then you go to "counter-value" targets of just aiming purely at killing people.

So that can give you a sense of your relative risk. Do you live near important military installations? Do you live near important communications/logistical/infrastructure hubs? Are you downwind (i.e., east) of the most relevant target near you? Those are the most important questions to take in mind considering your immediate survival. But most estimates see even at the height of the Cold War more than half of Americans surviving the initial exchange. The bigger survival questions are then: do you know first aid? Are you fit? Can you grow food? Can you sew/mend clothes? Do you have a supply of water/emergency rations? Do you have a firearm and know how to use it? etc. The irony of a lot of "preppers" is that their survival focus seems to be centered on acquiring gold bullion and guns and not on maybe dropping the 200 lbs of visceral fat they're carrying

Nothing like that seemed to exist when I looked, and in hindsight the reason seems obvious: for it to be accurate you'd basically need to know the targeting plans of your attackers, which are naturally going to be as secret as secrets can get, and which are pure data (as opposed to e.g. numbers of missiles whose silos/subs/etc can show up to satellite overflight) and thus easy to keep secret.

If you're worried about Putin you might make some inaccurate guesses, though. Russia has one currently-deployed warhead per 200k Americans. Divide that into your local population, deploy to maximize damage. See what happens if you place half as many warheads (assuming some will be targeted at US silos or reserved for subsequent deterrence), see what happens if you place twice as many (assuming many not-currently-deployed warheads are having that status upgraded right now).

My guesses were not reassuring. With a lowball estimate and low or reversed winds my house might remain liveable, but with a typical wind vector it's a fallout zone, and with a less optimistic warhead count it's rubble.

I don't know the current targetting doctrine of Russia and China, but the American one from 1956 was analysed in this blogpost, whose author is also the creator of NukeMap.

Having lived all my life in Moscow, I had no need for such a service. I would have zero chances of survival if Russia was nuked.

I've thought about this some. I don't think it can reasonably be done, since there's no way to know who might attack your country, how many nukes they actually have and intend to use against you, what they would be targeting in what priority, how many of what yield get aimed at any particular city/area, how effective any countermeasures are, and how well the missiles actually do at hitting their intended targets accurately.

If you're particularly worried, it's probably best to live as far as possible from any large cities and anything else that might make a good target like military bases or other critical facilities, and to build a fallout shelter.

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