>The survival guide is rather dated, 30+ years and close to 40 for what was not updated in the rewrite. I wonder if the weather patterns have not changed enough to make some of the argument moot.
None of the advice in the survival guide is dependent on weather patterns. Specifically, although some places, e.g., extreme Northern California, are likely to be survivable without a fallout shelter after a nuclear war, there is no place in the continental US that is guaranteed to be survivable, so since fallout shelters *are* a guarantee and can be built by most families, the survival guide advises everyone to build a fallout shelter as soon as war has become likely.
The author of the survival guide (Kearny) was focused on the survival of his country (the US) as a whole and didn’t give advice about “selfish” survival strategies such as bolting to New Zealand that do not contribute to the survival of the country as a whole.
Someone who does advise about “selfish” strategies is Joel Skousen, who has worked as a consultant to wealthy Americans on the subject. Skousen stresses that the main danger faced by people who’ve prepared for nuclear war is refugee flows consisting of millions of completely-unprepared Americans. Most large American urban areas have only enough food (e.g., in supermarkets and warehouses) to feed their populations for about 4 days, and once that food is gone, the people start walking into the countryside. So for example, Skousen has investigated the behavior of refugees near the end of the European Theater of WWII and has found that everything within about 5 miles of a road gets ransacked by refugees looking for food.
(The problem of refugees is why during the cold war Switzerland and some of the Scandinavian countries required the entire population to be prepared. E.g., Swiss cities could shelter their entire population in large communal fallout shelters whereas anyone building a house in suburban or rural Switzerland was required by law to also build a co-located fallout shelter.)
Skousen started out advising people to move to sparsely-populated parts of the US, but many people who did so reported back to Skousen that they ran out of money after a few years and that there was no way to earn money in the regions Skousen advised them to relocate, so nowadays he focuses more on strategies like having one member of the family learn how to fly a plane, then relocating to western Montana (the place in the US he considers the most survivable) using the plane on the first serious signs of war.
(The missile fields of eastern Montana and nearby are separated from western Montana by mountains that fallout will not cross. Yes, I have noticed that Skousen’s thinking is distorted by paranoia and conspiracy theories.)
>The survival guide is rather dated, 30+ years and close to 40 for what was not updated in the rewrite. I wonder if the weather patterns have not changed enough to make some of the argument moot.
None of the advice in the survival guide is dependent on weather patterns. Specifically, although some places, e.g., extreme Northern California, are likely to be survivable without a fallout shelter after a nuclear war, there is no place in the continental US that is guaranteed to be survivable, so since fallout shelters *are* a guarantee and can be built by most families, the survival guide advises everyone to build a fallout shelter as soon as war has become likely.
The author of the survival guide (Kearny) was focused on the survival of his country (the US) as a whole and didn’t give advice about “selfish” survival strategies such as bolting to New Zealand that do not contribute to the survival of the country as a whole.
Someone who does advise about “selfish” strategies is Joel Skousen, who has worked as a consultant to wealthy Americans on the subject. Skousen stresses that the main danger faced by people who’ve prepared for nuclear war is refugee flows consisting of millions of completely-unprepared Americans. Most large American urban areas have only enough food (e.g., in supermarkets and warehouses) to feed their populations for about 4 days, and once that food is gone, the people start walking into the countryside. So for example, Skousen has investigated the behavior of refugees near the end of the European Theater of WWII and has found that everything within about 5 miles of a road gets ransacked by refugees looking for food.
(The problem of refugees is why during the cold war Switzerland and some of the Scandinavian countries required the entire population to be prepared. E.g., Swiss cities could shelter their entire population in large communal fallout shelters whereas anyone building a house in suburban or rural Switzerland was required by law to also build a co-located fallout shelter.)
Skousen started out advising people to move to sparsely-populated parts of the US, but many people who did so reported back to Skousen that they ran out of money after a few years and that there was no way to earn money in the regions Skousen advised them to relocate, so nowadays he focuses more on strategies like having one member of the family learn how to fly a plane, then relocating to western Montana (the place in the US he considers the most survivable) using the plane on the first serious signs of war.
(The missile fields of eastern Montana and nearby are separated from western Montana by mountains that fallout will not cross. Yes, I have noticed that Skousen’s thinking is distorted by paranoia and conspiracy theories.)