I don’t know that that’s true everywhere. Airbursts (detonation mode for cities) generally don’t produce much fallout. Probably good advice if you’re downwind of hardened targets like the 3 clusters of Minuteman silos in the Midwest though which will produce a fuckton of fallout as they’re all hit with surface detonations. But the Russians/Chinese may not hit them at all if they know all those silos have been fired already.
Huh, I thought the fallout from airbursts would (eventually) kill more unprepared people than the immediate effects of the bursts would. Here is why I believe that.
The book Nuclear War Survival Skills says repeatedly and forcefully that everyone in the continental US should have fallout protection during the 2 or 3 weeks after an attack (and that for most American families, making your own shelter by digging in the dirt is their best bet). A large fraction of the book explains how to build and operate such a shelter.
Nothing has changed since the publication of that book in 1987 that I know of that would make ground bursts more likely. I always thought that ground bursts make sense (and made sense in the 1980s) only when attacking targets that the defender has tried to make proof against nuclear attack. I doubt there are more of those now than then. Since 1987 the Air Force headquarters that used to be in Cheyenne mountain (a hardened target) for example is now in a non-hardened building in nearby Colorado Springs.
And if you travel for hours by car during the first 2 or 3 weeks after a massive attack, you’ll get a fatal dose of radiation.
I don’t know that that’s true everywhere. Airbursts (detonation mode for cities) generally don’t produce much fallout. Probably good advice if you’re downwind of hardened targets like the 3 clusters of Minuteman silos in the Midwest though which will produce a fuckton of fallout as they’re all hit with surface detonations. But the Russians/Chinese may not hit them at all if they know all those silos have been fired already.
Are the black or the red supposed to be the minuteman silos on that map?
Huh, I thought the fallout from airbursts would (eventually) kill more unprepared people than the immediate effects of the bursts would. Here is why I believe that.
The book Nuclear War Survival Skills says repeatedly and forcefully that everyone in the continental US should have fallout protection during the 2 or 3 weeks after an attack (and that for most American families, making your own shelter by digging in the dirt is their best bet). A large fraction of the book explains how to build and operate such a shelter.
Nothing has changed since the publication of that book in 1987 that I know of that would make ground bursts more likely. I always thought that ground bursts make sense (and made sense in the 1980s) only when attacking targets that the defender has tried to make proof against nuclear attack. I doubt there are more of those now than then. Since 1987 the Air Force headquarters that used to be in Cheyenne mountain (a hardened target) for example is now in a non-hardened building in nearby Colorado Springs.