I tend to not try and dwell on things I can't do anything about but stumbled across this post about surviving a nuclear bomb attack. This isn't the attack from another nation, it is a terrorist attack, a suitcase bomb though the suitcase would have to be pretty big.
It has something of a nostalgic ring to it as growing up in the '50s we got daily doses of how to survive, maybe, a nuclear attack. And these weren't suitcases, they were ICBMs, inter continental ballistic missiles. Now you know why your parents are neurotic.
HOW TO SURVIVE A NUCLEAR BOMB
How does one rank hypothetical catastrophes? Which would be worse—another Katrina or another 9/11? It seems fitting to begin with the cataclysm we've all been worrying about for more than half a century: a nuclear attack on a major city. With some 27,000 nuclear warheads scattered around the world, and with, shall we say, less-than-ideal safeguards in Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea, some experts predict it is bound to happen sooner or later. They don't keep shuttling Dick Cheney to his undisclosed location (deep under Pennsylvania's Raven Rock Mountains)just for show. Shortly after 9/11, the White House was on high alert in response to a CIA report than an errant Soviet "suitcase nuke" was being smuggled into the United States. That report was eventually discredited, but given the current availability of fissile material and the shocking dearth of effort being spent to reduce it, such an alarm may eventually prove true. "If we continue along our present course," warns Harvard's Graham Allison, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable."
Here's the worst part: You will survive. Get those images of Jason Robards in The Day Afterout of your head. This is not that. We're not talking here about multiple-entry 20-megaton warheads wiping whole cities off the map in seconds. A single terrorist nuke, more likely in the 5- to 10-kiloton range (Hiroshima was 12 kilotons), will kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in any big city but spare the rest. In New York, that will leave about 7.5 million of us to sort through the carnage.
It has something of a nostalgic ring to it as growing up in the '50s we got daily doses of how to survive, maybe, a nuclear attack. And these weren't suitcases, they were ICBMs, inter continental ballistic missiles. Now you know why your parents are neurotic.
HOW TO SURVIVE A NUCLEAR BOMB
How does one rank hypothetical catastrophes? Which would be worse—another Katrina or another 9/11? It seems fitting to begin with the cataclysm we've all been worrying about for more than half a century: a nuclear attack on a major city. With some 27,000 nuclear warheads scattered around the world, and with, shall we say, less-than-ideal safeguards in Russia, Pakistan, and North Korea, some experts predict it is bound to happen sooner or later. They don't keep shuttling Dick Cheney to his undisclosed location (deep under Pennsylvania's Raven Rock Mountains)just for show. Shortly after 9/11, the White House was on high alert in response to a CIA report than an errant Soviet "suitcase nuke" was being smuggled into the United States. That report was eventually discredited, but given the current availability of fissile material and the shocking dearth of effort being spent to reduce it, such an alarm may eventually prove true. "If we continue along our present course," warns Harvard's Graham Allison, "nuclear terrorism is inevitable."
Here's the worst part: You will survive. Get those images of Jason Robards in The Day Afterout of your head. This is not that. We're not talking here about multiple-entry 20-megaton warheads wiping whole cities off the map in seconds. A single terrorist nuke, more likely in the 5- to 10-kiloton range (Hiroshima was 12 kilotons), will kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people in any big city but spare the rest. In New York, that will leave about 7.5 million of us to sort through the carnage.
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