Preparing for Nuclear War - An Introduction

"The most important thing is that when things get really bad and the world looks its darkest, you just have to throw up your hands and say well, all right! 'cause it's probably going to get a whole hell of a lot worse."

Cannibal! The Musical 1993

In 2017 I posted a rant where I complained to the effect that politically and environmentally, there has been such a continuous stream of horrific calamities befalling the world that whenever I start to write a post commenting on one disaster it gets overshadowed by something even worse before I can finish. I promised to do better but the disasters starting coming at an even faster rate.

So I decided to write about nuclear war - it's one of the few bad things that haven't happened yet and maybe I'll be able to post about it before it happens.

Ron Cobb cartoon from 1966 [source]

Objectively speaking, we should be worried about the threat of nuclear war. The Doomsday Clock is now at 2 minutes to midnight, which is the closest it's ever been.

The last time the Doomsday Clock was this close, people were digging bomb shelters in their backyards. Worse still, the clock has been counting down rapidly; it was 6 minutes in 2010, 5 minutes in 2012, 3 minutes in 2015 and 2 1/2 minutes in 2017.

Meanwhile, the United States has pulled out of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia as of February this year. This treaty was negotiated between Reagan and Gorbachev in 1987 and it's something of a worry (read terrifying) that the current administration is even more war mongering than Ronald "we begin bombing in five minutes" Reagan.

Prior to that they also unilaterally pulled out of the JCPOA (aka Iran Nuclear Deal) even though the IAEA said that Iran was abiding by the terms of that deal. Now Iran, with nothing to lose, has gone full speed ahead enriching uranium for bombs. Having seen what happened to Iraq and Libya after they got rid of their WMD programs, Iran probably consider that their only hope of staving off an invasion is to build as many nuclear weapons as they can as fast as possible.

It's an indication of just how much other ludicrously bad shit has been going down that most people don't seem even slightly worried about any of this. I think most of us are yearning for the good old days where the worst thing we had to worry about was a nuclear holocaust.

ANYWAY

I have for a while intended to write more about this subject. In fact I had an ambitious plan to create a sort of Beginners Guide to Nuclear War. Rather than just complain about stuff I would do something constructive. I would try to explain in simple terms how to measure radiation levels, what levels have what effects, what to expect in terms of fallout should a bomb go off and so on.

Now, in answer the the obvious question ("why bother if we're all going to die"), I should say that I do not believe that even a full scale nuclear war would destroy the world. In fact, if given the choice between an all-out nuclear war and the current host of environmental problems that afflict us (climate change, pollution, deforestation, over-fishing, over-population, soil erosion, water misuse, extinctions etc. etc. etc.) I would choose the former. In addition, based on historical precedent, the most likely scenario for a nuclear war is not a conflict between the super-powers, but the United States performing a relatively limited attack on some country which was unable to retaliate. The corrupt oligarchs running Russia and the United States have more in common with each other than they have with the rest of us and while mutual annihilation is by no means impossible, it's presumably less likely than when there were implacable ideological differences between the two.

So I believe there's a good chance that a nuclear war could leave us relatively unscathed here in the Southern hemisphere.

However, there would be fallout to be considered and this would cause massive panic. The average person in the street doesn't know how to differentiate between dangerous and barely-detectable levels of radiation, let alone the effects of different radioisotopes.

The government would be utterly useless in such a crisis. I guarantee their response would be a) tell the people to Keep Calm and Carry On, which would have the sort of effect that you'd expect and b) find some way of blaming Labor (and of course the Greens) for their lack of preparedness. The mainstream media have gone so far down the track of turning into outright corporate propaganda machines that they could not convey factual information if their lives depended on it - which might be literally true in this case. Other media sources would be hamstrung by a lack of knowledge and couldn't be relied upon either.

So my idea was to attempt to increase the level of knowledge about things nuclear. I would write a series of posts aimed at educating the reader to the point that when the fallout came, they would, in the words of the song, "know when to walk away, and know when to run."

[Source: @GrantWTrent who doesn't know the original source.]

I have now written (and mostly deleted) tens of thousands of words on the subject. As I started writing I noticed a curious phenomenon. I thought I knew stuff, and it seemed that all I needed to do was a little fact-checking to dot the i's and cross the t's, but the more I read, the less I realised I actually knew.

I suppose it goes with saying that nuclear physics is a complex subject, but even without all that bizarre quantum mechanics weirdness, there's still a lot of unusual stuff that you wouldn't expect. A couple of examples:

• Strontium-90 is essentially a pure beta emitter. Beta particles are stopped by only a few millimetres of metal shielding. Would a strontium-90 source (of non-trivial size) encapsulated by a few mm of metal be safe to come close to?
• All radioactive elements decay over time at a rate defined by their half-life. If you took a pure piece of the radioactive element uranium-238 and placed it in a sealed container, would the level of radiation within that container gradually reduce over time at a rate determined by the half-life of this element?

Full answers in a following post, but it's probably not much of a spoiler to say that the answer to both questions is "no".

So I have now come to the conclusion that it's not practical for me to create anything like the sort of easy-to-understand but accurate guide that I had intended, at least not within a reasonable period of time. However, I'm going to make an effort to post a few things on this subject which maybe helpful to someone.