How to survive a nuclear attack

(US Navy via National Geographic)

From the New York Times:

Suppose the unthinkable happened, and terrorists struck New York or another big city with an atom bomb. What should people there do? The government has a surprising new message: Do not flee. Get inside any stable building and don’t come out till officials say it’s safe.

The advice is based on recent scientific analyses showing that a nuclear attack is much more survivable if you immediately shield yourself from the lethal radiation that follows a blast, a simple tactic seen as saving hundreds of thousands of lives. Even staying in a car, the studies show, would reduce casualties by more than 50 percent; hunkering down in a basement would be better by far.

Yes, this is unthinkable. But I grew up when people were seriously worried about global thermonuclear war. At every school event, there were stacks of civil defense pamphlets, urging citizens to build bomb shelters. Terrorism is frightening, to be sure - that's the whole point, after all - but we have far less to worry about these days.

Terrorism works best against cowards, of course. Even the threat of terrorism gets cowards to overreact - to invade innocent countries, to torture prisoners, to abandon their own values in a fruitless search for guaranteed safety. And one of the ways we can fight it is by being reasonable. In this case, we should recognize that there's a vanishingly small chance that we'll ever need to know this information.

And yet, it's still good to know. There's nothing you can do if you're sitting on top of a nuclear bomb - or any other kind of bomb, for that matter - when it goes off. But the immediate blast radius is not the biggest problem from nuclear weapons. It's the radioactive fallout that causes the most deaths - by far. If worse comes to worst, hunker down and wait for help. According to the article, even a few hours would greatly increase survival rates.

And despite that mushroom cloud graphic I added to this post, if terrorists ever do get radioactive material, the most likely scenario is a "dirty bomb." Rather than a nuclear explosion, we'd likely just see an ordinary bomb designed to spread radiation. Yes, that would be terrible, but there would be relatively few casualties if people just stayed put and avoided the debris.

And remember, things have been worse. In my childhood, when we worried about global thermonuclear war, hunkering down and waiting for help wasn't an option. We soon realized that thousands of hydrogen bombs would wipe us out - wipe out both sides - no matter what we tried to do. The only way to survive that was to keep the peace.

We got past that, and we'll get past this - if we don't lose our courage and our common sense.