Nuclear War Survival
Covering as much as reasonably possible
This was voted to become free by paying subscribers..
As this is going to be an extensive topic.
Per the hiatus, it was agreed The Daily Beagle would come back with a nuclear survival plan. In light of the recent Ukrainian drone attacks on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, as predicted by The Daily Beagle over a year ago, now seems like a good time to publish as any.
Where -Not- To Go
A reasonable assumption to make, is that if Russia were to launch missiles, they would target:
Major cities [government offices are based there]
Power plants [disabling infrastructure weakens counter-response]
Bases and sites involved in nuclear weapons [weakens counter-response]
This will be only focused on the United States and United Kingdom, as documenting every country in the world would be a mammoth task.
…In The United States…
CBS published a map of the United States back in 2015 showing various sites that would be subject to a nuclear attack. Simply put: if it has an icon, it is considered likely to be attacked. If you click the above image it should enlarge. As you can see, it’d be absurd for the Daily Beagle to list places.
The large cluster of black circles might seem anomalous, but they actually align with the locations of nuclear missile sites as reported in Nuclear Heartland: A guide to the 450 land-based missiles of the United States:
So we can be reasonably sure that the CBS map is somewhat accurate, even if they fail to cite their sources.
The US NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Commission) has an interactive map showing locations of active nuclear power reactors.
Whether or not these will be actually hit is another question entirely. Whilst Russia have hit power plants during the Ukraine war, they’ve avoided hitting nuclear ones — although this may only be due to the fact Ukraine is on their front doorstep.
Even without direct hits, crippling hits to infrastructure may result in disastrous failures, like what happened with Fukushima. It doesn’t matter if a nuclear plant can withstand a direct hit from a plane, if all the engineers who are supposed to keep it under control are dead.
Nuclear power plants are particularly nasty, in that not only do they invite direct hits from nukes, but the spent fuel rods that are often stored within them poses a hazard for secondary fallout.
…In The United Kingdom…
The UK does not have a similarly convenient set of maps. The closest they have for nuclear reactors is a manually compiled map from Wikipedia (Wikipedia was legally ruled to be an unreliable source in Capcom Co. v. MKR Grp., Inc.), where it notes Torness, Hartlepool, Heysham and Sizewell have active reactors (green dots).
Some of you may be wondering why knowing nuclear reactor locations specifically is more important, than say, the local chemical plant in your hometown. Nuclear reactors undergoing meltdown are arguably worse than nuclear bombs in terms of fallout, as a bomb only goes fissile ‘once’, but a reactor will continuously spew radiation once supercritical.
…RAF Bases…
The Daily Beagle had to manually compile markers on a map depicting RAF bases [the cyan dots], which are most likely to be targets given they’re often host to nuclear bombers and interceptors. Included is known nuke-site Faslane submarine base. We also included the rough radius for a single, direct hit 100 kiloton warhead on the capitals. 100 kiloton is between the 10 kiloton to 1 megaton yield you might expect.
Areas to pay particular attention to avoid include:
RAF Brize Norton, host to nuclear missiles.
RAF Lossiemouth, previously host to nuclear weapons (carried by Jaguars), host to aircraft interceptors who tend to intercept Russian aircraft.
RAF Lakenheath, which will host Pentagon nukes in light of the Ukraine war
London itself. Russian politicians have explicitly threatened it before, and it is subject to the trifecta doctrine (simply put: they pepper it with 3 warheads in a trifecta pattern).
The Nuclear Explosion Itself
For simplicity sake, it is easier to presume everyone caught within the blast zone is either dead or de facto dead (either due to extensive third degree burns or radiation poisoning or building debris).
The majority of people won’t have fallout shelters, and those that do, don’t typically build them within cities. Even if they did, there are nuclear bunker-buster bombs now in use, known as Nuclear Earth Penetrators. There’s also the odds you would become trapped under the large quantity of rubble resultant from the explosion, unable to open the shelter door.
There’s a reason why they’re called fallout shelters, and not bomb shelters — they can only truly shelter you, temporarily, from fallout. So The Daily Beagle won’t be discussing survival within a blast zone. Avoiding the blast zone to begin with is the only winning move.
Outside of a blast zone, there is the messy concept of fallout.
Fallout
To get an idea of how complicated it can be, here is “nukemap”, which does overwhelmingly simplistic and crude simulations of blast and fallout (read: it isn’t realistic). You can use it to calculate your approximate safe areas (if any!).
To give you an idea of how big and variable fallout is, here are two images. One depicts a 10 kiloton warhead, directly on Parliament in London (the orange ‘flare’ is the fallout)…
…and another is a 100 kiloton warhead…
In the second image, the fallout is over 112 miles long.
What makes the fallout so dangerous is that it is totally dependent on weather.
The main variables that impact fallout range are:
rain (which can wash fallout down out of the atmosphere and directly onto you, essentially making it much higher concentrations than normal)
fire (which can burn materials with fallout on them, spreading it further; this can cause fallout to “re-spread” if it occurs post-settlement of fallout)
wind (which can blow fallout towards you; or it can blow it away from you onto some other unlucky fellow)
This is made worse by the fact one study suggests fallout can trigger rain. And obviously, explosions and heat cause fires and the shockwave generates a soundwave (essentially, a localised, all-directions wind).
It is obviously not possible to issue any sort of meaningful predictions given the complexities of weather involved on the day of the attack. Instead, only generalised, lame advice can be given:
Don’t be exposed to or stand out or under rain post-nuke
Don’t be downwind of the blast zone, and keep tabs of wind direction post-blast
Avoid starting any fires using contaminated material with fallout on it (E.G. chopping down trees and then burning it, for example)
It would be reasonable to assume average weather for your area. So if the wind in your area is predominantly North-Eastern, it would be reasonable to assume that ‘North-East’ is ‘down-wind’.
It is recommended that when using nukemap, you assume worst case scenario with the wind direction always being towards you.
In reality, because wind is variable, fallout distribution will look irregular. One example of irregular distribution patterns has been manually drawn above, but it could take any shape.
Accumulative Doses
Fallout isn’t going to mean much unless you understand how the basic toxicity of radiation works. This is going to be oversimplified, on account there is a lot to cover in this series.
You must treat your radiation exposure as an accumulative dose. That is to say, if you are exposed to 1 Rad per hour, in 3 hours you will have accumulated the dose of 3 Rads.
When articles talk about dose they typically mean accumulated dose.
So when the CDC remarks they’ve seen mild symptoms at 30 Rads, and acute radiation poisoning at 70 Rads, bearing in mind the CDC underplay how harmful things are, you know this is an undersell.
The dose never resets. Which is why fallout can get very scary, very fast. Let us look at the nukemap again with a 100 kiloton yield. We’re assuming ‘plain exposure’ (I.E. you’re not inside a fallout bunker or any sort of protection at the time it lands).
On the right, as you can see, pretty much all doses pose some sort of fatality risk. The red zone (not entirely visible, it’s where the windsock is) is pretty much guaranteed rapid death, as it exceeds the 70 Rads limit at 1000 Rads per hour.
The orange ‘flare’ like zone is also fatal, at 100 Rads per hour, easily exceeding the lethality dosage for Acute Radiation Syndrome (ARS) at 70 Rads. Essentially, within an hour of exposure you’d be extremely ill and de facto dying.
The lighter orange ‘flare’, at 10 Rads per hour, is sort of survivable, assuming you can move to an area that has a much lower Rads dosage in that time. After 3 hours exposure, you will have hit the 30 Rads limit and start seeing early ARS symptoms. At 7 hours, you’d be at 70 Rads and extremely ill.
The 1 Rad per hour zone seems deceptively safe, but you have to remember once the fallout settles, it will be continuously emitting.
So, if you stayed in this 1 Rad zone for 70 hours (2.9 days), you would be likely showing symptoms of ARS having been exposed to 70 Rads accumulated. It might not be as quickly as fatal as the other zones, but 70 Rads, even spread over 3 days, is not something you should be seeking out.
It is therefore best not to be in a fallout zone. People living in properly constructed fallout shelters (I.E. with air filters and sealed walls) will be able to reside there temporarily, but once their supplies run low, will still have to run the gauntlet of whatever fallout remains.
Not All Fallout Is Created Equal
The good(?) news is not all fallout emits the same kind of radiation. There’s many different types of radiation, but for your purposes you only care about four:
Alpha (can’t penetrate skin)
Beta (can’t penetrate thick clothing)
Gamma (can’t penetrate thick concrete, lead)
X-ray (can’t penetrate thick concrete, lead)
For simplicity, you can lump Alpha and Beta into the group that ‘cannot penetrate thick clothing’, and Gamma and X-ray into the group that ‘penetrates everything except meters of concrete, centimeters of lead and large quantities of water’.
Amongst these, there are some particularly nasty ones.
Originally, there was going to be a list (draft above) showing every conceivable fissile material produced during a nuclear explosion, and daughter isotopes (secondary materials), however it is an exponentially complex list that is very time consuming.
Here’s an idea of how complex, here’s just Americium-241:
Nuclear war would have finished by the time this list was processed into a spreadsheet!
If anybody is still interested, there’s an interactive chart of various radioactive isotopes and their daughter isotopes by a third party here (and is much more informative/useful to look at than a spreadsheet).
However, nobody is going to be able to completely memorise it, so instead…
Generalised Rulesets
…It is easier to generalise.
There are three pathroutes radioactive material can harm the body:
Direct penetration, A.K.A. irradiation, for example with Gamma and X-rays
Ingestion (fallout lands in food, gets absorbed by plants or creatures)
Inhalation (particles carrying radioactive materials gets breathed in)
If you don’t have anywhere that is either underground, thick with meters concrete, or has walls of lead (bearing in mind lead is toxic to handle, breathe in and touch), there isn’t much you can do about Gamma or X-rays.
…Any ‘Gamma-Proof’ Locations?…
None of these are guaranteed to work (the assumption is you don’t have a fallout shelter). However, caves, abandoned mines, shafts, or even the bottom of a canyon (note it won’t protect from overhead fallout) might work. It won’t work if the Gamma emitters as fallout debris float into your ‘safe space’ however.
Within a city limits, underground train stations, underground car parks, underwater tunnel crossings, or even concrete underpasses (small ones, like above) may offer very limited protection. A house basement with solid walls will offer some protection, however it won’t protect from the top (Gamma radiation can penetrate house brick and wood).
For Americans, depending upon design, large storm drains (during non-stormy seasons!), and even sewers — if you can bear the stench — may also offer limited protection against nukes; however you risk flooding and drowning instead (any risk is at your own liability). Being open-air you’re obligated to wear a full face mask and basic clothing protection at all times.
…What about Alpha and Beta-proof?…
Alpha and Beta radiation are far easier to stop from direct penetration.
House walls — even wooden ones — will stop Alpha and Beta radiation. Windows will stop low-energy Beta radiation, but not high-energy Beta radiation. You can solve this literally by covering them with anything opaque — wood, aluminium foil duct-taped to the window, plasterboard. Even your clothes will stop Alpha and Beta radiation.
…Inhalation…
In terms of inhalation, radioactive emitters have to travel on particles (E.G dust particles), so you will need some sort of particulate filter. Think of them as smaller than dust particles.
…Gas Masks…
My humble opinion is that so long as an air filter stops small particulate matter entering your lungs, it will suffice (it does not need to be nuclear rated, just have a very small pore size, we’re talking smaller than dust particles).
Whilst you can get Reactor P3 rated filters that react with airborne radioactive iodine (see above), if money is extremely limited, knowing iodine has a short half-life might be a trade-off you’re willing to accept. The main risks with Iodine-131 and similar is bioaccumulation (ingestion) rather than inhalation. Then again, if you’re in nuclear hazard town, then the extra cost will be worth it.
We are however talking full-face gas masks (like above), not any of that N-95 crap, or any of those “half masks”. It must form a seal with the face. The richer among you will still want to buy nuclear rated filters for your gas mask to be on the safe side.
Look for ‘CBRN’ (Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear) filters [older filters may be marked NBC (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical)], and make sure the threading (that’s the part that screws into the mask) matches the mask’s threading.
You do not want to find that your filter does not attach to the gas mask. Always test the equipment, and buy at least one spare filter.
Letters indicate the type of filter, and the number indicates how easy it is to breathe. If you struggle with breathing, you can get fan-assisted filters, however there’s no guarantee the electronics will work post-nuke due to the EMP effect.
…Indoor Air…
It will be almost impossible to completely seal a house against outside air getting in. You can certainly implement basic rules, such as not opening windows, and keeping doors closed, and duct-taping whatever cracks, holes, openings you find.
However, a lack of airflow will make it very stale — and carbon dioxide will build up, making it toxic. So you will still need airflow.
You may wish to use an air filter to pull air in from outside whilst wearing your own gas mask as an added layer of safety. But it will have to be an ultra-fine filter, not just that generic, low-quality commercial grade garbage.
Now onto…
…Ingestion…
Regarding ingestion, the key radioactive elements to be aware of are:
Iodine-131, half-life 8 days. It mimics normal Iodine and will be absorbed into your thyroid, giving you thyroid cancer. You need to pre-emptively take iodine supplements. The good news is, within 3 months it will have dropped to survivable levels (it won’t be completely absent, however).
Cobalt-57, half-life 271 days, It mimics Vitamin B12 and will be absorbed (it is unclear if the other radioactive Cobalts, such as Cobalt-60, does this, but it is better to assume they do). You need to pre-emptively and regularly take B12 supplements.
Strontium-90, half-life 28.8 years. It acts like Calcium, and thus will get absorbed into bone and bone marrow. You ought to pre-emptively and regularly take calcium supplements (but not milk — see why later).
Caesium-137 (American: ‘Cesium’), half-life 30 years. Whilst it doesn’t ‘integrate’ into the body’s organs, it still gets absorbed into the bloodstream and takes over 30 days to clear. It can be treated with Prussian Blue, which speeds up the removal time.
Cerium-144, half-life 285 days, Beta and Gamma emitter. It is poorly absorbed by the gut, but can still end up in bones (including animal bones). It is much more dangerous when inhaled.
Some people may ask why Iodine-133 is absent given it behaves like Iodine-131, however it only has a half-life of 20 hours, 1/8th the lifespan of Iodine-131.
Iodine-131, Strontium-90 and Caesium-137 are all common byproducts of nuclear fission. Cobalt-57 will only occur if fission (read: explosion point) encounters iron, which it may do if detonated within a city that contains iron materials. Cerium-144 is a daughter isotope byproduct and will start to appear after other radioactive byproducts start to decay.
Whilst there are an endless conga-line of fission materials that could land as fallout on food and water supplies, these are most striking in that they readily get absorbed into the body or pose a unique hazard.
The above materials are also toxic to inhale (especially Cerium-144), there’s also:
Americium-241, half-life 432 years, Alpha and Gamma emitter. It is primarily an Alpha emitter with very rare bouts of Gamma. It is found in earlier style smoke alarms, and is a byproduct from nuclear reactors. It isn’t generally harmful… unless it gets into the lungs.
…If It Is All So Dangerous, How Do I Survive?…
The biggest risks occurs whilst fallout is still airborne, or if it becomes disturbed (via physical disturbance, E.G you’re moving through leaves or bushes with it on, or fire).
The point of a fallout shelter is that you stay inside to wait until the fallout has settled, so it is no longer airborne. Once it is no longer airborne, in theory you can survive breathing the air without a gas mask. But only in certain regions — don’t ask which, we don’t know, depends on nuclear settlement.
That’s only half the battle, however. You will still need a dosimeter (something that tracks radioactive dose over a period of time), and will need to find an area with less radiation. Unfortunately, it is not possible for anybody to know where lesser areas are in advance. The tech savvy among you might be able to use drones to survey.
What’s the other half of the battle?
…Half-Life, Half-Death…
Fallout materials essentially fall into one of three categories:
Decays so rapidly they’re not a problem by the time fallout lands; or irradiates so slowly it doesn’t pose a main hazard
Decays “quickly” but is still a problem within the first few months (beaten by staying indoors and avoiding going outside)
Is perpetually always around (cannot currently be beaten)
Half-life is how long it takes for the material, on average, to be at half the power (read: radiation). So if Iodine has a half-life of roughly 8 days, then by day 8 it will be half the power. Then 8 days, half of that, and so on.
The good(!) news is most fissile material appear to emit either Alpha or Beta radiation. The bad news is Alpha and Beta become harmful if you consume or inhale their emitters. And this is where the biggest battle creeps in.
…Bio-accumulation…
It is nasty stuff.
Those who drank milk and ate meat were at the biggest risk of bio-accumulation.
For children drinking milk…
[…] the mean thyroid dose was estimated to be 0.12 Gy, with a maximum of 1.4 Gy. Among children who did not drink milk, the mean thyroid dose was on the order of 0.01 Gy. […]
— “Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests and Cancer Risks”, American Scientist
That is to say, non-milk drinkers had a 10x to 100x reduction in exposure to Iodine-131. We can reasonably infer this extends to other types of ingested radioactive particles.
Yes, this also includes meat, and even some fungi (mushrooms), emphasis added:
These concentrations, very localized, were among the highest in France. In parts of the some forests, game and fungi showed signs of abnormally high contamination […] the activity has reached 2000 Bq [Becquerel] for wild boars and 5000 Bq for some fungi […]
— radioactivity.eu.com, on the topic of Chernobyl
Algae also loves to absorb Strontium-90, and should be presumed to be radioactive.
[…] common freshwater green algae sequester strontium into insoluble crystals […]
Bearing in mind there are various aquatic (E.G. fish) species that eat algae, it is only natural to infer some fish will likely carry Strontium-90 in bioaccumulated amounts.
Additionally, blue-green algae is toxic (non-radioactive) in general.
Caesium-137 tends to get absorbed by plants.
[…] 137Cs [Caesium-137] is intercepted directly on vegetation surfaces during dry and wet deposition in the early stage after an accident […] 137Cs is then transferred into the soil with the highest soil-to-plant uptake in areas with high organic or sandy soils […]
— “Levels of 137Cs and 40K in edible parts of some vegetables consumed in Egypt”
Radioactive soil contamination goes as deep as 5 centimeters (roughly 2 inches).
More than twelve years after the accident, caesium was concentrated in the top 5 cm of plant litter, contaminating mainly young wood roots and fungi.
— radioactivity.eu.com, on the topic of Chernobyl
So you will have to dig deep to find uncontaminated soil if you intend to start growing plants.
…What Foods Are Likely Safe To Eat?…
Unexposed canned, tinned, jarred, dehydrated, freeze-dried and frozen foods that pre-date the nuclear blast should be fine. Any foods that were harvested before the blast but were open/exposed/unsealed risks having fallout on the outer surface of the food.
Any foods harvested on or after the blast should be assumed to be contaminated unless proven otherwise. The heavy caution is due to the fact radioactive material can stay resident in your body for years.
Foods grown indoors, using uncontaminated materials are less likely to be affected, but this isn’t 100% and the soil and foods ought to be sampled to verify. This is beyond the scope of this article.
…What About Water?…
There is little data on known on proven water filtration techniques for radioactive water sources. Many differing techniques still let a lot of radioactive material through, and are technical.
The paper “A Critical Review of the Removal of Radionuclides from Wastewater Employing Activated Carbon as an Adsorbent” goes over a mind-boggling number of techniques.
That said, there’s only two means within the reasonable person’s reach: desalination techniques (be wary: the run-off waste is highly radioactive), which will still contain some radioactive material even in the “desalinated” water. The other being activated carbon, which will bind to most types of radioactive material (adsorption, above).
Unfortunately, the design of a suitable desalination system or the source of activated carbon is outside the scope of this (already expansive) article.
What about tools used post-nuke?
…Damage To Electrical Systems…
Whilst nuclear explosions are capable of generating EMP (electromagnetic pulse) events that can fry electronics, it is worth bearing in mind radiation in general will interfere with electronics, either causing errors, malfunctions, or systems to fry or burn out.
Robots sent into the Fukushima disaster nuclear plant kept malfunctioning and dying.
Whilst these malfunctions will typically mainly impact those coming extremely close to very, very high doses of radiation — mainly Gamma and X-ray — it is worth bearing in mind given that even small radiation events may cause issues.
As a result, another risk in an irradiated environment is the non-functioning of vital electronic equipment. If the equipment is appropriately shielded, has not already been damaged, and is not exposed to radiation, chances are it will operate normally, however, most electronic equipment is not properly shielded and will likely malfunction.
…Supplies?
If you intend to stay indoors to wait out as much of the decaying radioactive material as possible, you must have a sufficient supply of both bottled water and food.
In terms of food rations, The Daily Beagle strongly advises boat rations. They’re extremely compact, and do not require cooking. They’re also the most lightweight, and your aching back will thank you.
The trade-off is they’re obnoxiously expensive compared to other ration types, and being only one flavour will become bland pretty quickly, but a single compact block can contain 2,000 Calories - or one day’s worth of food, meaning you can carry a lot of calories.
You will need to pair this with ‘A to Z’ multi-vitamins. Many lifeboat rations are pure carbohydrates (some may include Vitamin A). Whilst some obnoxious fellows will object to multi-vitamins, nutritional deficiency is also another major risk, and often one hidden in starvation. You will want the compact, dried tablet form, not “gummy bears”.
It is advisible you also buy Iodine, Calcium and B12 vitamin tablets separately. This means if your A-to-Z multivitamin supply runs out, gets lost or stolen, you’re not completely screwed.
If boat rations are too painfully expensive, then use tinned food. Just note that the sell-by-date on tinned foods is often horribly wrong, and the interior of modern cans and tins often corrodes before then (this is based on first hand experience).
So make use of a pantry rotation system (first in, first out — FIFO) to make sure you’re always cycling through and using up tins, re-adding new ones as you go along and using up old ones.
You can also find multi-vitamin tablets in local stores, but just be aware they may not be truly complete A-to-Z multi-vitamins, hence why they’re cheaper.
Phew!
Is there more knowledge? Absolutely, yes, and if anything, this article is horribly oversimplified. But it is still long!
There does not seem to be any other resources out there like it, however this should not be seen as the voice of authority. Being knowledgeable isn’t the same as being correct. Please do your own research, and make your own plans.
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On the lighter side:
> "I will probably not survive"
-- https://jennasside.rocks/p/i-will-probably-not-survive