I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war.
First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail.
Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher.
Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers.
The people in this article seem much more stressed and have not yet come to terms with the fact that sometimes life ends abruptly (nuclear or otherwise). If you actually get a nuclear war warning for real, my plan is just as good as any other. At least I didn't spend my last moments frantically running a bathtub and panicking.
I don't know about you but filling the bathtub is my instinctual reaction to anything that goes wrong. Job going badly? Fill the bathtub. Medical emergency? Fill the bathtub. Lost my house key? FILL THE BATHTUB.
This is exactly the thought. Water is the #1 survival necessity but an enormously fragile resource. Electricity can go out, pipes can burst, water supplies can be tainted. Some people keep years worth of canned food around but almost nobody has a year's supply of water.
not in Japan. Japanese water heaters are on demand heaters. I love them becahse unlike US style tank based heaters Japanese on demand heaters never run out of hot water.
I live in Japan as well & told my family the same a long time back. There aren't that many other specifics you can plan for, with the family typically spread across the city on the average day, but at least grab a bathtub of clean water to see you through a few days till things settle down.
I'm guessing that you don't have children. And no, your plan isn't as good as any other; its just one that suits your own fatalistic attitude toward the risks involved.
Yeah I think it's one of the worst reactions you could have.
Without any indication of how bad the attack actually is, you should really assume the best and set yourself up to be able to survive.
What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?
The immediate aftermath if the most important time. While he's futzing around with Youtube and getting drunk the more intelligent people are coming up with a plan to live.
Whether it's getting the fuck out of there or stockpiling water or climbing into a storm drain, almost anything is better than sending emails and jamming away to cliche songs.
>What if it's a conventional bombing, or you're not directly in the blast zone? Or if the nuke fails to detonate?
Yeah, this has been the most frustrating thing reading all of these accounts. A "ballistic missile" does not necessarily have a nuclear warhead. I don't see anyone correcting this and it seems like an important thing to know.
No country is going to risk that for two reasons in the current global context.
First, everyone will assume the payload is nuclear. Once the launch is detected, literally no one is going to even consider for a single moment that the missile might have a conventional payload. All actions, responses, and threat assessments are going to treat it as a nuke. If you're going to launch ICBMs at people, you might as well mount a nuke to it because the rest of the nuclear club is going to respond as if you had.
Second, the alert was for Hawaii. Given their isolation (they're over 7,500km from Korea), that means the missile is an ICBM. The Hwasong-15[0] can carry an estimated ~1,000kg payload, though it's unknown if it could do so for its full range.[1] That's tiny for a warhead. Mounting it on an ICBM, even if your country doesn't get blown to hell after launch, would just be a waste of money. The same goes for SLBMs as well. The only exception would be for precision strikes, but that's not really relevant to NK.
Context. It's hard to explain to people who didn't go through it. The word "threat" didn't even register. There is no other information to evaluate except the message and the dprk situation. No one is going to launch a conventional ballistic warhead into Pearl Harbor. The ONLY conclusion you can come to in the minute after you just got the info is some serious nuclear stuff is about to go down (but please let it not). The head of our (US) armed forces has been saber rattling for months. The risk of miscalculation is off the charts. Also there was no indication who sent the message (state, fed, ?). You are also in a surreal stunned state. Then you start looking for shelter and yes monitor twitter. Honestly I'm surprised people didn't freak out more and get hurt.
Not all ballistic missiles are nuclear, but anyone throwing one will expect that the recipients will assume it's nuclear and be likely to respond in kind and not wait to find out which. So who would want to launch a ballistic missile without a nuclear payload, if the response is probably nuclear?
The US has tried to build conventional missiles for fast global strike capability but it's somewhat complicated by the Russians being unable to distinguish them from nuclear ballistic missiles...
Yes, but in the minutes you have between warning and impact, how do you make this assessment? I think most people's immediate thoughts after the warning was North Korea and Nuke.
It's not that you need to know definitively, you just need to understand that there is a strong possibility that the warhead is non-nuclear and therefore a strong possibility that the worst-case doomsday scenario won't happen even if the attack is real.
This is apparently really important for people to understand, since so many commenters are saying they'd just wait to die since they assume a nuclear attack is not survivable. Few people would make this assumption about non-nuclear weaponry, so they should know that missile attack is not necessarily synonymous with nuclear weapon.
Actually there is about a 0% chance of a conventional ballistic missile attack on the US. If that. South Korea and Japan, yes, followed by a fire storm not seen since WW2.
Unless you're saying this person is worth less than you, then the plan suited to them is indeed as good as the one suited to you.
A few popular assumptions that aren't necessarily true: Living is always better than dying. Your actions have an effect on the outcome. You can do it. People should always do what they should. It matters.
You would have to ask them. Speaking for myself, I think a few minutes of acting however I wish, even at great peril, might be very tempting compared to living longer as a craven little mouse scurrying from hole to hole. Not sure what I'd choose until I were in the moment of course, but the example seems sufficient to point out that the diametric opposite conclusion is possible.
Like I said, it really depends on the circumstances.
Sometimes having control over your fight-or-flight reaction is better for you, personally, given your value system, than say trampeling fellow coworkers in a panic on your way out the door.
Don't judge too harshly people who don't share your starry-eyed view of the world. Let them have their peace if they're so resolved.
Was it unclear? That these are conclusions from evidence not built in popular assumptions. I donβt believe these things by training and for a long time I didnβt believe them. Iβve grown to believe themninstead.
"I have decided that if I'm ever about to crash my car I will unclip my seatbelt and steer violently to the side. My plan is as good as any other plan"
More like, "if I find out that the airplane is about to crash in a few minutes, I will unclip my seatbelt and roam around the cabin". You have control over your car, you have no control over the airplane or the bomb.
If I survive, I'm a refugee, foreign national with minimal language skills, I'm likely in an active war zone and my nation is probably one of the belligerents. My chances don't look good.
North Korea is estimated to have 10 - 20 bombs [1], and their bombs would have a similar yield to the two that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Presumably, only a fraction of the North Korean stockpile would be used against Japan (they would also want to attack targets in South Korea).
This is much less than the American bombings of Japan in World War 2, when 60 Japanese cities were firebombed (see e.g. [2]). But even so, the total deaths in Japan in the entire war were something like 4% of the population. If there is a war now, most people living in Japan will survive.
I would think basic knowledge of electrical engineering, solar & battery technology, radio, and mesh networking would make you pretty handy. Front end developers will be the first ones in the stew pot.
I donβt know, if any of those things can expose an API or provide some kind of IoT interface I could see backend skills being very useful.
I figure if most data centers are targeted and destroyed people will probably have to host servers on their own local machines, which at least requires a DevOps person in each community.
We make enough money to live in the suburbs instead of the city and can afford a house where we can store food, water, books (the dead tree kind), tools and firearms.
If you put a machine/wood working shop in your garage + you do your own home repairs you can learn all kinds of useful skills.
> What software development skills will be most useful in a post-apocalyptic world?
At the moment of writing this, North Korea alone is not able to bring about the kind of total apocalypse people are thinking when they talk about "post-apocalyptic world". Assuming China joins in (thought I am unsure why they would, unless US strikes first), according the Wikipedia they have 260 warheads [1], which is enough to bring about a massive catastrophe but I am not convinced that the result would be total collapse of civilization.
> Hopefully survival in the post apocalypse doesnβt hinge on time estimates.
Don't worry, we're implementing Survival KANBAN. Challenges and allocations will happen naturally on a board, while management tracks concurrent Survival In Progress to make sure we're not creating more survivors than we can handle.
Does wine do anything to increase the effective method of action of potassium iodide pill? Or just because? (My just because is to make pancakes in an emergency sit-tight scenario, when the power goes out for 3 days or I'm snowed in)
But being serious another nutrient you could take is Turmeric/Curcumin as an anti-rad supplement. However it isn't easily absorbed. There's a version called BCM-95 that is better. But better then that there's a Liposomal version that you can make at home with a ultrasonic cleaner. The idea is to buy 100% organic tumeric for $11 on amazon, and make the liposomal version. Take massive dosage if you are or about to be exposed to radiation. Sorry I don't have sources, because I'm not in the medical field, you'll have to source them and vet them yourself. If you are in the medical field I'd be interest in your input
> But being serious another nutrient you could take is Turmeric/Curcumin as an anti-rad supplement. However it isn't easily absorbed.
You need to take black pepper with it for absorption of Curcumin. Some of the curcumin supplements already have piperine for absorption, so there is no need to make artificial delivery mechanisms for Turmeric off of Amazon. Plus, the amount in Tumeric is very low compared to just purchasing the supplement with piperine in it. You'd spend all your emergency cash making some drug delivery system that wouldn't deliver much of anything.
Yah I hear ya, but if it's dprk launching a "low yield" device that lands a distance away you aren't going to be too happy with thousands of shards of glass in you because you didn't take some simple precautions.
You can survive a single small nuclear explosion if you're a comfortable distance from it and/or happen to be underground and protected.
Your odds of still being alive five years after a full scale war are tiny, unless you have your own concrete bunker a long way from any likely targets, and it's conveniently equipped with a near-infinite supply of water, food, livestock, seeds, farming equipment, and fuel.
Yes, exactly, thank you. The world has sharp corners and it appears that tourists and people who recently moved to Hawaii apparently have no idea that Hawaii's a fucking target. It's the center of the universe in the Pacific. There is an entire division of troops there, and carriers, and planes, and missiles, and nukes and nuke subs. Hawaii is the most tunneled piece of American soil. All of these people crying on the floor in the fetal position seem to have successfully lived out their lives inside a fantasy bubble where nothing goes wrong. I wonder how they would feel if they knew how dangerous it was to drive on the highway. It was actually less dangerous to go to Iraq than it was to drive on American highways. It's clear these fragile souls have no idea what's out there waiting for them.
> I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war.
I can't tell whether this is meant seriously or not, but assuming it's serious, I'm genuinely curious as to why this is "obvious"? Is this historical (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) or due to current political tensions?
I'm also in Japan, and I have a pretty serious go-bag for this kind of thing. It's because of political tensions for me; we're in spitting distance of North Korea.
I'm not sure NK would nuke Seoul anyway - it's too close. A massive artillery barrage or more conventional missiles (or chemical weapons?) seems more likely.
South Koreans seem to be calmer about the entire situation than just everybody else. And I say that as a Brazilian, that is not only on the literally opposite end of the world, but also did not get to see a war since WWII and even then had minimal involvement.
You certainly know something that nobody else knows.
Perhaps because they understand the reality of the situation better?
Look, almost everyone gets the situation with North Korea wrong. NK has exactly one deterrent from being invaded, and that is a ton of very boring, very conventional artillery that is within firing distance of Seoul.
In the case of NK being invaded, they would immediately start shelling Seoul and trying to reduce it to rubble.
If you start evacuating Seoul, NK will assume they're going to be invaded, and start shelling it.
In the improbable case that NK would start something, they would start by shelling Seoul.
All of these scenarios end with NK being reduced to rubble by the overwhelmingly superior force of South Korea + Japan + USA. That's the deterrent we have against them.
The nuclear missiles that NK is barking about is not a real threat. Everyone is watching NK 24/7,they cannot launch anything undetected. If something is detected, then South Korea, Japan, and the US will compete with each other about who can shoot the shit down first. And they will shoot the shit down. And after they've shot the shit down, they will invade NK to reduce it to rubble so as not to have to go through that again, at which point NK will start shelling Seoul, which sucks, but at that point it's an acceptable loss.
Every single scenario ends with NK reduced to rubble. They know this. They have zero reason to move the status quo. Instead, the real reason for them barking about their nuclear capabilities is to get more leverage in sanction discussions. And everyone goes through with this dog-and-pony show, because we can't openly state the exact capabilities of the anti-missile defense systems that are in place around NK.
I think this is mostly right, but there is still some room for concern. First off, those anti-missile defenses have never been tested in anger and we can't be 100% sure they will work. (I'd love to think we have an effective boost-phase defense in place, but I gather that's not going to be a reality for a few years yet, at best.) Second, what I think Kim really wants to use those nukes for, besides leverage in the sanctions discussions, is to pry apart our alliance with South Korea, by making it too dangerous for us to come to their aid once NK attacks Seoul. Even with Pyongyang flattened, there could still be launchers hidden in the mountains and one of those rockets might get past our defenses. Would you really want to risk Seattle or San Francisco or even Honolulu?
On the other hand, I think everyone except possibly Kim and his minions wants peace and stability on the Korean peninsula. The Chinese certainly do, and I think even the Russians, though they have less at stake, would not want to see war break out β certainly not nuclear war, which would endanger Vladivostok. What I don't know is how badly Kim wants to conquer South Korea. He likes to argue that his nukes are for defensive purposes, and that's not unreasonable under the circumstances, but the problem is that they can be used offensively as well. What I would like to see is a peace treaty that obliges not just us and Japan but also China and Russia to participate in obliterating North Korea should they attack South Korea or anyone else.
That sounds like a pipe dream, but consider this. We could provide South Korea with nukes. Yes, it would be in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. (I wouldn't suggest abrogating the treaty altogether, but it has clearly failed its purpose in this instance. A case can be made for restoring the regional balance of power.) We shouldn't bluff, but a credible threat to nuclear-arm South Korea might bring China and even Russia to the table.
Wow... Apart from the NPT (which is just a piece of scrap paper anyway, see Israel, India, Pakistan), last time someone thought putting nukes near adversaries on the other side of the world was a great idea, the world almost ended.
The entire incident is now known as "Cuban Missile Crisis", although it started with the great idea of placing Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey against USSR, continued with USSR placing missiles against USA in Cuba and ended with a single officer on a Soviet submarine, out of three required, objecting to launching a nuclear torpedo while being attacked from a USA ship above. Seeing how easy it is to spark a full war (e.g. Gleiwitz, Gulf of Tonkin), the Doomsday clock had its leap second that day.
Stationing nukes in the SK, close to both China and Russia would be such a major shift in power balance, that I would really like to see the crazyman who would go to China/Russia to even mention that.
What would be the point of arming SK over having a nuclear sub in the area? Would anyone really believe SK could launch them of their own volition? Surely they would be nothing more than US bombs in SK soil.
It controls the political risk of a rift in the alliance or cold feet on behalf of the United States.
The situation you see playing out in Europe, where Trumpβs affinity for Russia puts NATOβs integrity in question is an example of why a smaller party like South Korea would want an independent deterrent.
No, I get why SK would want them; my question is about the US giving them nukes - more specifically, why would anyone believe that those nukes, even if the US did put them in SK, could actually be fired by the Koreans independently.
I don't think the US can convince anyone that they would really unconditionally give nukes to SK to do whatever they wanted with them.
Seems to me that if Kim thought there was even a possibility that South Korea could retaliate on its own, with nukes, it would make him less likely to launch an offensive attack.
But you're right. We don't really want to put nukes under the control of the South Korean government. Convincing the Chinese and Russians that yes, we really will do that if we see no alternative, wouldn't be easy.
Western people are largely indoctrinated with the idea of life being sacred and the necessity to protect it all costs; many Asian cultures are much more matter-of-fact about death as the worldview is more cyclical than teleological and reincarnation is quietly assumed as the natural order of things.
Change western people to Americans and you might be correct. My experience is that a lot Europeans, New Zealanders and Australians tend to be pretty relaxed about world events. Not to say we donβt have our panic merchants but they do tend to be in the minority.
Sorry Canadians, I didnβt mean to lump you in with your southern neighbors.
Thanks for the reply. Living on the (sort of) other side of the world, in the UK, I don't feel under immediate or direct threat from current tensions. I am truly thankful that, for my generation at least, that this is the case. It's easy to forget, or minimise the experiences of people much closer to current political tensions and IMHO healthy to be reminded of them periodically.
We worry about the big, less likely risks than the common, more likely. In a major UK city you might become a victim of a terrorist attack - limited in scope but played out far more in the media - vs getting hit as a pedestrian by a car or a car accident.
In the US, we've completely gone down the way of sucking on the fear teat vs the actual dangers in our reality (cars, guns, heart disease, etc) and pay a pretty penny for it, whether security theater at the airport or our current political environment.
And I - just as genuinely, and not attempting to troll - am curious how anyone could be in doubt, current reports of red buttons and impressively coiffed heads of state taken into account.
Taking this in good faith (I didnβt downvote you :-) Iβll take a stab at responding:
I was curious as to whether there might be historical or cultural factors in play beyond the immediate political tensions. Itβs also worth pointing out that I live in the UK and whilst we get regular news headlines on the state of US politics weβre somewhat removed from much of the immediate political tension. Generalising perhaps, but I also feel less emotionally involved than my US-based acquaintances as a result.
Thank you - but several others found me worth downvoting :)
I'm live just across the North Sea from you, in Denmark, and I am completely decoupled from internal US politics. And of the distinctive coiffures, I must say I find young Kim by far the most worrisome, seeing as he probably doesn't have a functioning set of checks and balances to keep him grounded if he really does go mental some day. Were I living in Seoul or Tokyo, I really would have this on my mind every day.
Really I was just picking up on the word βobviousβ in the parent post. Whenever I see that I always wonder if the writerβs βobviousβ is the same as my βobviousβ. It usually is but, surprisingly often, is not.
Not sure but in Japan there are a lot of preparedness measures for earthquakes. Everyone goes through disaster training, people have survivals kits at home, are aware of evacuation centers, etc. There is some overlap between these measures and nuclear war but I'm not aware of a lot of planning for nuclear war itself.
Yeah, this isn't "obvious" at all. North Korea is not at war with Japan. What could it even gain from it anyway? Just war for the sake of war and have their country destroyed and their government overthrown? This doesn't make sense at all. Don't forget a lot of NK elite including Kin Jung-Un himself were educated in Europe. They know the state of the world.
So when I'll go to Japan again latter this year as a scholar, NK is the millionth thing I'll care. Because the risk isn't real, it's mostly propaganda towards a country that is trying hard to exists. I think the most important thread are actually the US and how they're unnecessarily adding fuel to the fire at any occasion.
In addition, I would mention that the mere existence of NK is a by product of the US intervention in the Korea War. Should the communist forces won like they did in China & Vietnam, the country would not have been parted like it is. And the situation towards capitalism would have started a normalisation like in China and Vietnam.
It depends if you have kids or not that you are responsible for. We can all make that choice for ourselves, but when you have kids most of us have a moral code to protect them from βsudden deathβ.
First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail.
Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher.
Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers.
The people in this article seem much more stressed and have not yet come to terms with the fact that sometimes life ends abruptly (nuclear or otherwise). If you actually get a nuclear war warning for real, my plan is just as good as any other. At least I didn't spend my last moments frantically running a bathtub and panicking.