Surviving a Nuclear Attack

I am hopeful this is information nobody will ever need. But it seems like one of those things that's better to know than not. Plus, maybe it will be a good conversation starter at your next dinner party...

Obviously, if you are too close to a nuclear explosion, you're dead. But there's an intermediate range, at which there's a lot of steps you can take to improve your chance of survival, both immediately and in the longer term. Obviously, the prepper / survivalist market has written a LOT about this, but here's my short "What To Do" immediately after a nuclear detonation. Also, please note that this is not comprehensive, nor am I an expert. Much of this is common sense, but it does include some info that surprised me when I learned it. Ultimately, you are responsible for your own safety, so try to keep calm and do what you can to stay alive.

The First Instant:  Seek cover from the flash and immediate radiation exposure - If you suddenly experience a flash brighter than the sun, DO NOT LOOK AT OR TOWARD IT. In fact, turn away from it, and get as much cover between you and the flash as possible. If the detonation is a high yield explosion, the flash may last many seconds. The flash isn't just visible light. It is intense radiation across the spectrum from long-wave thermal IR to gamma. Closer in to ground zero, the flash will ignite fabric and paper. There are photos of Japanese atomic bomb survivors with the patterns from the fabric of their clothes seared into their skin by the differential absorption of thermal radiation. Flash fire is an immediate hazard as things around you, and possibly your clothes, may burst into flames. If this happens, try to put out / remove the fire as quickly as possible, even while seeking cover.

The First 10-60 Seconds:  Seek cover from blast. Time is of the essence: If you're too close to the explosion, you won't have sufficient time to seek cover from blast effects, but then if you're that close, you may well be incinerated anyway. Try to get away from and seek cover from things that will become shrapnel when the blast wave hits, particularly glass. Windows will shatter inward and the glass shards will embed in everything they hit. In the immediate aftermath, medical care may be unavailable, and you want to try to minimize the risk of injuries that can get infected. Glass shrapnel can also be difficult to remove because it is not as easy as metal to identify in x-rays. If you get to cover, and then it seems like no blast wave comes, DO NOT LOOK OUT TO CHECK. Your sense of time may be distorted by the stress of the situation, and you don't want to stick your head out just as the blast sprays you with high speed debris. If, for some reason the blast doesn't reach you, you are still better off staying under cover anyway (see "The First Three Minutes" next.)

The First Three Minutes:  Stay shielded from the fireball. The primary nuclear reaction in a detonation is over in about the first 30 nanoseconds. However, during that initial nuclear reaction, many different radioactive materials are produced, and they continue through their radioactive decay chain. Some of the materials have very short half-lives. This means that the fireball and subsequent mushroom cloud is still emitting a great deal of ionizing radiation. The activity rate drops off over time, but staying under cover for even three minutes will significantly reduce your acute radiation dosage. Gamma radiation is very penetrative, so the more material you have between you and the fireball, the better. Ideally, it would be something REALLY thick, like a mountain. Usually there's not a convenient mountain between you and the blast to duck behind,  but if you can get behind a landscape feature, or a large concrete structure (as long as it won't also fall and crush you) it will help. And anything is better than nothing!

The Next Few Hours: Threats include fires, structural damage, and the immediate fallout. About 20 minutes after the detonation of the Hiroshima atomic bomb, the burning of the large number of wooden structures combined into a firestorm. In the case of Nagasaki, however, there was insufficient fuel for the firestorm to form. The thermal energy of the blast can also vaporize a lot of water from the surface, which can condense on the fallout particles and drop back to the ground as "black rain."  It is extremely radioactive, so if possible, avoid exposure to it, and absolutely do not drink it. Unfortunately, many of the burn and radiation victims after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima were desperate for anything to drink, and so consumed the deadly black rain.

The Next Few Days to Weeks:  Now you're trying to limit your exposure to the longer-lived radioactive contaminants, like iodine, and minimize their damage to you. If you have them, take iodide tablets according to the instructions. This is especially important for children. It will saturate the thyroid gland with non-radioactive iodine and limit the absorption of any radioactive iodine from the environment. Taking vitamin C may also help your body deal with the damage of radiation exposure. Try not to inhale, eat, or drink any fallout. Food in sealed containers will remain safe even if exposed to radiation. If you have a shelter, stay in it. If you don't, you have to decide if it's better to try to flee the fallout area, or stay under whatever improvised cover you have. If you do have to go out, wear a dust mask, or make an improvised face cover. Before you go back into a shelter area, strip off contaminated outer clothes and leave them outside. Clean the fallout off your skin, but make sure not to embed it into your skin by over-scrubbing.

Finally, any event that results in you needing this information will also mean that the world has changed. At least a lot, possibly catastrophically. But try to help others if you can, and focus on staying safe, healthy, and alive.

"Revolution" TV Show.

This entry is some thoughts about the new television series "Revolution."  This latest invention from the imagination of "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams premiered Monday, September 17th, on NBC.  The pilot episode was released early on Hulu, so I took a look at it.  I'll try to write this entry without spoilers, or at least without any more spoilers than the ads and website for the show provide.  Still, if you prefer to avoid even a hint of fore-knowledge, you may want to read this after you watch the pilot episode.

"Revolution" is set "fifteen years after the blackout."  In a video on the show's website, Abrams says, “The question the show asks is, 'What would happen if everything powered by electricity suddenly turned off?'” Because I'm interested in worst-case scenarios, disaster preparedness, and knowing what to do when the zombies come, I'm intrigued by ideas like this.  But this a problematic scenario...  People are really ingenious and given the proper motivation (say, the loss of civilization as we know it), they would come up with some pretty clever stuff.  Let's consider how...

While it's true that we use electricity for an enormous number of things, we can still do a lot without it, as we did in the past.  Energy can be harvested mechanically in the form of movement, with windmills and water wheels or water turbines. In 1890, George Westinghouse suggested that the energy of Niagara Falls would best be transmitted to Buffalo not as electricity generated on site, but as compressed air. Compressed air can also be used to store mechanical energy in high-pressure gas cylinders.

Furthermore, a lot of technologies that we think of as “electrical” don't have to be. In many cases, we use electricity to provide mechanical energy that could be provided by other sources. Refrigeration, for example, uses electricity to turn a motor to run a compressor. But there's no reason the compressor can't be turned by a water wheel or a windmill. Or a steam engine...

In the event of a “Revolution” scale blackout, the world would quickly see the return of the steam era. Boiler technology and steam engines would be the next big growth industry. Coal and wood fired steam railroads would quickly provide critical transportation links, first on a small scale as museum exhibits were pressed back into service, but then growing as fast as more equipment could be built. Central steam engines in factories could provide mechanical energy for all sorts of tasks, such as machining, cooling, cutting, building, and so on.

And if the “Revolution” world really just precludes electronics, it wouldn't be limited to steam engines. Diesel engines use the compression of the piston to ignite the fuel-air mixture, without any electrical spark plug. And they can be built to be started using only compressed air. It may take a lot of tedious pumping, but you could prime a compressed air system with a hand or foot pump. Then, once you've got the engine running, you could use it to drive a compressor to charge up the compressed air cylinder for the next time you need to start.  All without electricity. Virtually all large scale modern engines are highly dependent upon electronic engine control modules  (ECMs) to manage every aspect of their operation. But that's in order to make them as efficient as possible. You can trade away some of that efficiency for a much simpler, all mechanical control system. That's how they all used to be. And there would be enormous motivation for people to return to and advance these sorts of technologies.

Refrigeration also illustrates the case where the current state of the art is only one of many ways to achieve the desired goal, in this case of making things cold. Anyone with a propane fueled refrigerator in their camper knows that you can keep a fridge full of food or drinks cold just fine using a small flame to drive an absorption refrigeration cycle.

A permanent loss of electricity would limit the production of some materials. Aluminum, for example, is refined using an electrolytic process, without which, it is becomes a very precious metal. Fortunately, there is already a significant stock of metallic aluminum in the world that could be recycled almost endlessly. But anything that depends on an electrolytic manufacturing process could no longer be made.

Otherwise, I can think of only a few key technologies that would be impossible to at least approximate in a “Revolution” world: high-speed computing and high-speed, long-distance, and wireless communication. And even some level of both computation and communication can be done mechanically. Mechanical calculators existed for years before modern electronic logic circuits, and I'm sure the world would see new heights of sophisticated mechanical computers being built. It would be a steam-punk enthusiast's dream come true. I can also imagine a telegraph system based on mechanical modulation of something like a metal bar, in order to send messages significant distances at the speed of sound in metal, or around 13,000 miles per hour. Or perhaps we'd just see the return of other pre-electronic communication technologies.  Sure, neither of these are as good as what we have now, but they are still a major step above the pre-industrial, agrarian civilization portrayed in the show...