Would you want to survive a nuclear war?

So you notice a flash (not directly in sight cos youd useally be blinded) and see the famous mushroom cloud of fire in the distance,
you likely fill your pants with shit and piss and make a decision.

My decision would be to wait it out to see if there is any more,assuming there is more and assuming i dont get vapourised id probably want to shoot myself in the head.

one day youre going to die anyways, why not give life a shot.

why do most of your choices have the person killing themselves?


WHY would you kill yourself if you *survived*?

Well you may "survive" the bomb's explosion,but if the explosions are substantial and you do not have access to an underground shelter its very likely youll be exposed to a large amount of rads per second,radiation sickness would most likely be severe,todays bombs are h-bombs,more lethal than that dropped on japan.

Radiation sickness is nasty,horrible slow way to die,a gieger counter may detect it but unless you can get away from it youre always being exposed.

Forgetting that,putting all that aside plus the long term effects like definate cancer,its likely in such a war there would be no electricity,computers,tv,possibly limited information broadcast by radio,and no more government control or police except that of marshal law.

You could "try" to survive but considering the obstacles this might not be very long anyway.
If you dont get killed for looting,youll get your throat cut by some 10 year old desperate for that pack of crisps/chips you managed to hold onto.

There will be no society to speak of,survival of the fittest i guess.

If you get injured badly,dont expect an ambulence to pick you up,instead you might die in agony.

If you wear glasses and get them broken,tough shit youll have to make do without them even if youre blind as a bat without them.

Broken bones? hows no treatment sound?

Youll have to be careful whats got fallout dust on,or contamination in water,eat or drink something contaminated and youre likely to die slowly,see radiation sickness.

Its very likely your lifespan will be reduced cos of radiation and no medical help,ok i know people get cancer anyway,but its likely youll get it plus no one around to treat it.

Economy collapses,things aint made anymore,so the all important morphine is hard to get hold of.

A nuclear world war is quiet bleak,its not much of a life.

But maybe when it comes to it you not manage to kill yourself and your survival instincts take over.

radiation isnt that bad a thing, it promoted mutation :) it all depends on how far you are from the blast, and whether or not there is sufficient shielding, for example layers of concrete will block gamma rays, your clothes or glass will stop beta particles, and alpha particles wont penetrate skin. So if u live in an area near sufficient wilderness and enough animal population survives- you could start civilization anew.

well, providing you are upwind from the radioactive dust... and its not a global holocaust.

By the way youre wrong,only 2 of the choices are killing yourself.

The 4th one is not suicide,youre just going near ground zero,thats classified as homocide by the people who set the bomb off.

By the way youre wrong,only 2 of the choices are killing yourself.

The 4th one is not suicide,youre just going near ground zero,thats classified as homocide by the people who set the bomb off.

Um, you chose to go there and die.

EDIT:

By "surviving" I took it to mean that you survived and went untouched by the nuclear war, not that you were right there and got radiation sickness from all of it >_>

Yeah but its not by your own hands,killing YOURSELF means exactly that.

If someone fires a gun at me and i decide to not bothering dodging out of the way then if the bullet hits me,according to you the person firing the gun is not responsible and it was suicide.

Ill have to remember that one,if i ever decide to shoot and kill someone,in court ill say "im not guilty,he commited suicide"
theyll ask how thats possible and ill say "he decided to stand there and get shot,hows that my fault!"

Yeah but its not by your own hands,killing YOURSELF means exactly that.

If someone fires a gun at me and i decide to not bothering dodging out of the way then if the bullet hits me,according to you the person firing the gun is not responsible and it was suicide.

Ill have to remember that one,if i ever decide to shoot and kill someone,in court ill say "im not guilty,he commited suicide"
theyll ask how thats possible and ill say "he decided to stand there and get shot,hows that my fault!"


Um, no, that's not what I said.

If someone is going to shoot SOMEONE ELSE, and you decide to go there and get in front of the bullet, that is suicide.

Which is exactly the same as going to somewhere you know is getting bombed to die.

Um, no, that's not what I said.

If someone is going to shoot SOMEONE ELSE, and you decide to go there and get in front of the bullet, that is suicide.

Which is exactly the same as going to somewhere you know is getting bombed to die.

Well call it a grey area.

Its halfway to suicide,but let me point out one major difference,directly being in ground zero means you are vapourised in a nanosecond,even hard metals turn to gas in less than a second.

Death is certain,painless.

Where as killing yourself with a gun,is not only hard to do mentally,but it takes longer to die theoretically,and theres a possibility you dont do it right,people have shot themselves and survived cos they only blew thier face off or missed vital areas of the brain and so on.

Considering that,i consider it an alternate option,cos its the ultimate suicide:someone else is doing it,its CERTAIN and its extremely quick and painless.

As long as you are downwind of the blast you'll be fine. The irradiated cloud of dust and brick particles can only go in one direction. Some of it might reach the stratosphere and rain down on us slowly for a few decades but that's in traces too low to be worth worrying about. Uranium is still coming down from the tests in the 60's. Your lifestyle might become a little more rustic but those humans left are likely to band together. There will be a number of survivalist communes around shooting at anything which moves but the longterm survivors will be those who can homogenise into large villages. Small villages must scratch a living while large towns can afford to support specialists which means a better standard of living for all.

The death toll isn't anywhere near as high as you seem to imagine it might be. Blame that assumption on too many cheap hollywood movies covering the topic. Advisory groups to such establishments as the US Government have investigated every possible scenario. The very worst would cause great damage to high population and industrial areas but even those in the suburbs of such cities would mostly survive. Rural areas would be virtually untouched. Technology would be pushed back around a century.

Ok,it might be ive been led to believe things that are not true.

But has anyone seen the english one off docu-soap "threads"it was transmitted over here in 1984 i think,and its the bleakest film you could ever watch.

The other film,the american one "the day after" is like a really toned down version of threads.

Threads is a must see,but these two films are based on global thermal nuclear war.

In the day after,america fires 300 minute man 3 missles at russia,and russia fires an equal amount back.

300 nuclear missiles would do a lot of damage,and its a fact that nuclear weapons policy has a "use em or lose em" philosophy cos everyone has thier missiles aimed at each others subs and silos,military bases etc.

Except for terrorism i dont believe in limited nuclear exchange,cos they will use the "use em or lose em" philosophy,they aint gonna wait till they are hit,theyll fire all of them.

I know how to survive a Nuclear War.

1. Become a cockroach
2. Become a Telemarketer.

but there is no diffrence between the two.

i'd find the coast, get in a sailboat with whatever food is left (assuming I'm not muged or shot in the process as anarchy violently sets in), bring some friends, and sail off to an island in the pacific/carribean. It's always 5 o'clock somewhere! surely fallout wouldn't reach the islands, right? but then that whole nuclear winter thing... would that affect islands way out in the ocean?

Well actually theres no such thing as a nuclear winter,its a theory but not a very good one.

Its flawed by the fact that volcanos have exploded with force putting as much ash in the air as hundreds of nukes.

I think the climate could get affected but not like they say.

Hmm, from a logic vantage point I am not near well-populated areas. Near enough to see the explosion and the cloud, but not where I would be exposed to great amounts of radiation. Also, I could stay in the basement for some time, the 50 cm concrete walls should stop gamma radiation.
After that, I would distance myself from the impact zone, since I obviously do not want to die. Depending on the situation, I would either get off into the forests until the chaos is over, or I would join up with others. It is not likely that people will go about killing each other.

Broken glasses could be a slight problem, I cannot read things that are far away without them, the edges would be too blurry. But I assume that after a nuclear war there is not much too read anyway, so I would not have a problem.
Broken bones could hamper one, but they can be set straight and bound with some sticks to give stability.

To get food, I would simply take every piece of canned stuff I could find in the cellar in which I would hide from the start.

That reminds me, I still have a protection suit and mask around in my room (no, I am not joking, it´s a fact.)
Water, well there are loads of water bottles in the basement...

Anyway, I would probably pack the most needful things together, take some of my hunting knives with me and would try to make my way into the north of Europe, the unpopulated areas in northern Finland for example, radiation and pollution should be pretty unexistent there. (except the pollution caused my rain, which will inevitably spread over the whole world.)

So, either I die of cancer or something else, or my body adapts, I would take the gamble.

All complicated and morbid fantasy's aside - none of us can predict where our breaking point is until we've hit it. I personally think that I by sheer instinct would fight for life unwaveringly - only purposely giving it up if perhaps to save the life of another.

yep, i'd definetly sail to margaritaville...

if i managed to survive it would wait out the nuclear halflife then try to clone animals from frozen DNA, after i had restored as many species as possible i would kill myself and all other humans to ensure that it can never happen again

Radiation would kill you...

So you have a huge underground lair with the millions of dollars of required equipment, power, food and water storage. And a few PH.D's to help you Vslayer?

Radiation would kill you...
Radiation would be the least of your worries. Like Project Orion said, residual radiation (more commonly referred to as fallout) is only an issue within the first 36 hours or so, and only then immediately downwind of the blast.

If we're talking a protracted, countervalue exchange between two superpowers like what we feared during the Cold War, it would be pretty fucking bad because of the collapse of social infrastructure. Nuclear war is not particularly bad because of the weapons themselves, but because of the destruction capable. If you accomplished the same effect with billions of tons of high explosives we would be no better or worse off.

I liked a book that touched this topic. "Domain". There London gets nuked. As Stokes Pennwalt says the worst thing is that there is no government functioning and total anarchy starts. And though it is fiction in the book it was told that it is critical for health to wait out the first two weeks, after that you can crawl out of your shelter and look for ways to leave the nuked area.

while on the subject, can any of you advice good fiction about postnuclear war life?
PM me if you don't want to pollute this thread with offtopickness /sneers

wear lead underwear

while on the subject, can any of you advice good fiction about postnuclear war life?
PM me if you don't want to pollute this thread with offtopickness /sneers
Play the games Fallout 1&2 for the PC (1997/1999)

They're awesome.

I know they are :cool:
Igreatly enjoyed Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel too

I'd like to survive but not suffer - is that possible? :rolleyes:

Anyway, I want to see who gets nuked, who wins and of course, get to the spectacular mushroom clouds :cool:

a scary scenario: hackers manage to work their way into the Department of Defence's mainframe computers and, being anarchists, these particular hackers decide it would be fun to launch some nukes and initiate a nuclear war. Although highly unlikely, as i can't imagine anybody smart enough to hack a government mainframe and at the same time be so stupid, is this theoredically possible that nuclear war could be initated by such terrorist tactics? that'd be scary as hell...

Mmh, I think every nuclear war is kinda scary, no matter who initiated it. But it may be entertaining.

I believe that there was one little sliver of common sense in our nuclear force deployment that would stop this - which is that the weapons are not launchable purely from computer command. They require two cooperating people with codes and keys at each launch site.

I suppose if their computers were hacked, and their radio traffic - and an imaginary scenario was created for them, where they thought we had been massively attacked and had to respond, then it could work. But this would be a pretty tough undertaking for anybody to get away with, fortunately.

The FALLOUT game series.......The BEST Post Nuke War RPG games EVER made.

But dont forget the grandfather of them, 'Wasteland' back in the 80's.

Mmh, I think every nuclear war is kinda scary, no matter who initiated it. But it may be entertaining.

May be entertaining?,are you mental,maybe for a few minutes untill broken glass smashes into your face at 200-600 mph,its like "id like to watch more go off but i got no face or eyeballs"

Thats a point,would a nuclear bomb going off in a dessert have a more powerful kill zone due to sand being converted to glass?

I don´t mean the explosions are incredibly entertaining, but I believe the results might be pretty interesting. Like muitations or anarchy, the collapse of governments and the decay of mankind... doesn´t that sound thrilling?

Throwing very hot sands at enemies is really mean, it was used in medival times when defending a castle. I suppose the pain is pretty unbearable because sand gets everywhere. So why not use it in moder times?
Nearer to the explsoion it would be glass shards...mean.

I'm not sure it would be glass shards. Yes the initial heat wave would turn some sand into glass, but would it then have a chance to have cooled back to a solid state by the time the blast wave hit - so as to then shatter it?

Ok, then it might be molten glass, I do not know what would be more painful...

but if you are so close, you are dead anyways.

Yeah, its a pretty moot point because if you were in molten or shards of glass range -- it would be pretty irrelevant!

But, I still wonder just out of idle curiosity how much even spattering molten there would be. I would think that generally directly under the blast would be the primary area that sand would be fused - and that it would be more deformed and pushed down into itself much more than scattered at 90 degrees from the blast. Their might be an effect of an inverted cone spatter effect with the molten glass then raining down around it -- though by the time it landed it may not be molten anymore.

My, what a nice thing to be trying to figure out the details of! :)

Well my question is based on the process,the bomb produces extraordinary heat,then the shock wave travels away at 700mph radius,so you would think 15-25 miles from ground zero (which isnt necessarily a dangerous distance normally),would have cooling glass travelling at 100mph gradually decreasing,it occurs to me a bomb in a dessert has a larger KILL radius of maybe an extra 5 miles.

Hmmm, could be. Lets not ever find out!

I plan to survive and lead a small army of misfits and thugs scrounging the desert for precious gasoline...

Been more than one Sci-fi movie with that theme! :)

I choose to survive.
Most probably the easiest way to survive would be to go and forage around for food like in prehistoric times. At least for a while.
Also by forage it includes both natural(forests,farmland,swamps) and artificial sources(abandoned:stores,buildings,ect.)
Plus the less well known places might have more suplies then the well known stores.