One thing that would be really useful in terms of personal planning, and maybe would be a good idea to have a top level post on, is something like:
What is P(I survive | I am in location X when a nuclear war breaks out)
for different values of X such as:
(A) a big NATO city like NYC
(B) a small town in the USA away from any nuclear targets
(C) somewhere outside the US/NATO but still in the northern hemisphere, like Mexico. (I chose Mexico because that’s probably the easiest non-NATO country for Americans to get to)
(E) New Zealand, pretty much where everyone says is the best place to go?
Probably E > D > C > B > A, but by how much?
As others have said, even (B) (with a suitcase full of food and water and a basement to hole up in) is probably enough to avoid getting blown up initially, the real question is what happens later. It could be that all the infrastructure just gets destroyed, there’s no more food, and everyone starves to death.
Of course another thing to take into account is that if I just decide to go somewhere temporarily and there’s a war, I’ll be stuck somewhere that’s unfamiliar, where I may not speak the local language, and where I am not a citizen. Whether that is likely to affect my future prospects is unclear.
If it turns out that we’ll be fine as long as we can survive the bombs and the fallout, that’s one thing. But if we’ll just end up starving to death unless we’re in the Southern Hemisphere, then that is another thing.
(Does the possibility of nuclear EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks need to be factored in? I’ve heard claims like ‘one nuke detonated in the middle of the USA at the right altitude would destroy almost all electronics in the USA’, and maybe nearby countries would also be in the radius. If true, likely it would happen in a nuclear war. And of course that would also have drastic implications for survivability afterward. I don’t know how reliable this is, though.)
Another important question is “how much warning will we have?” Even a day or two’s worth of warning is enough to hop on the next flight south, but certainly there are some scenarios where we won’t even have that much.
Those are good questions on survival in different locations, and I haven’t seen estimates of those (lots of uncertainty in response). I think the EMP from a single detonation is not quite that bad, but I would expect many EMPs in a full-scale exchange. With two days warning, most flights will already be full, and the flight capacity over a few days is much smaller than the population, so I would not count on that. But driving is more feasible if you own a car (ride share would be more problematic).
Of course that depends on whether everyone else is also evacuating. For instance do we expect that if a tactical nuke is used in Ukraine a significant amount of the US population will be trying to evacuate? As has been mentioned before there was not a significant percentage of the US population trying to evacuate even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was probably a much higher risk and more salient situation than we face now.
One thing that would be really useful in terms of personal planning, and maybe would be a good idea to have a top level post on, is something like:
What is P(I survive | I am in location X when a nuclear war breaks out)
for different values of X such as:
(A) a big NATO city like NYC
(B) a small town in the USA away from any nuclear targets
(C) somewhere outside the US/NATO but still in the northern hemisphere, like Mexico. (I chose Mexico because that’s probably the easiest non-NATO country for Americans to get to)
(D) somewhere like Argentina or Australia, the places listed as being most likely to survive in a nuclear winter by the article here https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-022-00573-0
(E) New Zealand, pretty much where everyone says is the best place to go?
Probably E > D > C > B > A, but by how much?
As others have said, even (B) (with a suitcase full of food and water and a basement to hole up in) is probably enough to avoid getting blown up initially, the real question is what happens later. It could be that all the infrastructure just gets destroyed, there’s no more food, and everyone starves to death.
Of course another thing to take into account is that if I just decide to go somewhere temporarily and there’s a war, I’ll be stuck somewhere that’s unfamiliar, where I may not speak the local language, and where I am not a citizen. Whether that is likely to affect my future prospects is unclear.
If it turns out that we’ll be fine as long as we can survive the bombs and the fallout, that’s one thing. But if we’ll just end up starving to death unless we’re in the Southern Hemisphere, then that is another thing.
(Does the possibility of nuclear EMP (electromagnetic pulse) attacks need to be factored in? I’ve heard claims like ‘one nuke detonated in the middle of the USA at the right altitude would destroy almost all electronics in the USA’, and maybe nearby countries would also be in the radius. If true, likely it would happen in a nuclear war. And of course that would also have drastic implications for survivability afterward. I don’t know how reliable this is, though.)
Another important question is “how much warning will we have?” Even a day or two’s worth of warning is enough to hop on the next flight south, but certainly there are some scenarios where we won’t even have that much.
Those are good questions on survival in different locations, and I haven’t seen estimates of those (lots of uncertainty in response). I think the EMP from a single detonation is not quite that bad, but I would expect many EMPs in a full-scale exchange. With two days warning, most flights will already be full, and the flight capacity over a few days is much smaller than the population, so I would not count on that. But driving is more feasible if you own a car (ride share would be more problematic).
Of course that depends on whether everyone else is also evacuating. For instance do we expect that if a tactical nuke is used in Ukraine a significant amount of the US population will be trying to evacuate? As has been mentioned before there was not a significant percentage of the US population trying to evacuate even during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and that was probably a much higher risk and more salient situation than we face now.
was the Cuban Missile crisis higher risk than actual nukes going off? actual nukes seem to me to be more salient.
Having read the account of B-59 in “Doomsday Machine”, I think it was higher risk for odds of nuclear weapons hitting the USA.
Quick note: this post notes out some serious disagreements / issues with the paper linked in (D)
A bunch of us here at the Prague Fall Season would like to know this for F) a medium NATO capital outside the US/UK.