From my observation, most of the USA is woefully unprepared for major disasters, natural or man made. Apart from a certain segment of the population with large gun caches and a year's worth of food stockpiled, most people don't have any contingency plan or emergency supplies.
Every time there is a hurricane, it seems that it catches everyone unaware. Same for snowstorms. When California gets hit by a big earthquake (Magnitude 8 level), I can guarantee it's going to be complete chaos, despite the fact that we know it's going to happen.
Everybody should have at minimum 3 days of sealed food and water at home. That's how long it will take emergency services to reach you in case of a major disaster.
Back on to the topic of nuclear explosions. Most people have the misconception that they sound like a low rumbling that goes on for some time. In reality, they are a sharp crack, not unlike a conventional explosion, just a lot louder, as this video demonstrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwkTYeukE4
I remember the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in California. It was not chaotic. The TV news was still on, emergency services were doing their jobs, the tap water never stopped working, the power was back on the next morning, and there was not much if any of looting or similar crimes. Fewer than 100 people died, in an area with a population of more than 6 million people at the time.
It's also worth noting that a magnitude 8 earthquake in one part of California will have little effect in other parts. It's a pretty big place. LA could be totally destroyed and we would barely feel it here in San Jose.
I don't take your prediction of "complete chaos" very seriously.
To be fair, Loma Prieta was only a 6.9 on the Richter scale. A magnitude 8.0 quake would be > 10x stronger, slightly bigger than the 1906 SF earthquake.
I think you're right that the effect on California would be pretty ho-hum, though. California prepares for earthquakes; most of the building codes are designed for > magnitude 8 quakes, major companies headquartered here have earthquake drills to maintain continuity of business, schools teach kids what to do in an earthquake, and I'd bet that first responders and hospitals all drill for what to do. The electricity & Internet would likely go down, because PG&E and Comcast seemingly can't keep them running even in the absence of natural disasters. And transportation would be a problem - even the mudslides last winter managed to take out all the roads over the mountain and large sections of highway 1. But I don't think you'd see large-scale chaos or civil disorder, at least in Northern California.
No idea whether you'd see the same in SoCal; aside from them expecting a larger quake, sooner, than the Bay Area, they haven't had one since before urbanization. I suspect their building codes are the same, though, so unless it's Santa Ana wind season they'll probably do okay.
Really? Were you anywhere near the epicenter? My youngest sister lived barely a mile from it.
Highway 17, the main link between silicon valley and the coast, was closed for two months. The Bay Bridge was closed for a month. Over 40 buildings in downtown Santa Cruz demolished. 42 dead in the Cypress Structure alone (and my oldest sister just missed being #43)... which was two counties away from the epicenter.
You write: "Every time there is a hurricane, it seems that it catches everyone unaware .. most people don't have any contingency plan or emergency supplies."
I don't think it's quite that pessimistic. I was raised in FL, and know that many people do prepare. To give some concrete numbers:
"An AAA survey released Monday -- the first day of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season -- finds that 42 percent of Florida and Georgia residents do not make advanced preparations for tropical weather." - https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/aaa-survey-42-dont-prepa...
Why the improvement? According to the last link: “Major hurricanes like Harvey and Irma seem to be making residents more aware of the dangers of hurricane season and the need to make advanced preparations,” Futch said.
That said, I haven't found the published survey results and I don't know what "preparations" means. I suspect many are underprepared. Then again, underprepared is different from "don't have any."
> Apart from a certain segment of the population with large gun caches and a year's worth of food stockpiled, most people don't have any contingency plan or emergency supplies.
I'd say that I'm part of the periphery of that community. I certainly don't have a year's worth of food on hand, but I do have enough supplies to make it make it a couple of weeks at home without worry, and a plan to make a short journey to another family member's home if the emergency were to last longer than that.
For every serious "prepper" out there that have supplies for months or years, I suspect that are dozens of us that could at least outlast the immediate emergency and could "self-extract" from a disaster area.
> When California gets hit by a big earthquake (Magnitude 8 level), I can guarantee it's going to be complete chaos, despite the fact that we know it's going to happen.
Based solely on my own observations, I think California would be fine. Their buildings are generally designed for that eventuality, and an earthquake there would be geographically isolated and the disruption would be fairly short.
What really scares me is the New Madrid. I can only imagine the chaos and destruction in places like St. Louis and Memphis should there be a repeat of the 1811/1812 earthquakes.
I wouldn't have a huge problem going a few days without food. It would suck, but honestly wouldn't impact my life in a negative way at this point.
My kids, however... even if there were no physical repercussions, the amount of distraction that them being hungry would create would effectively prevent my wife and I from getting anything done.
While it may seem tongue-in-cheek, I'm also serious. Keeping non-productive family members comfortable during a disaster is very important in that it allows the productive members to apply themselves to resolving the situation.
About a decade ago, my wife was breastfeeding our first daughter. She had also gotten ill with some sort of gastrointestinal bug, and her milk supply had all but stopped - during a major ice storm in north Arkansas, which took out our electricity for almost two weeks.
We didn't have an emergency fund at the time and had very little money in the bank. There was plenty of food and water at home, but we ended up driving a dangerous and nerve-wracking 50 or so miles over terrible roads, in an unreliable and unsuitable vehicle (a two-wheel-drive '98 Ford Ranger with nearly bald tires).
It all worked out well - I kept it on the road and we made it to a hotel near a hospital, my wife's illness cleared up, and we didn't even end up needing to see a doctor - but my point is that my dependents forced me into an action that otherwise would have been far too risky to take. Had it just been me, or even just my wife and I, we would have been content to drink our stored water, eat canned food cooked on a camp stove, and sleep on the floor in the living room in front of the gas fireplace. Adding a newborn to that equation changed things drastically.
Fair point. I'm not sure of the practicality of training young children to fast for long periods. I remember trying it for one day and we failed loudly, so 3 seems a strech. And i was 12, which is not so young anymore.
The parent describes a theoretical extreme, but it doesn't happen in reality. When have these things ever happened in wealthy countries? Has anyone ever starved to death during an emergency in modern times? Has there ever been "complete chaos"? I have complete confidence that my neighbors and I can govern ourselves adequately for three days, check on the indigent, and help anyone who needs it.
We can invest endlessly in more contingencies. Perhaps there is a level of emergency preparation that is worthwhile, but 'prepping' for complete chaos, etc. is a waste of time that could be put to much more beneficial uses.
People aren't going to die from 3 days without food, but it will be very uncomfortable. People have died in wealthy countries due to dehydration after natural disasters, it happened in Katrina. People were without fresh water for up to 5 days in that case.
As I said, you should expect to fend for yourself for 3 days. If you have no food or water or medical supplies ready, how do you expect to aid and assist people who need help?
My experiences from New Zealand have led me to believe that if there's a magnitude 8 earthquake under a major city, which is entirely possible, that unless you are seriously injured you will be expected to look after yourself for several days.
Read about the situation in New Orleans, during and after Katrina (and especially during the evacuation).
Read about the debate over whether to attribute deaths to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (the government officially claimed fewer than 100; independent estimates run into the thousands).
I know about those issues, but I don't know the answer to the question at hand:
> did people die from starvation? Was there "complete chaos"?
Unfortunately, I (and other readers) don't have time to verify everyone else's claims; that's why the burden is usually on the person making the claim.
I think it's valuable to make you and everyone else more afraid. I'm constantly astounded at how little people care about the very real possibility of nuclear war. It was on everyone's mind when I was growing up in the 80s, but when the USSR collapsed, the concern evaporated even though the arsenals very much did not.
Avoiding nuclear war should be one of our top priorities (and was one of the major factors deciding my 2016 vote), yet it's hardly ever discussed. It's a bit crazy.
What can you actually do to avoid a nuclear war, though? I mean, aside from not giving the big red button to a guy who brags about the size of his big red button, there's not much. And I doubt your vote did any more good in that regard than my vote did. (There's probably a sizable fraction of America who actively wants nuclear war because we have more nukes than anyone else. The idea that your loss might not actually be my gain doesn't seem to compute for a lot of people.)
Mutual nuclear disarmament is the obvious answer (lookup the START treaty), unfortunately it's a slow process and hopefully there will be another president by the renewal time, as Trump doesn't like the treaty.
Regarding the access to the button, would you prefer to have egoistic, emotional man or rational and cold one, like Gen. Buck from "Dr. Strangelove"?
According to experts, the probability of nuclear war in any given year is around 1-2%, and those estimates seem fairly plausible to me.
Even if they're off by an order of magnitude, it means that although highly unlikely in a single year, it means that it's fairly probable to happen within a single century.
One argument against those odds is that it gives a probability of nuclear war happening between 1945 and 2018 well above 50%. But given the several very close calls we've had I think that number seems very real. Remember that both the Cavaliers and Donald Trump had odds around the 20% mark in 2016, yet both won. Unlikely does not mean impossible.
So I agree, lowering both the probability and severity of nuclear war should be a top priority for politicians and those who elect them. Maybe not as high as global warming, but close behind it IMO.
That’s interesting. I’ve guesstimated the annual risk at about 1% myself. As you say, the near misses we’ve had do seem to indicate that the probability is decently high.
In my admittedly amateurish opinion, having a vivid picture of the horrors of nuclear weapons can be very effective in curbing nationalistic and pro-war tendencies among both citizens and leaders of nuclear-armed states. MAD is effective only if all parties are keenly aware of the "Destruction" part of the deal.
I have seen this work first hand myself when India and Pakistan mobilized their militaries on a large scale a couple of times after the 1998 nuclear tests by both nations. A few articles that came out during that time about the effects of nuclear weapons decidedly served to cool off the fervor of several uber-patriotic people I knew.
To make you doubt the importance of ending the NK nuclear ICBM threat. Also the Iranian nuclear ICBM threat. See, if the thing to really worry about is nukes on little boats and minivans, then why bother with the ICBMs. For me the effect is the opposite: we must redouble our efforts to stop proliferation, to reduce the number of countries with the ability to make nukes that are not already nuclear powers, to reduce stockpiles of weapons grade fuel, and to reduce stockpiles of weapons to "reasonable" levels (we can't get rid of them entirely, sadly).
when it started with the obligatory blame trump for something paragraph, i closed it. I dont like much of what trump has done, but I dont got time for their propaganda.
Yes, the article had a clear and strong bias - but I really think you're making a mistake when you reject someone's perspective merely because they don't agree with you.
Meanwhile Trump is taking money from the Coast Guard (who could presumably patrol in order to catch those little boats) in order to pay for enforcing Federal misdemeanors on the border.
Good refresher on how horrible and pointless these are. We have so much nuclear capabilities in the US, with submarines especially, but also airbases around the world and missiles too that we can easily withstand an attack. For that reason, we should make it our policy that we will never launch a first strike. The reason is that there have been many many near misses. We know that China and Russia also have lots of capabilities for return strikes - yet even with this knowledge of mutual assured destruction we have had near accidents and they must have also. By saying we won't make a first strike we really lose nothing, but this should reduce that chance that a mistake could lead to launches. Russia and China should do the same.
I am reading _Command and Control_ right now, a book partly about a nuclear accident on American soil, but mostly about nuclear strategy and history up to 2000s. The writing style is not exactly beautiful, but I highly recommend to anyone interested in the theory and history of nuclear warfare. I am certainly learning a lot about the Cold War.
There was quite a bit of discussion about this photo[0] when it was released by North Korea. If I recall, the general consensus was that it wasn't possible to determine if the device was real (or a mockup of a real device), but it was apparent that the design was reasonable and that it wasn't an obvious fake.
I suddenly feel like I'm back in the Bush administration. Can we get our permanent code orange alerts back?
The biggest threats to nuclear peace at the moment are India/Pakistan, Israel, the United States, and Russia. I'd like to emphasize that the US is the biggest threat to world peace of all of the above, though a general nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India isn't implausible.
Don't let the media distract you from the real story. It is the ambitions of nation states and their imperial capitalist backers that are the threat to civilized life on Earth.
The part that saddens me the most is that real security checks, not the security theater which we have now (cops rummaging through backpacks), will only be implemented after something really devastating happens.
What a load of bollocks. You don't just go to the shop and pick up a few kilos of Uranium. Why do you think everyone made such a big deal about Iran refining their own?
Second, atomic weapons fired at ground level are missing the point. It shines energy so if you want it to affect things it needs to shine on them - like the sun does, in the sky.
> Second, atomic weapons fired at ground level are missing the point.
True, a ground burst isn't the most efficient for direct damage. In exchange, it means lots of fallout, since it throws radioactive material in the air, spreading effect around a larger area, and making sure the area is contaminated for a long time. Since we aren't exactly prepared to keep large areas of citizens in shelters for days, that's bad.
Airburst detonation, even 30 m above ground as in New Mexico, will distribute the explosion energy much more evenly and the epicenter will have much less impact.
Ground devices deliver a shitload of energy into the ground below.
One might wonder if the US, Russia, and China don't already have nuclear weapons under their control on foreign soil. Seems physically easy and only politically difficult. Would the US announce the discovery of such a hidden weapon if they found one in the US? I doubt it.
This is called our "Extended Deterrence". We also had nukes in South Korea for some time. Some of our NATO allies of course have their own weapons (UK, France).
EDIT: An interesting point about the history of extended deterrence is that the US put nukes in Turkey and that precipitated the Cuban Missile crisis as the Soviets felt they needed parity. Turkey is in the same ballpark range from Moscow as Cuba is from Washington D.C. This history is not often told to make it seem as though Washington was responding to some kind of unprovoked aggression.
It would be such a political risk to keep one in a target country without telling them, and they can already deliver them without much hassle when they need to.
It would be a constant threat not to the US (they don't know it is there) but to the Russia or China who at anytime could be found out and the response will not be what they want.
Only in the case that you want to set it off is it a net benefit, and even if you did it anonymously... the response still could be what Russia and or China wouldn't want.
There is really no good reason to do it, particularly since they could deliver one anytime fairly quickly if they needed to.
Terrifying thought - given their small size and the porosity of U.S. borders one would have to imagine it would be pretty easy to accomplish - on the other hand if the weapon were attributable to the host country it and discovered one would imagine that the u.s. would likely go to war over it. Especially considering the response to the positions of nuclear mussels in Cuba...
The USA and Russia certainly have the capability [1], both in terms of technology and in terms of being able to smuggle it in. There were secret caches hidden all over Europe by NATO and the USSR, and potentially Soviet caches on US soil, although officially none have been found.
But what would they have to gain by having a nuclear weapon in the wild, which is essentially controlled by whoever happens to have possession of it. There are a lot of checks and balances before a normal nuclear weapon can be armed and detonated, most of which you wouldn't be able to have in a backpack nuke. There's no political gain to be had by one of those weapons, if it was detonated it would be fairly obvious who's weapon it was. Conventional weapons have deniability.
The problem of reliably getting nuclear weapons onto a target has been largely solved. Between the nuclear triad and MIRV [2] warheads, mutually assured destruction has never been more assured.
I hope that the US military kept/keeps a firm grip on the nuclear arsenal and the CIA never gets their hands on a suitcase nuke. The organization has a history of some very questionable ops.
Why hasnt this happened? Meritocratic societies are immune.
Anyone capable of participating is not disenfranchised in society as they would need to have high IQ and education to initiate such attack.
> The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, was an architectural engineer. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed got his degree in mechanical engineering. Two of the three founders of Lashkar-e-Taibi, the group believed to be behind the Mumbai attacks, were professors at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore...
> A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.
This may be related to the countries where these people come from. This was on HN a while ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227. On a broader scale less privileged people may pursue a career in STEM in these countries.
Every time there is a hurricane, it seems that it catches everyone unaware. Same for snowstorms. When California gets hit by a big earthquake (Magnitude 8 level), I can guarantee it's going to be complete chaos, despite the fact that we know it's going to happen.
Everybody should have at minimum 3 days of sealed food and water at home. That's how long it will take emergency services to reach you in case of a major disaster.
Back on to the topic of nuclear explosions. Most people have the misconception that they sound like a low rumbling that goes on for some time. In reality, they are a sharp crack, not unlike a conventional explosion, just a lot louder, as this video demonstrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwkTYeukE4