Experts Say Staying Put Is Safest Move After Nuclear Attack

[babylonsister]

Experts Say Staying Put Is Safest Move After Nuclear Attack
By Daniel Fowler, CQ Staff


In the event of the most likely type of nuclear attack, people would be better off ignoring the instinct to flee and remain inside their homes, security experts said Tuesday.

“The natural inclination is to flee and what they’re going to do is they’re going to get caught in gridlock,” said Cham E. Dallas, director of the Institute for Health Management and Mass Destruction Defense at the University of Georgia. “They’re going to get caught in gridlock because everyone else will be fleeing, and that is not viable. Most people should not flee” because they won’t be affected.

Dallas made his comments following a Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee hearing on confronting challenges a day after a nuclear attack.

Ashton B. Carter, co-director of the Preventive Defense Project at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, echoed the sentiment. “Certainly most of my friends and family who don’t do this, they think that a nuclear weapon levels an entire city and that anybody nearby better get out of the way or they’re going to get covered in radiation,” Carter said after the hearing. “That’s just not true.”

In fact, Dallas’ written testimony said, “The highest impacts of radiation generally occur when people are caught in the open, or are tied up in traffic jams trying to escape in vehicles which provide little protection against fallout.”

more...

http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002704406

[Warren Stupidity]

1. Hogwasher's 'most likely attack' is a single 10k bomb.

I suppose that is the 'most likely attack' where anyone anywhere near an explosion has to worry about anything. In the other likely scenario, the one where people with actual nuclear forces unleash an actual attack, annihilation of most major metropolitan regions is the general outcome. What your plans are before you get incinerated are mostly irrelevant.

[yy4me]

2. When I was young, they told us to hide under our desks at

school. Cover your head with your hands and stay put until you are told it is OK to come out. That was the 1950's. So much for the progress of man. Now I am old and, in spite of all the advances in health and technology, I guess nothing has changed.

Sad

[Echo In Light]

6. The crucial aspect that's changed is we're closer to nuclear war now...

Than throughout much of the Cold War PR campaign.

[Edweird]

22. I thought the Cuban missile crisis was the closest.

[jtrockville]

3. "most likely type of nuclear attack"

Isn't the most likely type of nuclear attack the kind where we bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran? Does CQPolitics publish in other languages (like Persian or Azeri)?

[Echo In Light]

4. That last sentence puzzles me. What first hand experience is it based on?

"The highest impacts of radiation generally occur when people are caught in the open, or are tied up in traffic jams trying to escape in vehicles which provide little protection against fallout."

Did this occur among the doomed populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Granted I've not studied the matter in depth, however, realizing how most American cities would def be targeted with more than one warhead, getting the fuck out in a big goddamn hurry makes good sense to me ... which, I dunno, seems unlikely anyhow as that nightmare scenario would involve you doing whatever it is you're doing at that time, only to be vaporized one tenth of a second later.

[BadgerLaw2010]

8. Models of radiation plume and how much particles penetrate various things.

Your house provides pretty good protection from radioactive particles. Outside, you don't really have any.

If it's a multi-warhead attack, we pissed off Russia and your city is going to be incinerated before you could get anywhere. Fleeing in this case is pretty pointless.

[Junkdrawer]

5. FWIW, The Magistrate posted a few months ago that the attack will be this summer....

Caught my eye at the time....

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=124x192336#192349

[Botany]

7. ah, a little science

if only a small fraction of the world's nuclear weapons
went off .... and it matters little where our future would
be in doubt .... forget about the poor bastards who will
get roasted alive but think about the tons of highly
radioactive fallout .... the Chernobyl nuke will kill something
like 100,000 people thanx to radioactive iodine which
when taken up by people causes cancer of the thyroid ....
also the radionuclides and toxins will make it to the oceans
and kill vast amounts of the phytoplankton which make about
1/2 of the world's Oxygen .... no O2 = no life for us humans.

And these toxins will stick around for a long time.

The most significant isotope of plutonium is 239Pu, with a half-life of 24,100 years.
(from Wiki)

[BadgerLaw2010]

9. Huh? Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear weapon. It was a big fire.

I can't even understand most of the rest of what you are saying, but it looks like nonsense.

[Botany]

10. Yes, Chernobyl wasn't a nuclear weapon it was a fire @ nuclear power plant .

... but it did release lots of radionuclides that poisoned many people
some hundreds of miles away from the plant ..... and that is small
potatoes compared to the amout of "crap" nuclear waepons would
produce.


When you explode an atom or hydrogen bomb you suck tons of "stuff"
up into the air where it becomes highly radioactive .... when this "stuff"
returns to earth it is called "fallout" and the damage it will cause to the
earth's supportive capacity will be huge. Such as killing off much of what
produces the Oxygen we all breath.

[Marrah_G]

11. Scary stuff.

[BadgerLaw2010]

12. You have it backwards. Chernobyl was waaaay dirtier than any nuclear weapon could be.

The only way a nuclear weapon will be as dirty as Chernobyl is if it lands on missile silos or nuclear power plants and causes fallout of raw nuclear material similar to Chernobyl.

As far as an actual detonation? No way. Chernobyl is pretty much the worst possible nuclear situation other than an uncontrolled containment building fire that blew the roof off.

[Botany]

18. You are right

Chernobyl was lethal to the rescue workers and to
10s of thousands of others because of the radioactive
iodine which has caused many thyroid cancer cases.

But a nuclear bomb kicks up tons of crap too .....
In the late 1960s when the Russians and Chinese were
at each other's throats .... Russia was looking @ a preemptive
strike on China and some of it's nuclear arms and production
areas Dick Nixon sent Kissinger to tell the Russians that if
the "nuked" northern China (Manchuria) that more Soviets
would die in Siberia than in China because of the fallout.

So if ass-fucks bush and Cheney use "nukes" in Iran we will
kill people in surrounding countries as well.

[Leopolds Ghost]

27. Actually most plants & animals are remarkably tolerant of radiation from Chernobyl.

Only the trees in the path of the actual concentrated fallout died, and the radiation from that red ash (Wormwood Forest) was enough to kill anyone who came near -- it was like walking into a containment chamber.

But humans are among the few animals that care about reduced infant mortality, incidence of mutations, or live long enough to worry about deadly progressive illness from cancer in old age... birds and wildlife
love the wilderness that has been created in the no-go zone. Even wild
boars can be found there -- they nearly went extinct in Europe.

One guy went into former above-ground nuke testing zones here in the US
(illegally) and made a coffee-table book illustrating nature's ability
to cope. It is us who are likely to starve and die at increasing rates.

[Leopolds Ghost]

26. Not just "fire": a critical meltdown of fissile material producing lava: sand boron & Uran mix

Viewers who saw the light from the "fire" were struck dead shortly
afterwards because the radiation from looking at it was more deadly
than the flash from Hiroshima. The ash from the "fire" caused a
stand of trees known as the Wormwood Forest to glow red and anyone
entering the stand of trees would die from walking into that area
even with a lead suit on, until they were plowed under by tractors
whose drivers died immediately afterwards.

A similar Chernobyl-style incident was contained when two scientists
gave their lives to prevent a super-critical "fire" from occurring
at a research laboratory when, wearing next to no protection, they
were experimenting with neutron shielding of a solid sphere of Urand
accidentally *dropped* the Ur, causing it to go critical immediately.

The scientists gave their lives to retrieve the Ur by hand in seconds
before the entire building blew up, the surrounding scientists lives
were spared although they all died of cancer much later.

Critical is when a Chernobyl like explosion occurs, creating
incomplete reactions producing devastatingly toxic isotopes
that people can't even get near. The material heats up enough
to explode and form lava, but in doing so expands kinetically
and becomes sub-critical again.

Super-critical would be theoretically "cleaner"
because all the fissile material would have been spent, leveling
the entire surrounding area and producing more stable long-term
isotopes that "merely" kill off the people near the blast and
produce cancer and infant mortality for everyone else. But within
a few generations the area would be clean again. I think.

[AnnieBW]

13. Stay put, bend over

and kiss your a** goodbye!

[DFW]

14. In event of a nuclear attack, the BEST thing you can do is:

Convince yourself, no matter how strongly you may think the evidence
points to the contrary, that there is a country club afterlife.

Don't take too long, either.......

[ThomWV]

15. "Duck and Cover" was how they taught us when I was in school. Bwahahahahahahaha!

You see one of those mushroom clouds it won't make a whole lot of difference if you stay put or run like hell.

[TheWatcher]

16. Duck And Cover.

Nice to see the 50's are back En Vogue.

[Xenocrates]

17. Duck and Cover with Sauce

This is the fire in the theatre mentality. Someone is going to be trappled to death trying to escape, while those left behind might survive, might not.. depending on the burning building consuming or collapsing on them.

With todays nuclear weapons, if you are anywhere near ground zero, your chances are nil. Finish the movie.

[bmbmd]

23. If you've got a few minutes, here's a link

to the original "Duck and Cover" film I saw in school. Bert the Turtle, you know.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=C0K_LZDXp0I

[eShirl]

19. why are they bringing it up now (what's safe after a nuclear attack)?

:hide:

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

20. Excellent.

Now that everybody knows they should stay in their homes, I can flee the disaster by driving down empty freeways!

[Ghost in the Machine]

21. I live 8 miles from a nuclear plant. If it blows, my kids and I have a plan..

we're going to sit around and watch each others' flesh melt off until our eyeballs roll down our faces..

Big fun for the whole family, huh?

[alarimer]

24. I'd rather die during a nuclear attack than try to survive afterward.

I think the best place to be would be ground zero. Imagine the hellish aftermath. No thanks.

[Leopolds Ghost]

25. Lesson 1: BEND OVER AND KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE!

:evilgrin: