Every once in a while, we hear a bunch of rumbling on the news about a possible pandemic outbreak or a chemical attack like sarin gas or anthrax.  Sometimes the news talks about nuclear reactors having problems – like yesterday in San Diego.  These are real threats that could happen because of accidents, terrorism or simply an attack on us by another country.  What are you doing to be prepared for this possibility?   Most importantly, do you even know what you should be doing?

If you’ve already looked into prepping for these threats, you’ve likely discovered that there’s not a lot of straight forward and clear answers to questions.

Want to get some REAL information on Nuclear, Biological and Chemical (NBC) Preps?  Have you tried to decide which gas mask you should be purchasing for your family?  Or wondered if you need to get other protective gear for potential quarantine and survival of a serious pandemic outbreak?

So have we!

We think we know a lot of the answers to these questions – but we decided to get it RIGHT!  So, we’ve arranged for Robert Goepp, a career Hazmat expert and instructor, to join us on the show.  Robert has done Hazmat work in the Military, for the Fire Dept, and for DHS and probably a few other places he can’t tell us about.   You can read a lot more about him here.

Come join us LIVE TONIGHT and ask him any and all questions you may have regarding Hazmat and NBC Preps!

During the PLC show, you can follow this link and participate in the live chat – and ask questions during the show.  You can also call us live and talk directly to Robert.

You won’t want to miss this one!  It’s not always easy to get a true expert in this area to talk to you.

Friday, February 3rd 2012, at 6 pm MST (tonight) the Preparedness Learning Center Podcast/Radio Show broadcasting LIVE with Robert Goepp of Midwest Safety Associates.

Potassium Iodide or KI is a salt of iodine and is what the body uses to make thyroid hormones.  If you are exposed to radioactive iodine through fallout , your thyroid will quickly absorb it into your thyroid and cause serious problems.  By super loading your thyroid with safe iodine via Potassium Iodide you can minimize your bodies absorption of radioactive iodine.  It should be noted that Potassium Iodide is NOT a cure for radiation sickness nor will it prevent other problems that will occur from fallout or radioactive exposure.

Potassium Iodide should be taken when exposure to radioactive iodine is imminent.  Local Government and Health Officials will notify the public if this precaution becomes necessary.

Taking Potassium Iodide does not provide 100% protection against radioactive iodine.  Factors include how soon prior to being exposed that Potassium Iodide was ingested, how fast it can absorb into your blood and the total amount of radioactive iodine the person is exposed to.  In other words, it’s critical to take as soon as notification is issued, that you take it in a liquid form and that you take the proper dose.  And, of course, that you limit your exposure to any kind of fallout as much as possible.

There are two typical forms of Potassium Iodide, liquid and tablet.  The liquid form typically comes as a crystalline powder that you mix with water.  Tablets come in 130 and 65 mg, the 130 mg are typically scored for easy cutting.  The dosages are as follows:

• Adults – 130 mg
• Breastfeeding Women – 130 mg
• Children 3-18 – 65 mg
• Children over 150 lbs – 130 mg
• Infants & Children 0-3 yrs – 32 mg
• Newborn – 16mg

Taking a higher dose of Potassium Iodide or taking more than is recommended does not offer more protection and may cause severe illness or death!

These doses of Potassium Iodide are sufficient for 24 hours.  Typical expectations of exposure risks are that if dosing is needed it will likely only be needed for 24 hours.  However, it is possible that exposure risks will continue for several days.  Local Government, Health Officials and Emergency Managers will notify you as to how long you should be taking it.

Potassium Iodide may be harmful to you if you are allergic to iodine or with certain skin disorders.  There is minimal risk to taking Potassium Iodide unless it is taken for several days, you take more than the recommended dosage or you have a pre-existing thyroid disease.

Summing it up:

In my opinion, the easiest way to figure out how much Potassium Iodide to store is to calculate the maximum adult dosage (not the lower children’s dosage) for each member of your family and multiply it by 7 (1 week).  This is designed to give you an excess to allow for spillage, etc.  So, for my family of 10, I calculate 130 mg X 7 X 10 = 9100 mg or 9.1 grams.  I purchase Potassium Iodide in 40 gram bottles (typically for $10 – $15) and have enough for pretty much my whole neighborhood.

The book is based on an EMP event and most of the things in it are pretty close to all the research I’ve seen on EMPs.  The survival story is quite well researched and explored as well.  The book covers the time period from when an EMP event occurs to one year later and includes several of the same type of survival scenarios we read in Patriots.  The great thing about this book is that it makes you think broadly about survival and just how prepared you really are for it.  Reading it made me think of some areas where I can improve my preps but also made me feel that I was well prepared in several areas.  The saddest part of this book is the realization of just how bad it will be for the wholly unprepared, which is a large majority of our population.

Some areas of interest from the book:

EMP Protection and Readiness

Connor has written a post about EMP protection via old microwaves and I’m now planning a future post that covers EMP in depth.  This book helps you realize just how devastating an EMP attack is – and how fairly easy and likely it is.  An EMP attack will knock out pretty much all power and all electronic devices – this includes cars with electronics – that are not adequately protected.  This effectively puts us about 500 years back in civilization – not only do we no longer have any modern advances but most modern day Americans don’t know how to live without them.  The vast majority of people have NO IDEA how to set up a system that will generate electricity, how to survive by gathering from the environment, or how to get water besides from their tap.

EMP is something that CAN be protected from, it’s just a matter of preparation.  There are definitely some things that would be very handy to have protected.  Finally, it was interesting to me that pretty much nobody in the book really realized at first what was happening.  I’ve been aware of EMP strikes for some time and would like to think I would have realized what was going on – but then, I’m a bit different from most people.

Community Survival

In the book they focus mostly on community survival.  It takes place in a town that is in the mountains – which does not apply to most people.  It was interesting to read how the town leadership came together and what they tried (or did not try) to do.  The book addresses the die off rates of those dependent on medications (after a month most people are out), overweight and out of shape, and old or infirm.  It talks a lot about the ethics and morality of triage in a community and dealing with determining who gets the remaining food.

Leadership

Who becomes a community leader in such a crisis?  In the book, much of the town control is turned over to the emergency coordinator (FEMA?) and the mayor takes second seat.  I’m not sure that we really elect our leaders based on how well they will respond to an emergency.  What I got out of the book in this sense is that the best solution may be to band with a smaller community, such as your neighborhood, and have the leaders be based on their experience and skills in surviving the situation.  Of course, that leader and group would fall under the purview of the town leaders but for some of us in bigger areas, town leadership has very little effect over us in such a situation.

Good Vs. Bad Communities

In the book they are basically in a “good” community – lead by people who actually believe in morals and values.  They are up against a “bad” community which is lead by fat-cat bureaucrats who are worried about their own survival over that of the community.  Additionally, the “good” community was concerned about the welfare of other communities and interested in banding together for the greater good while the “bad” communities saw the other communities as a place to dump citizens they didn’t want to support or as a protective shield.  This again leads me to the conclusion that localized leadership is important and cooperating with the town leadership as a smaller group could be a key to success.

Accessibility of Meat and other Rations

Areas were quickly hunted out in the book – and they lived in the mountains.  The book addresses the fact that most farming operations have been shunned out of existence in large community areas.  As a consequence of that, domesticated meat animals are in poor supply whereas in the outcast farming communities they are abundant.  However, supporting the large amount of animals would become impossible without constant deliveries of feed and would result in animals going to waste – a conundrum of our modern society.  Thinking about this has lead me to consider how to band together with the local farmers in my area (I live in one of those farming communities) and make plans for how to manage in a situation like this.

Epidemics

The book does a great job of hammering home the medical realities of a situation like this.  Huge amounts of people die off due to disease and infection.  Outsiders, especially those from other countries who were stranded at airports, bring in exotic diseases to which we have no pre-built defense and very few  drugs for.  Rampant death brings its own disease and exposure as well which can lead to problems.  On top of all this, general hygiene will be significantly different as people will likely rarely be able to bathe.

Roving Refugees

This is a big risk for smaller towns, especially rural communities.  As conditions will be exponetially worse in big cities as they are in small towns, refugees will be flooding out of the large cities and inevitably head towards small towns.  Dealing with an influx of refugees brings a great moral dilemna – do you allow your own community to suffer and greatly deplete the available food resources in order to keep the refugees allive?  Or do you forcibly control the refugee population and move them out without allowing them access to your food?

Immediate Need of Resource Gathering

The book points out many potential resources that are overlooked in the begining – the biggest being trucks on the road that are full of food – much of it perishable.  In an EMP type scenario, trucks will be littering the freeway and will either be raided by the population or will hopefully be harvested for rationing.  For preppers who are already stocked with most things need there isn’t as much immediate panic, but on day one supplies will be taken and hoarded – hopefully by those who will be wise and fair stewards of it.

Long Term Survival – Food Reproduction

The book covers everyone eventually tearing out their lawns and building “Victory Gardens”, they also cover stock management a bit.  The key takeaway here in my mind was that everyone needs to have a good stock of seeds and should already be planting a garden large enough to provide for themselves.  Many people will die in the time it takes for a harvest to roll around.

It is unfortunate that our society is so absorbed with “pretty”.  Lawns and decorative trees are a complete waste.  If all trees were fruit bearing, things would be drastically different in a TEOTWAWKI situation.  Lawns, while useful for certain activities are generally a waste of time, resources and space.  Imagine how well a TEOTWAWKI situation would go if everyone had gardens instead of lawns, fruit instead of decorative trees and a domestic meat animal or two and some egg laying chickens in their backyard.  Our pride, envy and self-absorbed obsession with pretty yards will likely ultimately be the death of us.

One of the related risks to a nuclear attack is an EMP blast. Rather than detonating the nuke at ground level and thus destroying infrastructure and human life, the bomb is deployed in the atmosphere, and an EMP blast results. In the former scenario you’d be dead immediately; in the latter, many would die slow deaths, widespread panic would result, and terror would take a drastic toll—all because people wouldn’t have access to their machinery and gadgets that enable them to do all of their basic, day-to-day activities.

Just think about all the things you do on a daily basis that require electricity: turn on the sink to brush your teeth; get in the car to get groceries; withdraw cash from the ATM; refrigerate your food; use the internet to follow the news; call your parents; turn on the lights at night. All of these simple, daily tasks require the electricity we enjoy in abundance today.

But an EMP blast would immediately change all of that.

What can you do to prepare for a possible EMP blast in the future? How can you shield your electronics to ensure that you can play with your iPod in a TEOTWAWKI scenario, or scan the radio for news updates? One option is to shield your gadgets with a Faraday cage.

A Faraday cage—named after its inventor Michal Faraday—is essentially nothing more than a simple electromagnetic shield. Basic versions are just metal containers or enclosures that block the penetration of electromagnetic radiation. For one example (that you can purchase), see here. If you’re really adventurous, you can build your own.

But me? I’m both a cheapskate and completely lacking in the DIY skill department. So I took the easy route. I bought a microwave.

Microwaves are a sort of reverse-faraday cage, in that they are constructed to keep the radiation inside the box. But it works both ways, meaning that the structure also prevents radiation from getting in. I found a cheap microwave on Craigslist, brought it home, and cut off the power cord (so that somebody couldn’t accidentally plug it in and turn it on, thus cooking my toys). Keep in mind that the microwave need not be functional to serve as a faraday cage—all it needs is its original structural integrity, but no electric bells and whistles.

Inside the microwave you would put whatever electronic gadgets you would want to have access to in a post-EMP environment. I’ve got a HAM radio, GMRS radio, AM/FM radio, and a few other electronic devices inside of mine. It’s important to realize, of course, that the use of electronic equipment implies having access to necessary batteries or generators, as well as any needed sister devices (i.e. a second radio with which to communicate). So you can store a couple of radios (to communicate with friends/family if somebody needs to leave), or have a HAM radio setup to communicate with remote parts of the country/world that were not affected by the localized EMP.

What’s the likelihood of an actual EMP attack? Well, that of course depends on where you live, and who you ask. :) But as in all things, general preparedness implies a broad “what if” mentality that tries to take in as many factors as possible. Having a cheap, old microwave is just one more item to check off the list!

As we’re previously discussed, if we are subjected to a Nuclear Attack, it is imperative that you have someplace to go, the means to get there and that your destination is well prepared.

Bugging Out

We’ve covered some of this in previous posts, bugging out for a nuke means getting out of the target zone. If you’re in a big city you’re going to hope you have 20 minutes notice to enact your bugout plan. 20 minutes isn’t very much time, your best hope is going to be to put 12 miles between you and the blast before the blast happens. Here are the essential components of your bugout plan:

1. Quick access to your vehicle and quick exit from a garage (if you park in one). Make sure you always park as close to the building exits as possible and if you’re in a garage, make sure you park somewhere that gives you the best opportunity to beat the crowd both getting out of the garage and getting out of town.
2. Keep an Emergency Kit in your car. You may need this if you’re forced to take shelter before you get to your planned location. There are several posts on this site that cover BOBs and EDC and what you should have with you.
3. Have a pre-planned route to get out. This should not be the most obvious route – those will likely be crowded by panicked people who have no idea what they’re doing. Plan your route and practice driving it.
4. Have a destination. You’ve got to be going somewhere, the woods won’t save you. Make arrangements with a friend that lives in a rural area that is more than 12 miles out, the further the better. You’ve got to make these arrangements now, not on the phone while your trying to drive like a madman to get there.

When Bug-Out means Shelter-In

If you live in the country or your plan is to head to friends/family in the country your plan is to shelter in place. This means you’ve got to have your preps stored there and things are in order. We’ll go over how the shelter needs to be protected and what needs to be there in a later post. The key thing here is to know where you’re going to go and know that someone is going to be there to welcome you.

Gathering Family

If you have kids or a spouse, you’ve got to think of them as well. Your bugout plan has to include a fast way to pick them up and get gone. This means a rally plan. We’ll discuss family rally plans in a later post but it basically means that your family has figured out the routes they’ll take, where to meet up and how to get there. If you have a spouse and kids at home, they need to pack, go and meet you at a pre-determined destination. If your kids are in a daycare you or your spouse need to be able to call them en route and have a fast way to grab them and go. Kids that are in school need to have a rally point that they should run to by the school so you can do a drive by and pick them up. All this is doable but it has to be planned ahead of time and it has to be able to be executed very quickly.

Other Preps

If there is an adult at home when things get announced, what should they grab in the couple minutes they’ll have before they need to leave? 72 hour kits for sure, kids for sure, clothes on kids and a diaper bag if needed. Should they grab guns, ammo, food, medicine??? This all needs to be planned out now and checklists put together. When executing a bugout plan things are insane and people don’t think clearly. If they can grab a list and start working through it there is a better chance that important things will be grabbed.

Practice Runs

While they won’t be completely realistic, practice runs will help you make your list and help make sure that everyone knows what they’re supposed to do. Your first couple should be planned with everybody and prepared for. This gives you the chance to make and discuss lists before the drill. After the drill it is very important that you go through everything that happened and question whether it went smoothly, whether all steps were critically needed, whether there were things that were left out, etc. You should time each step so you know where your bottlenecks are. The overall plan has one important question to answer – can everything be done in less than 20 minutes? Once you’ve done a couple well planned drills do at least one surprise drill. Hopefully this will go smoothly. Do at least one drill a year, more if possible. Make sure everyone knows their part and how to execute it.

Reality

The reality of the situation is that if you live in the city you probably aren’t going to be able to make a successful bug-out plan. If that is the case and your serious about surviving this, move. Move out to a rural area where you have a good chance of being safe. It will have a lot more benefits than merely surviving an un-likely Nuclear War.

If you are in the country already then you don’t need a big bug-out plan, you can shelter in your home. In an upcoming post, we’ll go over sheltering in place and what requirements there are for it.

Determining YOUR Scenario

In our opening post we provided some background information on what can be expected in the event of a Nuclear Attack. While one isolated Nuclear Incident by terrorists or some other force is what we can hope for, as preppers we must prepare for the worst possible scenario, a real WTSHTF type of event. For this discussion that means a full scale Nuclear Attack perpetrated by at least one foreign country against us. This scenario means multiple bombs hitting us, potentially in the hundreds. After all, if they’re gonna throw one at us, why not unleash them all and finish the job? That’s what we have to assume we’re prepping for.

Determining your Proximity

While there is no way to know exactly what the targets are going to be, the next best thing is to rely on expert guesses, intel and other sources of information. While it’s rather dated, this list of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary targets provides an outdated expert guess. Visit that link, read through it, it’s excellent information, then find your state in the list of targets and determine how far you live from a primary, secondary or tertiary target. This is very important, your proximity to the cities on this target list will determine what your scenario is and what you need to be prepping for.

Proximity = Blast Zone

If you live in a Primary Target City, your best option is to be fully prepped to bug out at a minutes notice. Then you’ll need to be vigilant in ensuring that you always have the ability to get notifications – my recommendation is that you subscribe to multiple news alert services that will send you a text message of any alerts that are critical to your area. Look for your local paper or news station’s emergency alert system, if you’re in a big city chances are that you can get a text message alert. Pay attention on a national level too. If one city gets attacked by a foreign country, chances are decent that your city will be attacked too. Set up multiple, redundant notification systems so that you know when it’s time to go.

Next, you’ve got to be diligent in maintaining a bug out prep plan. You should have a kit in your vehicle, you should have rally points arranged with your family, have an evac plan, etc (we’ll go over this more later).

The optimal scenario here is that you get at least 20 minutes notice of an inbound bomb. That gives you a very limited amount of time to get to your car and drive like a mad-man through your pre-planned and tested evac route. You’ll want this to be a less than obvious route because all the sheeple will be herding themselves and their iron horses along the obvious routes. Your primary objective is to put miles between you and where the bomb is going to hit. As you distance yourself, you’ll fall into the following ongoing prep plans.

The other option here is, if you have access to a deep underground, hardened shelter – you might head there. But know in advance that you won’t be the only one trying to get there and it might just not be possible to shelter there. You don’t have time for an Option B here so make dang sure that your Option A is feasible.

Proximity = > 1 mile < 12 miles from Blast Zone

Whether this is where you live or if you’ve bugged out from the blast zone you’re in slightly less danger. Your options are to bug out of the danger zone or get into a decent shelter – this can be a well prepared basement (we’ll go into this later). Just like in the previous scenario, you should set up multiple alert systems so you have the most time possible to get ready – particularly gathering the family to safety. With limited time and only one opportunity, every minute you can buy yourself is critical.

Proximity > 12 miles

Your primary concern is going to be fallout. The closer you live to the blast zone, the less time you’re going to have to get everyone into shelter. Dangerous fallout will be landing within the hour of a detonation. You need a notification system just like the people in the blast zone, you need a family rally plan and you need to have shelter preps taken care of.

Proximity > 50 miles

Don’t think you’re safe – you’re safe from the initial hell, but you’ve now got to survive and deal with the aftermath. Your situation is better because you have a little more time to react, but you can’t be slothful – the quicker you get sheltered the better chance of survival for you and your family. The biggest advantage here is that you don’t have to have a fully stocked shelter – you’ll have time to move things into it and hunker down.

This proximity is where we’ll base the rest of this series on since from here you have the highest potential of survival and you are looking at surviving the fallout situation, which is the primary point of this series.

Planning to Survive Fallout

There are several things you need to consider in order to properly prepare for fallout survival. Most of these will be their own post in this series. Each of these needs careful and serious consideration and decisions made.

1. Your bug-out plan – based on your proximity, what do you need to do?
2. Your family rally plan – getting the entire family to the Bug Out Location – even if that is home.
3. Fallout Shelter – can you do it in your house? Possibly. What are the requirements?
4. Food, Water and Food Preparation – you’ve got up to 3 weeks, you better have a plan to eat and drink.
5. Hygiene and Waste Management – again, 3 weeks is a long time
6. Personal Health – what First Aid preps do you need to make?
7. Entertainment – if you have kids, 3 weeks of being cooped up is going to take a toll
8. Communications – how will you get incoming news?
9. Shelter Defense – what if the depraved neighbors or others come calling?
10. Venturing Out – How do you determine if/when it’s safe to exit the shelter?
11. Home and Neighborhood Defense – You’re out, now how do you stay safe?
12. Venturing Forward – You’ve survived hell, how do you soldier on?

I’ve had some feedback that this is a depressing, doomsday, negative series. My response is – no it’s not. This is a very realistic scenario, it could definitely happen, but if you aren’t prepared then yeah, it’s a depressing, doomsday negative series cause I’m telling you you’re gonna die – which you are. You’re only going to survive this scenario if 1) you are INFORMED and 2) you are PREPARED. If you aren’t doing those, you’re condemning yourself to being shot by someone who is prepared while you are trying to steal their stuff to feed your starving family. As I said before, surviving this is simple, being prepared for it is a little more involved and will pay off. Ignoring it just gets you dead.

Why a series on Nuclear Prep?

Some of you might be up on this stuff but for the most part, when the Cold War went away so did major fear of nukes and as far as I know, a LOT of the information about a potential nuclear attack and how to prep for it and survive it was forgotten. It seems that a lot of people are almost too scared to actually confront the possibility, better to bury their head in the sand and pretend it just won’t happen than to study it and learn how to be prepared for it.

I’ve only recently (in the last 6 months or so) really come to the realization that I was clueless about a nuclear attack and really had no idea what to do in the event of one. In my attempts to learn about it and to come to a clear understanding of what needed to be done to be ready, the most significant thing I learned was that it’s really not that easy to get clear answers on this. The reason for this (i think) is that the preps you should make for a nuclear attack vary greatly depending on your location and situation. Your proximity to a high potential target for example greatly dictates what your response plan should be, what your sheltering plan should be and what your proactive protection preparation should be. All the books on this subject try to cover all these areas and it becomes rather confusing – in fact I may still be confused about some things.

My research has centered around preps based on my proximity to a potential target, which is pretty far since I live out in the country. City slickers will have very different requirements than I do. To the point that, if you live in a major city like Los Angeles, San Francisco, or New York your first prep should be to move cause otherwise you really don’t have a very good chance of survival – you’ll be reliant on getting a maximum amount of warning (20-30 minutes) to provide you with an opportunity to respond and shelter. While I’ll cover some aspects of what to do in other situations, this series will focus mostly on surviving a nuclear attack outside the proximity of the initial blast zone.

Dangers of a Nuclear Attack

I’m sure there was a collective ‘duh’ over the title of this section! The bottom line though is that if you are not in the proximity of the initial blast then the danger to you isn’t the actual explosion – it’s what happens AFTER the explosion.

Initial Blast Zone

What is the ‘initial blast zone’? Most research I’ve seen is based on the expectation that the bomb is a 10-kiloton warhead with a ground burst – meaning it explodes on the ground rather than in the air. Given this scenario, the initial blast zone is a 1 mile radius from where the bomb is detonated. Within this radius you can expect almost total destruction lessening as you get farther from the detonation point. The actual blast will flatten buildings and everything else around. The radiation from the explosion will burn up nearly everything within the zone. The only real chance of survival from deep within this zone is to be in a hardened underground shelter – and you’ll be there for a very long time.

Secondary Effected Zone

This zone extends in about a 12 mile radius from the Initial Detonation. Within this area there will be destruction from thrown material from the Blast Zone and extensive radiation from the detonation. This area will also be thickly covered with radioactive fallout within minutes of the Initial Detonation.
Radiation

Outside of the initial blast zone the Primary Threat is going to be exposure to radiation. This will probably not be enough to kill you right away – the real danger is being exposed to enough radiation that it will slowly kill you over a couple days or weeks. Further out, the danger is being exposed to enough radiation that over time you will develop major cancers that will kill you over several months. To survive this, you must be in a radiation safe shelter when the bomb explodes.

Fallout

Fallout is the danger to the rest of us. That huge mushroom cloud that we all know is associated with a nuclear detonation is the result of the explosion, it is all the dust and debris being blasted up into the air – completely radiated. This fallout, once airborne, can travel long distances before settling to the ground. Think of it as ash from a fire that is blown around in the air. As it settles on the ground it continues to be radioactive, potentially contaminating whatever it has come in contact with. The half-life of this radioactive fallout is anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks. That is, within 3 days to 3 weeks the radiation will have dissipated enough that it is ‘safe’ to venture out for short periods of time. During the fallout danger period, it is imperative that you remain in a fallout-safe shelter and that you take radiation meds (all this will be covered in detail later).

Disruption of Services

It is extremely likely, and should be prepared for, that all typical services will cease to exist in a full-on Nuclear Attack. This means you will likely be without power, water, natural gas, phone, internet, cellular phones – and subsequently you will be without sewer, heat, cooling, and most communication. The likelihood of a restoration of these services within a reasonable amount of time is almost zero. It will be a fairly long time before these services are actually available again. All of this must be taken into consideration while prepping for this scenario.

EMP Blast

As if all that wasn’t bad enough, there is a very high likelihood of an EMP wave destroying anything electronic. An EMP wave is an Electro-Magnetic Pulse, a blast of energy that will not register for humans, we won’t really know it happened, but will completely destroy modern electronic circuits. It can be accomplished by detonation a Nuclear Bomb in the air, less effectively by a ground detonation. This means almost all computers, all vehicles less than 30 years old, all appliances with advanced electronic circuits will be completely disabled. This effectively cuts off any mobility and almost all communications.

The Danger from Others

If you’re able to smartly survive this incident, your initial survival may be hampered by attacks from others who were not informed or prepared. Roving gangs or even just individuals will be stripped to their basic survival mode – willing to do anything to provide for themselves and their families. You will potentially be subject to starving people who have been 3 or 4 days without food, wandering around searching houses looking for food and anything else. These people will also be very sick, allowing themselves to be exposed to radiation and radioactive fallout. Hopefully your sheltering plan allows you to create the illusion of abandonment and emptiness. And hopefully it allows you to set up to take a defensible position against any who break in and attempt to steal what you have – most likely by murdering you. My hope is that after 3 weeks when we re-emerge that most of these types have died – either from killing each other, sickness or starvation.

Overall

What all this means overall is that in the event of a full-scale Nuclear Attack, we will be knocked back to the 1830′s. There won’t be food in stores, we won’t have vehicles to get there anyway, we won’t have power or gas. Transportation and thus Shipping and thus Commerce as we know it will be gone completely. You will not be able to re-stock your supplies, if you don’t have supplies you won’t be able to get them in a civil way. If you are able to survive, many many people will be dead – either from the attack or from radiation poisoning, starvation, deprivation and so on. To survive this scenario is really fairly simple but specific – you must be able to shelter in a location that is stocked with food, water, medicine and weapons and is hardened against radiation.

In the next few posts, we’ll go over several scenarios and how to survive them. We’ll cover how simple it is to shelter against fallout, what medications you’ll need and where to get them. We’ll also go over how to convert your basement to a fallout shelter, what things to think through and what you need to get stored up in order to survive this. Most importantly we’ll go over how to make an action plan with your family in order to get everyone to safety in the event of a Nuclear Attack.

In the meantime, I highly recommend you watch the television series Jericho. While there are some issues with their presentation and portrayal of a Nuclear Event, they do a pretty good job of creating a potentially realistic scenario. There are lots of things you will learn from it and lots of things in the show will get you thinking. That link will take you to the CBS page where you can watch both seasons of Jericho in their entirety for free.

The next post in this series can be found here.