You will die if you do this. Yes having dirt over the windows is a good thing but if you are in the area where the bomb(s) have gone off it's too late. Don't try it. Stay indoors. One you don't know when the fallout is going to start falling. If you are outside when it does you're pretty much going to be dead. The dust settling on your plastic sheet or umbrella is radioactive. It doesn't need to touch you to kill you. It will bombard you with rads through the sheet or umbrella and you will die within hours to days. Also you don't know if there are going to be more bombs going off in your area. Build a shelter within the basement. Actually you should do this even if the windows are covered with dirt. Pick a corner furthest from the windows and start piling stuff into it. Leaving enough room for you and others of course. Distance and the thicker the materials between you and the radiation the better. If you have a basement it should already be stocked with food and water. Also while the windows shouldn't covered 24-7 I'd recommend having filled sandbags somewhere on your property where if you fill you might need them you can just pile them up outside the windows. They will work just as well and it's much faster than a shovel. Also if you can't go outside to cover the windows you could, if the sandbags are in the basement, put the sandbags on the inside covering the window. That would work as well.
As for Duck & Cover I know people like to make fun of it but it's actually a good idea to learn it and teach it to others. Obviously if you're to close to the bomb nothing will work. Duck & Cover is for those who are not vaporized or on fire, for the people far enough away to not be instantly killed but are still in great danger of being killed. If a bomb goes off and you are not instantly dead you have anywhere from a few seconds to almost a minute to act. (depends on your distance from the bomb) Don't stand there with your jaw on the floor looking at the mushroom cloud. Move. If you're outside lay down. Try to get into a ditch. Cover yourself. Try to get behind an obstacle like a building. Not a glass building. If you have no choice because you're in a city try to get somewhere where falling glass won't hit you. (don't hide in, behind or under a car/truck) Whatever you do if you are outside you have to lay down. If you're standing when the blast wave hits you then you will be thrown about like a rag doll and probably killed. The blast wave as powerful as it is will have trouble lifting you off the ground if you're laying down. That doesn't mean it can't happen. It just means the odds of it happening are far lower than if you're standing up. Inside, quickly move away from windows. Get down. Don't stand in your house. Get on the floor. Get to the side of the house that is farthest away from the incoming blast wave. Interior of the house such as a hallway is usually the best. When the blast wave comes through it's going to be throwing debris everywhere. It's going to be ripping buildings down from overpressure (the further your house is from the bomb the better for you). Your windows will probably shatter and debris from outside will be thrown into your house. You may still die but ducking and covering will increase your chances of surviving. And that's the main point of Duck & Cover. People ridicule it because they assume that everyone will die when a nuclear bomb goes off in the area. But it's simply not true. You can survive a nuclear bomb if your far enough away and you take immediate action to increase your survival rate.
We had earthquake drills in Seattle in the 60s. Concept of a nuclear attack was unknown to me outside of fictional stories. I do remember fallout shelter signs in most buildings. I think Donnie boy has single handedly turned the clock back to a more racist and fearful time. These are the good old days.
Meh. Lived at Ground Zero for 50 years. Even as kids we knew Duck & Cover was just a way to keep us from running wild in the halls when the sirens went off. What was funny in a macabre way was that the girls were told to get under their desks, while the boys had to lie in the aisles with their hands locked behind their heads. Was the message "We need the future mothers of America!" or simply that most nuns disliked boys? But even before I saw the footage of Hiroshima and all those doomsday films like On the Beach and Fail Safe, I figured I'd be a shadow on the wall in minutes once those sirens went off. (Funnily enough, the sirens would also go off briefly at noon every weekday, for Reasons. There was one at the top of my block, and the trick was to get past it before it went off and blew out your eardrums. I don't know how the people in the adjacent apartment building didn't go mad. The last of those sirens weren't removed until the 1980s.) Where I live now is probably far enough from a secondary target (Long Beach/San Pedro Harbor) where I'd have an hour or so to puke up my guts before it was over, depending on the wind. No amount of ammo and canned goods is going to help that.
Or given that you went to a school with nuns they thought it would be bad for the boys to be seeing all those girls lying on the floor with their butts sticking up. Nonsense. If you have a proper shelter you can survive. You got a basement? Than you've already have a shelter that will keep you alive if you do some basic prepping. Congrats. Unless you're in LA. Than you're probably a goner cause LA is going to get pasted with the nukes.
A basement, in earthquake country? Not hardly. But, yeah, when the nuns start telling you in first grade that the Evil Godless Communists are just waiting to kill you (although they had a worse hard-on for China than for the Soviets), you kind of figure: Nothing I can do about it. Hey, anybody wanna play stickball later? Of course, it starts even earlier, as soon as you can talk: Now I lay me down to sleep I pray the Lord my soul to keep If I should die before I wake I pray the Lord my soul to take
I've studied nuclear weapons and their effects for years and I can assure you that if you are a dozen or more miles from the typical yield nuclear weapon that the it is quite survivable. People forget that most people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki survived the nuclear attacks (some survived both). I know much smaller yield weapons but more radioactive per kiloton than more modern weapons.
Out in the boonies I suppose you could survive if you had a bunker and you'd been hoarding for years (don't forget the iodine tablets), but in primary targets, with today's nukes, nuh-uh.
Again, I'm not a dozen or more miles from the target. I'm smack in the center. I know it's the fondest dream of some here that I'd be the first to go, but if I do I doubt I'll care what they think.
Depends. If its the North Koreans that attacked a target in America they would probably only (at most) be able to get a single warhead on target. Perhaps not even that. A warhead detonating several miles away could mean the lives of several thousand people spared
Don't be ridiculous. If you died where would wordforgers get their daily dose of sneering contempt, haughty arrogance and undisguised superiority..
I think we'll have more problems than finding a replacement Garamet that we probably won't notice she's gone. Like even having the internet or electricity or cities that we live in not being vaporized.
No. No you fucking haven't. What you are describing is one degree in nuclear physics and another in medicine. You have not studied nuclear weapons. You have idly leafed through popular opinions in magazines and paperbacks which you now misremember. Knowledge exists. It is not arbitrary.
Yeah, one way or another it will likely be bad for us. If Kimmy decides to go out with a bang we are the closest major metro in continental US. Or if it is a real war Kitsap Naval Base is getting glassed.
I've studied nuclear wars for years and I assure you all, even a little nuclear war will be terrible. Experts agree it would totally fuck our shit up. Look at what happened with 9/11. A few buildings get hit with airplanes and we're still feeling the immediate aftereffects. Imagine millions of Americans dead in an instant and a city or two destroyed. That would make 9/11 look like Happy Super Funtime.
Here's a way to find out if you'll survive a nuke. I typed LA. and set my bomb as the NK nuke test in 2017. They likely won't have anything remotely close to what we have. Here's the blast radios. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/