I sure as hell don't want to end up as a crispy critter in the event of a nuclear "false-flag" attack. Some of you already have a shelter that you can run to. The rest of us will have to improvise a shelter as best we can out of whatever materials we can can muster. Cresson Kearney, the author of "Nuclear Survival Skills," advises digging a trench underneath a car and then duck-taping some plastic sheeting around the outside. I like this idea because it is simple, easy, and practical: all it takes is a car and a shovel and a few other materials that most of us will be toting around anyway. Now, a car-over-the-trench shelter isn't going to help very much if you find yourself anywhere near the epicenter of a nuclear blast, but then again, the same is probably true for just about ANY type of shelter that isn't buried deep underground and isn't made out of hardened concrete. The first rule of thumb, then, is that you don't want to find yourself anywhere near the epicenter of a nuclear explosion! OK, but what are you going to do if you suddenly find yourself at a fairly safe distance away from the explosion, which is perhaps a thousand miles or more AWAY from the epicenter, and you learn, thanks to the presence of your emergency radio, that you have only a matter of hours in which to prepare for the inevitable fallout ? It is precisely this kind of scenario that you will need to think about and prepare for. You already know what it takes to survive a nuclear attack because you've read the book about nuclear war survival skills. It isn't going to be a problem to ventilate yourself while inside your shelter because you already have all of the materials you'll need for constructing a hand-held ventilator right in the trunk of your car. You have food, water, a decent gas mask, and all of your bug-out gear.

The only problem is that you'll need a place where you can bug out to !

My own inclination is to pry open a preordained manhole cover and to jump inside with my "bug-out" gear and with a few weeks worth of food and water. I have never pried open a manhole cover, so I really don't know if that would be a suitable place for an improvised fallout shelter or not. Does anyone know ?? I would hate to get arrested by the police for prying open manhole covers.