> I do know that it isn't the direct hit that you need to worry about

Well, that varies. :-> I was a Minuteman missile combat crewmember back in the 70s, and we did worry about direct hits. Nobody worried about fallout or other survival issues, because we figured no one would.

But that's a different situation.

Actually, what I meant was that if you were at/near the site of a direct hit, you wouldn't be worrying afterward.

However, I believe that most atomic bombs are detonated in the air for maximum destruction, so 'direct hit' is something of a misnomer. Land-delivered ones, I have no idea.

Sue

Ah! Gotcha. :->

The air detonations are for maximum destruction of non-hardened targets like cities. For launch facilities and missile silos, the detonation is on or in the ground to dig us out.

I think my biggest concern is dirty nukes, a shelter will become a coffin unless you have a way out that doesn't get you covered and filled with the dust. There's really no avoiding it unless you can run faster than the wind.

Good hide out for conventional attacks and whatnot, but like I said, if your backyard is Chernobyl it's just a coffin.

Good point. Not all of us would have this ability, but prevailing winds and potential evac routes would be something to consider when siting a house, or choosing an apartment. There are several nuclear power plants in this state. I'm no expert here, but almost all winter, the wind blows from N or NW, so if there was a radioactive steam release, the plume would travel S or SE. The reverse is true in the summer.

Fortunately, our power plants are not like Chernobyl, and dirty nukes are a car-bomb type localized threat right now as those who would use them against us do not have a mechanized system capable of delivering a high-yield weapon to this continent.

Russia and the former Soviet satellite countries still have some aging ICBMs, but what is the tactical reason to launch at us? To disrupt our economy? To destroy our industrial base?....Very tempting to wax political here, but hopefully you see my point.

I think the nuclear threat is very small here, compared to multi-source air and ground water pollution. I think those take a slow, silent, deadly toll. Just my personal opinion.

The shelters that have remained in good shape are almost all those with walk-in entrances and secondary uses. The ones with same-level entrances from basements or into the side of a hill, and particularly those with wide and easy to use doors are far more likely to get maintenance and remain in serviceable condition. Those that you have to open a bulky hatchway, climb down steep and narrow stair, worse still climbing down a ladder, tend to get ignored and neglected.

The divide is between those where you can open the entry door with one hand and get into while carrying a box in your arms, and those you can't. If a shelter meets that standard you can use it for many other uses like storage, playroom, wine room, or pantry. If it gets used; it gets maintained.

many shelters were built 60s, there was a big uptick in shelter building around the time of the Cuban missile crisis.

As close as it was we actually got closer to a nuclear exchange than people at the time realized. Recently it has come to light that a Russian sub captain had nuclear weapons and both the authorization and mission defined reasons. Thankfully he declined.

His account is that even though he had reason to use them, and depending on how you interpret his orders, the duty to, he didn't want to be the man who started WW3. Like so many other events in history it was down to the conscience of a single fairly unremarkable man that made the difference. It was the conscience of a captain in the navy of serving the organization we would later brand as "The evil empire" that saved us all. Point being we need to be careful about discounting the humanity of, and vilifying, our present-day enemies.

Interesting link on the shelter, thanks.

Here's a riveting read on the Cuban Missile Crisis that came out a couple years ago. I plowed through it on a camping trip, could hardly put it down.


http://www.amazon.com/One-Minute-Midnigh...7151&sr=1-1

One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War

The 1962 Cuban missile crisis is probably the single most analyzed episode of the cold war. In the past decade, declassified American and Russian documents have proved that a nuclear exchange was even closer than most scholars had previously realized. Dobbs, a reporter for the Washington Post, has used those sources as well as numerous new ones gleaned from two years of research in the U.S., Cuba, and Russia. Although nothing presented here will change the overall view of the crisis, Dobbs presents new and often startling information that again confirms that the thirteen days in October brought the world to the edge of an unprecedented cataclysm. Dobbs spends little time describing the characters of the key players, but he does convey a sense of men under immense stress as events threaten to outstrip their ability to cope with them. This is a well-written effort to explain and understand our closest brush with nuclear war.

> I think my biggest concern is dirty nukes

Dirty nukes aren't that dirty, and it doesn't spread that far, as I understand it. They're more properly called radiological bombs or radiological dispersal devices (if you have a degree, I guess :->), and they don't have that big a range even downwind because they rely on high explosives to spread the radioactive component.

Even if you were in a town where an RDD was exploded, the increase in radiation would not be generally fatal to the populace, and the increase in risk of, say, cancer would be small enough to make connecting any one cancer to exposure impossible. The major problem is hysteria, although that would be delayed till someone noticed the increased radiation - it would look like a regular bomb with some casualties from the debris.

An article here
http://csis.org/files/publication/091109_Terrorism_WMD.pdf
says the increase in cancer in a couple of blocks downwind of an RDD would be 1 death per hundred due to radiation in midtown Manhattan, with some deaths farther out but at decreasing rates (1 in ten thousand). See pages 64 and 65.

It would have to be cleaned up, and the disruption would be enormous because of the hysteria, but the actual death rate would not be great.

I'm from Texas, and I would want a shelter for tornadoes if I still lived there. Those suckers are totally devastating. Nukes? Not so much. I never lived near any terror targets, and I had no concern about fallout from the West Coast after living through all the fall out from our own atmospheric testing in Nevada. :->

Now I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I still have no concern over dirty bombs, and I live far enough from San Francisco that a small nuke there might not even attract my attention, assuming it's not an air burst.

I doubt the Cuban missle crisis was the closest we've ever come to catastrophe. I'm sure there are many more incidents that were more dangerous yet less publicised. For example, Nixon's Operation Giant Lance was extremely risky, stupid, and could easily have led to a nuclear exchange. And it did nothing to hasten the end of the Vietnam war, which was its intended purpose. What a sad period in history.

I was a kid in grade school then. I remember the fear in my parents eyes, as we sat riveted to the radio listening to the reports. They knew World War II firsthand, and they were afraid.