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Surviving a nuclear attack
I'm more than a bit annoyed with this. He spends much of his time ridiculing the 50s and 60s civil Defense efforts, then later tells us pretty much the same thing, but in less detail.
The oft ridiculed "Duck and cove" bit was intended to protect you from thermal flash and blast effects if you were far enough from the blast to *maybe* survive them.
That is, minimize burns and try to keep you from taking too much damage from things like flying glass.
Idea of building home shelters, and having fallout shelters in buildings was also ridiculed. Including misnaming them "bomb shelters".
The idea was to protect against nuclear fallout. Radioactive particles raining from the sky after the bomb went off. You need certain amount of material or a *lot* of air between you and the particles.
He does talk about that near the end, but gets certain parts *horribly* wrong. For example he keeps talking about going *downwind*, Hell no! That's the worst possible direction to go. The wind carries the fallout plume downwind. so that means you'd be in the plume longer.
If you are downwind of ground zero, you need to go at right angles to the wind. That'll get you to a safe distance the fastest.
But if you are to the side of ground zero (ie if you face into the wind and ground zero is to your right or left) then head directly away from ground zero. Ditto for if you are upwind of it.
The big, important thing for trying to shelter yourself against fallout is that you are going to need to stay there for *days*. And you'll need food and water for that period. and if you don't have a way to detect radiation you *cannot* rely on the water pipes because they may have been compromised and contaminated. And, of course, the water system likely isn't working anyway.
Another, even more important problem is that you need to seal your shelter and find a way to filter the air so the fine radioactive dust doesn't get in. Even if you *don't* inhale it, it's dangerous to be around.
Mind you, rigging up a lot of this stuff isn't that hard. But you have to know how.
A couple of Dean Ing's books Pulling Through and The Chernobyl Syndrome have how-to articles in the back. The second book is more or less the first with some extra content.
The articles include how to build a homemade radiation meter and how to build an air pump and filters. Though as he's said since they were published, HEPA filters will do just fine nowadays. You just need a way to keep the filters away from you and be able to change them without exposing yourself much or getting any of the dust loose.
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The estimates from the Fifties and Sixties "proving" that a nuclear war would kill everyone on Earth were seriously flawed. They made several erroneous assumptions, such as that everyone else on Earth lived as tightly packed together as the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As well as that the damage from an explosion increases linearly, when more realistically it is at roughly the cube root of the increase in yield. They also assumed that all nuclear explosions would be low enough for the fireball to touch the ground. For maximum damage to civilian structures you want an airburst, which produces much less fallout.
I don't know if it's still offered, but about twenty years ago I took the CD radiological monitoring course. Very interesting.
I met Dean Ing once. He was a guest at RiverCon many years ago. Fascinating guy.
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and seriously flawed.
I've met Dean Ing as well. At Orycon, many years back. I and a friend asked him a few questioned about his "Streamlined America" trilogy. Especially about a certain wild boar. :-)
I've got several field manuals on radiation and shelter construction, but they're buried. Also have a Geiger counter that used to belong to a local power company (for the decommissioned Trojan plant).
Alas, it needs repairs as the "integrating" circuit quit working (probably a bad capacitor).