Originally published at Notes from the bunker…. You can comment here or there.

L.A. dry run shows urban nuke attack ‘a survivable event’

“This is a survivable event,” says Brendan Applegate, of the Naval Postgraduate School Center for Asymmetric Warfare, who helped design and carry out the exercise. “L.A. isn’t going to fall into the ocean and be gone forever. It will be a really bad day, but we need everyone to show up to work and save lives.”

Quite so. Even the bombings in Japan had survivors who were very close to the epicenters. In his remarkable book, Nuclear War Survival Skills (freely available on line), Kearny covers the amount of basic protection that would be needed to increase survivability by several magnitudes.

The notion that nuclear detonations are unsurvivable events seems to be untrue in the face of research and anecdotal evidence. In short, as long as youre not directly under the missle when it hits, and you can put several feet of earth or concrete between you and the blast, you’ll probably survive. (At this point the sheep start bleating “But who would want to survive after such a disaster!”..frankly, I would. Ignoring the motivational imperative to survive that is hardwired into our brain. I would want to survive just to be able to take part in the recovery and reformation of our civilization. A chance to start from a ‘clean slate’, as it were.)