DesertCreosote

A lot of other people have posted some really good stuff in terms of coping, and I think most of them are completely correct; it’s not something you can control, so it’s out of your hands and not really worth worrying about. That said, knowing that has never helped me stop worrying about something before, so I figured I’d type this up in case it helps. 🙂

Nuclear weapons have been a particular interest of mine for years. I’ve read most of the books out there on them, and I’m very familiar with the strategy involved in how they would be deployed in a conflict. I’ve also been to Trinity Site at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico twice, where the first nuclear weapon was tested, so I’ve seen their impact in person (I also have plans to visit Japan, and also the testing sites in Nevada, but haven’t been able to make those work out yet).

If a nuclear war happens, it won’t be the end of everything. They are big, scary, and should an actual full-scale exchange take place hundreds of millions (perhaps even billions) of people will die. It would be an absolutely cataclysmic event.

But that wouldn’t end everything.

A lot of people talk about how we have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world, which is hyperbolic. The Earth has seen much worse than a nuclear exchange, and it’ll be fine. Overall life will also be fine; plenty of plants and animals would get wiped out, because it would be a mass extinction event, but a huge amount of life would survive and be just fine.

What people mean is that human life would be destroyed, and yeah, fair enough, we’d definitely have a major regression in civilization. But it wouldn’t kill everyone (probably nowhere even close to everyone), and humanity would continue to exist. The impacts of the dust kicked up by the bombs would probably cause some global cooling temporarily, similarly to a couple huge volcanic eruptions at the same time would, and life would become pretty difficult, but it won’t wipe us out.

If you live in a major city in the United States, Europe, Russia, or China, none of this really matters to you. If a nuclear war happens, you might get 10-15 minutes notice, but probably the first you’ll know about it is when an intensely bright flash happens. If you’re close enough, you won’t even have a chance to understand what it is. If you’re a bit further away, you might survive the initial flash of radiation, but be killed by the blast wave, or by burns caused either by the intense amount of heat released or by the radiation itself. The exact radius for this is going to vary based on exactly what type of warheads are detonated in your area, but we’ll say if you’re within a couple miles you’ll likely be killed within a few days because of that.

If you’re outside that second zone, you’re going to probably be okay, at least for a while. You might have some burns you can recover from, your lifetime risk of cancer might be a lot higher depending on where you were, and you may have other injuries related to the bombing, but you’ll probably survive long enough to help with recovery. Congrats!

You asked what you can do to prepare. Well, honestly, not a lot. I’d recommend preparing the same way you should for basically any other large-scale disaster. Ignoring radiation (I’ll get to it in a minute), a nuclear bomb’s aftermath is going to be similar to an earthquake or large fire. Keep a few days or a week of bottled water on hand for each person in your household (and maybe a way to purify water longer-term), have food supplies, some basic medical gear, and emergency lighting/communications equipment. If you’re really concerned about nuclear war specifically, add in some iodine tablets for each member of the household. If you do this, you’ll be prepped not just for nuclear war, but also any of the other much more likely disasters that may occur in your lifetime.

Now, as for the radiation question. Most nuclear weapons are not made to spread large amounts of radiation around. They absolutely will release radiation, but it makes the reaction less efficient, reduces yield, and massively increases cost per bomb. I’m not saying here that it’s not something to worry about or be aware of, but it’s a smaller problem than Hollywood and mass media would have you believe it is. Avoid eating or drinking things that are from directly downwind of an explosion, and try to not let any ash or particles stay on you/breath them in, and you’ve done what you can. Most of radiation exposure management comes down to keeping particles out of your body, particularly the lungs. The longer you’re exposed to radiation, the more likely it is that it’ll do something bad to you. The best remedy is to keep it out of your body as much as you can, and put distance between it and you so the inverse-square law can help.

I hope this helps a bit. Overall, even with global tensions rising, I think the chance of nuclear war is very very low. We’ve been very very close to at least a limited exchange before, and pulled through, and despite everything going on I think the chances of an actual nuclear exchange remains incredibly slim. If you want to prepare, pretend it’s like another large-scale (and much likelier) disaster, and prep for that.

I’ve skipped over some things that weren’t really pertinent, like actual nuclear war theory, and simplified other things, so if you want me to expand on any of this let me know! Nuclear history has been one of my special interests for years and years, and I enjoy talking about it.

Do you have a better solution?

We know it’s rigged. We’ve known it’s rigged for decades. Until the system is changed so the states with tiny populations don’t have an outsized influence on things, it’s not going to get fixed.

Saying “peaceful protest isn’t enough” is also hand waving away what happens when protests aren’t peaceful. You’re essentially saying “people need to hurry up and volunteer to be brutally killed to change things,” and no matter how patriotic somebody may be that’s a pretty tough sell.

We’re not delusional. We see how bad it is. There are a lot of people protesting and taking action every single day across the country, but it’s harder to see a) because they don’t get much coverage from the media, and b) because while the total number of people protesting is quite large, they’re spread out across the entire nation and that’s hard to capture in a picture. Add into that the surveillance networks working to identify and punish those people, and there’s an additional chilling effect which reduces the overall visibility of those protests.

Yep. I switched to Kagi a bit over a year ago, which is paid search. And I pay for my email through Migadu; I thought about hosting it myself but honestly it seemed like more potential hassle than I wanted to deal with.

I’m guessing A Christmas Story (1983).

A central theme is the main character Ralphie really wants a Red Ryder Carbine Action 200-shot Range Model air rifle for Christmas, but all the adults he expresses this to insist he’ll shoot his eye out.

Normally I would agree with you, but given how much they care about privacy (as indicated by what they write about and talk about on their podcast), I don’t think tracking is what they’re after in this specific case.

And they know that the signup won’t completely block AI, but it does help.

Large commercial airlines already fly to untowered airports. It’s not incredibly common, but it does happen.

If as others have said, it massively reduces the number of flights that can be handled at once; you almost certainly won’t see parallel landings at an uncontrolled airport, for example. But it wouldn’t completely stop air travel.

I actually just read the entire thing for the first time last month (1999 through to the modern day), and I had to go look up her social media accounts to make sure she was okay when I got to the last strip in April 2024.

I’m really excited that it’s back, but a bit bummed that I need to follow it in real-time now. 😁

Yes, and the comics around it are absolutely amazing!

Here’s a link. The arc started at the end of June 2020, and ran through the middle of July. The strips after that revolve around coming out to her wife, and what happened there.

The building was sold to the university with ICE as a tenant in 2023. They were originally expected to move out “within a few months” of that sale, and their lease ended in April 2025. However, they had a contractual option to extend the lease through 2028, and they’ve chosen to extend it at least through April 2026 while their new building elsewhere is being built.

So yes, they’re tenants, but the university didn’t choose to rent to them. In fact, the university would like them to be gone for more than the current political reality; the university would very much like to renovate it and use it as academic space.

I played a Protector Aasimar Barbarian named Krill who was a fairly average scholar who had decided studying wasn’t for him. He heard somebody talking about “Power Word Krill,” and decided that he wanted to learn how to do it. He would basically go along with the party on everything (sometimes a little too quickly, he was hard to kill and often forgot others were squishier), but was absolutely obsessed with finding Power Word Krill.

He was asked multiple times if he was instead looking for “Power Word Kill,” but he really wanted to summon a lot of small crustaceans on demand. Or maybe it would just summon a big one, he didn’t know and was fine with either situation.

You may well be correct. However, I do think there will be an appetite for justice after all this is over, and I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that a future administration would go back and look at people from the current administration.

It’ll all come down to who’s making the decisions at that time, and whether the political calculus works out one way or another. I think it’s too early to speculate as to what an administration that is 3+ years in the future would do.

It’s definitely possible that this will continue across multiple generations. However, far more tyrannical governments have completely fallen apart after a couple of years, and it rarely goes well for those who had power in that time.

Regarding North Korea, yes they’ve had over 75 years of tyrannical autocracy, but that wasn’t in a vacuum. They have been largely dependent on first the Soviet Union, and now China; without those countries backing them up, they would have collapsed long ago. And Kim Il Sung specifically worked to create deification for his bloodline to consolidate power within his family; Trump so far has not been successful in doing the same, and so far nobody else has been able to match his cult of personality. As with many dictatorships throughout history, when the figurehead is gone, the regime starts to crumble.

I do take issue with your implication that hoping the regime will end is delusional. If we accept that we’ve already lost, what’s the point of fighting back? I do genuinely believe that this will end sooner rather than later, not out of delusion, but because so many people are fighting back against the administration and its goals without giving up. Even where I live, in one of the most conservative states in the country, there are tens of thousands of people who have turned out for protests and rallies. There have been ongoing daily protests, and even the conservatives I work with are upset about what’s happening.

We’ve been in such incredibly dark places before as a country, and we’ve made it out because people refused to give up. I refuse to assume this is inevitable, and I refuse to give up on working towards something better.