The conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East keep raging, Vladimir Putin has lowered the threshold required for Moscow to nuke Europe and Donald Trump is shadowboxing ahead of his return to the ring. You’d need almost divine reserves of Zen to not worry about where all this is heading.
Some people are really worried: they’re paying ‘eye-watering’ and ‘extortionate’ prices of up to £48,000 for nuclear bunkers in case the bomb drops, according to Metro. But surviving a nuclear war ‘doesn’t have to set you back thousands of pounds’, said the Daily Mail. You can build a shelter with ‘objects commonly found around the home’ like internal doors and shower curtains, according to the paper. So your ‘only expenditure’ should be ‘around £72’, on plastic sheeting and ‘a few broom handles’. Best of luck with all that.
The very, very worst thing to do in a nuclear war would be to survive it
I tried to build a homemade nuclear bunker myself once but in my defence I was only 11 years old at the time. It was the morning after I’d watched the BBC’s agonisingly grim nuclear war film, Threads, which portrays a nuclear strike on Sheffield. The film scared me so much that it turned me into a nuclear paranoiac overnight and it’s cast a (mushroom) cloud over my existence ever since. I can sense the march of impending Armageddon in even the calmest of news cycles.
As well as being paranoid about the bomb I’ve also become curiously preoccupied with it. I’ve watched dozens of films about nuclear conflict from The War Game (the only one to rival Threads for sheer hellishness) to the comparatively tame The Day After and the heart-breaking When The Wind Blows.
I’ve also consumed countless books, such as London After The Bomb and Nuclear War: A Scenario, which spelt out in painful detail the realities of nuclear apocalypse. One of my favourite podcasts is called Atomic Hobo and it’s presented by a woman who’s so obsessed with the bomb that she makes me seem disinterested and chilled out in comparison.
So having consumed so much graphic atomic content, I’m very surprised people are so keen to survive a nuclear war. Perhaps I could remind everyone of the excruciatingly obvious point that the very, very worst thing to do in a nuclear war would be to survive it?
A global all-out nuclear war between the US and Russia would lead to an absolute minimum of 360 million quick deaths, so your chances of survival are slim. Direct radiation and the fireball would kill millions within microseconds and then the blast wave would arrive to mop up any human life. You’d find those broom handles were a waste of money at this stage, and then you’d face the fallout dust, which would expose anyone left to terrible doses of ionising radiation.
Anyone who survived all that would contend with hell for the rest of their stunted existences: drastic changes in climate, widespread radioactive contamination and a terrifying collapse of society. A memorable scene in Threads sees a survivor offer her body to a man in return for a few dead rats for her to eat. Life really would be far from ideal and I wonder if you’d think that the £48,000 you shelled out to experience it was money well spent.
You wouldn’t even be safe if you lived hundreds of miles from where the bomb dropped because the ‘nuclear winter’ would cause drastic falls in temperatures and sunshine, a global agricultural collapse and disaster for virtually all forms of life on Earth for decades. That shocking collapse of food production would lead to protracted famine and the deaths of billions of people.
Those who survived to crawl through the rubble of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings went through hell. But even their awful experiences would be a crawl in the park compared those of any survivors of a future nuclear war; some of the weapons of today are far more powerful than the atomic bombs that dropped on Japan.
The human survival instinct is hardwired and it’s also only natural to want to protect yourself and your loved ones. But after a nuclear war the survivors will surely envy the dead, so don’t spend £48,000 trying to stay alive after the bomb drops. Don’t spend even £72. A much wiser pre-nuclear investment would be a bottle of whisky for you to drink as you rush to ground zero, as the sirens wail all around you.
Comments