Baby Duck And Cover

Given: Nuclear war would be a bad thing.

And please believe me when I tell you that every possible nuclear war scenario has been wargamed out 20,000 times, and continues to be, multiple times annually, in multiple countries, particularly the nine (so far) acknowledged to have functional nuclear arsenals. And we usually assign our brightest strategists to play the OPFOR's side, just to keep everyone honest.

And what is the result, in every one of 20,000 scenarios?

It's that if one nuke flies, from anywhere, to anywhere, ALL of them fly, worldwide, times every country that has them, generally within about 72 hours of Event Zero. Every. Single. Time.

Go back and read that again in case you missed it. I have no need to bullshit anyone on this; it's findable in a hundred open-source articles. You could look it up.

So knowing that, you have three things to occupy your time.

1) You either have access, within minutes (measured in single digits) to a fallout and/or blast-proof nuclear shelter, with the necessaries to ride out the actual apocalypse. Or, you don't. Either way, you have nothing to worry about. For different reasons, in each event.

2) If you feel the need to Chicken Little anywhere on the internet, to any degree, about decisions around the world which would unleash a nuclear weapon, over which you have less than zero control (and I'm not naming any names or pointing any fingers here), your posts and bloviations generally aren't going to age well. Because

3) Either nothing is going to happen. (And for but one example, if you're Rootin' For Putin, his life expectancy if he reaches for the nuclear option can be measured in the draw time for any one of a dozen Makarovs pointed at his head from phone booth range. Which is why he's rattled that saber 57 times in the last three years, with zero intent to ever do anything, because he reads the same wargame studies from his guys.) Or pretty much all life north of the equator will be snuffed in a very short period. And you're back to Point 1, above.

Either way, nothing you could say or do on the topic is likely to make any difference for you, or anyone you'd reach, unless they live in Australia, or had 8-figure disposable incomes to establish a zombie apocalypse warlord base of operations - and did exactly that YEARS ago.

Neither you nor anyone reading your stuff is on the Nuclear Football phone tree, and our first clue about things will likely be when the weekend football feed goes all snowy with zero warning, followed by an annoying tone coming out of the tube.

If they even bother. It will be even less useful that anything else FEMA has ever done. Learn that now, and wrap your head around it ahead of time. If you're not 20 feet from a long-term shelter you control, you may as well just bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.

Sorry to piss on your apocalypse party, but there it is. Some of us went through this before you were born, for decades on end, and figured all this out before you got out of plastic pull-ups.

See if you can guess why we're less than impressed with it the second time around.

If anyone really cares, there are great books on the whole topic, most of them free online as pdfs, and so old most of the authors have already long since died. (That right there should serve as a hint about how timely this information is.)

So at the end of the day, all you're accomplishing, by running to and fro on the topic, is advertising your Baby Duck status to all and sundry, because you just started noticing a subject that was old news by about 1960. (For Common Core grads, that would be 64 years ago.) That's not a good look, nor a great resume-builder.

And unless you own one of those old Atlas or Titan missile silos (in which case, why bring the topic up at all?? You don't need more drop-in guests come the day...), and have converted it into a plush nuclear war retreat long before now, all you're doing is killing electrons and wasting bandwidth, and you're not going to be one of the 1%-of-the-population surviving nuclear mutants who comes out of the other end of that pipeline, should the unthinkable happen, to a statistically inarguable 99% certainty.

So stop flapping your wings, squawking, and shitting everywhere.

It's kind of embarassing.

For you.

So maybe less clickbait, and more utility, over something that actually matters.