I recently saw a comment chain about nuclear bombs, and that led me to thinking about this. Say there is a nuclear explosion in the downtown of my US city. I survive relatively fine, but obviously the main part of the city has been destroyed, while major zones extending from the center were also badly damaged. What would be a good response to (a) survive and (b) help out the recovery effort?
if you’re gonna die in nuclear strike, it’ll be most likely because a building you’re in collapses. unless you’re very close to a target that might get a ground burst or small nuke, like airport, large transit node like cargo railroad terminal, high level military command hq or such, you shouldn’t worry too hard about radiation either. in any other case, if you’re within fatal radiation dose range, then you’re also deep within overpressure-that-will-collapse-any-building range and instant-third-degree-burn-and-beyond range. at smaller yields you’ll see fireball range greater than fatal radiation range. play around with https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ to get the idea
if you’re outside, you’ll get thermal burns and might be thrown around but as long as nothing falls on you, and ignoring burns, you should be mostly fine. there won’t be utilities, no power, no water, no communications, so you better have some batteries. if you have shelter, then if you have water and food to weather it out, and if you’re upwind of groundbursts if any, then you’ll probably survive
…long enough to be drafted, because in space of day we went from peace to total war