Duck & Cover. There’s been a lot of talk in the news about being prepared for a nuclear exchange situation with North Korea (lately) and before that, the Russians and the Chinese. We grew up during the apex of the Cold War, and Spice and I were a young married couple when we watched the Berlin Wall come down.
Duck & Cover Drill
Duck & Cover in 2017? Say it ain’t so!
Nuclear exchange… those two words really don’t do justice to the horror that would ensue if either side of a conflict started chucking around nukes.
Here at Beans, Bullets, Bandages and You we don’t do politics, we don’t delve into them in any way. We do, however, try to clarify things.
Nuclear weapons release is entirely a political thing, not a military thing.
Sure, the military would be the ones who pull the trigger, but release authorization would come from the top of the command chain, the president or premier or dictator-in-chief or general secretary…
Using the 3BY philosophy of “stay in your circle of influence” and “don’t sweat what you can’t control”, what does this mean?
It means we need to be thinking about tactical and strategic nuclear release, including the use of nukes to generate Electromagnetic Pulses (EMP’s).
How likely do I think the threat is? It doesn’t matter what I think, it only matters what YOU think. How severe would a threat be? For ground-strike or low-airburst nukes, it would suck to be under or near one, or in the fallout path, but other than that it would not be that bad. How bad would an EMP or a series of EMP’s be? Catastrophic collapse, TEOTWAWKI (The end of the world as we know it).
Balance
What we must do is balance our prepping with a reasonable risk analysis. Do we REALLY believe Country X is going to nuke us (and become a large charcoal lump on a map)? If we do, then I’m thinking we should be busy like bees working towards EMP preparedness.
EMP’s focus our prepping… but not why you might think…
Spice and I always think about EMP’s as a guide to our prepping, simply because it’s the worst case scenario for us and almost any prep that we do for an EMP is also useful for just about every other situation. We don’t personally believe an EMP or catastrophic Coronal Mass Ejection (CME – a really wicked bad sun flare that kills all electronics) will cause TEOTWAWKI, but massive CME events have happened as recently as the 1800’s.
My point to all of this? Be thinking about it, and start your own “risk analysis” of your life, if you haven’t already.
Back when I was a kid, we were taught to “Duck & Cover”. I was a military brat, and even though this film was dated by then, we sat through it several times a year, and then practiced ducking and covering our heads to protect us from the blast of a nuclear bomb.
I’m putting it here for you to watch and “enjoy”… several years ago it was really funny to watch… with the recent news? Not so much.
I think a lot of that old 1950s Civil Defense thinking needs to be dusted off.