If You Live Near These Cities, You Will Die (In a Nuclear War)

Spoiler alert: you will very likely die regardless!

I recently watched the infamous British 1984 movie Threads, and it got me thinking about military and secondary installations that I lived closest to. If you don’t know, Threads was the British answer to America’s 1983 Day After, only I’d argue that Threads did a far better job, especially as it wasn’t held down by American censorious standards; the true horrors of nuclear war came to life on the British screen than they ever could on American television networks.

While military installations would be the first things targeted in the event of a nuclear war, as shown in the film, they would be closely followed up with secondary targets, specifically targets of principal population and therefore economic value (AKA ‘countervalue targets’). Therefore, even if you live far away from a military base (indeed, you could be hundreds or even thousands of miles from one), you could still find yourself on the business end of a hostile ballistic missile.

Sheffield’s nuclear annihilation served as the demonstration piece of Threads—and, I won’t spoil it further. Watch it for yourself, and I hope it will have left you with as much impact as it did on me, as it does on any living soul that bears witness to it.

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Of course, the risk of nuclear war is just as high as it was in the 80s, as we all know. During the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, during Ukraine’s first major counteroffensive, NATO officials revealed after the fact that the risk of nuclear war had jumped up to 50%. To be clear: while NATO is as prone to exaggeration and farce as the Russians, when both echo one another, that’s when people should pay attention. That’s how I at least predicted Russia’s invasion in February of 2022. I knew it was going to happen because both US satellites and local Russian Telegram were both reporting a mass of tanks driving on roads near the Ukrainian border. You don’t put tanks on beautiful (less so in Russia’s case) concrete roads unless you want to destroy them, unless you don’t care at all about wrecking a municipality’s roads because you have bigger priorities, such as invasion and war. And just as then, I saw both NATO and Russians talking casually about nuclear warheads. I knew from US satellite footage that no missiles had left their storage locations so the risk never became terminal, but there was definitely a pattern of escalatory movements from the Russian strategic air and submarine fleets, to say nothing of their public pronunciations.

So yes, nuclear was very likely a 50-50 as recently as late September of 2022. The world flipped a coin and we survived, but as world tensions continue to rise due primarily to ecological collapse thanks in large part to an overabundance of greenhouse gasses in our atmosphere, we will find ourselves edging closer and closer to thermonuclear war.

Maybe it will be the Chinese invasion of Taiwan, something that the People’s Liberation Army Navy will be able to (in theory, at least according to both PRC and NATO sources) accomplish beginning in 2027. Or maybe the DPRK will launch the final campaign against the South. They should have a fully capable nuclear triad by the early 2030s if not sooner. Everyone knows about their advanced ICBMs, of course. But they’ve also started building nuclear submarines and are acquiring Russian technology for their own strategic air force. And then there’s the giant Indian and less-giant-though-still-mighty Pakistani elephants in the room. Oh, and the Israelis. Who knows where they have their 300 triad missiles pointed at, other than every Arab and Muslim majority city in the world? If Israel ever fell and its illegal nuclear weapons were not placed under international control, I personally would avoid any place that’s ever been a ‘Rome’, just in case (so, Rome, Moscow, Istanbul, Toledo, Madrid, Washington DC, et cetera et al).

Bottom line: we are just a few coin flips away from catastrophe, and as bad as Threads made nuclear war seem, the reality will be far, far worse.

So, in that spirit, below I’ve compiled something for my fellow Californians: a list of potential targets in a nuclear war, the likely yields to be used in an attack of this nature, and the estimated damage. This other can and should extrapolate to the rest of the United States. I of course cannot be held liable for this as I stress this is not “serious” advice, but also I must stress: there will be no civil courts for you to sue me for giving you ‘bad advice’ after the fact; if I survive the blast, you best believe I will be wearing leather, riding shiny and chrome, blasting away on my flamethrower guitar—meet me on the battle, rider of death, and let us see who comes away the victor, and let that alone decide the merit of my words!

Ahem.

Rather, the overall message should be: we need to restore the 80s and 90s dynamic that got us off the previous cliff. We need a strong, international political coalition that can push against nuclear war. If it could convince madmen like Reagan off the brink, it can convince madmen like Putin and Trump! After all: nuclear war cannot be fought, for it cannot be won. It can be survived, but that world will not be worth living in.

On Such A Winter’s Day

Listed above are all the major urban population centers and military targets likely to befall destruction of a nuclear war in California alone. Note that the projected damage is only for immediately right after the bombs fall. It does not take into account longterm radiological damage or societal collapse. The accompanying nuclear winter and societal collapse ensures that total casualties will far exceed these paltry estimates. Princeton’s own study into this revealed an estimated 34.1 million dead nationwide instantly with another 57.4 million wounded. Many of those who are wounded in the event of atomic bombing will be unable to receive medical care and will die quickly after the fact. Some estimates have total deaths reaching 98-99%, once nuclear winter sets in (see also the several years without summer (cf 536 CE, 1816 CE) in history to see how less solar radiation due to abnormal clouds will affect crop yields).

If we were to zoom out to the rest of the United States, even without assessing the projected damage, we could surely imagine how destructive the attack would be.

Once a nuclear exchange begins, people will have at most 15 minutes to get into a safe shelter. For those in the major cities targeted, there is practically zero chance of short-term survival, even if they found a deep enough bunker in time. An atomic airburst, the type of explosion most likely to befall most civilians, has many different ways of killing people. First, the actual fission reaction creates a ball of plasma that incinerates all matter beneath it in a radius of a few hundred meters, to kilometers, depending on the yield. Then, there is thermal radiation, which burns so hot it melts the skin off your bones like a perfectly cooked rib, igniting the very air in your lungs on fire. And all of it happening all at once, in a single second, across tens of kilometers. Then, with barely any time having passed, the crush: massive overpressure from the nuclear chain reaction crashing down upon the city, tens of thousands of pounds of psi bearing down with relentless force. Remember the Oceangate submersible, how the pressure of the ocean at 12,000 meters below the sea level eviscerated that tiny craft? Much the same will happen to buildings all across America. “Ducking and Covering” may save you from shrapnel and falling debris, but not if you’re directly in the path of the blast. In this case, it’s another coin flip: 50-50 says you die instantly, but 99% says you die in a month regardless.

Then the shockwave, then the radiation, then the firestorm. The first is the typical image we all possess of a nuclear blast outside of the mushroom cloud, of a tremendous shockwave ripping through the air and knocking down every building in its path. But this is actually one of the bomb’s weaker effects, as most of its energy is directed downward at its target. You don’t need to be in a bunker to survive this; you just need to be far enough away and in a stable enough structure to withstand the wind shear.

Radiation will be minimal with airbursts, with most of the radiation deposited into deep craters; however, groundbursts will still happen (to take out hardened locations like silos) and cause massive radiological damage nationwide. Supposing you survive those first two though, the firestorm will be as likely to get you. While modern cities, built using concrete and steel, are less fireprone than they were in mostly wooden Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there is still enough dry tinder to create thousand-foot tall walls of raging infernos. Cities like Los Angeles will become like lakes of fire, the surface boiling and bubbling as if a lake of magma had emerged from the crust. This will be like the worst wildfires in history, only they will be happening nationwide, with no hope or plan of putting them out save patience.

And suppose you survive all that, or suppose you are in some place that’s relatively safe, such as Wine Country in Napa, California. Other than the sky turning dark and staying that way within a week, and the occasional radiological windstorm, the worst will actually come not from the bombs themselves but from the main victims of the bombs: the millions of refugees, half of whom will be terminally wounded with either radiation or fire damage or both. Even those that are not wounded will be tired, mentally exhausted, and hungry. These more rural areas of America, already lacking in medical and food supplies, will be wholly unable to serve the influx of millions of people.

With command-and-control of the US military likely totally disrupted, with remaining units isolated and totally cut off from any logistical support, salvation from the remnants of the US government will not be forthcoming at any time soon either. International aid, from unaffected countries in the global South are also extremely unlikely, considering that the resulting nuclear winter will cause famines in those countries as well, though likely less severe than in the nuked North.

All of this in turn means that the millions of refugees are for the most part, doomed to either die in neglect or die as a preventative measure. For the latter, here is where the cold calculus of accelerating certain deaths take hold. After all, these millions of refugees, blasted with radiation and thermal damage will be breeding cesspools for diseases such as dysentery, typhus, typhoid, ebola, malaria, e coli, black plague, and any other epidemic disease under the sun, to say nothing of follow-up biological strikes from the nations that nuked us. After all, every major nuclear power also possesses a biological warfare division, filled with nasties like smallpox and antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. Once the nukes fly, there will be little holding back the remnant governments from launching the rest of everything in their stockpile at their foes.

In other words, in coping with supply collapse, local regional authorities, in seeing the millions of refugees, may just decide that mass euthanasia is preferable and indeed more humane for those people, although the lack of supply may just as well mean that no active measures would be needed against those people, just a bit of patience and strong enough padlocks and guards around surviving supply centers.

Regardless, plans are already in place to put survivors immediately to work: firstly to gather food supplies and secondly to plant the first harvest. Oil, coal, and gas production/refinement will also need to be restarted simultaneously. Millions of those who were not direct victims of the atomic blasts will start dying here, with forced labor, food shortages, and radiation storms causing mass casualties, week-after-week.

From there, it is anyone’s guess. Radiation damage will lower fertility and cause a cancer epidemic. Of the children who survive childbirth and make it to adulthood, their lives will be brutish and short. With food shortages endemic, population culls will keep occuring, either by design or by lack of food. Life expectancy could reduce to as much as 35 years or even shorter, with very young or very old people an extreme rarity. 20ish year old grandparents will be the norm, not the exception.

In 100 years, the population may stabilize to somewhere in the low tens of millions to few millions, though it should be noted this is an average. Some places, entire states and multi-state regions, will be totally unpopulated outside of temporary outposts and fortifications, much like we see today in Antarctica; such will be the fate of many major US cities like New York City and Los Angeles. For instance, California, with a pre-war population of 40 million will likely be reduced to 3 million within a century. We can therefore surmise a population ceiling of 50 million (at most) to a population floor of 20-30 million at least. For a current population of 342 million, this level of demographic collapse would be practically heretofore unseen.

So, the next time someone posts this

(or its Russian/Chinese derivative), please show them this article and ask them: is this the world you want to live in? Because to me, this reads as nothing other than a plan for mass suicidal genocide; as if Jim Jones gave 3/4 of Americans grape-flavored cyanide and they all eagerly drank it up, generation after generation. It’s not a world worth living in, at all. We can have such a better, more humane, less apocalyptic future. We’re living it right now, and as bad as it may seem, the future we live in today is better than the future we would have been living in had the bombs dropped in 1962 or 1983. Let’s leave the next generations the same (relatively) unnuked worlds. It’s the very least we can do.

On Sourcing
I utilized nonclassified nuclear war plans, existing military bases, nukemap, FEMA, CDC, Princeton, and other sources to come up with these estimates. Someone with actual national security clearance will be able to provide a more accurate picture, though they will not tell you, obviously!