World War 3 - Hour by Hour in the Suburbs

Kind: captions Language: en A nuclear missile is heading for your city right now. You have maybe 15 minutes left. So, what do you do? Run, hide, call someone, or would you do what most of us would do? Check your [music] phone, look out your window, and then convince yourself it's probably nothing. That hesitation is exactly what gets them killed. Your brain is wired to ignore impossible threats, even when the countdown has already started. It's called the 7-10 rule. So, strap in, grab a notebook, and pay attention. This is how to survive a nuclear blast hour by hour in the suburbs. Chapter 1, 8:07 a.m., one text message. David is not a morning person, which is unfortunate because at 8:07 a.m. on a Tuesday, the world is possibly 15 minutes away from ending. Suddenly, his phone buzzes. A piercing alarm fills the room. David grabs his phone. The screen reads, "Presidential alert. Ballistic missile threat inbound. Seek shelter immediately. This is not a drill." David reads it once and then again. It's [music] got to be some sort of scam or hoax. The message on his phone is already old news. The FEMA Wireless Emergency Alert System, or WEA, the same one that messages you about flash floods and Amber Alerts, bypasses standard cellular traffic to deliver warnings. It is completely immune to peak network congestion. And that's 12 minutes in which cell towers across three states [music] are simultaneously blanketing the area with the same emergency broadcast. The result, millions of phones erupt in alarms at the exact same moment. And incoming missiles don't wait for the network to clear. By the time David's phone buzzed, the warhead was already halfway to its target, traveling at approximately 15 times the speed of sound. David has, at best, 15 minutes. He's currently on minute two. Next door, his neighbor, Gary, is already ahead of him, or so Gary believes. Gary Kowalski, 43, has been preparing for this exact same moment for the better part of a decade. He has a bug-out bag for every member of his family, color-coded by priority, naturally. He has a hand-crank radio, three backup generators, freeze-dried meals, and a laminated emergency protocol binder. Gary sees the alert, and he's already in motion. He has preloaded his truck with 72 hours of emergency supplies, a tactical flashlight, and a CB radio. He spent a decade preparing for the day everything falls apart. The problem is, Gary prepared for survival after the collapse, not survival during the first 48 hours. He backs out of his driveway at 8:08 a.m., and he guns it. Meanwhile, David is still on his phone. This is one of the most well-documented psychological phenomena in emergency management research, and it has a name: milling. In the immediate aftermath of a disaster warning, the majority of people don't act. Instead, they gather information. They seek confirmation, and they probably call someone for social proof that the threat is real. In 2018, a real inbound ballistic missile alert was sent to every phone in Hawaii. Researchers at the University of Georgia studied how people actually responded. Some responded with sheer panic, texting loved ones their last goodbyes, inconsolable emotions, deathbed apologies. But most of the people waffled, trying to determine the truth of the message before acting. 45% of respondents to a survey of how they responded to the message said that they were unsure about its credibility. Another 27% disbelieved it outright. Some finished their breakfasts. Others just ignored the message. One man, the study noted, went back to sleep. The alert was live for 38 minutes before it was corrected. In that time, with a genuinely terrifying message on every phone in the state, the dominant human response was basically, "Sure." The time it took most people to determine whether the alert was credible or not, and [music] take some sort of action, was about 12 to 15 minutes. That is also, in a real launch, generally the margin between life and death. David has already burned three of them. He looks at his phone, then at his kids. His eyes drift back to the kitchen junk drawer. Buried beneath takeout menus and a handful of dead batteries is a laminated card with six bullet points. He made it 2 years ago after falling down a Reddit rabbit hole at 2:00 a.m. The first line reads, "Do not evacuate. Go below grade immediately." The clock is still ticking. There are 12 minutes left. Chapter 2, 8:08 to 8:20 a.m. The most important 12 minutes of David's life. When something terrible happens, everyone knows you just run. You get out. You grab your kids. You grab your wife. You grab your wallet and keys. You put as much distance between yourself and that terrible thing as you can, and you get out of dodge. This is the narrative of every evacuation drill David had ever participated in. Motion equals survival. Stillness equals death. The laminated sheet is clear. Don't delay and don't leave. David's wife, Karen, appears in the kitchen doorway. Her face is drained of color. She has the expression of a person who has not yet registered that the world has materially changed in the last few minutes. She asks if the alert is a drill. David shakes his head, "No, it's not." They are burning minutes they don't have. David grabs the kids and rushes toward the basement. The gravity of the situation hits Karen, and the panic is etched on her face. Gary Kowalski has been on the road for 3 minutes. His CB radio crackles with transmissions. Panic fills the airwaves. He glances out the window and he sees people scrambling with no idea what to do next. But, Gary has a plan. He has the emergency binder on his seat, and it's open to the evacuation protocol section. He's heading to rural Indiana and his brother-in-law's property about 140 miles west. The gas tank is full, and he has energy bars and military MRE ration packs. But, what Gary lacks is the protection factor. That's a measurement used by emergency planners to quantify how much a given structure of a vehicle reduces your radiation exposure relative to standing out in the open. A protection factor of 10 means you receive 1/10 the radiation dose that you would receive outside. A protection factor of 40 means you receive 1/40. Gary's truck has a protection factor of two, and that is being generous. The emergency management literature is not ambiguous on this point. A car, any car really, regardless of how many emergency supplies are in the back, regardless of how much it costs, is from a radiation standpoint essentially a large rolling window. The metal frame provides negligible shielding. The glass provides none. You're about as protected from a nuclear fallout event as you would be standing in your front yard. The standard suburban basement is a different story. Yes, even that unfinished slightly damp kind with the water heater in the corner has a protection factor of between 10 and 40. As you move to the center of the basement, it only goes up. Concrete, soil, and the mass of the house provide genuine shielding against gamma radiation. To put it differently, you're more likely to die from radiation exposure stuck [music] in traffic than you are sheltering in a sub-optimal interior room. Gary runs through his plan in his head. He's thought of everything, except traffic. The road ahead of him is at a standstill. Every other person in a 15-mi radius had the same idea as him. Somewhere ahead, someone is hammering the horn. Gary nervously checks his watch and turns up his [music] CB radio. After grabbing food, water, and a few supplies from the garage, David gets his family into the basement at 8:19 a.m., 12 minutes after the alert. Right on the outer edge of the window where the Hawaii data said most people finally stopped deciding and started acting. He pulls the basement door shut behind them. The room is dark and damp. He switches on his phone's flashlight as the kids climb onto an old couch. David sits beside them. He looks down at bullet point number two on the laminated sheet, his hand shaking. Stay below grade. Do not go upstairs for any reason. The danger is invisible. Outside, through a tiny basement window near the ceiling, the sky is completely normal, blue with a few clouds floating aimlessly by. Nothing is happening, or at least nothing visible. Chapter 3, 8:20 a.m., the glass coffin. The basement of the Caruso home is not a prepper's paradise. There is no reinforced shelter, which used to be the standard in homes built during the 1960s. There are no radiation suits hanging on the wall, no 6-month supply of freeze-dried anything stored in the closet. They've got their old couch, a water heater, and Christmas decorations in unlabeled boxes. Over in the corner is the shelf of canned goods that Karen panicked bought during the pandemic and then forgot about. They are now the family's primary food supply during an actual civilization-ending event. David does a mental inventory. 16 bottles of water behind the Christmas boxes. The water heater holds another 45 gallons, if it comes to [music] that. Canned food, though he has no idea if any of it is expired. Two phones, both mostly charged to use as flashlights. He's meant to put a real flashlight down here. Each time he's figured he'd just do it later. If there is a later, he won't make that mistake again. Outside through the small rectangle of the basement window, something has changed. A car alarm blares somewhere down the block, then another, then the faint sound of shouting. David's 9-year-old peers out the window. "Mr. Kowalski's wife is outside," he says. David crosses over to the window and looks. Linda Kowalski stands in her driveway in a bathrobe, phone pressed to her ear. She turns in a slow circle searching for a signal, or for someone to tell her that this isn't really happening. She looks up and down the street shouting into the phone. Then she looks up at the sky. If this alert is real, something is already on its way. David feels a cold jolt of recognition. He's watching someone lose time exactly the way he did. She is milling, and Gary left without her. David feels a powerful, immediate, almost biological urge to go upstairs, open the front door, and wave her over. And then he reads bullet point two again. The danger is invisible. So he stays where he is. It sounds like a moral failing, but But worth being precise about what David is and is not doing at this moment. He is not choosing to let his neighbors die. He is choosing to not open a door that once opened turns his basement from a sealed shelter into an unsealed one. This is a scenario where the threat is airborne particulate matter that you cannot see, smell, taste, or [music] detect without specialized equipment. He watches her disappear back through her front door. David looks down to bullet point three. It reads, "Blast wave arrives 1 to 3 minutes after the flash. Get low. Cover your head." He opens his mouth and the flash comes before he can say a word. Even through the small basement window, even at 20 miles distance filtered through glass and concrete and 6 ft of Ohio soil, the light feels wrong. It arrives without a sound. It's not like lightning or a power surge. This comes from everywhere all at once. The thin strip of lawn outside the basement window turns white and then whiter and then a color so bright the human brain has no name for it. It lasts all of 4 seconds and the basement remains silent. David gets low and he tells everyone to cover their heads and get behind the couch. Karen starts to remonstrate but David doubles down. They move and David checks his watch and starts counting. 90 seconds. That's what bullet point three says, 90 seconds from the flash to the blast at 20 miles. If Columbus took the hit, they're inside that radius. David gets to 71. One moment the house is silent. The next, it's not. The pressure change arrives less as a sound and more as a percussive shudder. It rushes through the foundation of the house and up the concrete floor until it strikes the soles of David's shoes, his knees, and his chest. The water heater clanks. Boxes of Christmas decorations shift on their shelf. Something falls over upstairs, probably the bookshelf in the hallway. With one final crack of the basement window, the room grows silent again. A few miles away, Gary's truck sits abandoned in the traffic jam. The CB radio is still crackling with fragments of panic. Gary knew he was stuck, that he couldn't make it to his brother-in-law's, so he did what everyone else did. He got out. People scream and push between the cars. Drivers abandon their vehicles. Gary is just one more person caught between fear and instinct. And then the sky turns white. For a moment everyone on the highway stops. The shouting, the running, the panic, everything freezes beneath a light brighter than anything the human eye was ever meant to see. Gary looks toward the city. A column of fire and smoke climbs up into the sky. The end of the world he spent years preparing for has arrived, but the preparation is sitting inside the truck. The emergency binder still open on the passenger seat. The supplies are still packed into the back. And Gary is standing exactly where his own plan told him not to be, outside. He looks toward the flash. In the basement David lifts his head. >> [music] >> He looks at his family wedged behind the old couch. His daughter Emma clutches her mother tight. David does a rapid visual inventory. There's no injuries or blood. And the water heater is still running. More importantly, the house is still standing. He exhales. The power is out. His phone flashlight is the only light source down below. Upstairs, something is dripping. A pipe, maybe, or the skylight. He looks outside the basement window. The sky is still blue, but the birds have stopped chirping. David looks at bullet point four, which reads, "It is not over. The fallout cloud is coming. Do not open any doors or windows. This is the most important rule." David's stomach sinks as he knows this is just the beginning. Now they have to wait. Chapter four, 8:23 a.m., the quiet hour. The house is still standing, [music] which is by any reasonable measure good news. David knows this is good news. His brain is correctly processing it as good news. And yet, there is something deeply unsatisfying about surviving a nuclear blast because the part that everyone imagines, the fireball, the instant destruction, is over in under two minutes. What comes after, if you're far enough from the epicenter, is undramatic, and that's the trap. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine that spent several hundred thousand years on the African savanna learning to assess threats by their visible properties. >> [music] >> If a predator appeared, it looked like a predator. If a fire started, it produced smoke. If a flood came, there was generally water. The threat presented itself, your brain flagged it, and your body responded. The system worked. Gamma radiation doesn't present itself. It is colorless, odorless, bears no distinguishing sound without the aid of a Geiger counter. It gives off no heat signature or any physical sensation at the exposure levels currently drifting toward the Caruso house on a northwestern course at approximately 15 miles an hour. The initial shock wave from the ground burst detonation that hit Columbus >> [music] >> blasted massive overpressure across the city, but ground bursts do something else. They suck enormous amounts of dirt, concrete, asphalt, and debris into the fireball itself. That material becomes irradiated and pulverized into microscopic particles. Then it gets carried downwind as radioactive fallout. And at this stage, that cloud doesn't look like a cloud at all. It looks like nothing, and it's now 11 miles away. David's family has roughly 44 minutes [music] before an invisible cloud carrying radioactive fallout drifts over the house. Every minute they stay sealed inside improves their odds. His daughter doesn't know any of that. She just wants to know where the cat is. David looks at bullet point four. Do not open any windows or doors. This is [music] the most important rule. His son looks at the cracked basement window, and he asks his dad, "If the bomb already went off, why are they still [music] down here?" It's the correct question. The blast came, the blast went. The house is still standing, [music] the sky is blue. Before David can reply, a thud comes from upstairs. [music] Once, twice, again, someone is pounding on on front door. David doesn't move. A shadow rushes past the basement window, then it stops. Linda Kowalski appears in the glass. Her face is pale, covered in ash, terrified. She sees them. A fist slams against the window. "Please!" Another slam. David feels his stomach drop. Every instinct tells him to let her in. He can't. He takes his son's hand and he turns him away. [music] One last bang against the glass, and then silence. The bomb isn't what kills most people. What kills most people in a situation like this is leaving too early. This is the 7/10 rule. It's the part nobody talks about because it requires sitting still and doing nothing. It works like this. For every sevenfold increase in time after detonation, the radiation dose rate drops by a factor of 10. At 7 hours, the dose rate outside is 1/10 of what it was at hour one. At 49 hours, it's 1/100, which means time itself becomes a weapon against the fallout. Every hour David and his family remain sheltered behind layers of concrete, wood, insulation, and earth dramatically reduces the dose they absorb. [music] By the 48-hour mark, a properly sheltered survivor may have received only a tiny fraction of the radiation dose suffered by someone exposed outside during the same 2 days. The math is not complicated. It's actually one of the more straightforward mathematical propositions David has encountered in his career as an IT manager. The math simply requires 48 hours in the basement. And that's the hard part. David glances down to bullet [music] point five. 48 hours minimum. 24 hours absolute minimum if you must. Do not [music] let anyone convince you otherwise, including yourself. Then something changes outside the basement window. It's subtle, the kind of thing that you would not notice if you were not already watching. If you had not spent the last 51 minutes staring at that tiny strip of front yard and the cracked glass and sky above it. The light is different. It's more diffused. It's as if the sun has moved behind a very thin high cloud that is flattening the shadows on the front lawn. David stares at his neighbor's oak tree. At this time of the morning, its shadow should be sharp. Instead, the edges are blurred. David looks at bullet point six, and he reads it once and then again. He stares at the window and then at his family. Chapter 5, 9:16 a.m. The black rain. If you see particles falling outside, [music] do not go near the windows. This is fallout. It is lethal. That's bullet point six. >> [music] >> David tells everyone to move to the middle of the room. There's no panic in his voice, but Karen knows there is something wrong. She stands up immediately and starts moving the couch. Outside the basement window, something begins to fall. It has the same lazy, directionless drift as snow, the same indifference to gravity. It's the color of ash, the texture of fine sand, [music] and delicately settles onto the Caruso's front lawn, onto the roof of Linda Kowalski's car, onto the handprints she left on the basement window. David watches the gray dust slowly erase them. Most of the radioactive fallout produced by a ground burst detonation is composed of particles large enough to be visible to the naked eye. It's not commonly understood, but the popular image of radiation is the invisible killer. Rays, waves, and emanations from a glowing source you can't see or touch. Fallout from a gr