In Nuclear Apocalypse, How Safe Is Your State?

I have always reckoned that, in the event of a global nuclear war, the best place to be would be at ground zero of a multi-megaton nuke; a real crowd-pleaser. May as well get it over with right away, and being vaporized sure beats dying weeks later of radiation sickness, starvation, or thirst — or all three.

As the Bard said, if the thing t'were be done, best it be done quickly.

As a child of the Cold War, I remember very well the "duck and cover" drills we practiced in elementary school classrooms, which gave the notion that there was some positive outcome to be had in surviving a major exchange of city-busting nukes. The small local city of Waterloo, Iowa, we were told, was on the Soviet Union's first-strike list, as the massive John Deere Waterloo Tractor Works, Engine Works, Foundry, and Experimental Farm were all located there in those days and major industrial sites like that were expected to draw some nuclear attention if that balloon ever went up. That never happened, of course, but there are still plenty of nukes out there, which begs the question: How safe are you, given the likely target list?

The answer? Not very.

Researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst investigated wind and weather patterns to predict the timeline of nuclear fallout, including the paths through which radiation would spread throughout the country.
Experts agree that the Midwest, where 450 ballistic missile silos are stored — particularly Montana, North Dakota and Nebraska — would be the most likely primary target as detonating just two of those storehouses could cause an explosion equal to 100,000 tons of TNT, per Scientific American.
Exposure to radiation poisoning from a nuclear attack would guarantee death for an estimated 300 million Americans within four days of detonation.

Yipes! How safe is your state from nuclear attack? pic.twitter.com/HcjskdKp1l
— Ward Clark (@TheGreatLander) December 9, 2024

There's a major flaw in this map: It assumes that only nuclear missile siloes will be hit. That seems a rather stunning underestimation. One would expect centers of government, military bases, and even major cities and industrial sites to be vaporized as well. That means buh-bye to Washington, to much of Northern Virginia; to New York, Boston, Atlanta, Miami, Chicago, Denver (the city with the second-largest federal presence after Washington), Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego. Add to that the various Army, Marine, Navy, and Air Force bases around the United States, including those in Alaska and Hawaii, and you'll be seeing a lot more purple on that map.

It's like Albert Einstein supposedly said; "No matter how World War 3 is fought, World War 4 will be fought with rocks and sticks." That is, if anyone's left to fight it.

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There's just no happy ending for anyone in the event of a major nuclear exchange. It would be a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, and could well spell the end of humanity. Of course, consider the time scales the earth moves on; in 10 or 20 million years, an eyeblink in geologic time, the planet will have recovered and be once more brimming with life — but we won't be among them. That life, indeed, may not be in any form we would recognize.

So, yes, the only way to win a global nuclear war is to not fight it. An old gag from those not-so-long-ago Cold War years applies as much today as it did then; that gag stated that, in the event of a nuclear bomb detonation, one should "bend down, put your head between your legs, and kiss your a** goodbye." So, forget that map and its guesstimations; in the event of a major nuclear war, we're pretty much all screwed no matter whether you're in New York, Wyoming, San Francisco — or Alaska.

This seems appropriate.