My Personal Preparations For Nuclear War

Executive Summary

• The Importance Of Avoiding Contamination
• The Steps I Took This Week
• Resources For Estimating The Threat Level For Where You Live
• Advice For City-Dwellers

If you have not yet read Part 1: We Risk Being Collateral Damage In The Neocon Lust For War available free to all readers, please click here to read it first.

First up, I promised you that if I ever took any actions I’d let you know about them.  I toyed with breaking that pledge (net very seriously) because I really don’t want to needlessly scare anybody.

I don’t like focusing on the negative, but I did catch myself thinking and slightly worrying about the tensions with Russia and realized that I did not have a few basic preparations.   So what do we do at Peak Prosperity when we have a gap between what we know and our actions?  We close up that gap with action.

I’ve written extensively about the possibility of war with Russia, and the possible things to protect against range from minor annoyances and shortages to a grid down event (via EMP or hacking) to a nuclear war.

Of them all, I suppose the grid down event scares me the most if it involved any protracted outage of more than a month.  Things fall apart never to be properly rebuilt if that happens. 

But a limited nuclear war, or even a more broad-based one if things really get out of hand, also worry me a lot.

And I am not the sort to sit around and worry.  I hate sitting around and worrying so last week I did what few things I could to assure that I can make the best of it if a nuclear exchange happens. 

Look, even if there’s only a 1% chance of a nuclear exchange over the next five years, I personally consider that that to be an excessive risk (given the catastrophic outcomes involved).  Given how I am built, I need to prepare as best I can so that I can relieve my anxiety and get back to living life fully.

As background, you should definitely re-read our excellent previously-issed reports on radiation and the difference between that and radioactive contamination because those are the building blocks for knowing how to survive. 

• Radiation – Part I
• Contamination – Part II

In fact, you should print them out and have them tucked into your preparations area. 

Having a grounded understanding of what radioactive isotopes are and what they do to a living system is critical knowledge to have.  But maybe you don’t need it yet.  So read the articles of background and put the whole subject away, hopefully forever, never to be revisited.

I’ll be honest; I am not all that scared by radioactivity.  My view is we evolved with background radiation and life has been dealing with it for a very long time.  Now contamination, on the other hand, which is the ingestion of a hot particle of some sort, now that scares me a lot. And it should scare you too. So much of my preparations are centered around…

Chris Martenson Oct 29, 2016

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