Tag: nuclear war

The Effects of Nuclear War According to FEMA

No one wants to think about a nuclear crisis – and hopefully it will never happen – but we all must accept the fact nuclear tensions are rising globally with Russia and China (and others are seeking nukes) so we should prepare ourselves and our loved ones in the event the unthinkable strikes our soil.

For decades, movies and some in the media have portrayed a nuclear attack as a “doomsday” event implying most people would be killed on impact … and survivors would want to die once they come out of their shelters.

In reality, unless you are actually at ground zero or within a several mile radius of the blast zone (depending on the size of the nuke, of course), there is a very high probability you’ll survive as long as you…

  • limit your exposure to radiation and fallout,
  • take shelter with proper shielding,
  • wait for the most dangerous radioactive materials to decay.

In other words, you CAN survive a nuke attack … but you MUST make an effort to learn what to do! By learning about potential threats, we are all better prepared to know how to react if something happens.

Please realize this is being written with small nuke devices in mind (like a 1-kiloton to 1-megaton device). A larger device, ICBM or a nuclear war would cause more wide-spread damage but some of this data could still be helpful. These are some very basic tips on sheltering for any type of nuclear (or radiological) incident.

What happens when a nuke explodes?

A nuclear blast produces a blinding light, intense heat (called thermal radiation), initial nuclear radiation, 2 explosive shock waves (blasts), mass fires, and radioactive fallout (residual nuclear radiation).

The below graphic shows the destruction of a test home by an atomic blast on March 17, 1953 at the Nevada Proving Ground. The structure was located 3,500 feet from ground zero, and the time from the first to last picture was 2.3 seconds.  It shows the force of the blast wave then the radiating energy set it on fire.

Also, if a nuke is launched over our continent and explodes miles above the earth, it could create an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). An EMP is a split-second silent energy burst (like a stroke of lightning) that can fry electronics connected to wires or antennas like cell phones, cars, computers, TVs, etc. Unless electronics are grounded or hardened, an area or nation could experience anything from minor interference to crippled power, transportation, banking and communications systems.

An EMP from a high-altitude nuke (where a nation or group succeeds in detonating a nuclear device carried miles into the atmosphere) could affect electronics within 1,000 miles or more as shown below. (Evidence suggests some countries and groups are working on enhanced and non-nuclear EMP weapons or e-bombs.)

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ULTIMATE ESCALATION: United Kingdom and France To Work Together on ‘Nuclear Deterrence’ to ‘Protect Europe’

If France and the UK can’t even tackle illegal migration on the channel, how will they manage to ‘defend Europe’?

When it comes to France and the United Kingdom, we feel tempted almost to describe them as ‘the former European powers’, because while they’re still the two nuclear-armed nations in the continent, generations of Liberalism/Globalism have turned both countries into pale imitations of the ones that emerged victorious in WW2.

Their current political leaders, French President Emmanuel Macron and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, have many things in common: complete adherence to Globalist failed policies, a constant push for military escalation in the continent, an obsession with Ukraine, frayed societies on the brink of collapse – and very, very bad popularity numbers.

They also have proved that they can’t work well together – they haven’t been able to accomplish the relatively minor task of tackling the small boat invasion of illegals to the UK from French beaches.

But now, during Macron’s state visit to London, they have announced plans to do something much harder: to coordinate their use of nuclear weapons for the first time to defend Europe from ‘extreme’ threats.

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Report: Pentagon Agency Believes US Needs To Drop A Nuke To Destroy Iran’s Fordow Nuclear Plant

The Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) has told US officials that in order to destroy Iran’s Fordow nuclear plant, which is buried deep underground, the US may need to drop a nuclear weapon, The Guardian has reported.

According to the report, Pentagon officials who received the briefing were told that dropping GBU-57s, conventional 30,000-pound bunker-busting bombs, would not penetrate deep enough underground and that it would only do enough damage to collapse tunnels and bury the facility under rubble.

The officials were told that in order to destroy Fordow completely, the US would likely need to first soften the ground with conventional bombs and then ultimately drop a tactical nuclear weapon from a B2 bomber.

The report said that President Trump is not considering using a nuclear weapon and that the option was not presented to him by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. According to a report from Axios, Trump is casting doubt on the idea that the GBU-57s could do enough damage to destroy the facility.

Israel wants the US to drop the bunker-busting bombs on Fordow since it lacks the capability, but so far, Trump has not given the order for US airstrikes on Iran. The president said on Thursday that he would decide within two weeks, although there are indications that attacks could begin this weekend.

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DNI Gabbard Warns World ‘Closer to Brink of Nuclear Annihilation Than Ever Before’

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard recently warned that a doomsday nuclear armageddon could be inevitable if more isn’t done to stop the escalating wars pushing the world toward mutually assured destruction.

In a sobering video posted to X Tuesday, Gabbard reflected on a recent trip to Hiroshima, Japan – the site where the U.S. first dropped an atomic bomb.

“This attack obliterated the city, killed over 300,000 people, many dying instantly while others died from severe burns, injuries, radiation sickness, and cancer that set in in the following months and years,” Gabbard noted, adding, “Nagasaki suffered the same fate, homes, schools, families, all gone in a flash. The survivors, the Hibokusha, they carried the pain of extreme burns, radiation sickness, and loss for decades.”

The DNI went on to note the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago pale in comparison to today’s nuclear weapons, which could vaporize millions in seconds.

“Just one of these nuclear bombs would vaporize everything at its core, people, buildings, life itself,” the former Democrat-turned Republican congresswoman noted, with graphics illustrating the devastating nuclear fallout. “The shockwave would crush structures miles away, killing and maiming countless people, and then comes the fallout, radioactive poison spreading through the air, water, and soil, condemning survivors to agonizing deaths or lifelong suffering.”

“A nuclear winter could follow with smoke and ash completely blocking the sun, plunging the world into darkness and cold, killing crops and starving billions,” the Trump DNI said. “Acid rain would scar the earth, wiping out entire ecosystems.”

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Will We See Mushroom Clouds Over Kashmir?

One of the world’s, oldest and most dangerous conflicts went critical this past week as nuclear armed India and Pakistan traded threats of war. The Kashmir conflict is the oldest one before the UN.

In my book `War at the Top of the World’ I warned that the confrontation over Kashmir, the beautiful mountain state claimed by both Islamabad and Delhi, could unleash a nuclear war that could kill millions and pollute the planet.

After three wars and many clashes, it seemed the two bad neighbors had allowed the Kashmir dispute to fade into the background as their relations slightly improved.

Then came the murder last week of 26 Indian tourists at Pahalgam, a Kashmir beauty spot, by Muslim insurgents. Kashmir was roughly divided between India and Pakistan in 1947. The larger part of Kashmir was annexed by Indian troops as the entire region was scourged by massacres and rapine.

As a result, India’s portion of Kashmir became the only Muslim majority state in India. Kashmiri Muslims have waged a bloody struggle since the 1980’s to leave India or join Pakistan. Today, 500,000 Indian troops and an equal number of paramilitary police garrison the restive province.

I’ve been under fire three times on the Line of Control that separates the two Kashmirs and at 15,000 feet altitude on the remote Siachen Glacier. I was with Pakistani President Musharraf after he tried to seize Kargil which lies above Kashmir.

The outside world cared little about the India-Pakistan conflict until both Delhi and Islamabad acquired nuclear weapons. Their ‘hatred of brothers’, as I called it, pits fanatical Hindus against equally ardent Muslims who share centuries of hatred and are being whipped up by politicians.

Right wing Hindu militants in Delhi demand reunification of pre-1947 ‘Mother India.’ Pakistan has about 251 million citizens; India has 1.4 billion and a much larger GDP. Pakistan would be unable to resist a full-bore attack by India’s huge armed forces. So, it relies on tactical nuclear weapons to compensate for the dangerous imbalance.

But both sides nuclear arsenals are on hair-trigger alert and pointed at the subcontinent’s major cities. A decade ago, the US think tank Rand Corp estimated an India-Pakistan nuclear exchange would kill three million immediately and injure 100 million. Such damage would pollute most of the region’s major riverine water sources all the way down to Southeast Asia.

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On Nuclear War and Expensive Pennies

Trump’s assault on USAID is more than an exposure of its alignment with far left narratives. It raises the question: How far will he go in dealing with its perceived waste and abuse?

It looks like he won’t be satisfied with merely slashing jobs and the agency’s budget.  Republican Representatives Chip Roy and Majorie Taylor Greene have already introduced legislation to permanently abolish USAID.  And what about this proposed legislation would make it permanent, should it become law?

Absolutely nothing.

Government has been at odds with its Constitution since the establishment of the First Bank of the United States in 1791.  In a letter to President Washington Thomas Jefferson said the Twelfth Amendment should be the final word on the issue of a national bank, that “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specially drawn around the powers of Congress, is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible of any definition.”  Twenty years later Congress failed to renew its charter but only by the tie-breaking vote of VP George Clinton.  President Madison reluctantly signed the bill authorizing the creation of The Second Bank of the United States in 1816, President Jackson fought to prevent renewing its charter in 1836, but the final blow came in 1913 when President Wilson signed the Federal Reserve into law, and monetary recklessness proceeded uninterrupted, often with favor.

If the central bank’s history is a bellwether, and it’s one of countless examples, nothing exists to prevent USAID II being passed by some future administration.

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The Pentagon is Recruiting Elon Musk to Help Them Win a Nuclear War

Donald Trump has announced his intention to build a gigantic anti-ballistic missile system to counter Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons, and he is recruiting Elon Musk to help him. The Pentagon has long dreamed of constructing an American “Iron Dome.” The technology is couched in the defense language – i.e., to make America safe again. But like its Israeli counterpart, it would function as an offensive weapon, giving the United States the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response. This power could upend the fragile peace maintained by decades of mutually assured destruction, a doctrine that has underpinned global stability since the 1940s.

A New Global Arms Race

Washington’s war planners have long salivated at the thought of winning a nuclear confrontation and have sought the ability to do so for decades. Some believe that they have found a solution and a savior in the South African-born billionaire and his technology.

Neoconservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a video last year stating that Musk might have “solved the nuclear threat coming from China.” It claimed that Starlink satellites from his SpaceX company could be easily modified to carry weapons that could shoot down incoming rockets.

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Angling Toward Armageddon: The Return of Senator Strangelove

Almost 80 years later, it’s sadly all too easy to forget that two nuclear weapons were once used with devastating effect on this planet. Here’s just a small description by one survivor of the atomic destruction of the Japanese city of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, that can be found in the book Unforgettable Fire: Pictures Drawn by Atomic Bomb Survivors: “Most of the A-Bomb survivors were burned all over their bodies. They were not only naked, but also their skin came off. They were wandering around looking for their parents, husbands, wives, and children in the city of Hiroshima which had been reduced to ashes.”

Only recently, one of the dwindling group of survivors of that American bombing, Shigeko Sasamori, died. She had been a child of 13 when her city was blown to smithereens and, though unlike so many of her compatriots, she lived to tell the tale, one-third of her body was severely burned. Unbelievably enough, she would be one of the 25 “Hiroshima maidens,” all disfigured by the first atomic bombing on this planet, chosen to receive medical help a decade later in New York City. Her death, as the New York Times reported in an obituary, came only “two months after the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Nihon Hidankyo, a grass-roots Japanese organization of atomic bomb survivors, for its efforts to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”

Unfortunately, as TomDispatch regular William Hartung reminds us today, global nuclear arsenals, including the American one, continue to grow and now hold weapons that make the bombs that devastated Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem more like BBs. To take just the three leading nuclear powers, the U.S., Russia, and China, each could, unaided, turn this planet (and undoubtedly several more like it) into giant graveyards.

While it’s true that, since Nagasaki was destroyed on August 9, 1945, no nuclear weapon has ever again been used in war, there are now believed to be more than 12,000 nuclear warheads on this planet. Nine countries possess them and, in a significant nuclear conflict, the Earth could be thrown into a state of “nuclear winter” in which billions of us could die of starvation, and yet, as Hartung makes all too vividly clear today, the vast U.S. nuclear arsenal is still in the process of being expanded (the term, hideously enough, is “modernized”) to the tune of perhaps $1.7 trillion to $2 trillion in the coming decades. Let him explain.

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Will Warnings of A Nuclear War Go Unheeded?

On December 7th, former United Nations weapons inspector Scott Ritter hosted a panel entitled “No Nuclear War: A Call for Reason” at the National Press Club in the nation’s capital.

The three-part symposium brought together a range of anti-war speakers to address the growing threat of a nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia. Trepidation over that increasingly likely scenario has only mounted following the reckless brinkmanship by the lame duck Biden administration in supplying long-range ATACMs (Army Tactical Missile Systems, pronounced “attack-’ems”) to Ukraine.

Not only do the precision-guided munitions give Kyiv the ability to strike deep within Russian territory, but the U.S.-made missiles must be launched with the help of Western personnel, something that will be interpreted by Moscow as an attack by NATO. While the live-streamed discussion was overshadowed by the earth-shattering news of the fall of Damascus to Western-backed jihadists, the catastrophic developments in the Middle East only made the apocalyptic theme more pertinent.

Participants in the forum included former Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, retired Army colonel and Washington insider-turned-critic Lawrence Wilkerson, Code Pink organizer Medea Benjamin, The Grayzone founder Max Blumenthal, his wife and fellow journalist Anya Parampil, Black Agenda Report editor Margaret Kimberley, broadcast host Wilmer Leon of (now defunct) Sputnik radio, political commentator Garland Nixon, author and human rights lawyer Dan Kovalik, MIT physicist Theodore Postol, and 25-year-old LaRouche Party agitator Jose Vega.

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Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Claims Nuclear War will be GOOD for Ukraine

Ukrainian Neo-Nazi Evgeny Karas claimed during in an interview on Tuesday with the Ukrainian broadcaster Radio Bayraktar that Russia striking Ukraine with nuclear weapons would in fact be good for Ukraine. The man is the leader of the ‘S14’ terrorist group, whose members have a record of harassing minorities and have been accused of high-profile political murders, according to RT.

”Nuclear war is good,” Karas said in the interview, according to RT on Wednesday. “When it happens, we’ll have no more reasons to whine. Nothing worse could happen after a nuclear strike.”

While the aforementioned statement may indicate a nonsensical bloodlust, Karas went so far as to claim that nuclear fallout in Ukraine may even be good for evolution.

“A nuclear war may help us evolve in a way that we could see through an official and tell whether he is a thief or not,” he said according to RT.

While the Neo-Nazi may think nuclear war will be enjoyable, the Japanese who actually experienced it did not.

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