No. 20855Anonymous 19th June 2016 Sunday 9:44 am20855Threads thread; or how I learned to stop loving and worry about the bomb.
Just finished watching Threads, suddenly all the problems of my life don't seem so bad. You'd think dying painfully of radiation poisoning over a couple of months would be one of the worst thing that could happen to you during a nuclear war, turns out you are wrong.
I'm a bit too shaken at the moment to process anything other than fear. Both of the futility of even bothering to prepare to survive, because the chances are me and everyone I know would be dead in the first few weeks, and if I did what would I do? I've started looking up the shelf life of foods and doing calculations for how much food and water I would need to survive the first 2 years post strike, on the off chance that I did survive. I don't think any other piece of media has affected me so deeply in a long time.
>>20857 Eh I figure it will be bad but Threads is deliberately a worst case scenario. Just remember the 3 ps; pigeons, pets and people.
I'm lucky enough to know a few farmers, a guy who grows ganja and I can make decent moonshine. A piano shouldn't be hard to come by so maybe I can set up a pub and every night at 8pm we will sing the Cheers theme-song to make the post-apocalypse more hopeful. You lads are welcome to come along and Cheflad can experiment with radioactive cuisine in the kitchen.
The thing about disaster movies is you realize everything will be right if we don't act like cunts to each other. They play on the idea that in mutual adversity people don't come together which is at worst only true 50% of the time.
>>20858 I've always thought about caving my flatmates heads in if we're going the 'fuck it' route. Maybe I will put the milk in first when there is nobody to stop me.
Threads is a sobering experience. I've seen it a few times now and it always leaves me feeling empty afterwards.
>The thing about disaster movies is you realize everything will be right if we don't act like cunts to each other.
Honestly I think the force of law that's stopping people from acting like absolute cunts is paper thin. You can see a direct example in the cunt riots of 2011 - when people think there is no law and order, things get very ugly very fast. I remember reading some quote about how we're only ever a permanent power cut away from a vicious and complete breakdown of society. I reckon it's true.
"Nasty, brutish and short", and all that. Be thankful that the government and police exist, even if you disagree with their policies and behaviour.
>>20860 My grandad escaped a civil war. The way it started was simply like a riot before the militias invaded the capital city. I have no faith in society and that's why I envy the Americans and their love to bear arms.
You will probably do okay if you live in a small town.
>>20859 >The thing about disaster movies is you realize everything will be right if we don't act like cunts to each other. They play on the idea that in mutual adversity people don't come together which is at worst only true 50% of the time.
Oh teenlad. Pic related.
I feel it's more 'teenlad' to assume that humans wouldn't co-operate (which is how we survived hostile conditions for thousands of years pre-civilisation), but would instead act like they do in post-apocalyptic films and games. But maybe that's how we would act as people conditioned by such media.
>>20859 >Threads is deliberately a worst case scenario
I remember reading (it may have been on here) that Threads is actually a relatively optimistic account of what would happen in a nuclear war. I guess there seemed to be quite a lot of survivors for such an attack.
>>20864 I don't know why, but this shite is how most teenlads in the west think shit goes down. Maybe in highly individualistic cultures, this may be true. In shitty societies and cultures like in Somalia and Afghanistan, when there is no central government, things just fall back to how they used to be, i.e. tribalism and religion. When the so-called militia invaded Mogadishu in the 1990s, the central government didn't flee, it just got broken down into tribal factions. Soldiers just took their weapons and joined their clan's militia.
The religious fanatics got funding from the middle east and hoovered up all the minor clans who couldn't defend themselves. Borders were redrawn, and you have Somalia as it is now.
Maybe Fallout 4 nonsense is more likely to happen in western countries where a sense of community doesn't really exist.
>>20869 The author runs SHTFscool, so he has an interest in playing to the American survivalist crowd, but nobody seems to have called him out as a liar, so who knows.
The other accounts on the internet are varied. Here's one from the other side of the spectrum:
'Second, this game portrays people as getting colder and more selfish as the time went on. It was exactly the opposite. Everyone shared everything. People helped each other in ways they would never do today. Notion that someone stole or killed from others is laughable. You have people on the hills shelling you with up to three thousand shells per day, trust me, breaking into someone’s place is the last thing on your mind. You need help. You ask, others will share. Plus, police was more effective in those days then they are today.'
Humans co-operate, yes, but we also compete. It seems to me that if co-operation were such a strong human instinct as you hope, we wouldn't be having a discussion about nuclear war in the first place.
The funny thing about modern society is that in a way we are all working together, we all contribute to the machine that operates days after day in bringing us food, electricity, and entertainment. But in so doing we have isolated ourselves. The denser our populations become, the more antisocial the individuals within become. We live in flats with neighbours above, below, and on either side, but don't know any of them by name.
The presumption that the breakdown of society would result in violence and anarchy is presumably based on the assumption that it is only the provision of food, water, electricity etc that modern society gives, that actually holds the entire thing together. People who would have been in opposing tribes if left to the "natural order" live side by side, but it only works as long as the incentive is there. And in general terms, this holds true- In cases of power cuts and such we often see people reverting to this tribal sort of mindset.
In addition one has to consider the instinct for self preservation, in the face of almost undeniably inadequate resources. We can harmoniously share our resources only as long as there are enough resources to be shared. In an event where clean water is scarce and food even moreso, as it would be in any urban centre after a nuclear attack, people are forced to compete in order to ensure their own survival, and we're back to the start of the whole circle again.
Humanity is a young species and we are still far closer to our most feral instincts than we would like to admit. When push comes to shove, are you going to be the one who puts your hand up and says "Okay, I'll be the one who starves to death. Take one for the team, you know" or are you going to crack someone's skull open to take their share? The answer isn't the one you probably want it to be.
>>20867 Groups restructure along racial lines when the group is directly threatened or indirectly through competition for constrained resources. Just imagine an episode from one of the many American TV series that document Supermax prisons (or the BBC's recent expo on Wandsworth), then unimagine the prison guards. There'd be initial carnage, which would simmer once the non-dominant races have been obliterated. Only then would the dominant group begin infighting.
Minority groups would have the advantage of greater community cohesion relative to the majority population. Unless the majority decided to systematically wipe them out, they would probably thrive. Your average white Briton doesn't know their neighbours, which contrasts starkly with the close ties of many ethnic minority communities.
Lads, I'm getting deja vu about this discussion on human nature. I'm sure we had a similar thread before Christmas?
>>20871 >Humans co-operate, yes, but we also compete. It seems to me that if co-operation were such a strong human instinct as you hope, we wouldn't be having a discussion about nuclear war in the first place.
However I was in Sheffield yesterday and most of the buildings seemed intact. In fact the Cold War ended more or less peacefully.
Wendt wrote a hugely influential paper on the topic in 1992 that I recommend you have a look at. I admit it might start a little thick but he makes very good points on how human nature is more than the realist school would make out:
https://ic.ucsc.edu/~rlipsch/Pol272/Wendt.Anarch.pdf
The thing I think you're missing is that by our nature we are a social species that cooperates for the common good. That *can* change but its not set in stone and although you might argue technology isolates us I don't think our society is one liable to turn in on itself in the face of hardship. Indeed in cases where societies have done such as Liberia or Rwanda we can see effects which stretch back generations that in the case of Liberia or the Second Congo War were later fed into by outside sources.
Our nature is to form an orderly ration queue and tut at various hardships. By all means if only paranoid survivalists survive then yes we will live in shittier times but that is the world they choose to live in.
>>20872 Nonsense. When groups of people are facing common adversity they don't turn on one another but instead are bound by it. When you're struggling to get by genocide is completely irrational to worry about or waste resources on.
You can point to Supermax prisons but I can point to the common bond soldiers share, the 'spirit of the blitz', that one bastard boss that co-workers are united in hatred of and how working class areas are much more prone to help one another. There is even an argument advanced in FP a few days back that makes the case that war is good for society for this very reason:
>>20874 >When groups of people are facing common adversity they don't turn on one another but instead are bound by it.
Until, as >>20871 points out, food and other essentials become life-threateningly scarce.
Don't get me wrong, I'm of the opinion that humans are social creatures by nature and the "individualist" mindset is basically dressed-up selfishness. That doesn't change the reality of the social dynamic.
A fair post lad, but it seems you're envisioning a post apocalypse that causes about as much social turmoil as, say, a bad snow storm. Our nature is to tut and moan while stubbornly getting on with it, but that only works when there are rations to go round and things to get on with.
Go read about the Siege of Leningrad. The sort of shortage that turns people to cannibalism. If we're talking about nuclear war, that's almost certainly the sort of situation we are in for, not just the mild hardships of a petrol strike or some such, requiring us to tighten our belts and show some of that "stiff upper lip".
Which is the context I'm working from- In the event of nuclear war, Britain would most likely be proper fucked.
>>20883 We do. We don't have enough arable land to overfeed ourselves on a diet with a huge meat component and maintain a multi billion pound food export industry, but we certainly have enough arable land to feed ourselves.
I wasn't imagining that they'd be targeted, just that blast zones of bombs landing on cities would cover a lot of countryside because we're so tightly packed. I'm willing to concede that I don't know what I'm talking about.
We have the primary ballistic missile early warning system for Europe and America. If you want to nuke the west, you'll want to take us out first. That's not a difficult task, because we're a small and crowded island.
The Russians would most likely use R-36M2 MIRV ICBMs for an initial strike. They have an active fleet of 68 of these missiles, each carrying ten 800kt warheads. One of those warheads dropped on a large city could kill 300,000 to 500,000 people. Across all their launch vehicles, Russia had a total of 1,735 active nuclear warheads as of March 2016.
Once you've taken out Fylingdales, you have nine warheads left over on the first missile. Instantly killing 5% of our population and obliterating our civil infrastructure is essentially a freebie.
>>20887 The blast zone likely wouldn't. The fallout might, sure, but if we're in a situation where multiple cities are basically gone then a) happily there are a whole lot fewer mouths to worry about feeding and b) we'll have more pressing concerns than the cancer risk from eating food grown in irradiated soil.
>>20892 That is actually good advice. Radiation is blocked by pretty much anything with mass, and the more mass you can put between yourself and the source, the better your chances.
It's not really the ionising radiation you need to worry about initially. That's a later hazard, if and when fallout occurs. Airblast detonations don't cause any significant fallout and maximise the damage inflicted.
The heat flash of a nuclear explosion would instantly set fire to almost everything within several miles. Fire was the primary killer in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki; firefighting efforts are futile, even if the fire brigade and the communications infrastructure remains intact. Threads reflects this quite accurately - many who survive the initial explosion will die shortly afterwards due to fire.
The other big killer is, perhaps surprisingly, flying glass. After the heat blast, a pressure wave will smash every window within a large radius with enormous force. Anyone standing near a window will be cut to ribbons.
This explains some of the seemingly ineffectual advice given in Protect and Survive. Whitewashing your windows and closing your curtains is a really useful protective step. The whitewash will reflect away much of the heat and reduce the chances of your curtains catching fire. The curtains will contain much of the flying glass.
This video explains the effects of a nuclear blast with chilling clarity.
>>20898 >The heat flash of a nuclear explosion would instantly set fire to almost everything within several miles. Fire was the primary killer in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Being made of tinder didn't particularly help there, to be fair.
My mum has a close Japanese friend who has bone problems she eventually admitted were caused by radiation in her family's past.
I slept with a Japanese girl who had a weird patch of dark skin with thick hair on it growing over her shoulder. Initially I thought it was a bruise but she said it was something the doctor did wrong when she was being born. Obviously that was bullshit. 80, 90 years later and they still have birth defects.
Nuclear bombs are fucked up.
>>20900 Sounds like bollocks to me. You can't get osteoperosis by being a child of someone who was once exposed to radiation. And dark skin with hair growing on it, wooooooh what a mutant! Pfff. There's no evidence for any of this to have been caused by the bombs, you're just making assumptions.
We'd have enough arable land to sustain the stabilised post-nuclear population.
But therein lies the rub. In order to reach that sustainable population level, a lot of people have to die. Many more than died in the initial attack. Many of them will succumb to the radiation and injuries, while many will perish from general sickness, and exposure to the elements.
In addition, what remains of society has to be allowed to adapt. Law and order will remain for a time, but increasingly break down as the influence of authority collapses. Most modern people simply don't know how to do things like grow crops and make bread- Office plankton who live on takeaways and microwave meals won't last long, but in the meantime they will have little choice but to beg or steal.
In the long term, human co-operation will prevail and a new form of society (albeit primitive, and most likely brutally feudal) will rise from the ashes. But it's not going to be immediate. In the short term, those first few months and years after the attack, there will be hunger, disorder, and violence.
>>20903 There are no "crude" nuclear weapons really. The risks of a terrorist group creating one, let alone managing to transport it into the heart of Westminster, are very very slim.
>>20906 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3737396/ >Animal and cellular studies tend to suggest that the irradiation of males, at least at high doses (1 Gy and above), can lead to observable effects (including both genetic and epigenetic) in the somatic cells of their offspring over several generations that are not attributable to the inheritance of a simple mutation through the parental germ line. However, studies of disease in the offspring of irradiated humans have not so far identified any effects on health, possibly in part a result of lack of statistical power. The available evidence therefore suggests that human health has not been significantly affected by transgenerational effects of radiation. As noted earlier any transgenerational effects may be restricted to relatively short times post-exposure and in humans conception at short times after exposure is likely to be rare.
>>20909 The legend on the plaque claims that it was "removed" and "returned to its original site" when the area was rebuilt, though that doesn't answer whether or not there's a Ship of Theseus thing going on.
I know people are not necessarily rational but in an open environment where a community is under extreme stress it doesn't make sense to me for them to waste resources competing. As I believe I've alluded to it depends largely on the people but when you can form a mutually beneficial partnership for what will inevitably be a long struggle or bash his head in for a box of crackers what do you think is the best option?
>>20881 >Go read about the Siege of Leningrad. The sort of shortage that turns people to cannibalism. If we're talking about nuclear war, that's almost certainly the sort of situation we are in for, not just the mild hardships of a petrol strike or some such, requiring us to tighten our belts and show some of that "stiff upper lip".
Actually despite the existence of cannibalism it seems to have been comparatively rare given the circumstances according to wikipedia. The city also held out, it didn't descend into anarchy and we have the stories of people like Dmitry S. Ivanov who starved to death surrounded by seeds.
http://articles.philly.com/1992-04-26/news/26003775_1_seed-bank-leningrad-collection
I mean we have the term 'siege mentality' for a reason.
>Which is the context I'm working from- In the event of nuclear war, Britain would most likely be proper fucked.
Its beside the point but the Soviet war plan for 'Seven Days to the River Rhine' makes an omission of both France and Britain as nuclear targets which some assume may have been because both states were capable of massive retaliation. Even the US airbases on British soil were only be attacked by conventional munitions.
Not relevant but interesting for a time when it was the Warsaw pact that was starting to rely on nuclear arms as a force multiplier.
