How to Survive a Nuclear Attack: What to Do, How to Prepare

With the ever increasing risk of global thermonuclear war, this guide should help prepare for and surviving nuclear bomb blast.

History of the Nuclear Arms Race

Within five and a half years of the scientific principle being demonstrated, the US Manhattan Project, under the leadership of Robert Oppenheimer, had succeeded in building the first atomic bomb. Almost all of this time was spent purifying the uranium 235. The design of the bomb was so simple that after a single test at Trinity, New Mexico, the Enola Gay delivered a single bomb to Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945.

A few years later, in 1949, the Soviet Union began testing fission bombs. This triggered the start of the Cold War. For forty years, the paranoid superpowers stockpiled an estimated 22,000 megatons of nuclear bombs and missiles between them.

East-West relations may have thawed since President Kennedy blockaded Cuba during the missile crisis of October 1962. However, just because Communism lies rusting on the ideological scrap heap does not mean that nuclear weapons pose any less of a threat to world peace. The break-up of the Soviet Union left a superpower-sized arsenal without a superpower to control it. Corruption and bankruptcy among the Russian military led to weapons-grade uranium, plutonium and tritium being available on the black market.

North Korea had also been actively testing nuclear weapons and was rapidly expanding its nuclear program with no care for international consequences.

In 1945, the United States was the only nation to possess atomic weapons. The USSR acquired them in 1949, followed by Britain in 1952, France in 1960 and China in 1964. In 1968, Britain, the US and the Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in an attempt to make it very hard for anyone else to produce or squire nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, France and China refused to sign the treaty, and the best that can be said of it is that it slowed the spread of nuclear technology.

Nuclear Weapons in the Middle East

India acquired the bomb in 1974 after promising that the technology was for peaceful use only. Israel, South Africa and North Korea pursued independent nuclear research programmes. Pakistan and Syria were sold nuclear weapons technology in the form of the M-11 and M-9 missile systems in 1991 by China, who also supplied technicians to help build a secret nuclear reactor in Algeria to enable the production of weapons-grade plutonium.

In 1981, Saddam Hussein paid France to build the Tammuz 1 nuclear reactor at El-Tuwaitha, 16 kilometres south-west of Baghdad. Its official purpose was for research into nuclear energy. However, Israel was so concerned about the reactor's potential to produce material for nuclear weapons that it launched an air strike and destroyed the facility shortly before its completion.

How does a Nuclear Bomb Work?

A sub-critical mass of uranium 235 is fired down the barrel of a large gun into another sub-critical mass of uranium so that they form a critical mass when they collide. Suppose the collision occurs fast enough to weld the two masses together. In that case, the fission chain reaction has time to initiate, and nuclear detonation occurs. The difficulty with building a uranium bomb is in obtaining a critical mass.

Most nuclear reactors use uranium fuel rods that contain only 3%t uranium 235 mixed with the non-fissile uranium 238. Military devices based on uranium generally require at least 90% U-235. Because the two isotopes are chemically identical, the process of 'enriching' or increasing the proportion of uranium 235 is a highly complex process that would be beyond the capability of any terrorist group.

However, Some nuclear reactor designs (notably the type supplied to Iraq by France) use fuel rods of bomb-grade uranium. These could be hijacked en route to the reactor and rapidly converted into crude bombs. Even uranium at 80% enrichment can be made into bombs simply by increasing the masses.

Plutonium is easier to obtain because it is produced as a by-product of uranium fission in nuclear reactors. Over 100 tonnes of plutonium are in storage at the Sellafield reprocessing plant. The critical mass required for a plutonium device is much lower.

Plutonium is a strong alpha radiation emitter that burns spontaneously in the air, is absorbed directly by the bone marrow, and causes cancer at lower concentrations than any other radioactive element. It is also invariably contaminated with plutonium 240. This isotope is spontaneously fissile, which means it will tend to initiate nuclear fission even in sub-critical masses of plutonium. This has the effect of causing the bomb to fizzle rather than explode unless the neutron density in the plutonium is raised extremely quickly, much quicker than can be achieved by simply firing one piece of plutonium at another. Instead, a hollow shell of plutonium must be made to implode very evenly by the pressure wave from a layer of high explosives surrounding it. This compresses the plutonium, increasing its density and initiating fission. Despite these complications, the procedure for making such a weapon is now so widely known that a terrorist might be able to build one in a few weeks using stolen plutonium.

What Happens When a Nuclear Bomb Detonates?

Within a millionth of a second of detonating a ten-megaton warhead, the temperature near a nuclear bomb blast rises to ten million degrees Centigrade, as hot as the Sun's centre. The energy explodes outwards at 186,000 miles per second as an intense flash of electromagnetic radiation of all wavelengths. X-rays and gamma rays deliver lethal doses to anyone within two miles of ground zero, while heat energy spontaneously ignites wood, paint, plastic, clothing and hair out to at least ten miles.

A massive fireball billows from the point of detonation to form a raging sphere of plasma that expands to two miles across and rises into the sky at three hundred miles an hour. The light from the fireball is bright enough to temporarily or permanently blind anyone looking directly at it from up to fifty miles away. Meanwhile, the shock wave created by the superheated air expands at supersonic speeds.

Two miles from ground zero, the time between the initial flash and the blast wave is less than ten seconds - insufficient time to take adequate cover. The force at this distance is capable of destroying reinforced concrete buildings. At five miles, an estimated 50% of people are killed by the blast wave itself or by falling masonry from collapsing buildings. Every window within twenty miles shatters, and shards of glass tear through houses and office blocks at several hundred miles an hour.

As soon as the first blast has passed outwards, a second wave rushes in the opposite direction as air is sucked in to replace that thrown out. This double blow causes weakened buildings to collapse toward the ground zero point.

The second wave of destruction comes from secondary sources - burst fuel tanks, gas mains, and collapsed buildings add fuel to the fires started by the initial flash. The myriad separate fires merge to create a "firestorm". When these fires cause sufficient updraft, a wind blows inwards from all sides, further fanning the flames. Even in underground cellars and bomb shelters, the temperature is enough to kill. Those not roasted alive are asphyxiated as the fires consume all the available oxygen or are poisoned by carbon monoxide fumes. The gale-force wind blowing inwards makes it almost impossible for survivors to escape the flames.

After sixty seconds of sustained energy release, the fireball has cooled sufficiently and is no longer luminous. A column of dust several thousand feet tall is sucked up from the ground by the updraft of the fireball. This dust mixes with the 30 per cent of the nuclear fuel blasted apart by the explosion before it could achieve fission and folds over into the apocalyptic signature of the mushroom cloud. Depending on rainfall and wind conditions, this spreads radioactive fallout that will be lethal to anyone for an hour after the detonation over an area of up to nine hundred square miles.

Surviving Nuclear Bomb Blast

Just because the blast catches you by surprise doesn't mean that there is nothing you can do to improve your chances of survival. If you are outside when you see the initial flash of light, run for the best available cover that you can reach in ten seconds. If you are within two miles of a one-megaton explosion, the blast wave will hit you before your ten seconds are up, but ten seconds of exposure to the thermal pulse at that range will certainly be fatal.

Surviving the Initial Blast

If you are still alive after ten seconds, standing behind a very solid, low wall or earth embankment, or lying in a ditch, you are in with a chance. If you are indoors when you see the flash, move away from any windows and position yourself in the corner formed by two load-bearing walls, preferably underneath a solid wooden table. This will help prevent you from being crushed when the ceiling collapses and the floors above you implode.

Stay under cover for at least two minutes or until the second blast wave has passed. If no blast wave reaches you in two minutes, you are over 25 miles from ground zero, and the only danger is likely to be breaking windows. At this point, you may count yourself among the two-thirds of the population that have survived the explosion. However, your continued safety depends very much on what you do next. All roads within a 15-mile radius of the explosion will be impassable, and the emergency services may take many days to find you. If the bomb was detonated as a ground burst, you now have no more than half an hour before radioactive fallout blankets all exposed surfaces and exposes you to lethal doses of radiation.

Deadly Radioactive Dust

If you can find a building that still seems substantially intact, immediately go to the lowest floor and use any available furniture, blankets, carpeting, etc., to close broken windows and doorways.

The fallout will land as fine dust, and keeping it as far away from you as possible is important. If the water mains have not been broken, fill as many containers as possible, preferably ones with lids. Once fallout has settled, radiation outside will not drop to safe levels for at least two weeks, and although you can survive that long without food, you will need between two and three pints of water daily. If there is no mains water, fill containers from the cold water tank in the loft. Because it is much higher up, the water in the tank will become too contaminated to drink once the fallout blankets the roof.

Radiation Dose

The next thing to worry about is the radiation dose you received as a result of your exposure to the initial blast. This will depend on how close to ground zero you were, how quickly you took cover and how dense that shelter was.

Every 15cm of earth or 10cm of concrete between you and the bomb will have halved the radiation dose you received.

The first symptoms of radiation sickness are nausea, vomiting, headache, and dizziness. You can gauge the extent of your dose by how long these symptoms take to appear. If you are experiencing them now, just thirty minutes after the blast, then you have probably received more than 500 Rads, which is fatal even with medical intervention. If the symptoms are also accompanied by bloody diarrhoea, fever and blood circulation problems, your dose may be as high as 5,000 Rads, which would kill you within a relatively swift 48 hours from profound damage to the central nervous system.

If nausea doesn't begin for a few hours, your dose will likely be in the 100 to 400 Rad range. You'll feel fine within a day as you enter the two-week latent phase before suffering diarrhoea, loss of hair, and small haemorrhages of the skin, mouth and intestines for anything up to a couple of months. Provided that you don't receive additional radiation doses within this period, you will almost certainly recover naturally, although your cancer risk will be raised by between one and five per cent. To check that you aren't exposed to any more radiation as you hide up in your shelter, you need a radiation dose-rate meter.

No medicine will prevent the damage radiation causes to human cells, but if you find yourself near an abandoned chemist, you can protect yourself from radioactive iodine. This is a common component of fallout and can be inhaled or swallowed along with contaminated drinking water. The thyroid gland absorbs iodine, and the high concentrations that accumulate there can cause thyroid cancer.

Taking 130mg of potassium iodide half an hour before exposure will saturate the thyroid gland with un-radioactive iodine and prevent the radioactive form from being absorbed. Radio-iodine has a half-life of eight days, so you will need about three months' supply if you plan to stay in the contaminated area.

Nuclear Bomb Survival Kit

A nuclear bomb survival kit is essential to surviving a nuclear bomb blast and its aftereffects. Here are some of the essential items your survival kit should contain.

First Aid Kit: Medical help is unlikely to be available. A medical kit is an obvious must-have item. It should include water sterilization tablets to keep your supplies clear of infection. Radiation depresses the immune system, so there's an added danger of infection from poisoned water or food.

Salt: A person can survive solely on the water for many weeks, but a lack of salt can cause painful cramps. Salt should be among the resources stored; other food types, such as powdered milk and canned foods, are not prone to decay. To quote an official UK survival guide from the 80s: "Don't forget your tin opener."

Radio: You'll want a radio to stay in touch with what's going on outside during your stay, but beware of the Electro Magnetic Pulse (EMP). Keep your radio inside a metal box when not in use to limit its exposure to the electrical surge accompanying a nuclear detonation. EMP could otherwise render it useless.

Seeds: US nuclear survival expert Cresson Kearney recommends storing seeds. Even after emerging from a shelter - after a fortnight, most fallout should have decayed - the survival of central food distribution systems should not be taken for granted. Radiation-free soil should be found, and the cultivation of vegetables should begin.

Plastic Bags: These will be an all-purpose survival aid. Suitably secured, they can safely store large amounts of water. They can also be filled with radiation-absorbing soil to help blanket your shelter against fallout. Plus, they are necessary to store waste and dead bodies.

Nightlights: To stand a reasonable chance of survival means spending up to two weeks in a shelter. Nightlights are essential.

Whitewash: Whitewashing your shelter or the windows and walls of your home decreases the chance of fire from the nuclear heat flash. A greater percentage of heat will be reflected.

Insect Repellent: Grimly enough, you can expect an increased insect population in the days immediately after a nuclear attack. Their exoskeleton bodies render them more radiation-resistant than people, and with heavy casualties, they'll have plenty of food. Keep them out of your fallout shelter with plenty of fly repellent.

Spinach: It might seem like an unlikely survival aid, but a 1986 US Military study said it had an inhibiting effect on the effects of radiation on the human nervous system due to its antioxidant status. It's more useful than vodka, the favoured Russian solution.

Peanuts: If you have to eat the same food for weeks or even months, what should you choose? Cresson Kearney, nuclear scientist and author of Surviving Nuclear War, recommends peanuts. Despite their fat content, they are a good source of protein. So get stockpiling... as long as you're not allergic.

Pillowcases: Pillowcases are another surprise boon. Filled with soil, they form makeshift sandbags around your fallout shelter. Whether you go for an unscrewed door against a wall or simply a trench in the ground, surrounding yourself with as much soil as possible limits your radiation exposure and could be a lifesaver.