Nuclear War Survival Skills is a guide to getting through the inevitable forthcoming nuclear devastation of America and the radioactive immolation of the last and greatest of human dreams. Written in 1986 by Cresson Kearny, it'll take you through everything from gathering food to the proper ventilation of backyard bunkers.
This updated and expanded edition of Nuclear War Survival Skills gives instructions that have enabled untrained Americans to make high-protection-factor expedient shelters, efficient air pumps to ventilate and cool shelters, the only homemakable fallout radiation meter that is accurate and dependable, and other life-support equipment. There instructions have been developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory civil defense researchers and others over the past 14 years. and have been field-tested repeatedly tinder simulated crisis condition.
Do enjoy establishment-friendly debunkings hilarious in their optimism! For example, contrary to myth, the great powers do not have enough nuclear firepower to wipe out humanity in one fell swoop, and also the nuclear winter will be no big deal. Which is to say that even a five-minute scan of this book makes clear just how completely doomed civilization is if more than a handful of nukes ever fly. The text is available at the Internet Archive, and you can pay $20 for a tatty old copy on Amazon. Read the rest
North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will delay a decision on whether to fire missiles at the U.S. territory of Guam as he waits to see what the United States does, the North's state media reported on Tuesday. United States secretary of state Rex Tillerson says any dialogue is all up to Kim. Read the rest
Listen: 'Nuclear War,' by space prophet Sun Ra and his mighty arkestra. Read the rest
Eric Schlosser's book and film Command and Control look at the terrifying prospects of nuclear friendly fire, where one of America's nukes detonates on US soil. It also looks at what might happen if a false alarm gets relayed to a trigger-happy general or President. He starts this New Yorker piece with a terrifying story from June 3, 1980:
President Jimmy Carter’s national-security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was asleep in Washington, D.C., when the phone rang. His military aide, General William Odom, was calling to inform him that two hundred and twenty missiles launched from Soviet submarines were heading toward the United States. Brzezinski told Odom to get confirmation of the attack. A retaliatory strike would have to be ordered quickly; Washington might be destroyed within minutes. Odom called back and offered a correction: twenty-two hundred Soviet missiles had been launched.
Brzezinski decided not to wake up his wife, preferring that she die in her sleep. As he prepared to call Carter and recommend an American counterattack, the phone rang for a third time. Odom apologized—it was a false alarm. An investigation later found that a defective computer chip in a communications device at norad headquarters had generated the erroneous warning. The chip cost forty-six cents.
Lots more scary info at the Command and Control film website.
• World War Three, by mistake (New Yorker)
Image: Maxwell Hamilton Read the rest
Fusion looks at the tensions between a pacifist religious sect and local North Dakota officials over an abandoned Cold War anti-missile complex that looks like something out of Illuminati conspiracies. The Hutterites won the auction for the giant pyramid on the prairie to the chagrin of local officials, who unsuccessfully tried to buy the decomissioned military facility. Read the rest
