Comment by jacquesm
13 hours ago
That's how long a typical submarine based hit of a Russian missile on the USA would take from launch to detonation over target.
Land based would take maybe twice that much.
Effectively the world has been 30 minutes from 'dead' since the 1960s.
It’s why the US mostly gave up on fallout shelters - no realistic amount of time to get to them unless you’re already sitting on it.
It's more that fallout shelters are basically useless even if you manage to get yourself inside before the detonation.
Basically, you would run out of water, and even if you have clean water you would still run out of food, even if you survived the strike and the fallout. We cannot actually live without major transportation hubs to deliver food etc., which by necessity are located in or near the major urban areas that would be destroyed in a nuclear war. That, more than anything else, is why the US and USSR ultimately abandoned "civil defense" and focused on "deterrence."
If this were true, then without constant resupply, space travel would be impossible. Yes the ISS crew get resupply, but if you’ve got a big enough bunker, you should still be able to feed a skeleton crew of a functioning government etc
Eh, you can store literally years of food and water in a shelter. The worst of the fallout burns off in weeks, and the rest is usually gone in a month or two except for some hot spots.
It’s why Hiroshima and Nagasaki were repopulated so quickly.
But yes, good point regarding the rest of the infrastructure.
Rebuilding society would be very hard.