Just went over this with out group.
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Nuclear War Survival Skills book. Look up the author. He has seen and done some shit. If I remember he was also there for some testing of nukes. Was working with congress on civil defense before M.A.D. and eventually started petitioning them to start civil defense up again after the US stopped it. This book has a lot of what civilians can do in case of an attack. There are some parts of the book that describe what you can do in 30 minutes (basically what you can do before the fallout starts landing outside blast radius) to survive. Amazing book.
I just printed this one.
There is a 2016 version, but probably not surprisingly, it is temporarily out of stock to purchase.
Anyone know if the 2016 version can be found for free like this one?
Highly recommend: Nuclear War Survival Skills: Lifesaving Nuclear Facts and Self-Help Instructions https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634502973/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_6NJHV4NY0TAPH7GXKMWC
You can also find it online as a free, legal, PDF. It's old, but the way nuclear bombs affect human bodies hasn't changed since 1987, and the author spent a few decades working in .gov labs on this stuff, so it isn't just generic prepper porn...the dude actually knows what he's talking about.
Short answer is "no", but 6" of dirt would. Maybe stage a few large (from the garden store) bags of soil near each window, then when needed cover the windows with dirt.
Key thing is you want dense mass.
Think about "up" too. A ground based detonation is going to throw irradiated dust way up into the atmosphere, which will settle on the roof of your house. Even if you're not getting radiation horizontally in the basement, you could be getting it vertically through the roof/floor.
I'd highly recommend this book: Nuclear War Survival Skills https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634502973/
It's also available as a free PDF, but after reading the first few pages of the PDF I concluded it was worth 15 bucks for a hard copy.
It was written in 1987 during the cold war, but the author was studying nuclear physics since before the first nuclear weapons were dropped on Japan, and spent several decades working in government labs doing research around what civilians need to do to survive Warsaw vs NATO went nuclear It's not just standard prepper fear porn...the dude has serious credentials and knows what he's talking about.
If you're at ground zero when a 5 megaton bomb falls on you, you're dead no matter what you do; vaporized instantly. If you're 2000 miles away from a 5 megaton detonation, you'll probably survive no matter what you do. Between those extremes, there's actually a lot of things you can do to greatly increase your chances of survival.
If there's an EMP, you can count on two things: you won't be reading any of the books you've saved on your electronic devices, and you'll be trying to survive in a post-nuclear nightmare. For this reason get a hard copy of Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny. It is the single best book written on the subject for the average citizen.
In addition I would get a hard copy of the LDS Preparedness Manual. You can skip past the first couple of dozen pages if you aren't interested in the religious stuff. After that is an encyclopedic resource for survival.
You can get both books on Amazon right now for about $40 total, and if you do it will vastly improve your survival library.
A nuclear exchange isn't going to be as bad as you're thinking.
If Russia dropped all of its 6000 bombs on the US all at once, they'd probably kill a third of the population, maybe half, pretty much the big cities. There's still going to be a lot of people around rebuilding.
"Mutually assured destruction" was a US doctrine that the rest of the world, rightly, didn't subscribe to. "Nuclear Winter" was mostly soviet propaganda disproved in the early 1980s.
I'd highly recommend reading https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1634502973/; it's not the normal prepper fiction, it was actually written by a guy working for the US government on what it would take to keep the civilian population alive during a nuclear war. A lot of that book (like the food storage information and improvised cooking methods) has value for other disasters too.
Nuclear War Survival Skills:... https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634502973?ref=ppx_pop_mob_ap_share
There's a pdf of the earlier edition (public domain) available if you do some searching.
Really good book.
https://www.amazon.com/Nuclear-War-Survival-Skills-Instructions/dp/1634502973
Appendix A.6 is probably it, or some variation based on what materials you can lay your hands on.
Know where it's in stock? I was hoping to get a second copy shipped to some family members on the other side of the country.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1634502973/ref=cm_sw_r_apan_glt_i_5A8EGFS3ZC0NF1BHHCTH
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1634502973/
Free PDF: https://www.nukepills.com/wp-content/uploads/woocommerce_uploads/nuclear_war_survival_skills.pdf
I just started reading that. It's a bit dated, but 1987 was the cold war with Russia and radiation hasn't changed much since then.
Assuming you mean finger lakes of upstate NY, I'd imagine you're in a good place. That's mostly farmland that's not likely to take a direct hit.
(By comparison, I'm in a city ten miles north of a large national guard base, and 20 miles south of a huge army base...I'm probably in a bad place)
>This edition of Cresson H. Kearny’s iconic Nuclear War Survival Skills (originally published in 1979 and updated by Kearny himself in 1987 and again in 2001)