User talk:Mysterious Whisper/sandbox/2

Comments on this draft

discredited is too strong---if it's been "advocated but then discredited" why would anyone read any further....---why not something like "advocated and dismissed" or some other less strong negative word. Hga (talk) 22:58, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

"a number of publications" ... lots of people, too, who of course write those publications. Famous serious ones like Edward Teller as I recall (father of the US H-bomb).

"full-scale nuclear war could potentially bring about the extinction of the human race."

Some, I'm not sure how credible, are/were pretty sure about the latter, at least in the context of the Cold War armories. It's not in the cards today, I'm pretty sure.

Actually, there's no secret to near total survival. As I put it back then, "With 1/3 of one year's (US) defense budget we could build a blast shelter space for every citizen, including a year's worth of food (which would make the farmers very happy). After that, SDI if we build it protects the people who get caught out and your record collection, with some inevitable failures. So, if you and everyone you love is alive, isn't saying you're rather be dead after a nuclear war the ultimate materialist statement?"

No one ever had a come back to that, all the way to a guy who became MIT's Provost. Hga (talk) 23:05, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

The statement for NWSS is too strong. It entirely depends on advanced warning, a day or very possibly two, to build a fallout shelter and related infrastructure to get you through the first couple of weeks of heavy radiation and to provide a safe place to sleep for longer. Blast shelters take longer, but it's all expedient stuff for when the government utterly fails at it's most important job.

Or as Dean Ing put it in Systemic Shock:

"The American public had by turns ignored and ridiculed its cassandras: city planners, ecologists, demographers, socialists, immigrants, who had all warned against our increasing tendency to crowd into our cities. Social stress, failure of essential services, and warfare were only a few of the spectres we had granted only a passing glance. We had always found some solution to our problems, though: often at the last moment. Firmly anchored in most Americans was the tacit certainty that, even to the problem of nuclear war against population centers, there must be a uniquely American solution; we would find it.

The solution was sudden death. A hundred million Americans found it."

With our abandonment of Civil Defense, if serious nuclear war is made upon the US, most survivors will simply not be in bad fallout plumes, let alone in targets. NWSS is for people who want to be prepared and who are smart or lucky enough to have enough time to set up before the fallout reaches them. Hga (talk) 23:17, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

This "draft" is just a rough template to get the main idea across (I spent all of forty seconds on it before real life called me away as well). If you look closely, you'll notice most of it was lifted from Nuclear warfare#Survival. The content (if you can even call it that) will likely change drastically before I move this to article space. Though, I suppose the above is still useful information. If I wanted comment on anything at this point, it would be on the sections, organization, title, etc.

Since there has never been a global thermonuclear war, a neutral article will need to cover all well-published opinions and theories, even if they are "wrong." (with any luck, I'll find enough facts to subtly demonstrate why they are wrong)

On the other hand, keep the literary references coming (especially if the text is available online). Mysterious Whisper (SHOUT) 23:35, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

You're obviously well-read on this, and though I understand you're too busy to write an entire article, I'd be interested to see how you would write the lead to such an article (Nuclear War Survival, with particular focus on debate). If you could come up with a couple of well-sourced paragraphs, I could probably extrapolate a better structure for the article (particularly the "Survivability" section), as the lead is supposed to be a summary of the rest of the article. Mysterious Whisper (SHOUT) 23:42, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

I've been a nuclear war survivalist since 1970 or so (2nd or 3rd grade; heh, I first read the government's primary source book back when my library's copy was titled The Effects of Atomic Weapons), very serious since 1983-4 when I bought a copy of the Dial Press edition of Bruce Clayton's great work that was curiously on display at the counter (well, it does have a great cover, "LIFE AFTER DOOMSDAY" over one of the classic bomb photos). And bought and read a lot of books since then. So I think I can contribute quite a bit from this "you can survive, if" angle, and much of what I wrote above was for the longer term benefit of this effort.

Looks like Systemic Shock isn't on-line from any reputable source, but I was sufficiently impressed by that passage that I typed it in from page 48 of the first (I think) Ace paperback edition in the '80s.

I'll see what I can come up with for the lead as well as organization, although I confess I have no interest in the debate part, that was more than enough of my life through the 1980s; someone else will have to handle that angle. Hga (talk) 01:12, 17 October 2012 (UTC)