My story is in its earliest stages, and I have a quick question. What is a good amount of time between the nuclear bombs dropping arouund the world, and people coming out of shelters?
Also, on a side note just for fun answers
: What would you do post acpocolypse? Imagine you were coming out of a fallout shelter say...189 years after the bombs dropped, and were seeing everything for the first time and just had some old maps from before "the war" to help you out. What would you do? Where would you go?
Thanks and I am interested to see your replies
JermanD
Haven't read all the other replies, so excuse if i'm repeating them.
Here's a neato and rather detailed scenario of how a war could have gone down and its consequences:
http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html
It posits a surprising # of the world's pop left after a war (above ground.)
"July 1988...Current population figures are: Rio Grande Valley--690,000; Travis County--550,000; Texas--16,800,000; the United States--245,000,000; the world--5,150,000,000. [right before the war]
"
August 1989...Surviving Americans now number 45,000,000, including 4,000,000 Texans. A few million surviving Americans are permanently sterile due to radiation exposure. World population is now 3,300,000,000."
It culled and collated from an impressive group of sources, from what i can see.
Another site:
http://www.mindfully.org/Nucs/Sagan-Nuclear-Consequences31oct83.htm
Carl Sagan has a much less optimistic idea, based generally on scientific study of Mars (so you have to skim down past his Mars observations to his extrapolations to how this fits into a post-nuc world.)
Partial quote follows:
"it is possible that something approaching half the human population on the planet would be killed or seriously injured by the direct effects of a nuclear war. Social disruption; the unavailability of electricity, fuel, transportation, food deliveries, communications, and other civil services; the absence of medical care; the decline in sanitation measures; rampant disease and severe psychiatric disorders would doubtless claim collectively a significant number of further victims. But a range of additional effects—some unexpected, some inadequately treated in earlier studies, some uncovered by us only recently—makes the picture much more somber still."
There are some kick-ass graphs and explanations that follow. I only skimmed, looking for a time-line (since you want people to re-emerge in around 200yrs.) Didn't find that, but did see some great explanations of eco-system changes.
On another site, Sagan talks specifically about nuclear winter:
"The cold, the dark and the intense radioactivity, together lasting for months, represent a severe assault on our civilization and our species. Civil and sanitary services would be wiped out. Medical facilities, drugs, the most rudimentary means for relieving the vast human suffering, would be unavailable. Any but the most elaborate shelters would be useless, quite apart from the question of what good it might be to emerge a few months later. Synthetics burned in the destruction of the cities would produce a wide variety of toxic gases, including carbon monoxide, cyanides, dioxins and furans. After the dust and soot settled out, the solar ultraviolet flux would be much larger than its present value. Immunity to disease would decline. Epidemics and pandemics would be rampant, especially after the billion or so unburied bodies began to thaw. Moreover, the combined influence of these severe and simultaneous stresses on life are likely to produce even more adverse consequences -- biologists call them synergisms -- that we are not yet wise enough to foresee." (
http://www.cooperativeindividualism.org/sagan_nuclear_winter.html)
I can't see it lasting 200 yrs, but it would change, totally, the world that your survivors walk out into. Non-man-made ice ages, however, did last hundreds of years. And once the world was chilled like that....
You *can* see the effects of a real-world nuclear disaster, if you want to look at pictures of Chornobyl:
http://englishrussia.com/?p=293
This place is fascinating to me in that the soil around it for hundreds of miles is *still* considered to irradiated to safely grow crops in (tho poor people are doing just that.) And yet the wildlife around the city is flourishing, since the absence of *people* is considered much more helpful to wildlife than the radiation is debilitating.
By nuc-war standards, Chornobyl is a very small disaster. Here's another site, tho, that talks about the real effects:
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/chernobyl/inf07.html
And i saw a show, some time ago, where they sent a robot in to check out the reactor that collapsed--it's still deadly close in, and it's gonna be for a looong time (can't, offhand, find out how long.) And the plug of cement and such is crumbling, and the doc hinted that if (and when) it collapsed, there'd be a sizable leak of still-deadly radiation into the atmosphere. But you know how those docs love to cry wolf. Heh.
Common understanding (which is, admittedly, often specious, is that direct-hit sites would be dangerous to walk through and deadly to live in or eat from for hundreds of hears.)
You can tell that i loves this stuff.
I'm a child of the 60s--the era of nuclear fear. You embrace your fears or they eat you up. Heh.
