The war in Ukraine is making people think again about the possibility of global nuclear war, for the first time since the end of the Cold War in 1989 (my final year of school).
It is also revealing the extent of deep underground facilities designed for nuclear war throughout Ukraine. In Mariopol, Soledar, Bakhmut and other places where pitched battles are being fought Ukrainian fighters are utilising old Soviet underground complexes under factories and in salt mines etc.
If these facilities were built throughout Ukraine then they were also presumably built throughout Russia itself.
It appears that the USSR actually prepared properly to survive a global nuclear war and those facilities are still available to Russia today.
It reveals a very different attitude to the survivability of global nuclear war between the US and Russia.
The accepted wisdom in 'The West' is that global nuclear war is not survivable. However this is simply untrue.
Hollywood movies suggest you'd need to stay underground for years because of radioactive fallout, but this is simply not true.
Firstly, only ground-burst nuclear weapons produce substantial radioactive fallout.
But air-bursting nuclear weapons is the far more effective use of them to destroy large areas.
The only reason to use ground burst is to destroy underground facilities (like opposition nuclear missile silos). Otherwise you just dramatically reduce the area of effect of a nuclear weapon.
Secondly, 48 hours is sufficient for radioactivity from a nuclear blast to drop to survivable levels.
Nuclear weapons produce three main destructive effects:
Based on Hollywood most people think the above order is what is most likely to kill you.
But the opposite is the case.
The radiation burst has the shortest range and is stopped by multiple thick walls in the line of sight or meters of earth.
The thermal fireball is what destroyed almost all the buildings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that is because they were made of wood and caught fire and burnt up completely.
Modern brick and concrete buildings are far more resistant to this thermal effect.
The destructive effect with the largest range and greatest impact is actually the overpressure shockwave that applies pressure to the side of buildings and has similar effects to an earthquake.
Earthquake proof concrete buildings will survive twice as close to ground zero as non-earthquake proof. At Nagasaki a brick earthquake proof building survived within 100m of ground zero.
Deep underground shelters will survive very close to ground zero.
Sources
https://military-history.fandom.com/wiki/Air_burst
http://www.ki4u.com/guide.htm
https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/devastating-effects-of-nuclear-weapons-war/
[Image from 1950s pamphlet which is out of copyright]
It is clear that the USSR made the correct preparations to survive nuclear war, but the US did not, because they believed it to not be survivable. Russia has inherited these preparations.
Moscow has also had a missile defence system to shot down incoming nuclear missiles for many years.
This is yet another reason for not continuing to escalate the Ukraine war. If it goes nuclear then Russia will survive but the US will not.
Interestingly Israel, where I live, has mandated earthquake proof buildings with blast-proof thick concrete walled shelter rooms (protected room or 'MAMAD' in Hebrew) in every dwelling constructed since 1991 (approximately 2/3rd of all dwellings).
The main purpose of these is to protect against earthquakes (we are in an earthquake zone and close to Turkey) and against the 10s of thousands of rockets and missiles fired by terrorist groups at Israeli cities over the last 20 years.
For the last ~15 years this has included a full Nuclear, Biological, Chemical (NBC) positive-pressure air-filtration system in every protected room.
But this same infrastructure also provides very effective protection against nuclear weapons. Very few Israelis actually understand this nuclear protection aspect, but someone in the civil defence field knew what they were doing.
Israel also has a 5 layered missile defence system or which the top two layers (Arrow II & III) can stop most nuclear missiles.
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