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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Nuclear Preparedness Guide, published by Fin on March 8, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum. Author: Finan Adamson Last Updated 03/2022 Overview This doc is to help you prepare for the tail risk of nuclear war. Estimates vary, but an EA Forum survey put the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war at 0.24%. This doc will go into some detail on threat models of nuclear war and then go over preparations you could make to survive being near a nuclear event. Threat Models Nuclear Bombs To get a sense of how a nuclear bomb damages an area, the distance of radioactive fallout, etc. you can check out NukeMap. The damage caused by a nuclear bomb or missile being detonated is going to depend on many factors including bomb size, detonated on ground or in air, weather, etc. This chart includes some distances and effects for different yields and detonation heights. Yield can vary a lot and is difficult to estimate because yields are often secret and can be changed in similar sizes of missiles because the nuclear material is not a heavy part of the missile. Historically, ICBMs in the Russian Arsenal include a range from ~40 kilotons to ~6 megatons. The largest bomb ever tested was Tsar Bomba, which had a yield of about 50 megatons. States generally keep modern yields secret, but common yields of ICBMs in the US and Russian arsenal would almost certainly include warheads with yields in the 100-500 kiloton range and might include weapons of 1 to 6 megatons. I’m basing this guess off of Wikipedia’s list of nuclear weapons. Nuclear War Estimates vary, but an EA Forum survey put the annual probability of US-Russia nuclear war at 0.24%. Living in the US, Russia, Canada, and Northern Europe this is the most concerning nuclear threat. 9 countries possess nuclear weapons. Nuclear Winter Nuclear winter is a controversial risk. During the cold war the security community and the scientific community disagreed about how bad a nuclear winter would be or even if it was possible. The cooling effect depends on a lot of things. How much smoke is created, how much of it is black carbon, how high is that lofted in the atmosphere, what is the weather, were there firestorms, what materials were burned, etc. Looking through the scientific literature, there’s a lot of uncertainty, but in an all out nuclear war between Russia and the US, a nuclear winter lasting months to years seems plausible. If there were a nuclear war between, say, India/Pakistan (about 100 nukes each) there would likely be global climate effects, but probably not nuclear winter. If you were prepping for nuclear winter you’d want months of stored food and water in a place away from potential targets. In the case of nuclear winter, you’d likely want to evacuate to somewhere in the southern hemisphere. EMP The probability of large scale damage from EMP could be higher than other kinds of damage from nuclear weapons because it takes fewer weapons to affect a large area. A single nuclear weapon detonated high enough in the atmosphere could affect an area about the size of the US. What we know about EMP comes from tests done by the US and Russia during the cold war. The US test took out all known satellites at the time and the russian test irreparably damaged several miles of power lines. The major concern from EMP is damaging the electrical grid. The US electric grid depends on Large Power Transformers. If the large power transformers were damaged it could take a long time to replace them. They depend on a lot of custom parts and rare materials. Large Power transformer production takes 1 to 2 years. Perhaps that would be sped up in an emergency or it could take longer if critical resources or supply chains are damaged. I could also imagine transitioning to more localized grids in that situation, but that would still result in unreli...