The aftermath

0:00Support for this show comes from Indeed. When the pressure's on and you need to hire the right person for the job, Indeed Sponsored Jobs has your back. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed are 95 % more likely to report a hire than non-sponsored jobs. Join the 3.3 million employers worldwide that use Indeed to connect with quality talent that fits their needs. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. When you need the right person to cut through the chaos, this is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs.

0:34And listeners of this show will get a$75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at Indeed.com slash podcast. Just go to Indeed.com slash podcast right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed-sponsored jobs. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier.

1:17CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

1:41This is Unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton. And today we have an episode from a show called Are We Doomed? The show is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. every episode, the host, Ben Bradford, digs into a potentially terrible doomsday scenario. And the thing about terrible doomsday scenarios is that they are really fun to make up stories about, right? We have lots of great TV and movies and books telling us what the various ends of the world might look like. But I have always personally been curious about what we actually know about how doomsday scenarios might play out. What is hype? What is real?

2:22What we don't know for sure? And what I appreciate about Are We Doomed? is that even though we will never know exactly what the end of the world as we know it will look like, Ben speaks to various researchers who are trying to figure things out. And so here is Ben Bradford and one potentially terrible doomsday scenario.

2:46You realize you're hearing air raid sirens. Your phone, which is on silent, suddenly blares. It's an emergency alert. Nuclear missiles inbound. This is not a test. This is not a test. You stare until a text from a friend jolts you into action.

3:10If we follow the roadmap of countless TV shows, novels, video games, what we do next is clear. We scurry down a ladder and clamp the hatch on a fallout shelter. Maybe ramshackle, maybe decked out. We hunker in a gloomy underground, peeling open cans of food. Maybe for months. Maybe for years. Waiting. To come up to the surface one day and restart civilization. When we do re-emerge, we join a sandy wasteland of sheet metal and cannibals. This is Thunderdome. Depth is listening.

3:49It's not great, but at least it's exciting. I love post-apocalypse movies. Mad Max, The Road, Snowpiercer, the Waterworld live show. Really good. I think there's something entrancing about a future wasteland. It's like a blank slate for a filmmaker to create a new world, but with little Easter eggs for us. A character has a spyglass, and we know it was a soda bottle. And then he gets chainsawed. These depictions, though, if you ask, especially studiers of nuclear war and fallout, are not exactly realistic. And I have a question. We've known since our first episode how easy it could be to start nuclear war.

4:32Oops. If the missiles do launch, if the air raid sirens really do go off, then what? There are bunkers and fallout shelters. Do they work? Who would go into them? How long might one actually be down there? If you survived, what world would you actually walk back into? Dying time's here. Not that one. I think a really common answer is, well, I'll just be dead, so I don't have to worry about it. If you're in that camp, I got some rough news. In an actual nuclear scenario, the best estimates are that while a horrific, unfathomable number of people die, a lot remain alive. And then... Given the option in human history, most people choose live.

5:21So today, you and me, we're going to survive nuclear war. From finding shelter to figuring out what our post-nuclear world really looks like. It will be deeply unpleasant, and not in a Mad Max way. A really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life. This is Are We Doomed, a production of Nuance Tales, part of the NPR Network. I'm post-apocalyptic Ben Bradford.

5:52Rewind to where all this started. The air raid sirens screech. Our phones blare with emergency alerts. Missiles are inbound. This time, it's not a Hollywood movie. So if we're going to survive, it's not initially about pluck. It's about location. Where are you located? I'm in Los Angeles. Oh, sure. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I assume that I'm dead, but we can discuss. This is Alex Wellerstein, nuclear weapons historian, author, developer of a detailed organ trail-like video game on the subject of survival and what it would be like. Alex says, in all-out global nuclear war, every major city is a prime target.

6:32I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, but like New York City. Our assumption is that New York City is glassified. Cheery. But Alex says, I am not necessarily dead, nor are you, even if you're a New Yorker. Even the most sort of destructive assumptions of the Cold War, where we assume the Soviet Union was just trying to, like, just take out Americans, essentially. It's still concluded that you could have 40 % surviving or something like that. That's not nobody. That is not nobody. So Alex thinks it's a mistake to assume we wouldn't survive the blast. Depending on where you're living, depending on where the weapon is targeted, depending on where it goes off, you might be hopeless.

7:15But Los Angeles is large, as you know. If the bomb actually lands on you, you're toast. But they can miss. If it lands 5, 10 miles in the other direction, you might not be fully toasted. You might be just a little, you know, warmed. We'd like to avoid being warmed, Alex says. That means shielding ourselves from the three deadly presence a nuclear weapon brings. There's going to be heat. There's going to be blasts. There's going to be radiation. The heat reaches the temperature of the sun. The blast crushes concrete buildings like walnuts, and the radiation melts our DNA. If we're outside the zone of certain death, but inside the reach of any of these three presence, we're going to need shelter.

8:00But where? In the early days of atomic weapons, people worried about bombs equivalent to those the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They dug conventional bomb shelters. Radiation, Alex says, was the smallest concern. If you're close enough that the radiation is going to affect you, the blasts and the fire are probably a bigger deal anyway. But countries continued to build new bombs, bigger bombs, missiles. The weapons are now hundreds of times bigger, can be even thousands of times bigger. But the new effect is going to be fallout. Clouds of radiation would now sweep far from a blast site.

8:39And this is caused by the immense amount of radioactive contamination that these weapons have. It's going to affect the suburbs. It's going to affect agriculture. And so the idea is that doesn't happen instantly. That will take several hours for that radiation to make its way across. And so you have this window of time in which you can maybe do something about it. So more people dug deeper, even farther from the projected blast sites. They didn't just look to shield from potential blasts. They looked to seal themselves away from radiation. So this is what gets us to the fallout shelter. The fallout shelter.

9:22In the early 1960s, Life magazine gushed on its cover. 97 out of 100 people can be saved with fallout shelters. That was wildly optimistic. President John F. Kennedy called for more than$200 million to build public shelters, equivalent to almost$2.5 billion today. The United States government had the option to build lots of public shelters. But that's not what we ended up with. Because it's really expensive. It's hard to get that pencil out. Yeah, right. Even$200 million could have only housed a tiny fraction of the populace. Presidents looked at this and said, I would rather spend that money on something else, like the interstate highway system.

10:03So Alex says the government's message and strategy shifted. So what they do is what we always do in the United States when we like have a public health problem, but we don't want to fund it, which is that we encourage you to take responsibility for your own health. And and we do that by just telling you, like, you should just build your own shelter. We're not going to do it. It's, of course, your job to protect your family from global thermonuclear war. It's your job. For a hot minute, the backyard fallout shelter was big business. There's for-profit enterprises that will sell you prefab shelters.

10:40There's a whole little shelter industry. Save your family from deadly nuclear fallout. You can picture the result. The hole in the ground in the backyard, ladder leading into the murk, canned food on green metal shelves, a studio apartment for the apocalypse. People did dig these and still do. But Alex says there were never that many. In general, it's a pretty small number of people who actually build a shelter. It's really hard to do. It's expensive and it's coming out of your pocket. There was other digging. The government may not have chosen to house all its citizens, but it has created some bunkers.

11:20These are real purpose-built shelters. Alex has visited one in Massachusetts. It's outside the borders of what they think destroyed Boston would be. Half an hour from the city, the State Emergency Management Agency uses this bunker as its current headquarters. Like it takes you underground and it's got like a big door and everything. These are the real Michelin star bunkers, the country clubs of anti-radioactivity. They have all sorts of facilities. They have a morgue. But they're also very exclusive. They're designated for different parts of the government to basically be whisked away to so that they can do what's called continuity of government.

11:58So the idea is that they'll survive and somehow run the country from down underneath a destroyed mountain. Your best bet to get in is to be like the undersecretary of education. It didn't have to be this way. We could have dug ourselves large public shelters. Other countries did. Switzerland still assigns every citizen a spot in a public fallout shelter. Finland and Sweden created some real first-class facilities with gyms and classrooms and ball courts. Even the U.S.'s great Cold War rival dug far more than we did. The Soviet Union, they did more state-run projects. Big surprise, right? Like, that's kind of their jam.

12:40But Alex says there were legitimate reasons to not do this kind of building. The Soviets could probably only have housed about 20 % of their enormous population. It's not clear that even they thought that was going to be very effective. Yeah. It's too expensive to build an extra city for all of your people. not only are you digging a new city under your current city, you have to stock that unused city with food and water for its theoretical inhabitants. It's a lot. This all matters, not as some dusty history lesson. It matters for us today, as we escape from the missiles, scrambling for shelter in the aftermath.

13:16We need to figure out where to go. With few backyard shelters or expensive public bunkers, lawmakers did provide one other option. If we weren't going to build new structures, we would at least recycle. They start a program to identify spaces that could be used as shelters, existing spaces. In the 1960s, military surveyors hunted for places we'd already built or dug, rooms that with minor adjustments and the right supplies could stand in to provide some protection from radiation. Some underground basement that was identified by a survey as like, yeah, this meets the minimum requirements for like what a fallout shelter would be.

13:57It's made out of this, It's got this many stories above it. It's got this and that." Cities and towns prepared an untold number of these kinds of makeshift shelters. Los Angeles identified more than a thousand sites. If you walk through New York City today, you can still see signs — faded yellow and black placards featuring the radiation symbol and the words, Fallout Shelter. So the air raid sirens howl. Our phones blare. Missiles screech. We stagger through city streets among panicked masses, literally racing from the imminent heat, blast, and subsequent fallout. We happen to spot one of those yellow and black placards and follow the arrows until we reach the end, where they're pointing, and we find nothing.

14:41All of these shelters are defunct. New York is taking down its placards, although there's confusion over even what agency is responsible for that. Los Angeles stopped maintaining its shelters decades ago, An inspector in the 1970s, per the LA Times, found food had rotted. Medicine that hadn't been stolen had coagulated. Chicago, the situation's similar. There was a time in which people thought the only way we can deal with nuclear war is to basically dig. And what happened is they basically concluded that they didn't want to dig anymore. And the only way they're going to deal with nuclear war was to threaten to unleash on everybody else if it comes our way.

15:21Deterrence became the sole defense strategy. Mm-hmm. We prevent war by pointing our weapons at each other, but we're not planning anymore, not really, for what happens after, if we ever pull the trigger. On one hand, that makes sense. We don't plan for what to do if the universe spontaneously collapses either, even though it's theoretically possible, and we will cover it. It's just too destructive. On the other hand, the lack of planning for nuclear war would leave millions and millions of people, possibly you and me, on our own, holding the bag. We don't have that much provided for us. However, good news.

16:01You and I are going to survive. We're going to spot our own shelter, hunker down in it, and emerge into a new world.

16:15Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, So why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com.

17:42The missiles crash and explode over our cities, over our military sites. In the area of each explosion, heat melts everything down to its atoms. Fires burst out spontaneously miles into the distance. The blast force pushes the world flat around it. And then, nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein says, something that looks like snow begins to fall. Sounds almost peaceful after all the fire and brimstone. But it's really radioactive debris. It's basically pulverized earth that has been impregnated with the remains of nuclear fission. And it's like snow that's dusting down. And that snow is radioactive, right?

18:26So it's shooting out little particles. For days, winds carry the snow to all kinds of regions that weren't directly targeted. So if we're not atomized by the heat or crushed by the blast, even if we're far away from all of it, we got to avoid the snow, the fallout. Theoretically, that's what all these fallout shelters were for. Although I wonder, was that real? Would they actually work? Was this just like a psychological thing or is this something that's like, oh yeah, actually for the four people who actually make it into these things, they're probably going to be okay? It depends on how much radiation, but the science behind them is pretty straightforward.

19:09forward, every time those little particles hit something else, they basically stop. If it's possible, you'd like a wall to absorb that or the dirt to absorb that and not you. You don't want to be the wall. You want other walls. Exactly. Alex says when you get down to it, the fallout shelter is pretty much that simple. It's just stuff that's going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb. So every foot of dirt you have, every brick you have, steel, lead, obviously these are very dense things, a bunch of water. Water is actually pretty good at absorbing lots of radiation. It's relatively dense.

19:48A decent shelter could cut down the amount of radiation tenfold. A really good one, 50-fold. Does that help you? It depends how much is coming in in the first place. If what's coming in is 50 times more than what would kill you, you're still dead. roasted internally by the radiation. Or you might just get sick. Radiation poisoning that we recover from. But still, if we're trying to survive, our best hope is walls. Lots of walls. Let's map two scenarios of where we might find them. Rewind. Our phones blare. Missiles are in the sky. The air raid sirens actually do not screech, because in most places they do not work anymore.

20:28We're not looking for a backyard shelter, because unless we're Jim the Prepper and we have our own, there aren't that many, and plus it's rude to go into people's backyards. We're not ending up in a government bunker unless we have very, very special clearance. But perhaps, perhaps our local emergency services scramble heroically. They put together makeshift shelters, as they do in hurricanes or earthquakes or wildfire. Maybe they fill one of those sites first identified back in the 1960s, where we know it will cut radiation exposure. So we're hurriedly ushered inside a dank, disused, moldy office basement.

21:03Other strangers packing with us. The door bolts shut. Outside, the poisoned snow begins to fall. Dusting down. Everything gets very still and quiet. Then what? Alex Wellerstein says if our shelter is anything like the old government plans, we're in for a bad time. Some of this stuff looks dire. I mean, some of these American plans for public shelters are things like, all right, we'll make a room and we'll just, like, fit 20 people in this room even though it's not very big. We will sleep uncomfortably if we sleep at all. Oh, you can rest on a cot that's two foot from somebody else's butt. We drink bottled water and eat canned food, or MREs, that the emergency personnel were able to leave with us.

21:51But what's worse is the plumbing situation. The most horrific thing, I really love this. They basically made in the United States what they called sanitation kits. Okay. They're like a cylinder, right? And you open them and they have a toilet lid that can go on them. Oh. And they have some chemicals and some plastic bags. Here's your toilet. Because you got to go to the bathroom. Yeah. And these things are squalid and disturbing. Princeton University ran an experiment in the late 1950s. They put a family in a basement fallout shelter for two weeks. Other than boredom, their biggest challenge was the odor of the chemical toilet.

22:29That was with only four of them. And then there's a line on it that says, like, this accommodates 50 people. And you're just like, this is the worst porta potty you can imagine. I don't want to make light of nuclear Armageddon. This sanitation product is obviously not the worst thing about nuclear war, not even close. But it kind of feels like it is. It makes it really concrete what surviving means in this circumstance, right? And that's why I like these examples. Totally. It's not abstract. It's not like a blinding light or, you know, it's not a post-apocalyptic Mad Max thing. It's like a really terrible toilet.

23:06The worst toilet of your entire life. This is really why I was interested in this episode. More than any news you can use, even though we are surviving nuclear war, This is a story about what the reality would feel like. Should we ever launch these weapons? A lot of people would have to adjust quickly to new circumstances. And humans do that. You may remember a few years ago, this first-in-a-century pandemic swept through, and suddenly everyone was wearing cloth masks and wiping down groceries. In nuclear war, how would our lives adjust? What would that be like? Things like toilets. Really, the definition of the mundane and banal.

23:45And yet, for a lot of us, the actual experience is probably not even getting that horrifying toilet. Because remember, the makeshift shelter is unlikely. More likely, no one's coming for us. Scenario two. Phone. Missiles. Scramble. Alex says without an official shelter, we're going to have to be flexible. My advice for people, sometimes people ask me like, oh, where would you go? and it's like, I don't, I don't, when is this happening? What are the odds I'm going to be sitting in the perfect location when something happens? I'm imagining Jim the Prepper, who really put the labor into digging out his stocked up shelter, finding out the end of the world is happening while he's on a work trip.

24:28What's better is to know what to look for. You could reason your way to the best option in front of you. Alex says we grab a go bag from our home or our car, and we're very simply looking to get away from the snow. Assuming the outside world is basically poison, and poison that can go through walls, but it gets weakened by every wall it goes through. So we want as many walls as we can find to catch the fallout so that our bodies are not the wall. It's better to be inside. You know, you want to be in the center of a building, and ideally, the bigger the building is better. Underground is even better.

25:03A basement might work well. an underground parking garage could be even more effective. So that if you were in this situation, you'd be like, oh, there's an underground parking lot over there. Let's go there. We do. We run down the ramps to the lowest floor of this garage. This is currently essentially the official guidance here in Los Angeles. You're on your own. Find shelter. Have a go bag with food and water. Stay there and wait. I think in my head, it's like you're down there for years. Now we're mole people. What is it actually? So definitely not years. Alex says how long we have to stay in our parking lot with God knows what kind of food or water and not even a squalid chemical toilet depends on the size of the bomb, our location, and therefore the amount of radioactivity.

25:54So fission products have a pretty regular decay curve. every basically seven hours you're in there, the intensity is going down by a factor of 10. Two weeks is sort of the maximum that anybody thought in the Cold War would probably be necessary. And that's probably overkill. Got it. We're down in our garage a week, two weeks. Surprisingly reasonable. You might dare think manageable. Still, during those days underground, it's dark. Our flashlights run out of batteries. Our phones, unless we keep them off, run out of batteries. We may not know how much time has passed, but eventually we chance it.