Online searches spike on surviving nuclear attack

Google searches for how to survive a nuclear attack have mushroomed since President Trump said North Korea would suffer “fire and fury like the world has never seen before” if it continues to threaten the United States, according to Newsweek.

Indeed, when typing “how to survive” into the search field, “how to survive a nuclear attack” is the first option that appears.

FEMA has developed planning guidance for responding to nuclear attacks, but the simplest guide is this: get far underground and stay there.

The luxury condos built into an old Cold War missile silo not far from Concordia may not seem so far-fetched by some folks these days.

FEMA indicates the safest underground spaces from nuclear fallout would be two stories beneath a five-story apartment building or underneath a large office. But toxic particles figure to linger in the air for months after a blast.

Sites such as secretsofsurvival.com advise starting to plan now with survival gear and building a fallout room, then stocking it with food and clothing. There’s even a wiki page on how to survive a nuclear attack.

But, as the wiki page states, “modern thermonuclear weapons are many hundreds, and in the case of the largest weapons, several thousand times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. We really do not fully understand what will happen when thousands of these weapons are detonated at the same time.”

This story was originally published August 10, 2017 at 1:36 PM with the headline "Online searches spike on surviving nuclear attack."