P&S: Where Would You Be In That Universe?

AndyC

AndyC

Donor
I was an eleven-year-old living in a village some miles east of Colchester. My mother moved us there on the philosophy of "getting it over quickly and painlessly if it happened", on the assumption that as Colchester was a garrison town, we'd vanish in swift nuclear fire.

Unfortunately, the general public view of nuclear bombs being so overwhelmingly potent wasn't quite the case. Given the expected size of the explosion, and given prevailing winds, if (and it's a big if) the Soviet missiles were accurate, I'd have survived well outside of the blast zone or fire zone.

The aftermath wouldn't have been much fun, though, with East Anglia devastated (multiple RAF and army bases).
 

von kressenstein

Banned
in 82 I lived in Saginaw, Michigan..

There were 2 warheads pointed at the city

1 to the west of the city and the iron works.. and one to the east and the assembly plants..

I lived 6 miles from the plants in the east.. i could be alive or dead.. but more than likely .. dead....

If was several years later .. for giggles.. I lived in DC... very close to NIH .. again.. would be more thank likely dead...

However there are posabilites where i would not be... depends on the size of the bombs dropped on saginaw.. and i believe they were in the sub 1 megaton range..

although... for what it matters... everything between Midland and Detroit becomes glass... Midland releases chemicals from Dow plants into rivers.... radiation from detonations ...

best saving factor is winds generally flow from the north and northwest in michigan
 
Julius Vogel

Julius Vogel

As a small child in the 1980s, who liked reading about military history, I was incredibly frightened about nuclear apocalypse. Took me a while to realise that no one had plans to do anything about NZ, which must have aggravated my parents when I had nightmares.
 

Vikingstar

I was living in Portland ME in February of 1984, just engaged. Portland was leveled, so I would either be dead, or trying to keep alive in northern ME. That would be problematic, since Maine is the "tail pipe of the nation", and unless the wind was out of the northwest Maine would get a LOT of fallout.
 

DocU

I think I'd survive the initial exchange from what I recall (we were a few miles north of Berwick) so the nearest targets would be Newcastle and Edinburgh.
 

Foxvc10

Quite dead, sitting in a bunker at RAF Wattisham after launching all the Phantoms that we could get away.

Family all dead from a dusting from London.
 

Jukra

Emperor Norton I said:
Whether from the point of view of if you, now, had been there in the 80s and onward, or from the point of view of you and your family in real time and how this would actually have affected you had it occurred, what would become of you in the reality of the Protect and Survive series?
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Probably alive and comparatively well off, thanks to parents working in health care jobs and relatives where one could have evacuated into. Instead of having luxury of late X-generation youngster exploring various jobs while and after studying history I'd probably have gone through an apprentice for some health care or adminstrative job.

Hunting, fishing, picking berries and mushrooms would have become a part of life much sooner than OTL for being a necessity in life. Reading might be much more focused on quality rather than quantity as the library collections would be smaller, there would be less to pick up from and thus reading would be intensive instead of extensive. Impact of computer games and internet would probably be not significant.

As for sports, instead of going to gym there would be just more traditional pastimes like skiing, running, cycling etc. Sailing would be combined with fishing, with more primitive equipment but less use of auxiliary engine.
 

Faeelin

Again, I'm gonna quote my favorite nuclear war piece:

Everybody dies. Your father and mother are decapitated and crushed by a falling building. Rats eat their severed heads. Your husband is disemboweled. Your wife is blinded, flashburned, and gropes along a street of cinders until fear-crazed dogs eat her alive. Your brother and sister are incinerated in their homes, their bodies turned into fine powdery ash by firestorms. Your children … ah, I’m sorry, I hate to tell you this, but your children live a long time. three eternal days. They spend those days puking their guts out, watching the flesh fall from their bodies, smelling the gangrene in their lacerated feet, and asking you why it happened. But you aren’t there to tell them. I already told you how you died.

It's what you pay your taxes for.
Click to expand...

http://www.varley.net/Pages/Manhattan.htm
 

Lycaon pictus

Donor
The good news is, there was a building where Dad worked that someone had designated as a fallout shelter. The bad news is, the whole area was downwind of D.C. (and Baltimore, which wasn't on the list but would have been a likely target and the list is known to be incomplete). Maybe I lucked out and got eaten when the shelter ran out of food ("luck" being a relative term here) but I probably just died of leukemia without painkillers.
 

cpip

Gone Fishin'
As I was five years old, in New York City... I'm almost certainly an irradiated corpse at best.
 

Otis R. Needleman

Banned
Vaporized, along with my then-wife and three-month-old daughter, when Goodfellow AFB, Texas was hit. We lived right next to Goodfellow, an intelligence training base.
 

rush4you

I would be born five years later in the Peruvian Andes, my parents were living in the outskirts of Lima, with luck, the nukes won't hit that area and they will go to one of their parent's place.
 
Tovarich

Tovarich

Banned
East Anglia was basically one large US base at the time (probably why the region looks like a profile of WC Fields in a GI helmet) so I'd be dead, hopefully quickly and without anyone putting the 3-minute warning sirens on, so I don't have to spend my last 180 seconds of this life shitting my pants in fear.
 

UncleDynamite

At that time I was living within spitting distance of Selfridge AFB. I probably would have subsumed into a rapidly expanding cloud of monatomic gas.
 
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