Your Apocalypse Strategy

[limpid]

2 minutes ago, peterms said:

Well, have we been consumed in a nuclear conflagration since I've been doing that?  There you go.  QED.

None of us are real. Except for the zombies.

[blandy]

58 minutes ago, ender4 said:

my wired doorbell stopped working, so i just cut the wires and bought a wireless doorbell instead.

My wired doorbell also stopped working, so I fixed it. But I must admit that with all this news about the apocalypse and everything, I'm not sure it was worth the bother. I mean it does chime lovely and all that, but if there are going to be these zombies and whatnot roaming about, then I don't think answering the door to them would be all that wise.

[peterms]

6 minutes ago, limpid said:

None of us are real. Except for the zombies.

Do you work for Merrill Lynch?

Quote

In a note to clients out Tuesday, Bank of America Merrill Lynch said there's a 20%-50% chance that we're living in the matrix — meaning that the world we experience as "real" is actually just a simulation...

 

[limpid]

28 minutes ago, peterms said:

Do you work for Merrill Lynch?

No. I'm not real.

[Nicho]

Dick in hand, hide under the stairs.

[mikeyp102]

Head to the Winchester, nice cold pint and wait for it all to blow over.

[Xela]

I'd wander around like the Omega Man for a few days.. taking cars for a spin, rummaging around shops etc before I get bored and then shoot myself dead. 

 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

Due to my job,  I had a place reserved for me at the Nuclear Shelter in Harborne. 

It was a dire place.

In theory we would have moved in at the very early stages of a crisis and remained there until it was safe to emerge. We did one exercise that involved us being there for a complete week. 

I remember one of our first briefings. If there was a nuclear war and every single nurse,  doctor, ambulance and hospital was unscathed they could only hopen to save 10% of the injured dying in the first 6 months. 

I gave up my place. 

 

[Xela]

I want to know more about your job!

[Mandy Lifeboats]

Russian spy. 

[mjmooney]

10 minutes ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

Russian spy. 

I did that. Forty years, man and boy. Hardest game in the world. 

[chrisp65]

12 minutes ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

Russian spy. 

I briefly worked on a project in Libya to build a two lane highway under the desert. 

We used to have the meetings with the Libyans in cars, driving around and around Malta.

 

[Mandy Lifeboats]

19 minutes ago, chrisp65 said:

I briefly worked on a project in Libya to build a two lane highway under the desert. 

We used to have the meetings with the Libyans in cars, driving around and around Malta.

 

I know.  

[peterms]

15 hours ago, Nicho said:

Dick in hand, hide under the stairs.

So, much the same as a non-apocalypse scenario, then?

[villa4europe]

15 hours ago, Xela said:

I'd wander around like the Omega Man for a few days.. taking cars for a spin, rummaging around shops etc before I get bored and then shoot myself dead. 

 

would still be a better ending than the will smith version...

[Mandy Lifeboats]

As Villa’s season is going so well I thought I’d bring everyone down to earth with a bump and writing about my experience of Armageddon.

 Everything I’m writing about refers to the 1980s and has long since been declassified and been in the public domain.   

 As I explained earlier in the thread I had a place in the “Civil Defence Shelter” in Harborne.  I think it was on  Meadow Road?  Meadow Lane?

In the early stages of an emergency I would be whisked into the shelter.  Once inside it was my job to operate what became known as the doomsday computer.  It wasn’t a computer.  It was a series of plastic disks where you entered known facts and a connected disk would give you some assumptions.  For instance if radiation levels in Birmingham were x that suggested that we’d been attacked with a weapon yield of y.  If we have been attacked by a weapon yield of y that was likely to have caused total devastation for z miles.  All of these facts and assumptions were fed in and communicated to any other shelter still operating.  That shelter would them use that data to predict problems coming their way.  For instance if you know the yield of a weapon, its height when detonating and the wind-speed you can map fall-out accurately.    With the prevailing UK winds,  Birmingham was mainly at risk from fallout from Bristol.  So knowing when it was due to arrive was handy.  It gave surviors time to put on a extra jumper and give the lawn a quick mow.    I would keep adding facts and testing assumptions to either strengthen or discount them.  It sounds complicated but it wasn’t.  It was just sole destroying when you set a certain parameter and the disks told you that meant 100,000 dead.  But it wasn’t all fun and games. 

We had exercises and played out some common scenarios.  Some of them are still fresh in my memory. The most common scenario was that NATO struck first when Warsaw Pact tanks crossed the Rhine.  USSR retaliated immediately with more than 100 but less than 200 weapons hitting the UK. Three waves of weapons would be launched. Smaller yields targeting strategic and military targets. Medium yields targeting population centres. Larger yields targeting geographical areas not hit by the first 2 waves.   The weapon destined for Birmingham would land somewhere between the Baggies Ground and Winston Green.  So its not all bad news.  The weapon would be targeted there as it would obliterate the city centre but also cause damage across the Black Country into Wolverhampton.  It was reasonably well predicted that not all weapons would find their target and that some would fail to detonate.  This gave a real possibility that a costal town/city with little military importance might be undamaged.  In one exercise the weapon for Liverpool fell into the sea.  In this had occured for real we would have  built society again using Liverpool as a base and with Scousers as the main population.  In which case we were instructed to find a spare bomb from somewhere and launch it at Liverpool ourselves.  Armageddon might be awful but it gets no better if everyone is wearing a shell-suit.  (This bit might be made up).  The population would drop to under 2 million before stabilising.  We never practised getting society back to "normal" as we would not be around long enough for that to happen.  The future of the UK would be determined by countries that were not destroyed and how they decided to interact with us. 

I found the exercises incredibly interesting but also as depressing as hell.  After a few years I hung up Doomsday computer. 

I’ll leave you with my favourite scenario that I use at a dinner party  to make people to leave.   

The missiles are inbound and you are the Governor of Top Security Prison.  Your inmates  are the worst murders, rapists, paedophiles and estate agents in the country.  Most of your wardens have returned home to be with their family.  Do you open the doors and let everyone out?  Or do you keep everyone locked up leave them to almost certain death?     This scenario is very real and there is a correct answer that was agreed in case it were ever needed.  If there is interest in this post I will post the answer.  But it will be the answer that was in place in the 80s.  It might have changed.  But I doubt it. 

[dAVe80]

1 hour ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

The weapon destined for Birmingham would land somewhere between the Baggies Ground and Winston Green. 

If that would have happened, it would have killed thousands of the outcast of society, the criminal element, the most untrustworthy in the country, the real dregs of human life, as well as all the people in the prison.

[blandy]

2 hours ago, Mandy Lifeboats said:

somewhere between the Baggies Ground and Winston Green

Ah yes, like Winson Green prison only a little more Churchillian.

[Mandy Lifeboats]

15 minutes ago, blandy said:

Ah yes, like Winson Green prison only a little more Churchillian.

Have you never met Winston Green? He's a great bloke. I can't remember where he lives. But his house was called "Jail View Terrace". 

[Rodders]

I reckon the answer is leave em be based on the possibility of the Nukes failing. Or why disturb people's final moments with the worst criminals for their final few moments too. The alternative answer being that if we're all died everyone deserves a dignity in death and so open the doors? 

Edited September 29, 2016 by Rodders