I am "lucky" enough to live within a few miles of a place I'm pretty sure would be a ground zero in an all out nuclear attack. I live in a university town. And the university I attend has a nuclear engineering program along with an accompanying research reactor. In any all-out nuclear exchange, anything related to nuclear technology is at the top of the target list. A facility that trains new nuclear engineers is definitely on the target list. We've actually talked about this. If we get this message, our plan is to round up the cats, throw then in the car, grab every mind altering substance we can get our hands on, and go get wasted outside the front gate of the reactor building. We won't try to break into the building or anything; the alert could always be in error and we don't need a felony for trying to break into a nuclear facility on our records. But when hydrogen bombs are involved, the front gate of the reactor building is close enough to ground zero to do the job.

Sorry, but there are indeed fates worse than death. For one, we would be unlikely to survive the initial bombing anyway. But most people have this idea that you'll get vaporized by a bomb. That's not how these things actually work. If you're killed in the first hour by the bomb, odds are it will be from being slowly cooked alive in the burning collapsed remnants of your own home. And sure, we could drive out into the country, but that would only ensure that we would die slowly from fallout induced radiation sickness, slow starvation after the complete collapse of all supply chains, or worse.

Trust me. If that alert comes, the ones close enough to ground zero to be atomized will be the lucky ones. This is something that you do not want to survive. I would encourage anyone that if they ever get that alert, to try to travel as close to whatever you think is your most likely ground zero as possible. You'll be doing yourself and your loved ones a favor. Unless you're already an off-grid survivalist type living in a self-sufficient compound way outside of any blast or fallout zone, all you're doing by escaping the blasts is stretching out your own misery. Do you and yours a favor by making it quick and painless.

On another note, Happy New Year!