Preparedness - Considerations for a Nuclear Detonation

All right, welcome to Season 5 of Inside My Canoehead. This is a Canadian podcast that's all about the integration of leading an incredible awesome life, individual responsibility, individual emergency preparedness, and how do we navigate life's incredible, wild disruptions that we see among us. Sit back, grab a beverage, and enjoy the episodes. All right, good morning.

Welcome back to the Ottawa Studios of Inside My Canoehead. Let's be blunt and upfront. Today, we are going to talk about nuclear detonation. If it's not something you're interested in, if it's not something you care about, if you think it's so wild and far-fetched that you don't want to waste your time, I appreciate you getting this far.

Have yourself an incredible day. But if you want a preparedness take on the application of nuclear warfare, grab yourself a beverage. Let's get to it. And no, this is not a doomsday, the world is ending type of episode.

I'm not going to talk about that. A lot of people have reached out, and I said in the last episode, and I got a lot of traffic over the last 48 hours saying, hey, listen, yeah, sure, let's throw something together and let's talk about nuclear, especially what we see is happening in Ukraine and the threat and the increased probability of the application of a tactical nuclear weapon in the battle space. So today, what we're going to talk about is, number one, how they work, how they're employed, to give you an idea from a military perspective why they exist and why they're employed, what you're to do in an area of a detonation. And what you're to do outside an area of detonation, talk about a little bit what the government plans are to do, and then a bit of probability analysis at the end.

So we're going to try to keep it as uplifting as possible, even though we are talking about a pretty significant event. So let's not get into the politics of Ukraine. Let's not get into the politics of who's right and who's wrong, because then you just miss the whole point. So basically, a nuclear weapon is the ability to create a splitting of an atom, nuclear detonation at a point in time of your choosing to enact the maximum amount of effect on somebody else.

Really simple. It's not different than that. So yeah, a nuclear detonation, it just makes everything in the world radioactive, basically. So every particle that's around in the air that's floating around that you would normally breathe, and most of these particles you can't see that are floating in the air become radioactive.

They get into your thyroid gland, and your thyroid gland actually regulates the rate at which your body uses calories. It slows or speeds your heart rate. It raises or lowers your body temperature, moves food through the digestive. These are all things that the hormone does created by your thyroid.

Now, that hormone is mainly contained of iodine, right? So this is why a lot of people talk about iodine. We're going to talk about that in a minute. But basically, it creates this radioactive particles in the air and on the ground and sitting on everything.

You may consume them by eating an apple out of a tree, et cetera, et cetera. And it just does nasty, nasty things to the human body. So that's, and as well, I mean, that's the after effects. But the actual effect of a nuclear weapon and why they're so useful in warfare is that it's simply a massive amount of energy released in a concentrated area, right?

So if you look at calories, for example, in your food, how do they know how many calories are in a Big Mac? It's really weird if you've never heard of this. They take a Big Mac, and they put it into a blender, and they make it into puree, and then they heat it until it explodes. And when the Big Mac mush explodes, they measure the energy it releases, and that energy is measured in something called calories.

Yeah, I know it's weird, but that's how it's done. So take that same thought to the most maximal amount of energy released at one time, which just eviscerates and destroys everything in the area, far more than an artillery shell could do, or a big bomb out of an airplane. I mean, that's the tactical and strategic advantage of a nuclear weapon, is that with a single ear device, I can take out Manhattan with one device, and I can do it sitting in my fat pants in the basement of a Russian guest house, right? So the point is, they have a huge application.

They're here. I don't care whether you agree with them or not. There's two types we're going to talk about, strategic and tactical. Strategic is about fear, right?

So these are the big weapons that are designed and scheduled to hit large-scale military facilities and capital cities and command and control centers. Now, the reality of military application, there's no logic in dropping bombs on Baltimore, for example, right? I mean, this makes for a great Hollywood movie, but strategic nuclear weapons are, the idea behind them is they're employed to destroy industrial complexes. They're employed to destroy command and control for the government and the military and large-scale military institutions.

The idea of a strategic nuclear war is that I'm going to take away the ability of my enemy to fight, to create the things they need to fight, and any structure and government that organizes their society. I'm not interested in killing all of their people in a city that has no military or moral value. The value behind a nuclear weapon is I can take out their ability to fight me permanently, like for generations, and therefore they have great application for that. But strategic nuclear weapons, the kind that whack cities from the other side of the world or launch from submarines, is all about fear.

Now, we've reached a point about 50 years ago of mutually assured destruction, even though we've done a great reduction in the number of nuclear warheads, the size and accuracy of them have only gotten better, and therefore we're likely still at a point where when we talk about mutually assured destruction, we're talking about taking away each other's ability to have an organized society. If you've ever watched Fear the Walking Dead or The Walking Dead, just replace the zombie with a bunch of hungry people that have no place to go, and you get the idea of an anarchical society that will emerge from something like a strategic exchange. It's not like the world becomes inhabitable. The world will react.

In a couple hundred years, the world will be fine. Humanity will be completely reorganized back into a 10,000-year-old tribal system by the employment of strategic weapons, which is why they haven't happened now, because mutually assured destruction. There's no point in killing your enemy if your enemy is going to kill you at the same time, right? You know, strategic weapons only work when there is a guaranteed or a fairly high degree of certainty in your ability to conduct a first strike to take away the enemy's ability to whack you.

You may take a couple hits upside the head, but your society is going to emerge and theirs is not. That's a strategic argument of another day whether that first strike capability exists, but that's why we sit in the world today staring at the barrel of each other's nuclear weapons and nobody's pulling the trigger, because we've successfully put strategic nuclear weapons into the discussion of, yeah, they're just never going to be used because there is no logic behind them whatsoever, other than they need to exist, can keep the other person from doing something really, really dumb. And no, I don't concern Ukraine as something at that level that would require strategic nuclear weapons. So then we've got to move to tactical.

This is what really everybody's talking about today. They have a very real and very useful case for battlefield employment. They're all about area denial. So if you think how a nuclear weapon detonates, it detonates in one of two ways.

You have a ground or near ground burst. That's what you see in the movies where you get the big, cool mushroom cloud. And what the mushroom cloud is, is the energy from the bomb goes out and then the energy comes back in. It goes out and that's why you have two shockways from a nuclear detonation.

You have the one going out and then the shockway coming back in because it literally creates a vacuum and it sucks everything up in the air. That's why you get a mushroom cloud. That's where you get the radiation from because all those particles and on the ground are sucked toward the detonation, spewed up in the air in this big mushroom cloud. Everything in the cloud is exceptionally radioactive because of the nuclear detonation and then these big clouds float and eventually they come back down to earth covering everything which we affectionately call fallout.

That's a ground or near ground burst. The majority of military thinking understands that in today's tactical world, we don't want to do that. What we want to use tactical nuclear weapons for are two principal purposes, right? There are three really.

So one is area denial. So we want to destroy an area to prevent the enemy from using it. So we're going to use an air burst. So an air burst is something that happens a couple of miles up.

So if you think of a cone, like those cones when the wonky protesters are yelling, right? So the detonation is the small part of the cone and then it detonates straight down in a directional way, this massive amount of energy towards the ground. Now it's energy, the radioactive nature of the bomb stays up. Now it doesn't mean there's no radiation, just the difference in the radiation is exceptional.

There's very little radiation that actually falls to the earth in the location of the detonation. What you do is you create a massive amount of force. Now if you want to deny bridges, road systems, rail systems, if you want to take out a dam to flood an area that an enemy is occupying, that takes a lot of precision munitions, right? Or one tactical nuclear bomb detonated at three kilometers up will take all this out for you in a cone of massive destruction.

So it's considered an area denial, which means you're basically going to take the usefulness of that area away. The enemy can't cross, you've destroyed all the things in the area. As well, the next thing that you have is the destruction of a brigade force. The Americans, you know, have combat striker brigades you've heard about.

So think about 5,000 soldiers and all their cool tanks and equipment running around the battlefield. I'm going to detonate a tactical nuclear weapon above them and a cone at a couple kilometers up. It's going to come down and it's basically going to destroy all of the vehicles and kill the 5,000 men, right? So it's a great way from a military tactical perspective to destroy a large number of troops in the battle space with reasonable precision.

What you do in that case, which is why you use an airburst, is I'm going to kill the enemy because I want to reoccupy that ground. So it's logical for me to make the entire ground space totally radioactive if I'm going to kill the enemy and then drive my troops through there, right? So that's me. The other one is an EMP, an electromagnetic pulse.

So that's a detonation a couple kilometers up. And basically what it does in theory, because there's a lot of debate about the extent of this, is anything with batteries or wires or electricity going through it will be hypercharged. It's like a massive lightning strike worth of energy going into all of your electrical devices. So basically it takes a city like Key, for example, if you do an EMP detonation above it and knock it into the 20th century or 18th century, sorry.

So basically all of the power generation is gone. And if it blows those transformers, which is the theory behind it, the ones that are on the street pole that bring the energy level down, basically, you know, you're taking away the power grid for probably two to three years in the city. And now think about if you live in a city and the energy and power goes away for two to three years. Think about how difficult it was for those in Hurricane Fiona and Hurricane Ian to deal with power loss for, you know, a couple of weeks.

Think about three years with no power, right? That means your water system will eventually run out of power. There's no amount of gasoline and generators can do it. So your water system goes away.

Your sanitation system goes away. Obviously all of your electronic world is gone. The internet is gone. The cell system is gone.

Just that's what an EMP does. It necessarily doesn't kill many people, but what it does is it basically takes away the ability for you to conduct anything beyond 18th century warfare, really. And now you're in a really big world of hurt, because the benefit of that from a tactical perspective is I get to then, your army has to come back to the city. Your army's not on the front line anymore, because the city is disintegrating into violence and anarchy after a couple of months, because people don't have food, people don't have water.

So your armies can't be used to fight the bad guys. Your armies have to be used to try to distribute aid, to help people, et cetera. So it basically neutralizes an ability of a country to conduct overt combat operations. So why would we see them in today's world?

So Soviet doctrine, if you understand it, and the current Russian administration has largely just kept the Soviet doctrine in place. The use of tactical nuclear weapons are smart in their thinking, because in their thinking that they just look at it, if they start to lose in the battlefield, and if it doesn't look like they can turn the tide, then they employ tactical nuclear weapons as part of their doctrine to stop the enemy's advance, to give them time to regroup, and take over the initiative. In military combat operations, initiative is everything. If you think about playing a game of chess, and you're putting all the pressure on the other guy, you have the initiative, right?

You are in the OODA loop. The idea is that you're making decisions faster than the enemy can, and the enemy is consistently doing nothing but reacting to you, right? So if you think about the current employment, it makes every sense in the world. In the Ukrainian fight, if Ukrainian troops keep having these tactical advantages and keep pushing the Russians back, then it is perfectly within their doctrine to use tactical nuclear weapons to destroy large parts of the Ukrainian army, to stop their ability to conduct forward combat operations, and then give the Russians time to regroup.

So them using tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine is absolutely 100% within their doctrine, and the situation is just getting closer and closer to where they will be feeling perfectly fine and justified in their employment. So knowing now roughly how they work and why it works, what do you do, okay? So what is somebody like you listening to this podcast, what considerations do you have in the nature? So I'm going to talk about in-area and out-of-area.

So let's be very specific. In-area, if you're in an area that's affected by a tactical nuclear detonation, or, God forbid, a strategic nuclear detonation, and you've survived, your requirements are to stay inside in a completely 100% air-sealed-off room or area of your house, which has generally always been the basement, for 14 days. 14 days is specific because those radioactive particles called fallout that have come down, 98% of the danger related to those is gone in 14 days. So in 14 days, you will be able to emerge from your little hidey hole in the basement of your house and start to figure out what to do next.

So your job, if you believe you are in an area that might receive some type of nuclear strike, is to be prepared to live in a part of your house, generally the basement, because you won't have the notice to run to this magical bug-out location, the world doesn't work like that anymore, with fast-tracking missiles before they figure out it's coming in, once they know it's coming in, figuring out where it's going to hit, because that is not until, like, the third stage of terminal velocity. Then you get a warning out. You're not going to have much warning at all. Maybe 10, 15 minutes on a very good day, but probably far less than that.

So you need to have an area of your basement. So they did this back in the 1950s and 1960s in Canada and the United States, a lot of great videos on how to build bomb shelters in your basement, and that was because that's when the world switched from Soviet bombers, which would take six hours to get, and they actually did an evacuation of Calgary that's really, really cool, back in the 1950s to practice, because you get six hours to notice that the bombers were coming. Now you get 30 minutes and an ICBM is coming, and that's from launch, and by the time you tell the citizens, you're looking at 15 minutes. So the government went around and put out some great videos on how to build bomb shelters.

So basically, think about the area of your basement that has no windows whatsoever, because you need to be able to seal this area off. Now, if it's not perfectly sealed, I'm talking sufficient tarps, three-mil ply stuff that you use to see a vapor barrier in the basement, a couple layers of that, a whole bunch of gorilla tape and duct tape, you have to be able to seal it completely, which means the room has to be big enough to contain sufficient oxygen for everybody that's going to be in there for 14 days. So you can't make a closet, because once you seal yourself in the closet, you're exhaling carbon dioxide, you're inhaling oxygen, and eventually you're going to create an imbalance in the area, so it has to be big enough. Most families' basement storage rooms that's under the stairs, under the garage, whatever it may be, is perfectly fine for that.

So you have to be able to completely and utterly seal it off, because you're in that room, unless the damn house is on fire, you're not leaving that room. So in that room, you have to have 14 days of water, 14 days of food, and it better be food that you don't need to cook, because when you start lighting gas, what is the one thing a fire needs? It's oxygen. You're going to be burning your own damn oxygen.

So thank you very much. Make sure that you have food that is shelf-stable and can be eaten without any heating requirements. You need to have blankets and stuff so you stay warm in sleep bags. I just used the bloody room that stores all my camping and my outdoor equipment.

It's already in there. So you need to be able to feed yourself. You need to be able to water yourself. The one thing everybody forgets is you're going to have to go poop and pee in that same room, and you're going to have to store your poop and pee for everybody for 14 days.

It's not a lot of cool to talk about, but you've got to figure out how to do that. And the best way to do that, ladies and gentlemen, is a five-gallon bucket. You can buy them at, you know, I don't care what store. You get contractor bags, not regular garbage bags, contractor bags.

You get a combination of hamster shavings and some kitty litter, and you put them in these bags, and then you use the bucket. Now, you can get Reliance Sales. really cool like 20 toilet lids that actually snap onto the top of a five gallon bucket right so you have a little bathroom you do your thing in there you pour a little bit of kitty litter a little bit of sawdust over top of it it probably won't help all that much with the smell so bring some cans of ax spray with you um and then when that bucket gets full you just seal it up and tie it up several times with a contractor bag because they're huge thick five mil plastic which is great and you set it aside you put a new one in and you carry on right so you have to do that as well um you have to think about uh ki pills so potassium uh iodine because in your thyroid gland excuse me iodine is in your thought is what uh your thyroid uses to um to regulate a whole bunch of body functions and when you get radioactive iodine is what's one of the big particles that comes out of a nuclear detonation ki pills prevent the uptake of radioactive iodine into your body because you've maximized the amount of iodine in your body now ki pills are available they're really hard to get now there's there's things online that tell you how to use iodine make your own i'm not going to suggest those because i know nothing about that i have radio um active i blocked radioactive iodine um coated to mass bitterness because they're really bad they're potassium uh iodine tablets my company i use is called radblock they're really hard this is manufactured in toronto they're really hard to get there's very specific directions on them on how much to take and when to take they will make you freaking sick because they're messing with your entire thyroid operation but when you do take them in exposure to nuclear radiation they prevent you from uptaking radioactive iodine in your system which is a good thing okay so you're in an area um the detonation's gone off you've survived you got your 14 days you've taken a couple of doses of potassium iodine according with the you've made it through right you're not staying in that area you probably could but you have to be ready to be mobile right um maybe your car made it maybe it didn't um maybe your atvio work it didn't um most people will say you gotta walk out well you're gonna be walking out of a city with everybody else who made it too right so a bunch of bikes don't hurt not be serious like everybody loves family bikes most families have bikes on that's really cool that and a bike is a great person-powered way to move and you're going to have to be probably leave the area that you're in um like i said 98% of the radioactive particles are gone but the ability of that area to support human existence is going to be exceptionally difficult right the regular things in society that keep your urban environment ongoing aren't there anymore and probably won't be coming back for an exceptional period of time are you are you like two years self-sufficient in your apartment or your high-rise building probably not so you probably can't stay there so have an idea in your head if you really want to plan for this have a destination in mind don't follow mobs have a place to go know somebody who lives 200 kilometers away that you can walk there the average person healthy person walks about four to five kilometers an hour carrying a reasonable load five kilometers an hour you're going to walk for about 50 kilometers on a good day as long as it's not too much up and down somebody was 200 kilometers away you're going to power through you'll be there in four or five days right have that destination in mind know where you're going to go show up with your stuff so the first one part is uh what to do if you're caught in a detonation so something happens and you're caught outside um flash flash flash there's a drill in the military you just hit the bloody ground because a blast wave will come out from the blast area and then it will come flying back the other way so you gotta wait till both blast waves go the reality is and even in a surface detonation where you have that large mushroom cloud you have 15 minutes before that radioactive fallout is going to come down so you have 15 minutes to get your butt inside a building far inside as you can to best reduce the amount of contaminated air you're going to be stuck with hopefully you're at home if not you've only got 15 minutes because after that you are outside exposed to the most highest dose radiation that will exist and you're not going to be able to walk home over two hours after a detonation to get to your house unless you're going to have a gas mask with you or someplace to cover if you're caught outside and you make it back home the first thing you do before you go down into your safe room and set up your safe room is strip everything off all of the clothes that you had on the outside you get rid of you take a shower with soap and water to get all the particles that are on you off you as best you can that's all you can do right soap and water have a bird bath in the middle of your basement floor you're not going to carry about what that's going to do to your remodel right and then you get into your house so now you've done that you've got to have a place to go post detonation so if you're out of area and this is the vast majority of people so if you're not in an area that gets struck by a tactical or strategic nuclear weapon your idea here is how is this going to affect my life like my house is normal my power is still on my society is still driving around i can still go over and access max and get a burger or whatever but somewhere else in the world somebody has employed a tactical nuclear weapon which always has the potential to cascade and escalate what am i thinking well you're thinking right now for long-term disruptions you're thinking that this may or may not go big and if you think it goes big and if you think it's going to go strategic which i will tell you i don't i think unless you're in eastern or central europe which i think there's likelihood of quite a number of tactical nuclear exchanges around germany poland the baltics that area likely will have a number of tactical nuclear detonations here in north america the odds are nil because tactical nuclear weapons can't get here the only ones that can get here are strategic so here in canada where i live the threat is a strategic strike against the city of ottawa where i live that is the center the capital of the nato nation where the military headquarters is and the government headquarters is if you think it's going to go strategic and you live in the capital city of ottawa your best thing to do is to hire yourself an airbnb in northern quebec or a couple hours outside of town and just take your family on a couple of week vacation make it fun joyful grab all of your supplies like i mean every damn piece of food in your house uh and head out to on a nice little family vacation for two weeks and if you're wrong your family has a nice vacation if you're right the best defense is not to be there right it's you know like mr miyagi said in the original karate kids the best defense is not to be there right so if you're somebody who fears that and it goes tactical nuclear in ukraine and you think it's going to go strategic my best advice to you is to take your family on a couple of week vacation uh and just carry on with normal life work remotely do your thing whatever uh and if you're right you made the best decision of your life if you're wrong you just had a great family vacation and you come back and everything's uh reasonably back to normal the other thing is is your best defense is a great offense go local go simple and what i mean about that is these type of tactical nuclear detonations in a foreign land have exceptionally high degree of influence on economic and supply chain activity around the world so stock markets will disintegrate um global supply chains even though they're in the process of reorganizing regional supply chains will be effective so when i mean go local the products you use and consume for your life should be coming from a you know a half an hour you know an hour two hour drive from where you live that's it you shouldn't be relying on any anything that is not produced locally because that insulates you against and i've said this before all the food that my family eats is grown be an animal or plant within 100 kilometers in my house full stop we don't need anything that comes from outside now there are some luxury chippy bags and all this other stuff but the essentials for life that we require a main staple from our diet is within 100 kilometers from here as are the inputs for that diet right so florida could go crazy california could have this massive drought and just stop producing food and i would be perfectly fine a lot of other people wouldn't but i would so go simple go local make your life as uncomplicated as you can in the sense that you have greatest control over your daily life um have substitutes for everything that you think comes from overseas right so your favorite shampoo either have 30 or 40 days supply of it or do something different right so just understand what those substitutes will be so if a product you very much enjoy from a different part of the country or different nation is no longer available due to disruptions as a result of these type of conflicts you have a substitute so you can carry on job you got to think about your employment you have to think about what would likely occur to your job not because it gets blown up by a nuclear bomb but because the excessive um economic complications that come from this type of thing what industry are you in are you in a resilient industry and that means an industry that is needed by society irrespective of the disruption so look at covid was your job canceled due to covid was your job canceled due to economic problems with covid so everybody stayed home your job couldn't make money and you for whatever reason um couldn't make any money right are your job closer anything like that think about how you're going to make money in an environment of the worst imaginable economic disruption you can think of now it's it's yeah the government will probably intervene we're going to talk about the government's response in a minute but the point here is that it's up to you to create as a resilient financial existence so as long as the world keeps turning it will for you know 99 of the world people you're going to still have to pay your rent you're still going to have to pay your mortgage you're still going to have to buy food um and so therefore you're going to have to figure out a way to do that and still earn sufficient income to do that skills you're going to have to have skills right if you've got to move or you go somewhere you decide to go somewhere else and you want to grow a garden learning to be a gardener doesn't work when you have to have that food produced to survive learning now and a good friend of mine who has bucket list homestead she did this thing called a one seed challenge it was for everybody that lived in an apartment it didn't matter it basically you took one seed one small container for the windowsill of your house and you learned to tender it you learned to water it you learned to take care of it you learned to trim it you learned the skill of gardening when you don't need to eat the produce don't try to wait until you need to eat the produce to survive to try to start becoming a gardener it's a heck of a lot more difficult than it looks right which is why a lot of people starved to death centuries ago because even though they were farmers they had a bad year or something went wrong and there was simply no food to eat and their family starved in the winter so you've got to figure out skills what skills do you need first aid gardening they're always the top of the list make sure your first aid is current make sure your first aid kit is current make sure you need to understand how to deal with the big stuff right now you run to an ER when you have a sniffly I mean that's the problem with today's society everybody runs to an ER and sniffly 200 years ago you ran to your grandmother and she fixed it for you with some weird concoction from the kitchen right so we have to become more self-reliant in doing so understand your community we survive as human beings not as lone wolves even though that's a really cool survivalist strategy we survive based upon community so you need to build community and together having neighbors and people that you care about be a faith community otherwise that we'll be able to rely on each other for help and assistance when these economic disruptions come people lose their jobs or people have a lot and plus there'll be a lot of stress in the world think about you know one of your corners of your blanket of preparedness is mental health right so making sure that you figure out how to not have this toast your brain pardon the pun it's very very important to take control of your emotions and be able to understand and talk through the mental health challenges that are going to come because you're going to see levels of destruction on TV that you've never seen before and something like that is very very difficult to go through if you have to go through it let alone see it on TV so you need to be able to have that community space family members loved ones where you can talk through this level of stress right so what is your government going to do every government has a different plan so let's leave the tactical out of it let's look at the strategic nuclear detonation every country has a continuity of government plan Canada started in the 1950s under John Diefenbaker and the idea was is that when you emerge from post nuclear detonation society has to be rebuilt so there are a lot of key members of society that are necessary right you're not going to be training new doctors when there's no medical schools anymore you're not going to be training new engineers right general laborers you can replace them with anybody but people who have very specific skill sets need to be protected in Marshall which is where the bunker mentality started coming in government bunkers if you've ever if you've ever been in um uh Ottawa go to the Diefenbaker that's out in Carp which is just outside of Ottawa and it is the decommissioned nuclear bunker that the Canadians built under Diefenbaker in the 90 started in the 1950s about how Canada intended to survive and like for example the ministry of transport was in there there's only three human beings from the ministry of transport the rest were left to their own devices so you understand how few key people the government intends to take care of the more important thing that you have to consider is the authoritarian response of governments around the world right we heard of things called martial law suspend suspension of civil rights you know curfew laws just look at how your government reacted to the COVID pandemic look at the intervention into individuals lives they took look at the restrictions they put on mobility this isn't an argument whether you agree with those or not but it was a very very microcosm but a very very good view on how your government views its rights and privileges to intervene in the society in times of emergency right it's a huge huge stretch to say governments will do the right thing governments will do a lot of things that they think is right but that does not mean they are the right thing so look at how your government locally subnational national reacted to the COVID pandemic the restrictions they put in and it kind of gives you a good impression on how they'll intervene in your life especially if there's no detonation think about how the Canadian government is going to clamp down on societal operations when the economy really does go pear-shaped and significant problems are happening to people you just just imagine what that's going to look like and then think about how you're going to want to live and react within that society and then make necessary precautions you've seen a glimpse right the last part to talk about is probability so the probability of a tactical nuclear detonation in Ukraine goes up as the day as long as everybody keeps feeling like it's okay to beat Russia now I'm not pro Russia but it's their doctrine you keep taking back that territory you keep pushing them back and the bear is going to bite back I'm not justifying it that's the reality right and there's nobody but Elon Musk and Xi Jinping the head of China and maybe Erdogan from Turkey they're the only three human beings that actually want peace America doesn't want peace NATO doesn't want peace Ukraine doesn't want peace everybody's calling for throwing more and more of the world's greatest weapons to help consume the entire Russian army because NATO's idea in their cowardice is if they consume the Russian army and chew it up and spit it out in Ukraine then it won't be able to fight elsewhere in other words the Ukrainians get to do all the killing and dying for NATO and NATO just gets to fund it with their massive military systems and oh by the way they're making billions of dollars in profit in corporate America and corporate Canada off it it's disgusting nobody wants peace so I don't see any reason how this doesn't end in a tactical nuclear employment unless somebody finally steps up as a peacemaker in the words of her late her majesty we need statesmen and we don't have any right now the traditional statesmen and people often conflict this current situation or compare this current situation to 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis everybody thinks that Kennedy stood up like a hero and he did a very good job but what a lot of people don't want to you know politely and conveniently remember is the only you back Russian missiles were on Cuba because America had Russia backed into a corner and it had no choice because at the time remember they were medium range missiles is all that existed the ICBM was still in testing and wasn't a major thing so NATO had Russia surrounded by medium range nuclear missiles in Germany in West Germany sorry and in Turkey that could hit Moscow pretty easily but Moscow couldn't touch the United States of America with a medium range missile the only way to touch them was a bomber fleet right strategic launched sorry submarine launched ballistic missiles didn't exist the Cuban Missile Crisis Russia had no choice but to build missiles in a place that they could hit the continental US with very little warning to put an even power on with what was going on in Turkey and West Germany because they had the Soviet Union surrounded by medium range missiles and could whack Moscow in a very short period of time but Moscow couldn't whack Washington so the missiles in Cuba were all about evening the score of the world now if you remember history the American Monroe Doctrine called the 1830s, 1840s called for, you know, America won't tolerate anybody messing around in their backyard. So what Kennedy actually did is he made an agreement in the background to remove these medium-range missiles from Turkey, from West Germany, and he made a promise to never, ever, amen, invade Cuba, violating the U.S.

Monroe Doctrine. But it was a deal he had to make. That was the only way that the Russians were ever going to remove those nuclear missiles from Cuba. And so it wasn't American prowess and a blockade and the great American power that ended that thing.

No, it was a great statesman-like deal that set the conditions for peace that we enjoy today or up until the last couple of years. Those type of statesmen aren't present right now. Everybody's doubling down on warfare, and they're eating it up, right? They're lapping up the warfare that's going on because it's happening way away from us here in North America.

It's just a bunch of Ukrainians that are killing and dying, and the Russians will go tactical nuclear if we keep funding all of this warfare, and the Ukrainians keep winning, right? And the Ukrainians are doing a great fight, don't get me wrong. But they're winning only for two simple reasons. They're winning, number one, because they're getting the world's greatest weaponry free of charge from every advanced military around the world, and two, they have access to U.S.

military intelligence, which literally can tell them the perfect location of every damn Russian soldier and piece of equipment on the battle space. They're getting that free of charge, and because of that, they're winning. And if they keep winning, Russia will use a tactical nuclear. Now, when it comes to strategic, I live in a world where, no, it makes no sense for anybody to employ a strategic nuclear weapon.

I see the probability is really, really low for that to happen, but there is the potential because we lack statesmen on the international stage to put a halt, you know, once the tactical nukes start flying, right? When that happens, does Poland invade Kaliningrad and try to take Kaliningrad? Does Belarus invade Poland? Does Poland and Belarus start fighting?

One's a NATO member, one's a friend of Russia. Poland declares Article 5 against Belarus because Belarusian troops have entered Polish airspace or have entered the ground space of Poland. All of a sudden, NATO is drawn into a mandatory fight against Belarus. Russia has sworn, including nuclear, to defend Belarus.

Now, you have Russian and a NATO aircraft meeting face-to-face, and it's just all of a sudden, it goes, both sides have tactical nuclear, and it can escalate really, really quick. If there are a series, more than one, and a series of detonations of tactical nuclear devices in Ukraine, and it extends to ground invasions across borders with NATO nations and Russian sympathetic nations in Europe, I will be taking a two-week vacation from Ottawa with my family. We're going to rent Airbnb, and we're going to have a nice little vacation. And when we come back and nothing happened, my family will have a nice little rest, shall we say.

So hopefully today's episode was helpful. You never want to have to make these, but remember, in the basics is, if you are in an area of a nuclear detonation, you have 15 minutes to get inside something and get underground as far away from airborne particles as you can for a period of 14 days, then you emerge. The area you live in is likely probably largely going to be intact, and even if it is, it's not going to be able to support and sustain life as it normally does. You're likely going to have to go somewhere.

Have that location predetermined of where you're going to go. Have your mobility determined, because if it's an EMP, your car may or may not work. Have your plan to go there. If you're really concerned about a strategic nuclear strike where you live, there are ways, and there are great things online.

Just Google bomb shelter government of Canada, stuff like that. It'll show you how to do it. The basic premise is you have to have a room that is 100% sealed off of air. You're going to be in there 14 days to allow the nuclear particles' radiation effectiveness to go down 98% to 2%, and then you're going to be able to emerge and figure out what to do next.

The best thing you can do in preparedness is to have a plan. It costs you absolutely nothing to think through how you're going to deal with an event, including something that's incredibly large like this, but it's really not that much different. If you live in a floodplain, and your house floods, and it's damaged and unoccupiable, and it could be up to a year before your bloody insurance company rebuilds it, this is the same thing. You're going to have to relocate your family temporarily for a year or two to a new location.

Preparedness tells us that you need to think about this ahead of time and have that plan. It costs you nothing to figure out where you're going to go. It costs you nothing to figure out how you're going to get there, and by doing that little mental exercise, you are far ahead of everybody else. So take the time to plan.

Don't worry about the fear-mongering. If you think logically through it, the biggest effects of the employment of tactical nuclear weapons on the other side of the world is the economy is going to be thrown into a turmoil, something of which you have never seen because you simply have never seen it, and so you're basically going to have to be able to manage your own financial health through that. Access to goods and services are going to change dramatically. Go local, go simple.

Don't overcomplicate your life. Make sure everything you need to have an awesome, incredible existence on the face of this planet comes for an hour car out of your home, and then everything else, whatever happens around, as horrible as it is, does not have a direct impact on you. You have the ability to conduct operations and make money in many different situations. Get your skill sets up.

They're all free to learn on the internet. There's great people who will teach you how to do anything on YouTube. Remember, having preparedness in place brings down your anxiety level because future possible events have been dealt with. You've figured out how to manage them, and you have a plan, which means as much as the anxiety will be raised when bad things happen, a great preparedness plan has you far ahead of everybody else.

Create a great community, and just sit back and chill, right? Carry on with your life. Be prepared, and hopefully this was useful. So drop me your comments at Jeff at preparednesslabs.ca.

Hit me up at insidemycanoehead.ca. Any other suggestions you have for podcast episodes, keep them coming. I am shortly off on my annual food harvesting trip because I don't want to trigger all the vegans out there in the world. I'm going up into the woods to find a large piece of walking meat and harvest that large piece of walking meat and bring it back.

So I'll be off the air for about a week to 10 days, depending how successful that is. So take care, stay safe, and I'm going to put up some great videos of my little meat harvesting trip in the coming weeks. So enjoy your day, and remember, breathe deeply. We're going to be okay.