UKRAINE AND PREPPING FOR DOOMSDAY

I think we all know who the monster is here.

Putin's actions trigger long-buried fears of nuclear war for generations of Americans

By Deborah Netburn | March 4, 2022 | news.yahoo.com

Growing up in Las Vegas in the 1980s, Glynn Walker always knew he could die in a nuclear attack.

The 43-year-old engineer remembers "duck and cover" drills in elementary school, where you dive under your desk in the event of an air raid, and basement fallout shelters in churches and gymnasiums with radiation-warning signs on their doors.

“We had the nuclear test sites, Nellis Air Force Base, the Hoover Dam," he said, referring to Nevada landmarks that likely were in the crosshairs of Soviet military strategists. "We knew we’d be a target,” he said.

The prospect of nuclear war also permeated popular culture at the time, as it had done during the initial nuclear era of the 1940s, '50s and '60s. Movies like "War Games," "Red Dawn" and "The Day After" played on TV. Pro-wrestling hero Hulk Hogan battled the villainous Russian Nikloai Volkoff right after Saturday morning cartoons. "99 Luftballoons," a pop song about an accidentally triggered Armageddon, by the German New Wave band Nena, was a radio hit in the early 1980s.

“I can remember riding my bike through the desert as a kid and thinking one day this whole valley will be a radioactive hole,” Walker said. “I didn’t panic about it. It was just the way it was.”

As the years passed, Walker stopped worrying about nuclear bombs as other threats emerged: terrorism, the war in Iraq, climate change. But the old anxieties came flooding back last week as Russian President Vladimir Putin launched a massive military invasion of Ukraine, while warning potential foes who intervened of “consequences greater than any you have ever faced in history,” and putting his nuclear forces on high alert.

Walker doesn’t think nuclear war over Ukraine is likely. “My hope is there are some guardrails or he’s playing chicken,” he said of Russia's pugilist-in-chief.

And yet, like other Americans, some for the first time in years, he’s found himself fantasizing about what would happen if a nuclear bomb went off near his home in the Atlanta suburbs, several miles from the nearest city.

“This time I’m thinking I won’t be eviscerated, instead I’ll be left to slowly die of radiation poisoning,” he said.

That brings him no comfort.

“I don’t want to watch my children die and I don’t want to let them see me die either,” he said.

Experts say that Putin has little to gain from starting a nuclear war, but his recent rhetoric has stirred up long-buried fears in generations of Americans who grew up believing nuclear annihilation was not just possible, but practically inevitable.

“All it took was one guy basically saying, ‘OK, I'm putting my guys on nuclear alert,’ and all of a sudden all the movies in our head are back,’” said David Greenwald, a psychologist and author of the 1987 book “No Reason to Talk About It: Families Confront the Nuclear Taboo.” Putin "brought this stuff out of the closet.”

Nuclear anxiety has been part of the American psyche since the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. What before had seemed like science fiction suddenly became reality: Humanity was armed with the power to destroy civilization.

Children, struggling to process what most grown-ups could barely comprehend, let alone deal with psychologically, were especially impacted.

“There was a lot of research that showed the youth at that time experienced deep fear and anxiety that adults could no longer protect them from adult things,” said Spencer Weart, a science historian and author of “The Rise of Nuclear Fear.” “People who joined the counterculture in the '60s will tell you it was 'duck and cover' and hiding from 'the bomb' that convinced them we had to change the system.”

The fear came in waves, peaking in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis and again in the early 1980s because both Soviet and U.S leadership seemed unpredictable, if not bent on confrontation. But even as global warming supplanted atomic Armageddon as the most likely destroyer of civilizations, the threat of nuclear war never went away entirely.

“It receded from the public imagination in part because there were other problems that came to the fore, but we still live in a world of nuclear weapons,” said Francesca Giovanni, executive director of the Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard. “It’s always been in the background.”

For many adults who've lived their entire lives in the shadow of "the Bomb," the sense of deja vu is palpable.

As a child in New York City in the 1960s, Victor Narro remembers feeling comforted whenever he saw a sign indicating a fallout shelter — three yellow triangles in a black circle. “As a kid I held that image as a sacred image of safety,” he said. “That was the indoctrination.”

His family immigrated from Peru to New York City in the '60s, when he was 4 years old. When he started kindergarten the following year his teachers told him the city would likely be the first target in a nuclear war — that’s why his class had to do so many drills.

“They were always leading us to different parts of the playground,” he said.

In college, Narro became a student activist and put a lot energy into trying to dismantle the arms race. But the work felt hopeless to him and he came to believe he would not make it out of the 1980s alive. He relied on his Catholic faith to help him cope. “I remember praying a lot,” he said.

The end of Ronald Reagan’s presidency brought Narro some relief, as did the dismantling of the Soviet Union in 1991.

“By the early 1990s, I started feeling like it was behind me,” he said. “I knew there would always be nuclear weapons, but the end of the Cold War felt like the end of the policy of destruction from both sides to maintain peace.”

This last week however, the old feelings of fear and hopelessness resurfaced.

When Putin started talking about nuclear weapons, Narro posted a fallout shelter sign to social media. “I was like, ‘Is anyone feeling this?’” he said. "I wanted to re-create that space of safety."

For Kim Lachance Shadrow, 46, a freelance journalist in Long Beach, the week’s events brought back memories of a particularly frightening music video from the 1980s, Genesis’ "Land of Confusion."

“I didn’t see any of the nuclear war movies, but I watched MTV like a maniac and recorded videos as if they would never be shown again,” she said.

Lachance Shadrow wasn’t a huge Genesis fan, but "Land of Confusion" was one of the videos she taped and watched over and over again. It stars a creepy Ronald Reagan puppet in the midst of a fever dream. In the final moments of the video, he reaches out from a brass bed to call a nurse to bring him a glass of water. Instead of pressing the red button marked "Nurse," he pushes the one just above it marked "Nuke." The video ends with a fiery mushroom cloud.

“We were painfully aware that could happen anytime, anywhere,” she said.

The video was released in 1986, the same year that Lachance Shadrow remembers visiting the Trump Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, N.J., with her family. Her parents left her and her sister in the hotel room while they went downstairs to drink and gamble. It was April 26, the day the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) exploded, and Lachance Shadrow and her sister watched the news all day long.

“I was 11 and that was the period in my life when I started to question Catholicism and my Catholic school experience,” Lachance Shadrow said. “The Genesis video was a big video for me, and Chernobyl was life-changing.”

While pop culture has extracted some catharsis from our nuclear anxieties over the decades — Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb" (1964) is a masterpiece of fission-reaction gallows humor — a handful of books have tried to warn about the possible fate of the earth if humankind isn't careful.

The last chapter of planetary scientist Carl Sagan’s best-selling classic “Cosmos,” published in 1980, is a plea to the people of Earth to wake up to the danger of nuclear weapons.

“From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces,” he wrote. “To preserve the lives and wellbeing of the citizens of the planet.”

Over the next decade, he and his wife, "Cosmos" co-author Ann Druyan, led protests at nuclear test sites in Nevada, where they were arrested several times.

Over time, they felt they were successful in helping to bring public attention to the cause of de-escalation and disarmament. The number of nuclear warheads in the world had been reduced by 40,000 from the height of the Cold War to the end of the Obama administration.

“Someone was listening,” Druyan said in an interview this week from her home in Ithaca, N.Y.

In the 1990s, the couple turned their attention to climate change, which appeared to be moving faster than earlier models had predicted.

Druyan said she understood the shock that so many felt when Putin put the world back on nuclear notice.

“Here we are in a situation we have not been thinking about because we had other fish to fry,” she said. “When we look at the destruction of the entire Earth, we were thinking the feedback mechanism speeding up was the most urgent problem, and suddenly the subject has been changed.”

This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

Steel Bunkers, Iodine Pills, and Canned Food: Fear of the Nuclear Apocalypse Is Back

The prepper community has grown quickly through the strife of the last few years, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has only accelerated that trend.

By Mack Lamoureux | March 3, 2022 | vice.com

For the first time in five years, Gary Lynch’s company is so busy that he needed to leave his office to go help his employees in the field. 

His company sells steel bunkers and bomb shelters. 

The general manager of the Texas-based Rising S Company had to help install a 1,600-square-foot model, which goes for a touch over $300,000. He told VICE News during his lunch break at the local Taco Bell that his company received over 700 inquiries recently, in a time frame where they typically would have received about 10. 

“On Thursday morning, when we started seeing the nuclear threats, the phones started ringing immediately,” said Lynch. Some of the people who called were people who were already considering the need for a backyard bunker, and the Ukraine conflict is what finally pushed them over the edge. A good chunk of the inquiries, Lynch said, were pretty frantic. 

“There's the people who don't know (what to ask); they've never looked at (bomb shelters) before,” said Lynch. “They're the ones that are calling and asking, ‘Will this protect me from nuclear fallout?’, and we have to tell them ‘Well, no, it's not going to protect you from that, from a direct hit from a bomb.’”

The threat of the Russian invasion of Ukraine becoming a conflict between the world’s two biggest military superpowers has many people thinking about what has felt unthinkable for a generation: a nuclear war. And for some who are frantically searching to ground themselves in uncertain times, they’re turning to something most people wouldn’t normally describe as “calming”—doomsday prepping.

Europeans are stocking up on iodine tablets (a Google Trends search shows near-vertical growth on that term in late February), and YouTube is suddenly full of “experts” giving advice on how to prepare for the end of the world. Those in the “doomsday prepper” community say their community has been growing for years, with climate change, a global pandemic, and the general “end times” vibe of the last several years. But it has accelerated in the past weeks. 

John Ramey, the founder of the prepper website The Prepared and a former Obama White House adviser, said the community has doubled in the last few years and pointed to a pre-pandemic FEMA study that showed the number of American citizens preparing for some sort of disaster increased from 3.8 percent in 2017 to 5.2 percent in 2019.  

Ramey said most of the folks who’ve been in the community for a long time aren’t the ones worked up. Neither Ramey nor Lynch said he thought nuclear war was imminent, but they’ve both been taking calls from people worried about it.

“The top search terms on our site have been war and nuclear-oriented things like iodine, nuclear, and even EMP,” said Ramey, referring to electrical magnetic pulse, which happens after a nuclear detonation. “So it's clear that this is on people's minds and that there's a group, a portion of people, that are riled up, and concerned about it.” 

Since Russian dictator Vladimir Putin launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week and put his nuclear deterrent forces on “high alert”, the subreddit r/preppers has been inundated with “Questions from New Preppers.” On Facebook, people are reaching out to groups like “Prepping for Beginners” or “Doomsday Preppers Worldwide” with questions about what food to stock up on, how to make sure they have a supply of drinking water, and so on. 

“New here. I'm wondering if anyone has ideas for covering basement windows to help with fallout radiation,” reads one comment on Doomsday Preppers Worldwide. “Our basement is going to be our safest place if anything were to happen, but the windows worry me.”

VICE World News spoke to Scotty, a university student in Texas, who said he’s feeling pretty high anxiety about the Ukraine situation. When Putin warned of “consequences you have never seen” if any country interfered with his plans, Scotty decided to start prepping. The 25-year-old, who only gave his first name, went to Reddit's Prepper page to get some advice. Since then, he’s been slowly picking up items for the apocalypse during every trip to the store. 

“It's been on my mind for a while, but the invasion of Ukraine really set me off,” he said. “With the pandemic, the increase of severe natural disasters, and just general unrest throughout America and the world, it seems like not a bad idea to be semi-prepared for a variety of emergencies.”

“Especially when it feels like everything is out of my control, prepping makes me feel like I can control something.” 

He’s not the only one. 

Across the world—but especially in Europe–people are stocking up on iodine tablets, believed to protect from radiation poisoning. Finland has reported a strong increase in the sale of potassium iodine pills, and nearly 30,000 Belgians rushed to the pharmacy to get free tablets offered by the government. At the time of this writing on Amazon, if you type in “IO”, it will autofill to “iodine tablets for radiation.” 

“I know this sounds like absolutely surreal, crazy stuff, but there is a real sense of fear and we need to prepare,” a Brussels woman who stocked up on the pills told the Globe and Mail. “My friend went to five pharmacies to find the pills, couldn’t, and went on a waiting list for them.” 

“Where to buy iodide pills?? Everywhere is out of stock,” one person wrote on Doomsday Preppers Worldwide. 

The urge to prepare has travelled as far as Canada’s West Coast, as Total Prepare on Vancouver Island—a company that typically outfits people for earthquakes and tsunamis—said they’re experiencing an increase in people purchasing their freeze-dried food. 

“It definitely was a noticeable change,” Cort Daigle of Total Prepare said. “Not like blowing-the-doors-off busy, but definitely you could sort of see the bump. It was definitely noticeable in metrics.”

Like everyone else in the industry, prepper content creators have been focused on the Ukrainian conflict. While a good portion offered up relatively rational possible outcomes—the grain supply being impacted because Ukraine and Russia supply a substantial portion of the world’s wheat—many others focused on the possibility of nuclear war. 

One YouTuber named southernprepper1 who has over 200,000 followers has been making videos all about how to handle nuclear fallout—"How to protect your animals after a Nuclear War" is one example. In a recent video, he said he's getting a lot of letters regarding "concern and fear in regards to nuclear weapons." 

"I don't want to panic you, but people are panicking," he said. "I can sense it in my emails, I can sense it in my phone calls, I can sense it with the desire to purchase things." 

"The purpose of this video is that I want you to have a plan by the end of the day. No panic, a plan. What would happen if nukes impacted the United States a limited amount. Am I at ground zero? Do I need to flee? Do I need to worry about fallout?" 

Ramey warned of “fear porn”, and if you spent any time on prepper forums in the last few weeks, you’d see that term popping up in discussions about influencers.

While that certainly exists in the community currently, Ramey, a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur, is adamant it’s just a fringe minority. He said his community is working hard to break the prepper stereotype of a high-strung backwoods person burying gold in the backyard. He doesn’t believe the Ukraine conflict will result in nuclear war, and he’s happy to talk people off the ledge. 

"Prepping is a source of calm for people; it's a way to take control over their agency and feel like they can do something in a mad world,” said Ramey. "We don't want to scare people and rile people up. People don't want doom-scrolling because you can get that from TikTok and all the other shit.”