THE RX FOR EVENT X

BY BRIAN M. MORRIS

Let’s be honest: If we are struck by an asteroid of “Lucifer’s Hammer” proportions, it will simply be a situation of right time, right place if we are going to survive the initial event. The same thing goes for a large-scale thermonuclear war.

The Arms Control Association estimates that as of 2018, the United States had 1,350 strategically deployed nuclear warheads. Russia has 1,444. This doesn’t include another 4,000 and 4,350, respectively, that are in active and inactive stockpiles.

None of the current nuclear defense technologies is even close to 100 percent effective, so how many nuclear warheads would need to get through our defenses before what was once the United States became nothing but a glowing nuclear wasteland? Any answer would be purely speculative.

I would guess that in the event of a full-scale nuclear exchange, scores of nuclear weapons would make it through our imperfect nuclear missile defenses and find their way to strategic targets across the country. Of course, this would probably not happen before our own government had the chance to launch a counterstrike that most experts say would have an equally devastating effect on our enemies, causing mutually assured destruction for all involved. 86

Then, what is the use of prepping? you ask. While it might be true that there is little use in preparing for a “biblical-scale” doomsday scenario such as the nuclear conflagration described above, that level of event is at the far end of the range of possibilities. Short of that, there are many events that can be bad enough to collapse our regional or national economy, undermine our government and infrastructure, fracture and dissipate our military and law enforcement, and leave all of us to fend for ourselves. These are the hypothetical scenarios I call “Event X.”