Potassium Iodide

Astrosmith, the creator of "True Anomaly", asked recently if we should be taking potassium iodide tablets.

Says Astrosmith:

Potassium Iodide (KI) protects your thyroid from absorbing radioactive iodine that will be in the atmosphere after a nuclear explosion. This would lead to you getting thyroid cancer a few years later.

I read this bit--along with the rest of his comments--to my wife, and it sparked a rather long-winded discussion (over a week now) about our own survival options in case of "a nuclear detonation or nuclear "dirty bomb" attack", particularly one against the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex.

We live less than twenty-five miles from downtown Dallas. Our home is on a narrow one acre lot, roughly in the middle of a long row of houses up and down the row, all facing a relatively quiet county road.(paved... with easy access from the Interstate)

According to survival stuff I've read, this is nearly as bad as it can get, since hordes of unprepared starving and desperate city dwellers would flood the area, bringing with them all manner of mayhem, stealing and looting any food and water supplies we may have stored up, doing much raping and killing in the process.

We are in an indefensible area, a basically flat, empty space with lots of low foliage for ground cover in all directions, so the advice to us is to prepare our "bug out bags" and such other stuff we would need for survival and head for the hills at the first sign of the inevitable collapse of law and order.

Problem is that we are 600 miles from those hills--where family members are already living--would have to refuel in the Amarillo area while trying to get there, and drive through numerous small towns. In other words... no freaking chance.

Amarillo would be a Mad Max style nuthouse by the time we got there, and all those little towns would have blockaded all the highways through their area to protect them from the hordes of unprepared starving and desperate city dwellers, and would certainly not let us pass through with a vehicle full of priceless survival supplies.

A house without electricity would not have refrigeration or air-conditioning. Dry, canned and bottled foodstuffs don't need refrigeration and are not a problem, but hiding in a sealed-up house (to reduce the infiltration of radioactively contaminated particles into the structure) without air-conditioning would most likely cause our deaths in short order by heat prostration.

I have started buying small quantities of survival equipment each payday in a no doubt pointless attempt to prepare. Both of us--being in our sixties--have little or no physical assets to offer a survival group, and if ever caught with our guard down, would most probably be killed for our supplies, or killed so we wouldn't waste any.

Since ammunition is universally considered as one of the most valuable commodities in a post-apoplectic world, I am also buying more 12 gauge ammo, double-ought and slug, not to shoot potential invaders with (that would be a pretty short gun battle), but to offer as trade items for other necessary survival items like food, water, gasoline... and a chance in the lottery to stay alive.

But--to be truthful--we don't think our chances of survival are good, actually very close to zero, so we hope that nothing like this happens until after we're gone.

The Potassium Iodide tablets?

We would not survive long enough for thyroid cancer to become a problem.

Potassium Cyanide would be a better choice of pill... at least in our case.