I have been blogging about the increasing risk of World War III lately. Tensions are rising between the U.S. and Russia, both of which have thousands of nuclear warheads. Even a few hundred detonations of nuclear warheads might cause a nuclear winter that would bring down human civilization.
I live in an area that is a prime target for Russian warheads. There is a tiny piece of the coast of Puget Sound inside Seattle that is not in a primary blast radius for a nuclear detonation. There is a park there and I always thought that if I had a little warning, I would go there and watch the fireworks.
For a long time there has been speculation on where in the world it would be best to be if you wanted to survive an all out global nuclear war. This is assuming, of course, that a nuclear exchange of warheads does not cause a nuclear winter in which case there would be no place that would permit human survival except perhaps in well prepared underground bunkers.
Even without a nuclear winter, North America, Europe and Russia would all be devastated. Basically, the whole Northern Hemisphere would be a wreck. A U.S. government study from 1980 predicted that in a major nuclear war, up to eighty percent of the population of the U.S. would die immediately. After the war, the remaining population would be ravaged by starvation and radiation poisoning with little help from a decimated government.
One location that is often mentioned is the southern island of New Zealand because it is in the Southern Hemisphere, has banned nuclear weapons and contains no strategic target for the warring nuclear powers. It is far from the combat with fertile soil, lots of fresh water, mild climate and a congenial society. A lot of the same criterion are mentioned for Perth, Australia which is one of the most distant cities on Earth in the Southern Hemisphere and in a non-nuclear nation.
French Polynesia has its proponents as well. One of the most attractive feature of the over four hundred island archipelago is the fact that ocean and atmospheric current come from Antarctica which has absolutely no targets for nuclear warheads at all. The amount of fallout from a war in the Northern Hemisphere would be minimal in the archipelago.
The big question is whether or not these Southern Hemisphere areas could survive as functional societies in the aftermath of a major nuclear exchange. The remnants of the navies of the warring nations might seek refuge in the Southern Hemisphere. If they still carried major munitions, it is conceivable that they might become pirates and use their weapons to threaten port communities.
In any case, a great deal of food and consumer goods from the Northern Hemisphere would disappear and any community that survived would have to be basically self-sufficient. From that standpoint, New Zealand would probably be the best bet. In any case, billions of people would die in the war and that level of mass extinction might well cause a sort of society wide PTSD in the survivors.
New Zealand:
