by John Traveler

Created on: June 11, 2009

Members of the baby-boom generation may remember the shrill scream of the air raid sirens, the duck and cover under your desk drills practiced at school, the people building bomb shelters in their back yards in the early 1960's. The thought of a nuclear holocaust was horrific, and yet, most people believed that somehow they would survive. After all, thousands who were a safe distance from ground zero in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had survived. But where would the safest place on Earth be, during a Nuclear war?

For a long time in the sixties and seventies it was believed, that since a nuclear war, if it ever happened, would be between the super powers, the United States and the Soviet Union, that the effects would be pretty much limited to the northern hemisphere. It would be pertinent to consider too, that the largest nuclear bomb ever exploded (dubbed the Tsar bomb, see flash video at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxD44HO8dNQ) was only a 57 megaton blast. It would also be prudent to point out at this point that the Tsar bomb was originally designed to be a 100 megaton bomb, but was scaled back because of the effects such a big bomb might have. But big bombs truly are big and heavy, and not well suited for Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) delivery systems. These bombs, if they were even possible to build would need to be delivered by aircraft. For this reason, it was pretty much thought that most of the bombs in Soviet and American arsenals were of the 20 megaton or less variety, although such information remains classified.

When it comes to surviving a nuclear blast, proximity to such a blast is an obvious key consideration. For instance, during the cold war both Soviets and Americans targeted cities with population densities greater than 20 or 30 thousand, and in particular, centers of industrial or technological importance. For instance, post cold war information indicates that the San Francisco bay area was target one for the Soviets, primarily do to its electronics industry and as a Mecca of innovators and inventors. After all, Radio, Television, Microcomputers and a long list o other electronic firsts are associated with south bay electronic firms and educational institutions like Stanford, San Jose State University, UC Berkely and UCSF. And how could we overlook Lawrence Livermore Labs here, a key facility for development of nuclear weapon technologies?

There can be no doubt that the SF bay area had multiple bombs targeted at it, most likely

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