Do other country s have something like EAS?

[BadRocketsCo.]

Hello!

For what I know, USA has a program called Emergency Alert System for different kinds of dangers. I wonder, do other country´s have something similar? Do you people know?

[ZedNova]

France, Canada and japan all have a form of EAS. I don't know if every country has one though.

[KOCOUR]

We have it. We have sirenes in every street, we have centralised emergency wakeup call system for Firefighters and rescuers by cellphones, etc.

Allso they announce it in TV and radio whenever there is higher risk of floods or storms.

Edited June 17, 2014 by KOCOUR

[lajoswinkler]

I think every country has it, but it doesn't have to look like the typical EAS in USA, with that screen on TV.

There are sirens, and if something awful happens, people would get notified. Efficiently? LOL, not.

[cantab]

I don't believe we have anything like that in the UK. Sudden natural disasters are relatively rare here, so that's one of the big use cases mostly gone.

[cesarcurado]

Not in my city, not that I know of at least.

But I heard there are in others cities in areas where landslides might happen.

It's not like we need it that much anyway

[EdFred]

In addition to radio, television, and siren (usually for tornadoes) I also get an emergency alert sent to my Blackberry with detailed information.

[BadRocketsCo.]

Okay, thank you all! Is there perhaps a simulation, which shows the blast radius and fallout radius of an atom bomb explosion? Me and my friends are working on an fictional book about a nuclear war and we want to do some research.

[lajoswinkler]

I don't believe we have anything like that in the UK. Sudden natural disasters are relatively rare here, so that's one of the big use cases mostly gone.

You had it for nuclear war. I doubt it doesn't exist in some form.

[BadRocketsCo.]

You had it for nuclear war. I doubt it doesn't exist in some form.

I wonder, would small countries, like Estonia have something like that?

[lajoswinkler]

Every country used to have those. Countries involved into Cold War had special systems. Even the NAM countries had it.

[Extemporary]

Okay, thank you all! Is there perhaps a simulation, which shows the blast radius and fallout radius of an atom bomb explosion? Me and my friends are working on an fictional book about a nuclear war and we want to do some research.

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

[BadRocketsCo.]

Is this the sort of thing you're looking for?

http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

Exactly what I need, thanks!

[BadRocketsCo.]

Every country used to have those. Countries involved into Cold War had special systems. Even the NAM countries had it.[/quote

Okay, thank you for the info.! How do the other countries warning systems work? Not all of them are probably the "sirens, TV program cancellation and text to automated speech" kind of systems. Or are they?

[Justy]

Canada does not have anything like EAS. The closest we have is Weatheradio / Radiometeo, our version of your National Weather Service All Hazards Radio where you get a special little receiver that listens for tornado or flood alarms. It has the ability to carry non-weather alarms too, same as yours (it even uses a compatible region code, like you ise for counties), but it's unclear on whether it'd actually be used. The province of Alberta built a more involved system after a tornado hit a major city (Edmonton) in 1987, and their system is more like EAS, interrupting commercial broadcasts etc. I think the village of Tofino on the west coast built its own tsunami siren, too. Aside from that, no, we do not have a national CONELRAD / EBS / EAS, and all attempts to build one have been answered with, "yeah, that's a great idea, we should have one... some day."

Edited June 18, 2014 by Justy

[Extemporary]

I think the village of Tofino on the west coast built its own tsunami siren, too.

I have family in Tofino and they do have tsunami warning systems. There are sirens, and there also are signs along roads to show the most effective evacuation routes. I noticed it when I visited them a few years ago.

[Justy]

I have family in Tofino and they do have tsunami warning systems. There are sirens, and there also are signs along roads to show the most effective evacuation routes. I noticed it when I visited them a few years ago.

Decades ago we had air raid sirens on the mainland, they used to fire up the one in Port Coquitlam (just outside Vancouver) on Remembrance Day at the end of the two minutes' silence. I know I heard it the first time I went to the ceremony as a kid in the very early '80's, but it was torn down shortly after. I'm not sure if there are any public warning sirens in service in BC aside from Tofino now.

The Province of British Columbia promotes subscribing to text messages from the Provincial Emergency Program's Twitter feed. This way you can be woken up at 3am to be notified of a forest fire evacuation 900km away, or an offshore earthquake already judged to pose no tsunami risk. It's a terrible system.

[Seret]

You had it for nuclear war. I doubt it doesn't exist in some form.

No, as far as I know there's nothing in the UK. There may have been something in the past, but there's certainly nothing now. Given that there is still a large state-owned broadcaster that can reach most of the population over various media I suspect the government didn't see a need for a parallel system.

[KvickFlygarn87]

In my town we have an alarm system, yes. I live in Sweden.

[lajoswinkler]

Okay, thank you for the info.! How do the other countries warning systems work? Not all of them are probably the "sirens, TV program cancellation and text to automated speech" kind of systems. Or are they?

As far as I know, they weren't all like that. Special broadcast of automated speech was possibly only in USA (I don't know about USSR). The rest had informative pamphlets and sirens.

No, as far as I know there's nothing in the UK. There may have been something in the past, but there's certainly nothing now. Given that there is still a large state-owned broadcaster that can reach most of the population over various media I suspect the government didn't see a need for a parallel system.

There certainly was something in the past.

The Moog music and animation are creepy as hell.

I don't know if there were special automated messages like in USA, though.

If there is EAS like this, the parallel system must exist as a backup.

[rdfox]

For the record, if you're REALLY looking for detailed nuclear weapons effects calculators/simulators, there are a number of them out there that, while they don't give you pretty pictures, they *do* give you detailed numbers regarding what damage a given device would do.

First off is this: http://www.alternatewars.com/BBOW/ABC_Weapons/Nuke_Effects_Calculator.htm It shows quite a bit of generic information for a given weapon yield, but doesn't do much to explain what it means (most people don't know how much overpressure does how much damage, for example).

Next up, we have http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/intro/nuke-effects-calc.htm . This has some interesting interpretation information on it, but it doesn't give very much calculated data, and focuses almost entirely on fatalities, with little detail on effects on structures.

Finally, we have the Big Daddies of the nuke calculator world, from Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapon Archive (home of the Nuclear Weapon FAQ--highly recommended reading if you want to write about a nuclear war!), we have this: http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Library/Nukesims.html

That actually contains three separate calculators. The first is an Excel spreadsheet of blast and thermal effects; I've never used it, since I don't have Excel, but it's reputedly quite good. However, the ones I really recommend are the other pair of calculators, a couple of closely-related programs used (possibly to this day!) by the US Defense Nuclear Agency, which calculate the effects of nuclear (and, for BLAST.EXE, non-nuclear) explosions. They have a wide range of capabilities and a LOT of options for customization of the simulated burst (read, re-read, and re-re-read the help screens, because they provide huge amounts of useful documentation for this!), including the type of weapon (pure fission, boosted fission, or fission-triggered fusion, and different efficiency categories for each, plus "clean" and "dirty" configurations for the fusion weapons), the burst height, and the type of surface at the burst point (used in calculating cratering effects). However, because they *are* DOS programs from 1984, they aren't the most user-friendly. However, they should run in any version of Windows I know of (not sure about 8, but I know that up through 7, you can run them).

Note that the burst height setting is also one of the most important in there; most of the calculators out there "assume optimum burst height," but the definition of "optimum" varies depending on what you're trying to maximize. These calculators generally maximize the 5psi blast radius, to provide maximum casualty numbers. While this may be appropriate for some targets (particularly if the war goes into a countervalue mode where you're attacking cities and industrial sites rather than military targets, and for airfields without Hardened Aircraft Shelters), most nuclear weapons targets are highly hardened and would require a different (lower) burst height, to maximize the radius of the pressure curve that would cause failure of those targets. Some examples would be how most US nuclear missile silos are reputedly hardened to withstand an overpressure of 500 psi, while some Russian silos are hardened to 2000 psi(!); the US silos would require a very low burst height indeed, while the Russian ones would almost require that the silo itself be caught within the fireball, mandating a surface burst to destroy them. Likewise, command and control bunkers would generally require surface bursts to dig them out and collapse them. While all of these (except the Excel spreadsheet and BLAST.EXE) provide some estimates of fallout radius, that isn't entirely accurate, as they don't account for downwind drift of fallout and really only show the short-term fallout zone, not the areas that would be contaminated in the 6-36 hour period. Also, *none* of these (and as far as I can tell, *no* publicly-available tools) provide prediction of the effects of high-altitude bursts intended to generate EMP effects; the best rule of thumb there is to use geometry to find the line-of-sight radius to the burst and then assume that all non-hardened solid-state electronics within that circle are fried. (Radiation/EMP-hardened electronics, like used by military forces, and old-fashioned vacuum tube-based hardware can both survive within that radius, but if they're close enough to the burst point, then the induced currents in the copper wiring itself will still fry it. Again, just a rule of thumb, but I'd say about a 150-mile circle around the burst point would have high enough EMP to do that.)

Of course, there are four truly important things to remember when writing your hypothetical war's target list and weapons allocations:

1) What is the target each weapon is being used for? Unless it's either the 1950s (with the doctrine of "Massive Attack" in place), a punitive retaliatory strike by a nation already devastated by an attack, or a madman terrorist out to kill as many people as possible, cities will generally NOT be targets. "Countervalue" strikes (i.e., strikes aimed at industrial infrastructure and the civilian population, meant to devastate the recipient's economy and chances of postwar recovery) are not only distasteful and quite possibly war crimes, but they're also inefficient in the use of weapons, particularly as a first strike option, as they leave your enemy entirely capable of responding in kind. "Counterforce" strikes (i.e., strikes aimed at "blunting, reducing, and degrading" the enemy's warfighting capability in general, and nuclear forces in particular) are seen as vastly preferable, as they not only have the potential for limiting the level of violence employed (ICBM silos, for example, tend to be located in thinly-populated agricultural and undeveloped areas, so hitting them causes relatively few casualties), but every successful strike decreases the enemy's capability to retaliate. (Command, control, and communications centers also fall under "counterforce" targets, though they tend to be located in closer proximity to population centers, as do airbases and submarine bases. However, even those would likely generate less violent retaliation because of the presence of obvious military targets being struck at.) The first step is to determine what targets need to be hit, and ranking them in priority so that you know which wave of attacks they're hit in. (Again, economy of force and controlling the level of violence to try and avoid spiralling out of control into Armageddon are keys to selecting waves of strikes, as the idea is that you launch a strike, then there's a pause as you give the enemy a chance to surrender before launching your next wave.)

2) Once you have your target list completed, you need to know what sort of effects are required to destroy each one. This has a direct effect on how you attack it.

3) You then need to determine the burst height that maximizes the radius of the effects curve matching that. If a given weapon's ideal burst height for a given target results in an effects circle smaller than the Circular Error Probability of the weapon (a measure of accuracy; CEP is defined as the radius around the aimpoint within which there's a 50% chance of the weapon actually hitting), then you almost certainly need to select a larger and/or more accurate weapon. After all, if the odds say that the weapon will land far enough away from its target to *not* destroy it, there's not much point in firing in the first place! (Note that accuracy is likely better than yield; the US no longer stockpiles the 9-megaton "city killer" warheads used on the Titan II ICBMs, or even the 1-megaton warheads used on early Minuteman ICBMs, instead preferring strategic weapons in the 125-550 kiloton range with much greater accuracy, as it's possible to have many more of them. Likewise, for "soft" area targets like cities, simulations have shown that it's more cost-effective, in terms of building the warheads, to blanket them with a pattern of smaller weapons than to try to use a single huge one. We do still have some weapons up to 5 megatons or so, but those are for special purposes like digging out deep command bunkers with a series of surface bursts. Russia still has a limited number of 20-megaton weapons that were specifically designed to collapse Cheyenne Mountain, but those are similarly special-purpose weapons, and efforts since 1970 or so in all nuclear powers have been more towards increasing the weapon accuracy and decreasing the warhead size.)

4) Once you've determined what your target is, how "hard" it is, and what the appropriate weapon and burst height to destroy it are, you have one last major consideration--what is the reliability of the weapon system? Just how likely is it that the whole thing will operate as planned and put the warhead within the CEP circle? Manned bombers, for example, are extremely good at putting the weapon on target--IF they can get past the enemy's air defenses. Ballistic missiles, on the other hand, are more likely to suffer random errors (particularly due to the winds aloft during boost and entry) that throw the weapon off-target, but are very hard to defend against. Cruise missiles combine the worst of BOTH worlds(!), albeit with some amelioration in each (small, hard-to-find targets for air defenses, and their autopilots will correct for wind drift to some degree). All options have a nonzero chance of failure of the delivery system (ICBM/SLBM blows up during boost, cruise missile autopilot has its gyros tumble and dives into the ground, manned bomber's crew is killed by radiation from a nearby burst or just plain gets lost, etc.), and there's also a small, but still nonzero, chance of the weapon itself failing to function at all, or of fizzling and not producing full yield. Once you figure out the odds of everything working right, getting the weapon to its targeted burst point and the weapon firing as designed, you can then use that to work out how many weapons you actually need to use to reduce the target's odds of survival to an acceptably low number (i.e., "guarantee" target destruction). Again, this may end up seriously affecting the choice of weapon, as what would otherwise look like a highly attractive option might not be reliable enough to be viable given the size of your inventory--particularly if you're in a situation where political authorities have authorized a limited number of weapons to be released.

Note that you need to run all four of these considerations past EVERY TARGET to decide what gets hit, when it gets hit, what it gets hit with, and how many are aimed at it. Only after you know all these things for EVERY target on the list can you really say what the war will end up looking like. (You may also be surprised to see what you thought were certain targets end up being passed up as being too much trouble and/or too expensive in the number/size of warheads required...)

I'd personally recommend that you get a copy of the old game "Bravo Romeo Delta," a US/Russia strategic nuclear war simulator set in the late 80s/early 90s, which may not be the *most* accurate out there, but playing it repeatedly will give you insight into the sort of decisions that go into nuclear war planning and help with defining your target list and weapon assignments...

[pxi]

In Ireland, we have a simple plan - tune to Radio 1.

Now consider that we in Ireland referred to World War 2 as "the Emergency", and a 3-decade paramilitary struggle as 'the Troubles'.

I'm not trying to be flippant, but in the event of nuclear war, I pretty much expect to tune into Radio 1, to find Joe Duffy explaining how to put on sunscreen.

[BadRocketsCo.]

Wow, rdfox, you have done a lot of homework . Anyway, I will do my research. Thank you for all the info!