Second, you receive such a large dose of radiation that it basically cooks you from the inside or out. First, you burst into flames and die a fiery death leaving a shadow for the eternities on the wall behind you. The key is to understand that there's three ways a nuclear weapon will kill you. That got me into buying other books on the subject ( Life After Doomsday being the bible on the topic at the time). Sure, it's horrific and the worst thing that could ever befall the planet, but still, if I did nothing but avoided living next to the new MX missile system, Norad, or any major US city, there's better than a 1 in 3 chance I'd survive.
That's when I stopped and thought, wait, that's not that bad of odds. There were about 230 million Americans at the time. It cited the coldest, hardest statistics that up to 130 million Americans would die in a full nuclear exchange.
I started prepping in the mid-1980s after reading a peace-nic book, Nuclear War: What's in it for you? The book was trying to be as slanted as possible to make everyone oppose the US nuclear build up during the height of the Reagan era.
