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What possible ‘good news’ could there ever be about nuclear destruction coming to America, whether it is Dirty Bombs, Terrorist Nukes, or ICBM’s from afar?

In a word, they are all survivable for the vast majority of American families, IF they know what to do beforehand and have made even the most modest of preparations.

Effects of 500KT Air Burst Weapon
Effects of 500KT Air Burst Weapon

Tragically, though, most Americans today won’t give much credence to this good news, much less seek out such vital life-saving instruction, as they have been jaded by our culture’s pervasive myths of nuclear un-survivability.

Most people think that if nukes go off then everybody is going to die, or it’ll be so bad they’ll wish they had. That’s why you hear such absurd comments as; “If it happens, I hope I’m at ground zero and go quickly.”

This defeatist attitude was born as the disarmament movement ridiculed any competing alternatives to their ban-the-bomb agenda, like Civil Defense. The activists wanted all to think there was no surviving a nuke, banning them all was your only hope. The sound Civil Defense strategies of the 50-60′s have been derided as being largely ineffective, or at worst a cruel joke. With the supposed end of the Cold War in the 80′s, most Americans saw neither a need to prepare, nor believed that preparation would do any good. Today, with growing prospects of nuclear terrorism, and nuclear saber rattling from rogue nations, we see emerging among the public either paralyzing fear or irrational denial. People can’t even begin to envision effective preparations for ever surviving a nuclear attack. They think it totally futile, bordering on lunacy, to even try.

Ironically, these disarmament activists, regardless their noble intent, have rendered millions of Americans even more vulnerable to perishing from nukes in the future.

The biggest surprise for most Americans, from the first flash of a nuke being unleashed, is that they will still be here, though ill-equipped to survive for long, if they don’t know what to do beforehand from that first second of the flash onward.

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US President Barack Obama has unveiled his administration’s plan to overhaul the country’s Cold War-era system for controlling technology exports with more centralised and streamlined processes.

“For too long, we have had two very different control lists, with agencies fighting over who has jurisdiction. Decisions were delayed – sometimes for years – and industries lost their edge or moved abroad,” Obama said in a 31 August speech to an annual Department of Commerce export controls conference.

“Going forward, we will have a single, tiered, positive list – one which will allow us to build higher walls around the export of our most sensitive items while allowing the export of less critical ones under less restrictive conditions,” he said.

This plan is largely in line with a proposal announced in April by US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who has said the legacy system is detrimental to national security.

Obama said he plans to sign an executive order that creates an “Export Enforcement Coordination Center to co-ordinate and strengthen our enforcement efforts” by eliminating gaps and duplication of efforts across multiple departments and agencies.

Under the existing US export control regime, exporting military equipment requires oversight from the Department of State, which consults with the Department of Defense. Exporting technology that had military and commercial applications requires oversight from the Department of Commerce, which also consults with the departments of state and defence.

Senior Pentagon officials have voiced concern that this system is dangerous in that it places walls around too many technologies, with some walls not high enough and others hindering exports to partner nations.

With the Obama administration’s new plan, agencies will create export control lists of munitions and dual-use items that are tiered to “distinguish the types of items that should be subject to stricter or more permissive levels of control for different destinations, end uses and end users”, the White House said in a statement.

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