"It was a nuclear winter. A radioactive snow was falling, a dosimeter was crackling comfortably …" So a story about a nuclear war with a New Year flavor could begin. But the article is not about that, but about the readiness for a nuclear war and its consequences. Or, more precisely, about certain aspects of this case.
Dosimeters - for all or almost all
In my opinion, the most important thing in preparing for a nuclear war (practical training, not in words) is the mass production of dosimeters, radiometers and other devices that can register and somehow measure radioactivity. This production should be so massive that everyone or practically everyone has dosimeters, and their use and wearing would be as commonplace as the use of, say, smartphones.
Now, of course, dosimeters are on sale. Only now they are not cheap and you cannot call them affordable. For example, a household dosimeter MKS-01SA1B costs 22, 2 thousand rubles. Even compact samples have very reasonable prices. For example, a small Radex One dosimeter (weight 40 grams, length 112 mm) costs 6, 9 thousand rubles. Or a Soeks 112 dosimeter (the size of a felt-tip pen, 126 mm long) - 4, 3 thousand rubles. For a specialized device, this is a lot, the overwhelming majority of consumers, which, in principle, can shell out that kind of money for an electronic gadget, will not buy a dosimeter on purpose.
But it is necessary that such devices be widespread. If almost everyone has a dosimeter, then any spot of radioactive contamination, any source of radiation will be quickly detected. Radiation is dangerous when nothing is known about it and therefore it is easy to overexposure. The detected radiation source can be removed, bypassed or the time of your stay near it can be reduced to safe limits. From the point of view of the military command and the leadership of civil defense, the presence of millions of dosimeters creates a fundamental opportunity to quickly collect comprehensive information about the radiation situation both in peacetime and during a nuclear war, and to respond appropriately to this.
It is more expedient, of course, to mount dosimeters in various household appliances as a kind of makeweight. If the USSR was seriously preparing for a nuclear war, and did not depict readiness for it in words, then dosimeters would be built into televisions, radios, radio receivers, radio points. It could have been a very simple device that would trigger an alert with a "nasty" wheeze and a blinking light bulb at a dangerous level of radiation (say, 0.5 roentgens per hour). And the instructions would say that if your TV suddenly wheezed and a red light blinked, you need to urgently call the police and report it.
But this was not done. Now, under the current conditions, it would be most expedient to make an automobile dosimeter (automobile devices are less sensitive to dimensions than gadgets for personal use) and add it to the mandatory set of automobile accessories. There are almost 52 million cars in Russia. If all of them are equipped with even the simplest dosimeters, then this will already create an opportunity to collect data on the radiation situation, at least in the territory covered by the road network. Automotive dosimeters can be connected to navigators, collect and transmit measurement data to a centralized system, the military or the Ministry of Emergencies. This system is also very useful in peacetime: it allows you to identify point sources of radiation, abandoned or lost by someone, and it will also be able to identify attempts to illegally transport radioactive materials.
Commandant's office of the zone of radioactive contamination
In a nuclear war, when after nuclear strikes there are zones of radioactive contamination, a large number of dosimeters make it possible to solve the tasks of reconnaissance of the radiation situation most quickly and completely. This is important because this environment is changing rapidly. After a nuclear explosion, a cloud of radioactive fallout is carried by the wind, which can change direction and speed, thereby affecting the size and configuration of the radiation track. The trail is then modified: radioactive elements are carried by wind and water, which leads to the spread of the trail, as could be seen in the contamination zone in the Urals after the accident at the Mayak plant. The level of radiation and changes in the boundaries of the contaminated zone must be constantly monitored in order to make the right decisions.
This requires a lot of dosimeters. The standard army radiation reconnaissance means are unlikely to cope with such a task on their own. First, it will take a long time for them to soften. Secondly, they are unlikely to cope with the study of the situation on an area of tens and even hundreds of thousands of square kilometers of areas of radioactive contamination, which will undoubtedly arise after massive nuclear strikes.
This is precisely why it is necessary to accumulate millions and millions of dosimeters in peacetime, to make this device widespread so that at the decisive moment they are available in places where they are needed, and not in warehouses hundreds of kilometers away. If there is a dosimeter in every car, then by an elementary survey of drivers or viewing the log of the device, it will be possible to collect fairly accurate information about the spot of radioactive contamination that has appeared.
What steps can be taken next? First, the zone of radioactive contamination is a zone of limited and controlled access, therefore, a commandant's office and its own commandant service are needed there. Its tasks are on the whole similar to those of the commandant's offices in the front-line zone.
Second, you need to quickly, within a couple of hours or faster, determine where the population comes from (and all those in the zone should simply be expelled due to the high level of radiation), where it is worth deploying decontamination work, and where you can simply get by with access control with a limited period of stay. All this must be done quickly so that the population and those who are in the infected zone do not have time to collect a significant dose. The biggest difficulty lies in evacuating the population and placing them in evacuation centers.
The third is the introduction of an access regime, the arrangement of control points and radiation shelters for it, patrolling of the territory, the creation and deployment of decontamination detachments under the control of the commandant's office of the radiation contamination zone. Personal dosimeters greatly simplify the organization of access control.
The commandant's office of the radiation contamination zone is quite capable of resolving all issues of residence and stay on its territory, the use of military or economic facilities located there, and issues of decontamination. Therefore, from a military-economic point of view, radioactive contamination is not at all as dangerous as it is commonly thought. But on condition that the commandant's office will have a sufficient number of dosimeters.
By the way, I do not at all consider the experience of work at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant to be optimal and even successful from the point of view of organizing a zone of radioactive contamination. Rather, it is an example of how it should not have been done, what should be considered separately and in the context of preparing for a nuclear war.
