a list of 2013 predictions

[cryingfreeman]

I'm still working on the book (and my treatment of Wales and its current and potential targets) but everything has been held up by (a) a road trip to the continent in November, via Wales, oddly enough and (b) moving from the village I was living in to a house in the countryside far from the madding crowd in December!

The Welsh mountains, in particular the rugged northern ones, are as good as it can get south of the Highlands for initial radiation blocking in the UK in the event of a nuclear strike. Fallout however may arrive should Anglesey's bases (secondary targets) be struck and if the weather is the usual Atlantic zonal stuff (i.e. west-to-east air masses), or if we get an easterly carrying the denser fallout concentrations from primary strikes to the east of Wales. That all said, we're not talking Cold War proportions of fallout, due to the lower yields of modern precision weapons. As for a nuclear winter, my own view is that the powers that be themselves don't believe such a phenomenon is possible and that it was a propaganda relic of the old Cold War. Don't forget, thousands of nuclear test detonations since WW2 and no sign of a nuclear winter... Flora and fauna would be damaged to varying degrees but it wouldn't be wiped out unless we're hit with a cobalt-salted weapon (super-radioactive device designed to pollute and kill by sickness). Such devices are supposedly too dangerous for use because of hemispheric damage, i.e., the attacker would ultimately poison themselves.