The VICE Guide to Surviving the Nuclear Apocalypse

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

Here we go guys. President Trump has smashed that button. Say goodbye to the local Wimpy Burger, Darren, because North Korea, Russia, China, the USA, France, Germany, Japan, Belgium, and Brazil have set the charges and it's time to gather your loved ones. As missiles cruise through the sky, tipping their bonnets to each other, hurtling towards destruction, you should be thinking Hey, I don't want to die or turn into a melted cheese monster with four impotent, leaky dicks.

In 2016, the doomsday clock is, according to 'scientists,' at three minutes to midnight. Reckoning is upon us. The lord God is tired of your memes, your Nutri-Bullets, your Tumblr page of Tinder encounters gone awry. It's time to start again, time to salt the earth with radioactive poison, like the great flood of Noah's time, but with a deathly green mist covering all surfaces and obliterating all life. It will probably be quite cathartic, but only for those lucky enough to live through it. First you need to know how to survive this end time, what to do, where to go, and how to make sure your swag is on point so you can be on the first street style blog of the Terrifying New Age. Welcome to the VICE Guide to the Nuclear Holocaust.

Like Wile E. Coyote falling down a canyon, the comedic cartoon whistle of the warhead lowers in tone overhead, so you know it's about to create a crater the size of Grimsby. But where to go? What to do? Unless there's an obscene level of lead in your one-bedroom flat, it's probably best to seek out alternatives.

Makes sense, right? Undoubtedly the best place to be during any kind of bombing raid, as our forefathers rightly knew, is under the ground. They can't get you there, unless they run into the tube with guns, in which case they will get you and slaughter you almost instantly. After the 7/7 attacks, the tube has been an area of fear for commuters, but I think we can all agree to be civil in the underground system while the earth catches fire above us. It would take a real sick fuck to do a terrorist attack in that instance.

But the tube is kinda boring, right? Other than maybe skidding on the floor on your knees in a particularly large station like London Bridge, they don't provide a great deal of entertainment. Sure, it's probably your safest bet, but you're going to be down here for weeks, maybe months if Putin really goes hard in the atomic paint. So where else?

On London's Southbank sits one of the last bastions of arcade gaming left in this two-bit death hole. This subterranean joy pad makes the perfect hiding space. Inside you will find an assortment of video games, like your Street Fighter and the Tekken, alongside that game where you use a fake gun to shoot things in a cowboy-themed giant electric diorama. They also have one of those pods where you sit in and it shakes you around while the screen plays a CGI rollercoaster ride. Hot dang, how much fun are you allowed to have during the end of the world?

The down side to this is that once you run out of coins for the rides, you're fucked. In the madness of the boredom the NAMCO-ites would doubtless turn to dodgem-jousting, the winner granted rights to create coin-shaped discs from children's bones. You'd be surprised how quickly society devolves.

On the plus side, there is a McDonald's there, but it's near the entrance so you'd have to brave an blizzard of ash and charred skin to get to the McFlurry machine.

Don't fret! There's plenty of places you provincial bods can lay your heads as the crust of the earth cracks. If you're near any high-rise buildings, it's best to stay near the middle if you can't find somewhere underground. This is because the radiation particles will most likely bed themselves around the base of the buildings, so the middle or top is a safer bet. Naturally if you're near ground zero, you will die almost instantly anyway, so no need to split hairs. One thing you never hear people say you should do in the event of nuclear attack is go out to sea. If you live in a port town or somewhere near the water, get a fucking ship and sail very far away. You can watch the degradation of all human life from the comfort of a little pleasure boat called the 'HMS Baz' or something. Bring champagne!

So you've decided on your place of hiding. Cool man, nice one. What's for dinner? Oh, you didn't bring any supplies? I look forward to watching your yellow skeleton turn to dust in the wasteland. There will be a litany of gas-masked bandits out for blood and crisps, so make sure you pack well.

Of course you need food that will last. Canned goods are traditional, but if you've got shit cans, and are rushing to the tube as hell rains down above you, it may not be enough. Ensure that you have a steady supply of beef jerky, as it doesn't tend to go bad and is kind of gross, so you won't want to eat it all at once. Things you don't want to take include: any and all fruit, all vegetables (unless dried), things you need water to cook (like jelly), any not-jerkied meats. For the love of God make sure you put your can opener in your bag or you'll find yourself whacking it against someones head trying desperately to access its sweet goo.

The obvious answer here is that you need water and a fucking shitload of it. If you can, try and divine some using, you guessed it, bones. If you're not into that and basically can't be bothered, it would be prescient to take a fatal amount of alcohol with you, so you can get pissed and die quickly, just in case it all goes wrong and you have to watch your family being eaten by cannibals while trying to trade some old cigarettes for a bite of a Clif Bar. You'll need your energy, too, so try and loot as much Monster and Red Bull as possible. Strength and awareness is imperative.

A radio is a good idea. Make sure it's one you can operate without the use of batteries, like a wind-up one, as there will usually be an emergency broadcast by the head of state. In our horrid vision of the future this is almost certainly going to be delivered by George Osborne, cackling madly 100 feet under ground in his bunker using rat skulls as shot glasses. Don't throw your phone away in a fit of despair, either. The signals may still be operational, and you'll probably want to be playing a lot of Flappy Bird as water and food supplies run out. Relax, take your mind off it, yeah?

Try and find your dad and nick all his tools as well. All dads have tools, it's the law, so plunder your old man's stash of oxidized spanners and get out of there, alone. They'll only slow you down, the old fuckers.

It's time to venture outside, friends. The least amount of time you should wait in your shelter is 8-9 days. The fallout has stopped blotting out the sun and turning the planet into a big snowball full of glowing cadavers, and you've got to bite the bullet. You will be met with a different world to the one you left behind. Rubble. Corpses. Smashed up Pret a Mangers. Ghosts wandering around, skin all stuck to the floor, like pulling some gum away from the bottom of a table. Oh hell yeah, it's all fucked up here. But the kids are running out of Minions advent calendar chocolates and they're starting to scratch each other in the eyeballs, so you must make the move.

If you've left it long enough, the air outside shouldn't turn your lungs into ashtrays and your skin to burnt toast, but there's always a chance, so mentally prepare yourself for an agonizing death and the unimaginable embarrassment of emerging on the surface only to crumple straight to the floor like a bit of kitchen towel. Cover your face. Get a bag of dust masks from B&Q and strap them all to your face. Try and take some toilet seats and fashion a shitty suit of armor from it. You really could make a decent chest plate. It won't stop a bullet, but in my head, the nuclear holocaust would mean everyone reverts back to using swords.

The all-clear has been given and the creeps from below tentatively taste their first bit of sunlight in forever. But what is needed to start society anew?

WhatsApp must be reinstated. We need to communicate with each other to make decisions about the new frontier, and that can't happen if half of us are on Android and half of us are using iMessage. It would be chaos. Next, reinvigorating nutrition. We need a juice bar on every corner selling radiated superfood smoothies, which will also help clear out all the beef jerky stuck in your bowel system.

Most houses will have been destroyed, but that doesn't mean the housing market needs to falter. The housing market will be immediately reinstated, with the same prices (only now the currency is 'Children's Bones'). Gonna need a lot of bones to live in nucleated dystopian Kensington I'm afraid guys!

And the rest is sure to follow. VICE will always be here to help in times of dire need, of course. Our archive of fun and interesting evergreen content will see you through from this Doomsday till the next. There is one upside about the impending nuclear holocaust: whoever runs that motherfucking Get In The Sea Twitter account will no doubt be vaporized and forgotten to history with no funeral, and will be but a screaming shadow painted on the ground. Good luck!

Follow Joe Bish on Twitter.