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The United States keeps up to 400 Minuteman III nuclear missiles on alert in underground silos spread across Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Nebraska. Any enemy who wants those missiles out of the fight has to hit every silo with a warhead detonated at ground level. A ground burst throws tons of dirt and debris into the cloud, that dirt comes back down as fallout, and the upper-level winds over the United States carry it east. A family living 30 miles west of a missile field may come through a war in better shape than a family living 300 miles east of it.
Where you live in a nuclear war comes down to two questions. How far are you from a likely target, and which way does the wind blow from the big targets to your west? Episode 2 covered how to pick the safest room in an ordinary house. This episode answers whether your family should be in that room at all or a few hundred miles away. The sources are the government’s own: The Effects of Nuclear Weapons by Glasstone and Dolan, the Department of Defense’s published installation lists, the Pentagon’s 2025 report on China’s military, and current fallout modeling from the University of Wisconsin. I spent 30 years reading threat indicators for a living, and this is how I would read the map.
Here is a fact most people have never heard. When the government tested nuclear weapons in Nevada in the 1950s, the county in America that received the highest dose of radioactive iodine from those tests was Meagher County, in central Montana, more than 600 miles from the test site. The National Cancer Institute documented it in 1997, and 15 of the 25 highest-dose counties in the country were in Montana.
The Five Categories of Likely Targets
An enemy planning a strike on the United States would work from a target list, and most of what would be on it is public.
Missile fields. Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and F.E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming, with the Warren missile field running into Colorado and Nebraska. The silos are the largest single set of targets in the country.
Bomber and submarine bases. The bombers fly out of Minot, Barksdale in Louisiana, and Whiteman in Missouri, with B-1 bombers at Dyess in Texas and Ellsworth in South Dakota. The ballistic missile submarines are based at Kings Bay, Georgia, and Bangor, Washington.
Command and government. Washington, D.C., Offutt Air Force Base outside Omaha, home of U.S. Strategic Command, and the military complex around Colorado Springs.
Major military bases and ports. Navy ports such as Norfolk, San Diego, and Pearl Harbor, plus the large Army and Air Force installations.
Key infrastructure and large cities. Major refineries, large power generation and transmission hubs, and big population centers.
The Department of Defense publishes its installation list. Pull up the bases in your state and the states around you and write them on the worksheet that goes with this episode.
An enemy chooses targets two ways. One goes after our weapons, which means the silos, bomber bases, submarine bases, and command sites. The other goes after cities and industry. A large attack does both. China changed the picture. The Pentagon’s report on China’s military, released in December 2025, says China’s stockpile sat in the low 600s through 2024 and is on track to pass 1,000 warheads by 2030. Russia already holds the largest arsenal in the world. With two adversaries carrying large arsenals, more warheads are available to cover more targets, and the second-tier bases and infrastructure in categories four and five move up the list.
China and Russia have also already placed themselves inside American utilities. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has published advisories on Chinese access to power, water, and communications networks. That puts the grid on the target list before any missile is launched. Episode 6 of this series covers the grid.
Distance as Protection
Blast and fallout behave differently, and you plan for them separately. Blast reaches out a few miles in every direction from the point of detonation. Fallout travels in one direction, downwind, and it can reach hundreds of miles.
Take one common warhead size, 300 kilotons, detonated in the air over a target. Using the scaling in Glasstone and Dolan, most houses are destroyed or badly damaged out to about 3 miles. Exposed skin is burned out to about 4 miles. Windows break out to about 8 miles. Bigger warheads push those rings out, but blast range grows with the cube root of the yield, so doubling the size of the warhead increases the damage radius by only about a quarter.
That means a family living 15 or 20 miles from a target is very unlikely to see blast damage at the house. Their problem is the fallout.
You can run this for your own address. NUKEMAP is a free modeling tool built by Alex Wellerstein at Stevens Institute of Technology. Enter your home address, place the detonation on your nearest target, set the yield to 300 kilotons, and look at where your house falls relative to the rings. The worksheet walks through the settings step by step.
Wind and Fallout Direction
A warhead detonated high in the air over a city produces very little local fallout. A warhead detonated at or near the ground produces most of it, because it pulls dirt and debris up into the fireball and that material comes back down radioactive. Missile silos are hardened to survive a near miss, so an attacker uses ground bursts on them. That makes the missile fields the largest fallout source in the country.
The cloud from a large ground burst climbs 30,000 to 40,000 feet. At that altitude the winds over the United States run west to east most of the year. Fallout begins landing within the hour near the target and keeps landing for hundreds of miles downwind, in a long plume that is heaviest close in and stretches out with the wind. Think about a campfire on a windy day. Stand upwind and you barely smell the smoke. Stand downwind and the smoke follows you no matter how far back you step.
The clearest case on record is Castle Bravo. On March 1, 1954, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb in the Marshall Islands. It yielded about 15 megatons, far larger than planned, and the winds shifted from what the planners expected. Fallout came down on Rongelap Atoll, about 100 miles away, where people lived, and on the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon No. 5, which was outside the danger zone the government had drawn. The people of Rongelap were not evacuated for about two days.
The Nevada tests showed the same thing on American soil. Fallout from those shots traveled north and east across Utah, Idaho, and into Montana, and it landed heaviest on ranch country that had nothing to do with the testing. The wind on the day decides where fallout goes. A plan built only around the circle on a map misses the larger danger.
Look at what sits west of your home, out to about 300 miles. That is where your fallout would come from. Write those targets on the worksheet.
Living Near a Target Versus Living Downwind of One
Once you know your distance and your wind, your family falls into one of four boxes.
Box 1: near a target and downwind of others. This is the highest risk. You face blast from your own target and fallout from the targets to your west.
Box 2: near a target but upwind of the big target sets. Blast is the main danger. With normal winds, fallout from your own target blows east, away from you.
Box 3: far from any target but downwind of a big target set. This is the box people underestimate. Eastern Montana, the Dakotas, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and on toward the Great Lakes sit downwind of the missile fields. Sebastien Philippe at the University of Wisconsin-Madison modeled attacks on the American silo fields against a full year of daily weather data, and his maps put Wisconsin in the fallout path. A USA TODAY project modeled 450 silo targets with National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) wind data and reached the same general picture.
Box 4: far from targets and upwind of the big sets. This is the lowest risk. No location is free of risk, because the wind changes and smaller targets exist in every state.
Families in Box 3 need the full shelter plan from Episode 2: the right room in the house and two weeks of supplies inside it. The six geographic and relational factors from When America Breaks, Episode 4, still apply to every family. This episode adds the target and wind layer on top of them.
Relocate Ahead of Time or Shelter in Place
Most families shelter in place. If you are outside the blast rings and your house has a usable shelter spot, you stay. Leaving after an attack puts you in a car on a jammed road, and Episode 2 covered how little protection a car gives against fallout.
Relocating ahead of time makes sense if you live inside the blast ring of a primary target, or you are in Box 1, and you have somewhere to go. Leaving only works early. Once missiles are in the air you have somewhere between 10 and 30 minutes, and every road out of town is full. The decision has to be made before the war, with triggers written down in advance. A trigger could be open war between the United States and Russia or China, a national mobilization order, or a nuclear weapon used anywhere in the world. Pick yours, write them down, and when one happens, go.
Your destination is family or church members in a lower-risk area, arranged ahead of time, with supplies already staged there. Pick a primary and an alternate, and plan two routes that stay clear of the targets on your map.
What Luke 21 Tells a Family Deciding Whether to Leave
In Luke 21:20-21, Jesus tells His followers that when they see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, the people in Judea should flee to the mountains and those inside the city should get out. He gave them a sign and an instruction ahead of time, so they would not be deciding under pressure when the armies arrived.
Church history records that the Christians in Jerusalem acted on that warning. Eusebius, writing in the fourth century, records that the church left the city for the town of Pella, east of the Jordan River, before the Roman siege of A.D. 70 closed around Jerusalem. They had the sign in advance and they left while the road was still open.
That is the model for a family living near a target. Know the signs, write down the triggers while you can think clearly, and act on them when they happen. The Lord gave His people the warning, and they acted on it.
Building Your Location Plan
The Target and Fallout Location Assessment Worksheet that goes with this episode takes you through the whole process:
Mark your home on a map.
Mark every target within 50 miles, using the five categories and the Department of Defense installation list.
Mark every major target within 300 miles to your west, starting with the missile fields.
Run your nearest target in NUKEMAP and see whether your home falls inside the 3-mile ring or the 8-mile ring.
Put your family in one of the four boxes.
Pick your plan: shelter in place, or relocate on written triggers. If you are relocating, choose a primary destination and an alternate, and plan two routes that avoid the targets on your map.
Bring your church into it. Church families in different towns can host each other, so a family in a high-risk area has a place to go.
Mark the map this week, and put your family in a box.
Sources
Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan, The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, 3rd edition, Department of Defense and Department of Energy, 1977. Blast damage radii, scaling of blast with yield, surface burst versus airburst fallout, and fallout patterns.
Air Force Global Strike Command and Minot Daily News, September 24, 2025. Up to 400 Minuteman III missiles on alert at Malmstrom, Minot, and F.E. Warren Air Force Bases.
Department of Defense, Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China, December 2025, with the Federation of American Scientists summary. China’s stockpile in the low 600s through 2024, more than 1,000 projected by 2030.
Department of Defense installation lists.
Alex Wellerstein, NUKEMAP, Stevens Institute of Technology.
Sebastien Philippe, University of Wisconsin-Madison, fallout modeling of attacks on United States missile silos, reported by Wisconsin Public Radio, February 24, 2026.
Sebastien Philippe and Ivan Stepanov, “Radioactive Fallout and Potential Fatalities from Nuclear Attacks on China’s New Missile Silo Fields,” Science and Global Security, 2023.
USA TODAY, “Nuclear Sponge” fallout mapping of 450 United States silo targets.
National Cancer Institute, 1997 study of iodine-131 thyroid doses from Nevada Test Site fallout, as reported by the Daily Montanan and Idaho Capital Sun, January 2024.
Department of Energy and Marshall Islands records on the March 1, 1954 Castle Bravo test.
Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Book 3, Chapter 5.
Final Thoughts
Mark the map this week. Then tell me in the comments which box your family landed in and what your nearest target turned out to be. I read every comment, and families in your part of the country learn from what you found.
In Acts 17:26-27, Paul tells the philosophers in Athens that God made every nation from one man and determined the times and the boundaries of where people would live, so that they would seek Him. God placed your family where it lives for a purpose. Knowing your nearest target and which way your wind blows is stewardship of the place He gave you, and it lets you either stay and serve your neighbors or leave on time with a clear conscience.
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