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Russian TV Warns Citizens of Impending Nuclear Attack

“Take potassium iodide pills!”

For many of us, this is the first time that we’ve been living and breathing and working and surviving in a world this close to catastrophe.

Those who endured the Great Depression, sandwiched between two World Wars, certainly take the cake here, but at least they had the plausible deniability of not seeing it all coming.  The war just arrived to them in newspapers, upon which no dissenting voices could comment en masse and in real time.

Now that we’re living in an interconnected and virtually privacy-less society, we can watch the slow moving asteroid that is World War III grinding toward us; its trajectory and acceleration moving ever so slightly some authoritarian nation pulls the trigger on some bold international maneuver.

This smothering anxiety has many of us wondering whether or not the end, the actual “the end”, is right around the corner thanks to Russia’s fatalist fetish for nuclear weapons.

This week, the Kremlin got a taste of their own medicine, as Russian citizens found themselves living through a hoax nightmare. 

People living in the east of Russia have once again been targeted in a television and radio hack, apparently suggesting they had been subject to a nuclear attack.

It is the third time media stations in the country have broadcast hoax warnings in just over two weeks.

On February 22, a fake civil defence siren said an ‘air raid alert’ was in effect, while another on February 28 said there was a ‘missile threat’.

The more recent warning was downright terrifying.

Today’s message, however, included a chilling new detail – an instruction for those listening to ‘take potassium iodide pills’, which are typically used in radiation emergencies.

Those watching television saw a map of Russia gradually turning red from west to east, as a voice said: ‘There was a strike. Urgently go to a shelter.

‘Seal the premises. Use gas masks of all types. In the absence of gas masks, use cotton-gauze bandages.’

Screens also flashed up with a black and yellow radiation warning sign and a message saying: ‘Everyone immediately to shelter.’

Russia’s repeated nuclear threats have been a near-constant source of tension throughout much of the region and the world at large, giving this terrifying prank a unique gravity all its own.

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