What will the last few hours or days be like before TSHTF?

I am watching the market for a moderate up-turn followed by:
1. Israel going to war. This make happen in days or a protracted span but when they are up against the wall with three or four countries joined together then...
2. followed by the USA helping Israel. This will happen in less than a week after Israel has more than one country they are fighting.
3. The market might taper off or just go flat with no increases except in the defense contractors.
When that happens we have a short period of time before the Old USSR and China form a pact and save the world from the big bully - the USA!
It may be a pre-emptive nuke strike or a monetary attack but it will be fast once it starts.

The money brokers are not going to let the dollar fail - I believe that will be the real reason we go to war but we won't be alone. It will also be an excuse to bring in the UN. The UN will make policy in order to "help" us including their UN Gun Ban.

I don't expect any of this to happen in the next year but probably in the next five years.

Lucky Jim said:

Here's my list of things that could zap us (in no particular order)-

1- Chernobyl-type nuclear plant accident, but on a much bigger scale, poisoning an area as big as the USA or the whole of Europe and Asia.
2- Massive meteor or asteroid strike wiping out millions with blast and tsunami, and kicking up enough dust to black out the sun for years and causing crop-killing temperature drops.
3- World War 3 exchange of nuclear weapons poisoning virtually the entire planet.
4- A plague wiping out most humans on earth after accidental release from a bio research lab, or a deliberate release by terrorists to wipe out the population of a specific country, or perhaps a virus naturally evolves that has no cure.
5- EC Event (Economic Collapse) triggering total breakdown of law and order resulting in looting gangs etc.
6- EM pulse (from a solar flare or nuclear bomb) blows out the electricity grid and electronics, it'll be bad but hopefully the govt will have contingency plans to get it fixed and relief food and medicine convoys up and running.
7- Mega-earthquake bigger than anything the earth has experienced before, demolishing a whole bunch of cities across countries or continents.
8- Mega-tsunami triggered by gigantic quake at sea, wiping out coastal areas for a hundred miles or more inland.
9- Runaway volcano that carries on spewing out dust and ash for months, throwing a grey wind-carried shroud around the planet blocking out sunlight and triggering subzero temperature drops.
10- Haywire weather (nonstop storms, tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, floods etc) caused by global warming, pollution, ozone depletion etc
11- City Lockdown by the Authorities where citizens are ordered to stay indoors for whatever reason such as a terrorist manhunt or whatever which could last days/weeks

Click to expand...

The Chernobyl melt-down is about as big as a nuclear reactor accident gets. The fall-out was spread as far West as Sweden and just as far East.
A massive meteor strike is a no-win situation but it would have to be a very big meteor and we would have a lot of time to watch it coming.
A nuclear war would do little outside of the 100 mile diameter from ground zeros. It would take more warheads than exist to wipe out just the USA. There are very few and small effects beyond the blast of modern third generation thermo-nuclear warheads.
A plague - like Ebola or one of the other hemorrhagic fever diseases would be devastating if it took just a bit longer to gestate. I agree this is one that would be hard to cope with.
Economic collapse is something that could happen if the right conditions existed and nothing was done to prevent it. Gold and silver hoarding is the only way to come out the other side with much of anything.
EM pulse from natural causes worries me less than one from a very high altitude nuclear detonation. It is farely easy to stop damage from a solar mass ejection or solar flare because we have enough notice to shut down the grid. Without the grid operating the damage would be practically non-existant. A high altitude detonation of a nuclear device - especially a primitive one (first generation) would be devastating for several reasons. It not only carries the E-3 pulse that the solar events carry but it also carries the higher energy E-2 and E-1. The E-1 is the most dificult to protect against and anything with diodes or transistors (any electronic devices) would be fried instantly. Then the E-2 and E-3 would take down the grid, transformers, generating stations and finally the lines themselves. One other reason is that there would be no notice. One second everything is normal and the next second absolutely no power at all, anywhere within the affected area. (In the USA from West to East coast from southern Canada to the middle of Mexico. Not enough spare parts to make new generators no spare parts for electronics and not enough cable to replace the lines. We would be without power for twenty or more years. How does your prep stand up to that?
Mega-quake? Like if the entire Pacific plate suddenly sunk 10 feet? While the quake itself would be terrible the water displacement would be unimmaginable. The entire western USA from the Missouri River west would be under water. The Asian and eastern European continent would be as severely hit. Even at that it would only affect about half the globe - maybe 2/3 of the population with half that many dead or dying.
See above for mega tsunami........ BAD!
Runaway volcano or one or two of the mega volcanoes would be enough to almost completely wipe mankind off the face of the earth.
Weather has absolute causes and effects. It takes energy to cause storms and such and once the flow of heat to the atlantic shuts down (global warming) then the weather just gets cold. (ice age cold) but as long as we have fuel we will survive in large numbers.
City lockdown would be a joke. If people resisted it wouldn't last more than an hour. We out-number the police and military 10 to 1. We are also better prepared.

So, Massive meteors, uncontrolled plague, EMP from a high altitude nuke, mega-quake or tsunami, and super volcano, are the ones that we can't worry about as preppers other than being as self sufficient as we can.