I just watched Patlabor 2 last night, about a civil war in post-Cold War Japan. The main theme is the following: The thing about one-in-a-million events is that they are eventually going to happen once the other 999,999 occur. Thus a government which does not plan for one-in-a-million scenarios is truly derelict and incapable of survival.

The literal title is "If the crisis or the war comes". Swedes and the Swedish language has a somewhat poetic tendency to refer to things in definite article, embodying them, when wanting to underline the seriousness.

Nothing new here, the Swedish government has been publishing this guide since the second world war [1] and updates it regularly. It is not directly related to an increase in international tensions and would have been published even if Putin and his cronies were out on the pony farm. The last update was published in 2017/2018 by the previous labour-led government, now that Sweden is part of NATO it needed an update to reflect that fact. Previous versions were published in 1943, 1952, 1961, 1978, 1983, 1987, 1989, 1991 and 2017/2018.

[1] https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om_kriget_kommer

In retrospect, it seems like it was a bad idea for Western countries to assume that things were going to remain peaceful after the fall of the USSR. Glad to see the threat of war being taken seriously.

A simple note: if you live sufficiently south for p.v., in a home, you can sustain services disruptions significantly:

- p.v. with storage means freezers operational, and freezers means food, protein in particular, for potentially very long periods

- even without p.v. a home in the wood means being able to heat in the winter sourcing wood in nature, uncomfortable but still heat, also usable to cook

- you have room to store water, from the aqueduct with a personal pump in home pipes, so with p.v. you get cold and hot water, potentially for a week or two, and in nature sources tend to be common at our latitudes

In an apartment in a dense city you can just keep a bit of water, but still much less than the countryside, next to zero chance for p.v. and energy storage, very limited chance to source water in nature, even issues to walk for many stairs if elevators have no energy. Long story short: you can't be resilient. Oh, and you might be targeted because hitting a city it's easy and some damages are assured, hitting the countryside is essentially wasting weapons. Remember as well: with wood you can cook various long lasting foods, like rice, beans, ... without wood or locally produced energy your cooking ability going down to zero.

Floods? Spread homes might be or not at risk, but they are still spread, meaning few per flooded are, so rescuing it's doable as temporary shelters, emergency food supply etc. Dense areas? The same in risk terms, but extremely hard to help simply because there are too many people hit together.

Earthquakes? Very similar, plus the fact that light homes tend to allow quick escape, tall buildings do not, and even if they might be well designed in seismic terms they are still very problematic. Fires? idem.

Long story short: it's pointless to publish such next-to-obvious recommendations, some could do something, many could not.