Most Replayed Moment: Here's What Happens When A Nuclear Bomb Drops! These Countries Will Be Safe!

Steven Bartlett (0:04)

If I was a fly on the wall, not that there would be a wall left, what would I, what would I, and I was looking at America or the UK after it had been struck by these nuclear bombs, by thousands of Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons, what would I see, what would the visuals be in those minutes after the strike?

Annie Jacobsen (0:23)

I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon. It's a one megaton thermonuclear bomb in painstaking, horrific detail, all sourced from Defense Department documents, defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and to humans. And it's horrifying. But on top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light, which is 180 million degrees, which catches everything on fire in a nine mile diameter radius, on top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and all the buildings coming down and more fires, igniting more fires, on top of the radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks, if they happen to have survived. On top of all of that, each one of these fires creates a mega fire that is 100 or more square miles. And so essentially, in essence, what do you see? Well, in the scenario at minute 72, 1,000 Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States. And so it just becomes a conflagration of fire. It's just fire, fires burning, fires, 100, 200 square mile fires burning. And then we move into nuclear winter. And that's sort of the denouement of the book, where I tell you about nuclear winter from the point of view of one of the original scientists who wrote that original nuclear winter paper with Carl Sagan back in 1983 And his name is Professor Brian Toon, and he's spent the decades since working with the state of the art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter will look like.

Steven Bartlett (2:10)

Because I've always thought, you know what, nuclear war wouldn't be that bad if, you know, Russia launched a thousand of their nuclear bombs at the United States, and I was here in New York where I am now. I would die instantly, so I wouldn't really know what had happened. Is that true?

Annie Jacobsen (2:23)

I think you would want to die instantly. I mean, there's a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, the former premier of the Soviet Union, and he said, after nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead. Because there is this sense of if you survived, I mean, there is no more law and order. There is no more rule of law. There is no government. Craig Fugate made that very clear. The bunkers that the people in the military command and control centers would be in, let's say the secret bunkers, not the ones that are targets that Russia is going to take out, that I write about in the book, but the smaller ones. Those are going to only function for as long as there's gasoline to run the diesel generators. And then those people are going to have to come out. And who's left? It's man returning to the most primal, most violent state as people fight over the tiny resources that remain. And by the way, they're all malnourished. Everybody's sick and most people have lost everything and everyone they know. How's that going to feel?

Steven Bartlett (3:38)

It's going to feel, as you describe here on page 277, there are a thousand flashes of light superheating the air in each ground zero to a hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit. A thousand fireballs each more than a mile in diameter. A thousand steeply fronted blast waves. A thousand walls of compressed air. A thousand American cities and towns where all engineered structures in five, six or seven miles radius change physical shapes, collapse and burn. A thousand cities and towns with molten asphalt streets. A thousand cities and towns with survivors impaled to death by flying debris. A thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions of dead people. With tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third degree burns. People naked, tattered, bleeding and suffocating. People who don't look or act like people anymore. Across America and Europe, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying, while hundreds of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they run out of fuel.

I mean, that is some visual. How many people would be dead or dying, do you think, after those 72 minutes?

Annie Jacobsen (4:54)

Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs, no question. But the number that I think is very interesting to think about comes from Professor Toon and his team, who wrote a paper for Nature recently, 2022, and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based around food. And the number that they have is 5 billion people would be dead.