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

If I were a fly on the wall after a mass nuclear strike on America or the UK, what would I see in those first minutes. In your scenario, the opening blast hits the Pentagon.

It starts with a one megaton detonation that delivers blinding heat on the order of hundreds of millions of degrees, ignites a wide ring of fire, flattens buildings, and bathes survivors in lethal radiation. With about a thousand warheads landing, those fires merge into hundred to two hundred square mile firestorms, and the smoke drives us into nuclear winter, which climate scientist Brian Toon has modeled in detail.

I’ve always consoled myself that in New York I’d go instantly and not feel a thing. Is that even true?

You’d probably wish it were instant. Law and order collapses, bunkers run until the diesel runs out, and then it’s malnourished, grieving, sick people fighting over scarce supplies in a world without government.

You describe a thousand fireballs and cities turned to molten rubble; how many are dead within those first seventy two minutes.

Hundreds of millions die immediately. The deeper loss comes from food system collapse, which Toon's 2022 Nature study estimates could kill about five billion people.

With roughly eight billion alive now, where would survivors have the best shot. I was thinking New Zealand or Australia.

That’s the guess. Those are the places most likely to keep agriculture going.

I was there when Iran hit Israel and felt oddly safe. Is that really the place to be if it all kicks off?

Most mid latitudes would freeze over, places like Iowa and Ukraine could be locked in snow for a decade, crops fail, the ozone shreds, and people hide from sunlight underground. New Zealand and Australia are the outliers, and unlike an asteroid, nuclear war is our doing, which means leadership can pull us back.

There’s a hopeful precedent. Reagan watched The Day After, shifted from hawk to working with Gorbachev in Reykjavik, they stated nuclear war has no winners and should never be fought, and treaties cut stockpiles from about seventy thousand to about twelve thousand five hundred; getting to zero is work for the disarmament community I’ve been learning from.

I asked chat GPT to imagine an AI breaking out and ending the world; it had the system grab nuclear weapons and launch, which felt disturbingly plausible.

I’d push back a bit, because popular sci fi colors that picture, and our nuclear command, control, and communications are deliberately analog and highly insulated. Submarine launched missiles even use star sighting for navigation, which is a low tech safeguard against digital takeover.

Still, an AGI might outplay weaker states or spoof alerts and trick people into firing.

All the more reason to drive the arsenal toward zero or at least to tight caps so an automated trigger cannot cascade through thousands of warheads. I’m optimistic by nature.

Do you think humanity will experience a nuclear war.

I wrote the book to nudge us toward the idea that human made risks demand human made solutions.

It’s low probability but high consequence, and the odds tick upward the longer we live with these devices and the possibility of a reckless leader.

I hear that concern more from your generation, which has more information and faces new threats, and it points to a needed shift from treating everyone as an enemy to managing adversaries without constant escalation.

But war seems baked into human drives for status, ego, resources, and survival.

Anthropologists show that in first contact some people default to suspicion and others to alliance, and we do not know why, but we can train our minds to see opponents rather than mortal enemies and pick cooperation. Even in dark reporting, I try to find the workable silver lining for myself and my family.

That was one of our most replayed moments from a past episode; the full conversation is in the description, and thanks for listening.