What Happens AFTER Nuclear War?

What Happens AFTER Nuclear War?

The Devastating Aftermath of Nuclear Conflict

Nuclear war would forever split human history into anything that happened before and the post-war apocalypse. In the worst case, mass fires consume everything within tens of thousands of square kilometers, killing hundreds of millions within hours. But the worst part comes after that – nuclear war could trigger a nuclear winter that might kill billions, maybe even completely collapsing our civilization.

The Immediate Destruction

When a nuclear weapon is detonated, a bubble of gas hotter than the sun is forced into existence, so hot that everything within kilometers immediately begins to burn. The terror bubble expands rapidly, filling the sky over its target, creating a devastating shockwave that causes most of the immediate destruction. Basically you break a lot of stuff and set it on fire – and in the worst case this turns into a firestorm that consumes everything and everyone on the ground.

Right after the explosion a gigantic mushroom cloud rises over the destruction like a demon throning over its perverse work, but in the following hours a far more deadly cloud forms. The fire burning cities, forests or fields, heats up so much air that it creates its own micro climate and wind system. Hot air and hot smoke rise, pulling in fresh air from the surroundings, and fresh oxygen stoking the flames even more. This creates an updraft and forms a colossal pyrocumulonimbus cloud that carries the soot and aerosols from the flames high into the stratosphere.

• The initial nuclear blast creates a bubble of extreme heat that expands rapidly, causing massive destruction.
• The resulting fires generate towering pyrocumulonimbus clouds that carry soot and aerosols high into the stratosphere.
• In a full-scale nuclear war, hundreds of these firestorms could send up to 150 million tons of soot into the upper atmosphere.

More: Killers On The Hunt: How Murderers Caught Fellow Killers

Nuclear Winter Begins

Under normal conditions, the soot rising from a big fire is quickly washed out by rain. But a pyrocumulonimbus cloud can reach altitudes well above the height where rain clouds form. Once above the tropopause, there is simply no weather to remove soot from the atmosphere, so it can stay aloft for years.

If this happens to a single city, it’s a tragedy, but a fairly local one. But in a full scale nuclear war, warring nations following the cold logic of mutually assured destruction, could use hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons all at once, creating hundreds of fire storms, sending up to 150 million tons of soot, a cube the size of a skyscraper, directly into the stratosphere.

In the next few days and weeks the soot begins to blanket the earth at high altitudes, absorbing light high above the ground and preventing sunlight from reaching the surface. This is not like science fiction where the sky turns dark and the sun disappears. Winter is what happens when just a little less sunlight hits the ground – and now suddenly a lot less sunlight gets through. Yesterday the world was normal. Today nuclear winter begins.

“Nuclear winter is not permanent, and definitely no new ice age. The effects on the climate only last as long as the soot remains in the atmosphere, which is at most a decade or so until it clears out and temperatures normalize.”

The Devastating Impact on Agriculture and Food Supplies

How bad nuclear winter would be is still an active area of research. It all hinges on one thing: How much stuff will burn really hot? How many firestorms would be caused by the heat of the explosions? This depends on many factors, from the materials a city is made of, to the time of the year, if a forest is nearby and so on. So just keep in mind we are working with some assumptions.

The good news is that nuclear winter is not permanent, and definitely no new ice age. The effects on the climate only last as long as the soot remains in the atmosphere, which is at most a decade or so until it clears out and temperatures normalize. The bad news is that this causes almost immediate climate change within a few weeks – it disrupts our climate system faster than any living being can adapt to.

In this new climate, our seasons are suddenly all wrong. Winters are much longer, summers shorter and colder – or gone altogether. This also means less evaporation over the oceans, which means less rain and maybe large scale droughts. This is bad because our food eats the sun. Without good summers and enough rain, growing seasons shrink or even collapse.

• Nuclear winter disrupts the climate system faster than any living being can adapt, with longer, colder winters and shorter, drier summers.
• This sudden climate change devastates global agriculture, as the world’s major food-producing regions experience crop failures.
• The majority of humanity lives in the mid-latitudes, where temperatures may stay below freezing for years, making it impossible to grow crops.

The vast majority of the food we eat stems from a few highly efficient crops, that are mostly produced in a few very agriculturally productive regions, like the US Great Plains or Ukraine. From these bread and rice baskets of the world, they get traded and shipped around the world. In the worst case of a full scale nuclear war the temperatures in the midlatitudes will probably stay below freezing for several years. Nothing at all can grow under these conditions and the world’s breadbaskets would suddenly turn empty.

If food production crashes, the world’s food producers would very likely ramp up prices or even stop selling food to other countries – if they’re still able to farm their fields at all. Humanity has only a few weeks’ supply of crops and food, not enough to survive this drastic drop in production.

But the climate is not the only issue: modern industrialized agriculture is a complex affair that relies on functioning supply chains to provide unthinkable amounts of industrially produced fertilizer and chemicals to kill weeds and vermin. Massive numbers of specialized modern machinery is plowing, sowing, harvesting and distributing. After a nuclear war, especially if the countries that produce the food were part of the nuclear exchange, there may simply be no more fuel, fertilizer or machine parts, because there are no more oil refineries, ports and other essential infrastructure left, damaging global food production even more.

“If you have more people than calories, then within a few weeks you don’t anymore. Humanity has only a few weeks’ supply of crops and food, not enough to survive this drastic drop in production.”

Potential Nuclear War Scenarios

Let’s look at what science says about the actual wars that could happen. The most likely smallish nuclear exchange would be fought today between India and Pakistan, with relatively low yield weapons. Even in a pretty mild nuclear war like this, the immediate explosions would kill around 27 million people, which is horrible enough. In just a few hours, more people would die than in all of World War 1. The ensuing fires would not cause a nuclear winter, but a mild ‘nuclear autumn’. But even this would disrupt the climate, and thereby global agriculture, enough to starve up to 250 million people worldwide.

Unfortunately India and Pakistan are in an arms race and have been increasing the number and power of warheads in their arsenal. The next stage of escalation would be war with hundreds of nuclear weapons, the bombs and fires destroying many major population centers and killing over 100 million people. A war on this scale would cause a nuclear winter that would damage global agriculture enough to cut the available calories for humanity in half. The number of people that starve to death would be as high as 2 billion. One in four humans alive today.

The worst-case scenario is a full scale global war between NATO nations and Russia – or China, which also continues to build its nuclear arsenal. In a war between a former, future and current superpower, thousands of nuclear weapons could be detonated. In a scenario with around 4400 nuclear weapons, 360 million people would perish right away. We have no other event to even compare the death and destruction to. It’s like humanity dropping an asteroid on itself.

The nuclear winter that follows such an apocalyptic war would tank human calorie production by as much as 90%. Not only would almost all of our agriculture take an immediate and deadly hit, the climate would take at least a decade to recover. Because a war like this would specifically hit the world regions that produce most of the food for humanity – recovery will be much, much harder than with other conflicts. Within two years the global death toll from starvation could rise to about 5 billion. In mid latitude countries like Russia, China, Canada, the U.S. and much of Europe only a few percent of the population might survive. Humanity will never be the same again.

• A limited nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan could kill 27 million people and disrupt global agriculture enough to starve 250 million.
• An escalated conflict with hundreds of nuclear weapons could kill over 100 million and cut global food production in half, leading to 2 billion deaths.
• A full-scale global nuclear war between superpowers could kill 360 million immediately and reduce food production by 90%, potentially leading to 5 billion deaths from starvation.

Potential Survivors and Rebuilding

While nowhere is truly safe, some nations in the southern hemisphere may fare well enough to endure, while the rest of the world collapses. All the nuclear weapon states are in the northern hemisphere. So a few countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina may be able to endure for a bunch of different reasons. Their nuclear winter would be milder, they have a lot of livestock that would not be as affected as crops. So they would probably stop exporting food and focus on keeping their own people alive – assuming they aren’t invaded for their food by other starving nations.

It’s safe to say that the world would become extremely unpleasant for a long time and it’s impossible to know how many people will have died when the nuclear winter ends. In the worst case human civilization could collapse and the survivors would be thrown back thousands of years, slowly trying to recover a world full of scars and graves. Eventually, when they’ve rebuilt civilization, would they ever build nuclear weapons again?

“While nowhere is truly safe, some nations in the southern hemisphere may fare well enough to endure, while the rest of the world collapses.”

What Can We Do to Prevent Nuclear War?

We know for sure that we need to do anything we can to make sure nuclear war never happens. This video was supported by Open Philanthropy – if you want to know what YOU can do to reduce the risk for nuclear war you can either support expert organizations or become a citizen expert yourself and learn more.

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No matter what, we must do everything in our power to prevent nuclear war and the catastrophic consequences it would have for humanity. The future of our civilization depends on it.