We examine how bad things could get — and the precautions to stop it from happening.
If you grew up in the 1950s or ’60s, you were more than likely taught how to behave in the event of a nuclear attack. You might have practiced drills at school, where you were required to hide under your desk, or maybe you watched one of those “duck and cover” cartoons, which were meant to prepare young children for what seemed, at the time, to be a rising global threat of nuclear war.
In the decades since the Cold War ended, the awareness of nuclear attacks has dimmed for younger generations, with the spotlight shifting toward other dangers, like climate change. But, unfortunately, this existential threat is once again creeping to the top of our radar.
In August, a top United Nations official issued an eerily stark warning to the world about the renewed threat of “nuclear annihilation,” arguing that a number of global conflicts, including the war in Ukraine, have caused this threat to skyrocket to levels last seen decades ago. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said that humanity is currently “just one misunderstanding, one miscalculation away from nuclear annihilation,” and that this is all happening “at a time when the risks of proliferation are growing and guardrails to prevent escalation are weakening.”
The threat of nuclear war has been a concern since the days of black-and-white TV, but as the United States and Russia (the two countries with the highest number of nuclear weapons) are increasingly at odds, alarm about the potential for devastation has reached a frightening pitch. But it’s not just those superpowers we should be worried about: Experts have been closely watching the ongoing geopolitical tensions between India and Pakistan as well, since both countries have more than 100 nuclear weapons, and then there’s North Korea, which fired a missile over Japan for the first time in five years at the start of October, prompting fresh worries.
Nuclear war is definitely a nightmare scenario, but it’s hard to imagine what something so dramatic would actually be like, so we dug into the real-world effects of this apocalyptic scenario.
When an atomic bomb hits land, the effects are immediate — and devastating
If you’re wondering what exactly happens when an atomic bomb is dropped on a country, you only need to look at our nation’s military history for a sobering lesson.
On Aug. 6, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, it dropped a second bomb over Nagasaki, another Japanese city. The devastation of these two bombs was simultaneously immediate and long-lasting.
When the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the resulting explosion instantly killed approximately 80,000 people. Those victims could have been killed by a number of factors, including the intense heat from the blast, as well as injuries inflicted by the collapse of buildings. An additional 40,000 people died immediately from the atomic bomb dropped in Nagasaki — and while these two death counts are staggering all on their own, they don’t yet account for the tens of thousands who would eventually die of radiation poising in the days and weeks to come.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly how many people died because of the collective blasts. However, current estimates suggest that as many as 135,000 people died in Hiroshima and up to 80,000 died in Nagasaki, including everyone who succumbed to the side effects of radiation.
It’s a pretty grim picture, but it doesn’t necessarily serve as an accurate predictor of the effects of another nuclear attack. From the size of the bomb itself to the weather to the exact location where the bomb is dropped, a wide array of factors can influence how high the death toll actually rises.
Historians Richard Wolfson and Ferenc Danloki-Veress wrote an article for MIT explaining how atomic bombs can leave different impacts depending on whether they detonate in the air or on land. “The most widespread damage to buildings occurs in an air burst, detonation thousands of feet above the target,” they wrote. “A ground burst, in contrast, digs a huge crater and pulverizes everything in the immediate vicinity, but its blast effects don’t extend as far.”
“Nuclear winter” could make our planet totally uninhabitable
It’s common knowledge that atomic bombs have the power to kill thousands of people on impact, not to mention destroy vast swaths of land and cause radioactive damage. But what might be less understood is how damaging nuclear warfare would be to our global climate.
Years of research on the possibility of a “nuclear winter” suggests that any sort of prolonged nuclear war could send upwards of 150 million tons of smoke and debris into Earth’s atmosphere. As Wolfson and Danloki-Veress write for MIT, this layer of soot could cause a massive drop in global temperature, and overall precipitation could drop by 90 percent or more.
This would create a chain reaction of devastating events for all organisms on earth, including humans. Food supply chains would crumble, radioactive waste would destroy countless areas of land, the chemistry of oceans and other masses of water would be altered, and Earth as a planet would become unlivable.
The effects of nuclear warfare that you rarely hear about
The long-term radioactive damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been well-documented. What’s lesser known is how the United States’ decision to drop atomic bombs on Japan actually led to radioactive damage stateside, too.
The Manhattan Project was the code used for the initiative to build the atomic bombs in World War II. As a part of that top-secret project, Uranium was purified in downtown St. Louis, and the radioactive waste that resulted from that process was quietly moved to a segment of unused land, where it flowed into a nearby creek during rainy periods.
The radioactive waste in this area has been contaminating the soil and water in certain neighborhoods for decades — and nearly all of this was only recently discovered by a pair of activists who founded the organization Just Moms STL.
One of those activists and founders, Karen Nickel, detailed all of the medical abnormalities that have arisen in her community, due to what she believes is its proximity to radioactive waste. “We’ve had babies born without eyes,” she said. “There was infertility on the street, birth defects, four cases of lupus within my 5- or 6-house radius. My sister had cysts that covered her ovaries when she was 11 and our next-door neighbor’s daughter had cysts when she was 9.” There are much higher rates of cancer in Nickel’s neighborhood than in the United States at large, as well.
What keeps a nuclear attack from taking place?
Now that you’ve taken in all this information about the terrors (and rising possibility) of nuclear war, you might be wondering what, if anything, is keeping this from happening. One of the biggest answers is also the simplest: Deterrence is an incredibly powerful political tool.
Any country with a nuclear weapon knows that if they deploy that weapon, they run the very high risk of being bombed themselves in retaliation. What’s more, the last several decades have given scientists the time to research and share information about the terrible consequences of nuclear war. As a result, world leaders are largely aware of how this kind of attack would be to the globe’s atmosphere and stability, even if the bomb didn’t drop anywhere near their own territory.
These deterrents are in some ways a matter of instinct, but there have also been several treaties established to codify this sentiment. For example, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (mentioned above) was established in 1970 for the exact goal of deterrence, and more than 191 countries have committed to the conditions of the treaty, including Russia and the United States.
So while treaties don’t guarantee that nuclear war won’t happen (which is why that U.N. official sounded the alarm earlier this week), there’s the at-least somewhat comforting knowledge that precautions are in place to prevent it — and that just about everyone on the planet agrees it would be the worst-case scenario.
