What happens in a nuclear war?

Since the US bombing of Japan in World War II, the world entire has remained terrified of nuclear weapons. Even as scientists and scholars spent decades warning about the existential threat posed by technology that can literally end civilization, countries across the planet raced -- and race still -- to gain this capability for themselves. In tonight's episode, Ben and Matt ask: What actually happens in a large-scale nuclear war? (Spoiler, tune in for our upcoming episode: "What can I do to survive a nuclear war?"

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn this stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:24):
Hello, welcome back to the show. My name is Matt.
Our colleague Noel is on an adventure, but will be
returning shortly.

Speaker 3 (00:31):
They called me dead. We're joined as always with our
super producer Andrew Treyforce Howard. Most importantly, you are you.
You are here. That makes this the stuff they don't
want you to know. We are recording this on Monday,
May twealth, Year of our Lord, twenty twenty five, which
means here in the US, yesterday was Mother's Day. If

(00:53):
you are able to chat with your mom or contactor,
please do so. And we're sure that your mom will
say you don't have to call on a specific day.
She's just happy to.

Speaker 4 (01:05):
Hear from you.

Speaker 3 (01:06):
I'm starting absol positive note Matt for this one.

Speaker 2 (01:10):
Especially, Yeah, yeah, had a great Mother's Day over here.
A bunch of mothers in a bunch of different types
of mothers, right, different stages of life over here, in
this sector of stuff they don't want you to know.

Speaker 4 (01:25):
I don't know how to whatever.

Speaker 3 (01:27):
Yeah, yeah, anyway, if you can, you should. And we
are with that positive note talking about something that has
worried the heck out of civilization since the close of
World War Two and rightly terrified people at times. Some
of us in the crowd may be old enough to
remember things like the Cuban missile crisis. You may have

(01:50):
if your history buff read about any number of near
misses in a launch of global catastrophes. We have been
scared the civilization for the better part of a century
now by the possibility of a full scale what we
call a hotter kinetic war involving two or more nuclear
capable actors. And Matt, I believe you and I are

(02:15):
of a generation that still grew up under the shadow
of the potential catastrophe between the USSR and the USA.
Did you ever have to do any of those nuclear drills.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
No, I never got any of the nuke drills, but
we definitely got the the fear talked into us about it.
I mean, once you learn about a nuclear weapon and
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and you learn about all the testing
and all that stuff, and yeah, I remember in school
that was hammered Home is a big deal. But also

(02:51):
I think it's a little bit nerved on purpose in
the American education system.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
It is now. I remember, I remember fully the the
like Catch twenty two, surreal nature of those drills where
they would tell people to get under their desk in
case of a nuclear attack, which was just I think
even kids saw that that was in effective. The best

(03:17):
it could do is maybe shield you from some collapsing buildings.
But better than nothing, which seems to be the argument
everybody makes this.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
Well, you know, one of the big reasons for that
is because of the light blast that could occur depending
on how far away you are.

Speaker 4 (03:32):
From the initial explosion.

Speaker 2 (03:34):
Because the it's the small small amount of increase in
PSI that right causes whilch just burst all the windows.
So actually being under the desk would probably be a
lot safer than not being there.

Speaker 3 (03:46):
Sure again, better than nothing, right, but still you know,
it's better than nothing, not a global nuclear war. And
now to your point about nerving. Now the situation seems
to have a vault. Humanity is worried about one thousand
thousand things, the nuclear war situation or the conversation around it.

(04:10):
Now it looks better in some ways a much more
dangerous in others. So tonight we're asking what happens if
everything goes wrong, You know, if one day the geopolitical
breaks don't work and the car flies over the cliff.
What does a nuclear war actually look like? Hopefully we
get through this episode before we find out in person,

(04:32):
so we're going to pause for a word from our sponsors.
Here are the facts, all right, Matt. We've talked about
this in previous episodes. I read listened to our Dead
Hand episode, by the way, which holds up in a

(04:56):
very frightening sense. But I think it's safe to say are,
thankfully at this point, only two real world examples of
high level wartime nuclear detonation in all of history, the
US bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
Yeah, that's correct, two bombs dropped from one country on
to another. The first one was August sixth, nineteen forty five.

Speaker 4 (05:25):
That was over Hiroshima.

Speaker 3 (05:28):
M Yeah, Yeah, it's one of those things we referred
to as a chonky boy in Maybe it was Strange News.
An American B twenty nine bomber is the first one.
This explosion. We'll get into the mechanics of these explosions later,
it immediately killed an estimated eighty thousand people, the majority

(05:49):
of whom were innocent civilians. That's only the beginning. Three
days later, a second B twenty nine, a second Chonky Boy,
drops another bomb, this time on Nagasaki. This kills an
estimated forty thousand people. And when we say eighty thousand
and forty thousand, fellow conspiracy realists, keep in mind we're
talking about the immediate pop the immediate deaths. Tens of

(06:11):
thousands more people will die in both regions as a
consequence of what we could call you know, total weapons
in total war, radiation, poisoning, the related destruction flying glass,
crashing buildings, and then of course the lack of medical care,
clean water, and food which leads to you know, proliferation
of dysentery disease. People are dying slow and agonizing deaths

(06:36):
from birds. You can and should have you the chance
visit places like the Hiroshima Piece memorial in the Peace Museum.
You can get a first hand look at artifacts and
consequences of this. It is a harrowing piece of history,
which means it is a piece of history that all

(06:57):
nations need to remember.

Speaker 2 (06:59):
Oh yeah, yeah, For sure. Another thing to remember is
that when the US deployed those B twenty nine, they
deployed multiple for both of those you know what they
would call missions, so that several different pilots and groups
of people in planes actually dropped bombs, but only one
of them within the group actually dropped the nuke. And

(07:22):
that way nobody really knew who actually caused all of
that destruction and mass death.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
Yeah. Similar in a macro sense to what we used
to do with firing squads, right where you would have
five or six soldiers shooting, shooting for an execution, and
only one would have a live bullet. The idea that
you could give people some sort of psychological soop, right,

(07:49):
or reassurance. Maybe it was not me because otherwise how
well you deal with the deaths of hundreds of thousands
of people on your conscience?

Speaker 2 (07:59):
I mean, just one thing to think about, specifically with
an A bomb, an H bomb, and a nuclear weapon
of any kind that we're maybe in your mind think
of the explosion and you can see the images that
we've seen over the years of what these look like.
One thing that I always kind of slips my mind,

(08:20):
maybe because it is so horrifying, but just the number
of fires that get started afterwards, like after that initial explosion,
then the amount of fire that occurs on a much
larger radius that consumes so many other people, especially depending
on the time of you know, day or night that

(08:41):
it's dropped, and all that other stuff, and how much
warning and.

Speaker 3 (08:45):
Wise conditions relative industrial infrastructure, petroleum fields, things like that,
forest forest coverage. Yeah, this is something that the Roti
Museum I visited. I won't monologue about it, but this
is something that they spend a lot of time on there.
In addition to the human costs, the environmental costs, things

(09:08):
that simply cannot be mitigated, cannot be repaired, right, this
is a hard stop to a lot of what we
would consider natural life and natural environmental processes on the planet.
And you could consider war analysts would consider these operations

(09:29):
in Japan and World War II a military success, in
success being defined by the fact that the ruler in
Burihiro Hito did surrender unconditionally as a result of these
attacks and honestly the larger failing efforts of Japan during
the war. But it was also inarguably a humanitarian disaster.

(09:50):
This was a pyrrhic victory for the world overall. And
if you visit either site today again, please do if
you have the chance. You'll see that a chill still
hangs in the air. This is almost more than almost
a century ago now, and the areas are physically safe
for humans, I can confirm that firsthand. But each city

(10:12):
still bears the scars of those horrific acts. You can
see the melted rubble of buildings, melted rubble of buildings,
and this attack, this series of attacks, also provides historians,
world leaders, and scholars and scientists with crucial data on
what could happen in the modern day if these weapons

(10:34):
or things like them are unleashed in other regions in
larger quantities. As a result, we see the emergence of
two incredibly different philosophies, each a reaction to the same
inescapable truths.

Speaker 2 (10:48):
And when we're thinking about the devastation that was wrought
above Hiroshima with that weapon, that atomic bomb, that bomb
was known as Little Boy, and it was only a
fifteen kilo ton bomb, which you know, only fifteen kilotons.
Basically that's the amount of tons of T and T

(11:10):
essentially that it is equal to theoretically, so fifteen thousand basically.

Speaker 3 (11:19):
And it did not reach near its full capability as well,
the technology was still very much in its early days.
And the other one, fat Man, had similar results in Nagasaki.
It was fat Man and Little Boy I believe.

Speaker 4 (11:36):
For the dude names.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, fat Man is Nagasaki, and it was only twenty kilotons.
But just this concept of all of these other defensive forces,
especially on the US side, calculating well, how much more
devastation would be caused, and if we increased the kill
a toonage, you know, by two or something like that,

(11:58):
and then we'll talk about, as move towards the future,
towards now, how much these weapons have grown in lethality
kill a tons specifically to megatons, even agreed.

Speaker 3 (12:12):
The attacks also provided historians, world leaders, scholars, and scientists
with crucial data on what might happen were these weapons
unleashed in other regions or troublingly in larger quantities. So
as a result, we witness the emergence of two vastly
different philosophies. They're drawing very different conclusions and directives from

(12:40):
the same set of now escapable truths. One school of thought,
which we would loosely call non proliferation argues a spectrum
of solutions, one that no new nukes should be created,
no new nations should acquire nuclear power, that there must
be a robust and force framework against building any more

(13:03):
of these potential world enders. And on the far end
of that spectrum, the non proliferation spectrum, you see some
groups arguing that all existing nukes should be dismantled as well.
So every nuclear nation then becomes Frodo right there in
Mount Doom. And you're trying to talk them into throwing

(13:24):
the ring into the fire spoiler, it does not work.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, that ring has some real I don't know what
would you call it, pull just this concept if the
ring is in fact the power that comes with having
deployable nukes just in your back pocket there right.

Speaker 3 (13:44):
And Tolkien was not writing about nuclear power actually in
Lord of the Rings. He found it irritating when people said, so,
so we want to bust that myth on his half
on his behalf posthumously.

Speaker 4 (13:56):
But it also works perfectly.

Speaker 3 (13:58):
It works perfectly, is the thing Jarr. So the other philosophy, again,
drawing from the exact same set of data and objective observations,
they go in a very different direction, and they argue
any nation currently in possession of nukes must logically fight

(14:19):
their damnedest to keep them, especially after the lessons of Libya,
right or failing that, if you are a nation with
the capability to acquire this power, then you need to
do so immediately. And this is where we see things
like the nuclear arms race of the Cold War, or
of course, the philosophy of MAD mutual assured destruction. And

(14:43):
here I want to pause to give a shout out
to our old pal, good friend of the show, Josh Clark,
who wrote an article for How Stuff Works that holds
up regarding MAD. So just look up that article and
you can get the quick skinny on this. The concept
is counterintuitively, the more nations that have nuclear weapons, the

(15:08):
more valuable nukes become as a deterrent instead of a
gun you actually fire. So similar to the old you
know standoff in wild West fiction or film, if everybody
has a gun and we're all the same room, we're
all pointing at each other, then the likelihood of anyone
firing drops drastically. That is, for a time, that theory

(15:31):
seem to hold true, especially because multiple other nations possed up,
you know, like NATO Article five is probably the most
famous example. You attack one of our guys and the
whole gang jumps into the frame.

Speaker 2 (15:46):
Well, yeah, the game changes from who has nukes to
who has the most outdated early detection system, who has
the best early detection system for a launch?

Speaker 4 (15:58):
Right?

Speaker 2 (15:59):
And does anybody glitch out all the time or send
the wrong information? Because imagine that room where everybody's got
a gun, right, and nobody's firing because everybody's got a gun.
What if there's somebody who has a hearing aid that
malfunctions and they think somebody shot, so they fire.

Speaker 3 (16:18):
And there have been a lot of close calls, right,
some immortalized in film and fiction, but definitely based on
real world events. We also know that once the first
bullet in this comparison fires, other bullets inevitably follow. In
the standoff, it's no longer standoff now it's a race

(16:39):
to get rid of all your bullets. Right, And so,
in other words, this scenario where to continue results in
a world where the winner or the winners defined by
whichever nations are left standing amid the rubble. What they're
ruling over is little more than ashes and poison, and

(17:01):
we know, we know this is a possibility. This is
not just a mad cap thought experiment. Since the development
of nuclear weaponry and it's later proliferation, there have been
well over two thousand documented nuclear explosions, and a spooky
thing about it is we don't know for sure how

(17:21):
many have actually been exploded, right The majority have been
tests right now, the estimation is something like twenty six
hundred and twenty four. But then does it count things
like the Vela incident. Does it count things that occurred
somehow without observation, especially in the early days out in

(17:42):
the stands of the USSR. Some of these were held
in secret, But then if you look at the cases
like the DPRK, these tests are loudly broadcast to send
a message to the world, you know. So it's weird
because we have to tell you hat in hand that
it is difficult to know exactly how many detonations occurred.

(18:02):
It is actually a matter of debate, as we record
in twenty twenty five, but we do know with each detonation,
civilization learn more about the possibilities on the horizon, which
means that no matter what they said to their domestic
population in power structures across the planet. Military leaders privately

(18:24):
and at times publicly agreed. Look, nuclear bombs present terrifying possibilities.
These warheads canned in the world, But the most terrifying
possibility is that our nation might not have access to
some of these capabilities. Right, we know that guns exist,
we know that other people have guns. What can we

(18:46):
do to protect ourselves? And there's a logic to that.
It's a brutal logic, but it makes sense.

Speaker 4 (18:53):
Yeah, absolutely, So we'll.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
Fast forward to May twelfth, twenty twenty five. As we're
recording this episode. The situation has changed, and Matt, I
think it's fair to say there have been attempts at
stepping down the global nuclear arsenal, but for people who
want it eliminated, that's still not enough. We know that
there have been various agreements, especially between the Russian Federation

(19:17):
and the United States, to decommission and to disassemble some
of their warheads. But at the same time, more nations
acquired this ability, right, China, France, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel,
and North Korea plus Russian in the US, those are
what we call the Big Nine. And if you got

(19:40):
these guys to all put aside their disagreements and count
together how many warheads that is in total, the global
tally is something like twelve thousand, three hundred and thirty one, which,
just for a so off note for those of us
playing along at home, Yes, that is more than enough

(20:02):
to end civilization as we know it several times over
according to current scientific estimates.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
Yeah, it's weird to look at the little map from
the Federation of American Scientists looking at the US having
around around three thousand, seven hundred and Russia having around
four thousand, three hundred. But then I don't know lately,
maybe just with the news, maybe simply because they are

(20:30):
engaged in a current hot conflict that is in a
quote ceasefire. The one hundred and seventy nukes that Pakistan
holds and the one hundred and eighty that India holds,
it's given me pause.

Speaker 5 (20:43):
Yeah, and also on my end, it gives me pause,
even when you know, when I was studying this professionally,
it gives me pause that the numbers are always caveated.

Speaker 3 (20:55):
With around yeah, and estimated. Maybe it factors and in
factors in guests, secrecy, and a bunch of other things
that they don't want enemy nations to know. But that
also those caveats also come as a result of not
knowing maintenance regimen for a lot of a lot of disarmaments,

(21:18):
specifically Russian, but other countries as well. Because these are
not like the old rotisseri made for old made for
TV rotisserie chicken commercials, where you quote, set it and
forget it. You have to keep checking in on these
things because they're you know, they're finicky anyway. Point B.

(21:39):
With all this, proponents of mad and other philosophies believe
that they will tell you this results in a fragile stability.
Critics of proliferation say, look twenty twenty five, the present,
the current now is too different from the past for
those old assumptions to remain serviceable. What about, for instance,

(22:01):
non state actors acquiring nuclear weaponry, terrorist separatists, religious extremist
with a dirty bomb and an act to grind What
if one of those near misses that we alluded to
earlier actually does go wrong? What if it's no longer
a near miss? What happens then? Luckily the world hasn't
found out yet. But we're going to pause for a

(22:23):
word from our sponsors. And dive in. Here's where it
gets crazy. Okay, Matt, we'll talk about some of the
I think specific game theory and regional hotspots in a moment,
but I think we can both agree a nuclear war

(22:46):
as we've defined it now would result in things going
extremely wrong, extremely quickly.

Speaker 2 (22:53):
Oh yeah, definitely. We've got a couple of different the
scenarios that have been written about out recently and explored
thoroughly pretty recently, from in twenty nineteen and then again
last year in twenty twenty four. So we can shout
out Annie Jacobsen for her book Nuclear War, A scenario

(23:13):
then goes through pretty much what we're about to take
you through. It's what happens if the world is at war,
not just a NATO country versus let's say Russia, where
it's just happening in one part of Europe and Asia
over there, it's the entire world is launching nukes. Right,
that's what we're going to talk about, first full scale war.

Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, yeah, let's get to that. Let's also shout out
Nuclear Choices for the twenty first Century, a citizen's guide
that's written by Richard Wolfson. We need to shout out
the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist, because they do great
work here, hosting as well the doomsday clock, which we've

(24:00):
we've talked about in the past. Shout out to our
pal Jack O'Brien.

Speaker 2 (24:04):
And definitely Princeton Signs and Global Security and Alex Glazer
in particular, because there's a thing on YouTube you can
watch that is basically what we're going to be walking
through here of what happens when the nukes launched, where
did they launch, and then what are the casualties.

Speaker 4 (24:19):
It's fun.

Speaker 3 (24:21):
It will also introduce, you know, just in the case
of farness and injectivity here, some scientific disputes by various
people who are questioning some of these calculations. But anyhow,
let's go anecdotal first and we'll shout out more sources
along the way. The harsh reality is that the days

(24:42):
of World War two are long past, which means that
people have been working on this technology pretty much around
the clock since that time, since the discovery. So the
capabilities of twenty twenty five are streets ahead, as community
would say, of what was available in the nineteen forties,
again the better part of a century ago. I would add,

(25:04):
it's also important to recognize that population centers have shifted. Now,
Unlike in the nineteen forties, most people live in large
metro areas, cities, conurbations. That means that there are more
targets in one place. There are also more bombs to
hit those targets. And further, there are more efficient ways

(25:26):
of moving those bombs across the planet from point A
to point Z. And now we've got you know, we've
got these posse contracts. I'll just loosely call them. We
don't call them that in the Ivory Tower, but several
of the Big Nine have almost all the Big Nine
have hard limits and constraints about how these things could

(25:48):
hypothetically be deployed. Several of them have something we call
no first use policy, arguing that even in most regional
conflicts or times of high tension, they're not going to
be the first guys to launch a warhead. Their nukes
therefore launch only as a counter attack or a response

(26:09):
retaliation measure. But other countries like Pakistan don't bother to
make such vows. And then yet other countries like Israel
are reluctant to openly admit to any nuclear capability in
the first place, which is a lot like a teenager
coming home being very high and pretending they just like snacks.

Speaker 4 (26:36):
Yeah, we're talking about like Israel.

Speaker 2 (26:38):
But you know, officially on the books in all of
these places anywhere that's talking about nuclear weapons nowadays, including
the Federation of American Scientists points out that Israel has
at least ninety nukes.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Yeah. Yeah, and for their credit, Israel has never denied it.
They've just never confirmed it. And that's part of the strategy.

Speaker 4 (27:04):
There right now.

Speaker 2 (27:05):
Well, and how many of those are tactical nuclear weapons
that would would register as a nuclear weapon but not
in the same way as some of the older detection
let's say technologies across the world could even probably see
it's interesting. It's interesting that it's all going down, it's
all that's all stuff. And you know, we're talking about

(27:29):
capabilities still here in past World War two and if
bombs dropped now and when they would drop. An important
thing to take into account is, in most like gamed
out scenarios of nuclear war, it's almost all military targets,
at least in the first few salvos.

Speaker 3 (27:48):
In the first waves, yeah, the first two waves or
military targets.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
And that could that could just be hours We're talking
hours between when the military targets get taken out then
the city centers could get taken out, right, which is
just shorter than a conventional war. Yeah, it's much shorter,
but it is just I guess it's in my mind.
There's this thing called Plan A you can look up

(28:14):
and that's by that Alex Glazer person, a bunch of
other folks that where they actually use that nuke map
site that you can go to and you can basically
drop specific kiloton weapons on different places around the globe
and you can map out where the nuclear fallout goes
and how many casualties roughly because of the populations as

(28:36):
they go through there. They built a scenario they called
Plan A in twenty nineteen which basically shows all of
those military targets happening if it started in Europe basically
with NATO versus Russia, then expanded out to NATO calling
in the US to launch their ICBMs, to then Russia

(28:56):
launching their ICBMs. And it's all based on detection, right,
It's not based on nuke's dropping. It's based on somebody
got an alert that a nuke.

Speaker 3 (29:08):
Got launched, Detection of launch, not detection of detonation. Yeah,
and that's an important point. We also want to shout
out Alex Wellerstein, who I believe is the author or
one of the maps I was using Nuclear Secrecy dot Com.
That map. That's a pretty great one too, terrifying by
which means great. This is the thing, right we're talking about.

(29:35):
We and many other people much brighter than us, have
gained out what they see as the potential call and response, right,
the chain of action that occurs, and inevitably, in most scenarios,
other people jump into the fray. NATO Article five. That's
a great example. These countries are bound to back each

(29:56):
other up depending on a type of conflict that occurs,
and in backing each other up and enjoining that conflict conversation,
the entire situation escalates. And this leads to this leads
to the concern about what we could call regional hotspots,
which I suggest we get to in a moment. But first,
maybe we talked about this. What happens on the ground

(30:20):
the first warhead launches and successfully detonates, that's the real
what happens. And I suggest we stay pretty general because
as we know, a wealth of factors and variables affect
the aftermath. The key to variables here are going to
be who attacks whom, and where those attacks occur. The

(30:42):
most immediate effect of a nuclear explosion lasts under a second.
It's an intense burst of nuclear radiation, mostly gamma rays
and neutrons. Our friends thinks, our friends at MIT for
confirming a lot of this. But the thing is, even
though that lasts under a second, it travels. The direct

(31:02):
radiation extends nearly a mile from say a ten kiloton explosion,
and it's lethal. This weirdly enough, frighteningly enough, this is
not that significant. Other lethal effects come into play at
even greater distances. But if you're right there, if you

(31:24):
have that tragic, heartbreaking front seat to this, you'll see
an exploding nuclear weapon instantly vaporizes and for a time
it generates a gas, or it becomes a gas that
is hotter than the core of the Sun. And this
hot gas has its own energy X rays. They heat
the surrounding air. This creates, as we alluded to earlier,

(31:46):
a fireball that forms and quickly grows. If you take
a one megaton explosion, after ten seconds, you have a
fireball a mile in diameter. And if you are fifty
miles away, this still looks brighter than the sun.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
And just a reminder, we're talking about one megaton, which
is like the big version, right. The first ICBM that
China deployed was the dong Feing four and that was
three point three mega tons. And if you go into
just the current arsenals that many other countries have, including
you know the US, the old minute Men warheads, those

(32:26):
were a full megaton, and the old Soviet, the old
Soviet missiles, the ones that were involved in the Cuban
missile crisis, those were two point four to two mega tons.
So they're big old bombs and they get a lot
bigger than that too, and.

Speaker 3 (32:42):
Most dangerous potentially have never been detonated. Important note, folks,
uh Matt saying deployed that means move somewhere, put into
maybe activation. The possible use thereof deploy is not detonation.
But deploy is a huge signal, right, and it's a
signal that can be very difficult to walk back. We

(33:06):
know that along with this fireball there comes a lot
of heat. This is something called a thermal flash, and
the thermal flash has a lot of consequences far after detonation,
it ignites fires from far away as twenty miles. It
can cause severe, even fatal burns, So twenty miles away,

(33:31):
for instance, as we learned in the museum, two thirds
of people who somehow survived Hiroshima did so with extensive,
severe burns. You can look at plenty of documentation about this.
We suggest that you have a strong stomach should you
choose to do so. Then after that, of course, there's

(33:52):
the blast wave, there's the ground wave. The blast wave
is something we talked about briefly off air, but I
know we both researched this extent. It goes down to
psi pressure per square inch. The blast wave moves outward
thousands of miles per hour. It slows as it spreads naturally,
but it carries with it about half of a bomb's

(34:14):
explosive energy, regardless of the yield size of the bomb.
It's responsible for most of the physical destruction you see,
and people can actually as odd People can actually, under
some circumstances, deal with a deteriorating blast wave, but they
are very vulnerable to collapsing buildings, to pieces of glass

(34:37):
that become you know, a rainstorm of knives. Essentially the
force of this wave can be such that glass, which
is a breakable thing, right, you can break stone with glass,
but the glass is flying at such a high speed
that it can embed itself into stone structures. A human

(34:57):
flesh stands no chance against this force can slam you
through the air into walls, you know. I mean, if
you're close enough to nuclear blast, your shadow can be
burned into the material behind you. So that happens. That

(35:17):
all happens very very.

Speaker 2 (35:19):
Quickly, right, yeah, yes, And the way an attack would function,
if it was on any scale, there would be dozens,
if not hundreds, of these types of explosions happening almost
simultaneously across the world.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
And things get extraordinarily complicated if they start happening in
areas close together. Right, So let's go to the midterm.
Let's talk fallout. Fallout defined on two levels, First the
actual radiation, and then second, I would argue the political,

(35:56):
the geopolitical fallout as a result of that first nation. So,
the most heavily analyzed scenario time after time has been
Russia and the US attacking one another. Because of the
relatively US centric analysis at play, that's the easiest stuff

(36:18):
for Westerners to access. The assumption is always that Russia
attacks first because it makes US look like the good
guys in these scenarios. So let's say Russia attacks the
US first. Then, because NATO members UK and France also
have their own nuclear weapons, they are bound by NATO's

(36:39):
Article five to defend the United States. So Russia, being
well aware of this, logically hits UK and France as well,
to the best of its abilities, with any military targets
that they feel might be capable of launching nuclear weapons.
The add on possibility here the bonus points would be
to attack those places in such a way that uses

(37:04):
their own weapons against them that also detonates the nuclear
material on site. Double whemming. Yep, hasn't happened yet. But
by this point, to your earlier note there, Matt, it's
well known that by the time Russia is doing this,
within a very short period of ours, probably retaliation has

(37:30):
already occurred. The US and allies, assuming they retain any
capability which spoiler they will, they strike back. So Moscow,
Saint Petersburg, several military sites leveled. No stone upon a stone,
and the dystopian theory would argue that this continues until

(37:50):
someone is surrendering or incapable of continuing. In our standoff analogy,
you fire the bullets until you're it clicks dry. So
if Moscow is wiped immediately, we might finally see the
dead Hand activate, which is just insane. I still wonder

(38:12):
if it, if it could actually work, and I want
to pause because that's just a personal hobby horse of mind.
But Matt, do you think the dead Hand still functions?
Do you think it ever did function?

Speaker 2 (38:24):
I think yes, but I think there I think there
are still humans at the wheel with the Dead Hand,
They're just in strategic places where they won't get touched,
like in certain military facilities. I don't think it's this.
I don't think it's a system where nukes just fire automatically,
but there are Again, we go back to the detection systems.

(38:44):
In that plan A that I was looking at. It
starts with one tactical nuke being launched by Russia basically
onto Ukraine or into a into a NATO controlled area,
and then NATO retaliates with one of there like a
small singular tactical nuclear weapon which is much smaller. Right,

(39:06):
it's meant to take out a facility or something like that.

Speaker 3 (39:08):
So called bunker buster.

Speaker 4 (39:10):
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2 (39:11):
But in that scenario, the only thing that messes up
is the early detection systems that are aging out in Russia,
so the system believes that it is a much larger salvo,
so that it does activate basically the early warning system
that says, hey, we're being attacked, we need to hit

(39:32):
the military sites now before ours get taken out.

Speaker 3 (39:35):
And check out our episode on the dead hand, which
bust some of the more extremist myths about it, but
does give you a sense of how this would work. Essentially,
it's a line of continual check ins with these various
facilities to power structures of the Russian government, and if

(39:56):
those power structures don't have the right communication protocol, then
there's another series of tracks balances, and if that also
goes for loop, then the then a satellite is launched,
or excuse me, a missile is launched that communicates with
other remaining nuclear facilities or par nuclear launch sites such

(40:20):
that then they would begin to launch on their own
preprogrammed paths.

Speaker 2 (40:24):
Yeah, and there is a thing that we need to
talk about that I just have to find here. It's
something that Annie Jacobsen talks about in her book something
that every single leader who is in charge of that
decision of whether or not to launch a nuke, generally
a president or somebody high up in an executive branch

(40:46):
in any country. This concept of jamming that occurs in
those moments, because we're talking about moments, not you know,
the person in charge has a week to moll over
the consequences of whether or not we unleash these ungodly weapons,
because we've had them launched at US. You were talking minutes,

(41:07):
literally minutes where you were going to have basically everyone
in your ear that is of sufficient rank from the
military trying to tell you what you need to do.
And then you generally, as either a civilian leader if
it's a democratic world country or like in the US,
or if you're in another country where you've got more

(41:28):
of an autocratic thing, you still have to make that
decision so quickly, based on the best intelligence you have,
based on the sensors that your country has deployed.

Speaker 3 (41:41):
And based on further your awareness of enemy force capability
and distribution, which is why nuclear capable subs are such
a crown jewel for the US and Western navies. This
if we okay, so let's assume things continue to go wrong,
with each detonation increasingly desperate and ruthless, and happening within

(42:05):
a short period of time. We see the same consequences,
and those consequences can become magnified and exacerbated depending upon
how closely various detonations occur. So if, for instance, if
Washington gets hit and then New York City also gets hit,
then the areas between DC and New York City encounter

(42:29):
a much higher degree of consequence and a horrific aftermath.
And this applies not just to those regions, but to
the number of detonations across the globe. This is where
we enter the concept of nuclear winter. Long story short,
If hundreds of nuclear explosions occur in a short enough

(42:51):
span of time, civilization can encounter a new realm of
environmental devastation called nuclear winter. Now, nuclear winter has not
occurred at this point, scientists still argue about it, but
one of the best comparisons we could have would be

(43:12):
how gargantuan volcanic eruption events can darken the sky. Right,
that is a thing that we know can happen. Concerns
about nuclear winter they hit the forefront in the nineteen seventies.
We get this fellow conspiracy realist. The boffins knew about
the damaging effects of light, heat, last radiation, and smoke

(43:33):
caused by nuclear explosions. They knew about it for decades,
and world leaders sort of ignored it. They didn't really
talk about it, even though they knew well before the
nineteen seventies.

Speaker 2 (43:46):
Yeah, they did well, Yeah, because they figured out with
some of the first nuclear testing what occurs when an
atom bomb, a nuclear weapon, an h bomb, whatever it is,
when it explodes.

Speaker 4 (43:58):
We talked about that.

Speaker 2 (44:00):
Giant sun essentially hotter than the sun, fireball that it
creates when that explosion occurs, especially if there's like a
city underneath where that fireball is, and all that combustible stuff,
including the concrete, starts to vaporize and carbonize, basically turn
into just carbon floating through the air. It creates this

(44:21):
huge we've seen the mushroom clouds. We know what that
looks like. But that mushroom cloud, as it's forced up
from all the heat below it, it goes up past
the rain clouds, past the tropopause where the rain clouds
form like the biggest rain clouds, and you get what's
called a pyrocumulonimbus cloud that is above all the other

(44:41):
clouds and that crap. Once it's up there for each explosion,
it sticks around for years, not days, not months, years,
potentially up to a decade. It sticks up there, and
it is a black dark cloud that covers up even
the clouds below it, right, and the cities below it,

(45:03):
and the agriculture below it.

Speaker 3 (45:08):
Yeah, we also need to talk about the stratosphere. The
stratosphere is home to a layer of what we call ozone.
Ozone is running interference for life on Earth by shielding
everyone from the harmful ultraviolet radiation of the sun. The
ozone can be depleted by the large amount of nitrogen

(45:29):
oxide produced by the nuclear explosions. To the studies about
large amounts of dust and soot and smoke, Yes, they
can potentially block sunlight from reaching Earth's surface. This leads
to a temporary cooling of the air. It's exacerbated by
the vast swaths of smoke and pollutants coming from the

(45:51):
forest that will burn then the plastics, the oil fields,
the petroleum stores. The best study for this, or I
would say the most prominent, is the t TAPS study
from nineteen eighty three. It's named after its four authors, RP. Turco, Optoon,

(46:11):
TP Ackerman, JB. Pollock, and Carl Sagan. At least one
of those guys is very well known to the public,
and there the idea of nuclear winter hinges not so
much on the emission of radiation from the initial blast.
It's the fireballs, the smoke, the soot, the dust. They
drift at high altitudes and they ride strong established west

(46:34):
to east winds. If this happens between say, the USSR
excuse me, Russia and the US, then this knock on
consequence can form a uniform belt of particles that circle
the northern hemisphere like a big girdle or corset from
thirty to sixty degrees latitude. These clouds block out almost

(46:59):
all all of the light from the sun, and initially
their study said this could be several weeks. But even
if it's just several weeks, the consequences are immediate. Surface
temperatures plummet. Most importantly, plants photosynthesis halts because the plants
can't eat anymore. This kills a huge portion of vegetation

(47:20):
animal life, including human animals, and this occurs in step
with the existing damage to all human infrastructure. So even
if nuclear winter just happened without nuclear attax, we'd be
in a tight spot. But for it to occur after
all like medical rescue, communication infrastructure has just rolled craps,

(47:45):
then the situation becomes very dire. Indeed, we're talking about
a massive and sudden drop in human population. The immediate
radiation could largely be a thing of the past. Now
we're talking about starvation, exposure, disease, and of course crime,
people become increasingly desperate.

Speaker 4 (48:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:03):
Absolutely, I just want to differentiate the two sets of
cloud cover that can occur, because you are absolutely right
you're talking about there's there are different amounts, different amounts
of smoke and types of smoke that.

Speaker 4 (48:15):
Are going to be generated.

Speaker 2 (48:16):
And as you're talking about the knock on effects like
forest fires, those kinds of things, petroleum burning, anything that's
just almost what I would call a normal insane fire
happening on Earth that is going to do those things
where it lasts, you know, a couple of weeks as
those clouds kind of circulate around the Earth. But the

(48:37):
really scary one that causes the winter, at least from
what I'm my understanding, from a couple of sources is
that it's the stuff that goes above the clouds. So
imagine another layer of clouds up near that more ozone
layer that you're talking not quite that high up in altitude,
but near there. That that's the thing that actually blankets

(48:57):
everything that doesn't it's not subject to the same system
of rainfall and then clouds forming again, and then all
those particulate, all that particular matter just falling back to
the earth pretty rapidly. That's the stuff that can last
for decades, which is that's how you get in some scenarios,
two billion people starving quickly because the agricultural ability of

(49:20):
humanity is halved. That's it. That's base. That's the basic
scenario for if the US goes to war with Russia.
Right now, you have the amount of food that humans
can produce.

Speaker 3 (49:31):
And that would be do uh, that would be doing
no small part to the geographic bread basket locations the
interior of the United States and Ukraine.

Speaker 2 (49:42):
Yeah, but and and also but hey, but the good
thing is if you're in parts of Australia and Argentina,
you're gonna be good to go because almost none of
that stuff is going to affect you.

Speaker 4 (49:53):
In the southern hemisphere that far.

Speaker 3 (49:55):
South, depending again on the nature of the conflict, and
you can check out a great thing video by our
Fowls in a Nutshell for a quick explainer on that.
We also need to note again it's important. It's important
to acknowledge scientists still dispute the exact calculations evolved with
those earlier studies. Thankfully, this dispute can occur because a

(50:21):
nuclear winter has yet to occur. Again, thankfully, speaking of
things that have yet to occur, We're going to take
a break for a word from our sponsors, and then
what do you think We'll dive into some of those
regional hotspots. Okay, all of the things we've mentioned so far,

(50:46):
and by the way, in that earlier conversation, both of
those forms of messing with the air are very bad.
There's not one that's better than the other. They're still
terrible for people on the ground. This is why people
are paying so much attention to what we call regional hotspots.
These are areas of local conflict that in the pre
nuclear days could still have sown chaos now right, you know,

(51:11):
like Franz Ferdinand that was a non nuclear conflict. But
these regional hotspots now more than ever, hold the potential
for creating this existential threat nuclear exchange with global consequences,
spelling doom for billions of people half a world away.
When we talk about regional hotspots, it seems like three

(51:33):
of the most prominent are going to be Russia, Eastern Europe,
India and Pakistan, and of course the Middle East.

Speaker 2 (51:40):
Yeah, definitely, and India Pakistan is top of mind because
there's currently a truce of some sort, there's a ceasefire,
but that was not the case just several days ago.
There was serious hot conflict happening with Indian Pakistan because
of the Kashmir region. That is we talked about that
in the line of actual control and the different groups

(52:03):
that say, hey, this is ours or this is partly mine,
and I get to have the military force and control
this area.

Speaker 3 (52:11):
Yeah, as everyone watching the news is aware, India and Pakistan,
who have been beefed up since more or less at
each other's throats since nineteen forty seven, are reaching a
new level of tension. They're both nuclear states, they're extremely
hostile toward one another, and they are right next to
another nuclear capable power, China. So almost all of the

(52:37):
time they have had different propagandistic saber rattling events, right.
We see this often in the form of missile tests.
These tests have recently escalated into actual non nuclear missile
launches against military sites in both countries. Something that concerned

(53:01):
a lot of people here in the United States or
in the global West was when the current Vice President JD. Vance,
speaking about this rising conflict, said it was quote none
of our business and just apolitically. This left nuclear scholars
baffled because, you know, the logic being a nuclear exchange

(53:22):
between these two densely populated countries will have effects on
the rest of the world, definitely on the rest of
the region. So what's kind of everybody's business?

Speaker 4 (53:32):
Yeah, you're absolutely right.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
You know, this also brings us to something you mentioned earlier,
limited nuclear war scenarios, right, and tactical nukes. Even if
there's a limited scenario and everybody else refuses to get
involved to a greater degree, to a global degree, then
India and Pakistan can still use like one hundred strategic

(53:59):
weapons to attack military and urban centers, which means very
quickly fatalities can reach fifty to one hundred and twenty
five million people. Again, just like Kiroshima and Nagasaki, the
vast majority of these people are innocence. They are civilians.
They're just trying to live their lives. That's why. Interestingly enough,

(54:21):
maybe this is almost inspiring everyone outside the region. Every
other nation has sort of put aside their concerns and
disagreements to argue for restraint. Even you know, China and
Russia and the US are unified on this, and those
are three countries that do not like each other.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
It's weird because it would the effects would be roughly
nuclear autumn. Right what we've described there was nuclear winter.
This would be bad, and a lot of places wouldn't
be able to produce food anymore, at least in the
same way that they produce them now. A lot would
have to change in order to make food production happen.

Speaker 4 (54:59):
In those areas.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
But you know, it would only cause a couple hundred
million people to starve, he said sarcastically.

Speaker 3 (55:09):
And you know, also, while we're continuing with I guess
cold comfort news, it's not that either country, Pakistan or
India has officially declared they're going to launch nukes. It's
that at any time either country could and there's a
lot of sigan and analysis going into location and movement, right,

(55:30):
and a lot of very frantic conversations on both sides.
We know millions would die as a result. And then
we go to we go to something that is probably
a little more familiar to a lot of people in
the quote unquote Global West. Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine
began in twenty fourteen in earnest continues as we record

(55:54):
in recent months and multiple news sources up to it,
including just a few days ago. In fact, Russian President
Vladimir Putin has made these repeated, at times cryptic statements
about the possibility of deploying and detonating nukes in the conflict.
As of so we said, we're recorded on May twelfth,
As of May fourth, literally last week of Vladimir Putin

(56:18):
stated the need to use nukes in Ukraine has not
yet arisen, and he get this, hopes it will not.
That is a world away from saying Russia will not
attack in this manner.

Speaker 4 (56:30):
That's a yeah, that seems insane.

Speaker 2 (56:33):
Yeah, I just I just don't understand, because you you can't, Ben,
Can you imagine a scenario where Russian forces for one reason,
or another decide to launch a large ton like a
several mega ton nuke in that conflict.

Speaker 4 (56:51):
I can't imagine that being a good strategic decision.

Speaker 3 (56:56):
It's not rational.

Speaker 4 (56:57):
Yeah, maybe that's it.

Speaker 3 (56:59):
That's the see axiom of all game theory, and arguably
that can be a weakness when we're talking about you know,
theocracies or people with nothing to lose. I mean, look,
current game theory informs prudent statements from everything we can tell.
Yet Western analysts remains skeptical, especially because of that. I

(57:22):
hope we don't have to do it caveat, which is frightening.
Russia conventional military is in dire straits. And we don't
mean they're playing backup for the band haha. They've got
hard supply manpower issues, multiple operations are disastrous. Their access
to consumables like ammo and electronics have conspired to render

(57:45):
this invasion a quagmire. You know, it seems like achieving
the original Russian conditions for success is increasingly a pipe dream.
But those same conditions make it almost impossible to fully
withdraw it. As though Russia shot a barbed arrow into
the West and now that arrow, like it or not,

(58:06):
is stuck in the flesh, it's hard to pull it out.
So the way you could win logically is by changing
the rule of the game. And this goes to what
you were talking about earlier. The prime axiom of game
theory always assumes a rational actor. Any rational actor in
charge of Russia would conclude, similar to what we just did,

(58:26):
that deploy nukes is a no win situation. Population and
industrial centers in Russia would be certainly hit within days
or even hours afterward. So the concern in the West,
the reason we're mentioning this on air. It's still whispered down,
but it's increasingly prevalent. If Putin is somehow no longer

(58:47):
a rational actor, what if all those rumors about his
health for the last few years are true. What if
he feels, for one reason or another, that he's gone
too far into the water to return to the shore
of logic, you know what I mean? What if it's
all about legacy? What if he has what if he
has This is speculation that I heard off book, and

(59:08):
so we don't want to give too much credence to it.
But what if what if he has a terminal diagnosis
of some sort? How does that affect his decision.

Speaker 2 (59:17):
What if the people that oppose him are equally irrational.

Speaker 3 (59:21):
Right, yes, exactly, And that goes to the idea of irrationality. Yeah,
that takes us, of course, to the Middle East, which
I think we have to spend a little bit of
time on the current crown jewel of potential nuclear disaster
the Middle East, or if one be more accurate, we
could call it West Asia. Only Israel currently possesses nuclear

(59:43):
power in the region. Sorry, guys, everybody knows, but various
other countries desperately want this power. And we talked about
the lesson of Libya, but we didn't say what that was.
Libya stepped back its efforts to become a nuclear power,
and for people like the the Kim dynasty in North Korea,

(01:00:03):
that's a parable. That is a warning. They see the
death of Gaddafi in the toppling of that regime as
a more or less direct consequence of complying with demands
to become a non nuclear power.

Speaker 2 (01:00:21):
And well, he agreed in two thousand and three to disarm,
right and then that was a long process and he
wasn't taken out until twenty eleven something like that.

Speaker 3 (01:00:33):
And I'm on record saying I think that was more
closely affiliated with him messing with the money.

Speaker 2 (01:00:39):
I'm glad you're on record for that. But yeah, I
don't I don't. I don't know what killed him. But
it's definitely one of those things where if you as
a country give up that power, and what is to
stop anyone with conventional weapons to come out in there?

Speaker 4 (01:01:00):
Who's more powerful to take over?

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
Yeah, back to our Old West scenario. That's why it's
relatively rare in a standoff for you know, that's why
everybody says put the gun down, and people almost never
do that, you know what I mean, unless there's a hostage.

Speaker 4 (01:01:16):
But instead they say pick up the gun.

Speaker 3 (01:01:19):
You put the gun down. But yeah, so because of
what And again, to be clear, I'm giving the perspective
of people in nation states pursuing nuclear power given the
lessons of Libya. From their perspective, it's almost certain that
none of these countries in the area would ever step
back from nuclear status once they attained it. And if

(01:01:41):
you are, if we're talking perspectives here, the chief concern
of Israel is Iran. Iran is a powerful regional theocracy,
and despite its public statements, it seems pretty set on
acquiring nuclear technology. Now, the official statement of Iran is
usually we're acquiring peaceful nuclear technology, right, not nuclear weaponry.

(01:02:06):
But we've talked about the development and enrichment process. It's
basically the same thing. The difference is the matter of iterations,
kind of in your Centerfuges.

Speaker 4 (01:02:15):
Everybody is developing peaceful nuclear power.

Speaker 3 (01:02:18):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, just like we have the
Department of Defense almost when Chicago like defense.

Speaker 4 (01:02:25):
But our Department of Energy, right, you know, heavily involved in.

Speaker 3 (01:02:30):
Nukes in a very peaceful way, because so peaceful, peaceful
AF which again I'm still startled that people thought that
AF stood as as fore told, peaceful as for told.
So much this concern is so big that Israel has
repeatedly floated the idea of a preemptive nuclear strike on

(01:02:54):
facilities before Iran acquires the bomb.

Speaker 4 (01:02:59):
And this or just kill all the scientists right.

Speaker 3 (01:03:01):
Right or implants stucksnet. Yeah. There have been many non
nuclear operations to prevent this capability. So the idea of
launching a nuke, even like a tactical one, is still
for some parts of Israel's government and still very much
on the table, or I should say they're military structures.

(01:03:23):
So the thing is, even supporters of that plan, if
you talk to them, they will honestly acknowledge. Yeah, preemptive
attack would be pretty chaotic. It would trigger instability, there'd
be hard conflict across the region. Right, it would exacerbate
pre existing tensions and lead to inevitable attacks on the

(01:03:44):
nation of Israel. But the argument amid the supporters is
that not attacking, not doing a preemptive nuclear attack will
result in something far worse. That's their perspective.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
Yeah, I'm thinking more and more about how a nuke
would be deployed because you tell me what you've found, Ben,
Because what I've found is that most of these detection systems,
going way back to like VELA, going way back to
all these they are detecting ICBM launches mostly right like

(01:04:19):
the exactly, so with all of the like we've been
reading about how there are so many different rockets being
sent up to deploy satellites right now across the world,
humanity is just flinging thousands of these smaller scale satellites
to float around the globe for a while. It does

(01:04:41):
feel like if if a country decided to deploy a
NW old school style, like with a bomber where you
just drop it out of the sky. That's not going
to be detected in the same way you detect the plane.
But you wouldn't detect that it's a nuclear weapon falling
to the earth until it needs.

Speaker 3 (01:05:01):
You would need to have you would need to have
the ability to see what kind of payload is on
the plane, and there are ways to do that. But yeah,
you're you're right. You don't have a single No one
who's got their vinegar about them, in my opinion, has
a sig single detection strategy, meaning nothing depends on just

(01:05:25):
the one basket of chicken eggs. Instead, you have a
lot of cigarette You still even have humans, which is
not a job, not a job most people want.

Speaker 2 (01:05:36):
Well, we're talking about physically watching where nuclear materials are,
where warheads are and if some if materials are missing,
or if a warhead is missing. In that kind of thing,
and that intelligence gathering on every side, right, people are
just watching each other for all of that stuff. And
that's why the dirty bomb scenario was always kind of scary,

(01:05:57):
right briefcase, quick look just on that nuke map site,
and it's not absolute, right, but it's it's a pretty
good idea when you're looking at that site, just to
see the radiuses of different things like the fireball, and
then where that that PSI change is going to be
where glass shatters. But with a smaller like a dirty bomb,

(01:06:19):
it is only rated, at least according to that website
and some stuff I've just looked up, it would we're
talking tons, not kill a tons with a dirty bomb, theoretically,
at least from everything I've found. And if you look
at that type of damage, it's still massive, but it
is not in any way the same thing as a

(01:06:43):
one of these larger, possibly mega ton bombs that have
that a major country would drop on another.

Speaker 3 (01:06:52):
Right, and then we also have to consider and you're
running along here, but we also have to consider the
possibility of satellite deployment. Oh yeah, right, which is a
big part of according to publicly available information, this is
not a big part of X thirty seven b's mission X.

Speaker 4 (01:07:13):
Thirty seven boom.

Speaker 3 (01:07:15):
And there's a kicker combo to all of this, which
needs to be said. Due to again, these what we
call them earlier posse contracts held by almost all nuclear nations,
in some degree or another, it is possible that a
single exchange in one of these hot spots we mentioned
could trigger exchanges in other, like non geographically related regions

(01:07:38):
as well, And once a set of countries goes hot,
the others are likewise emboldened to do so. This is
not a good guys, bad guys thing at this point.
It means that a nuclear launch is dangerous, not just
because of the immediate physical consequences, but also because it
makes it that much easier for everybody else in the

(01:08:00):
standoff to say, oh, I can launch my toys too,
you know what I mean. As a matter of fact,
I better because this moves quickly. In actual nuclear war,
the period of deployment and detonation, or the period of
detonation for sure, would be fairly short in duration, kind
of like how real gunfights almost never last as long

(01:08:22):
as they do in the films. Right, It's the consequences
that get you, you know what I mean. If you
are hearing this, the elephants make war. You are the grass,
no matter what you believe, no matter what you agree with.
You don't get to take a survey as the bomb
is landing, and the bomb doesn't get to decide whether
or not you get to survive some areas of the world,

(01:08:45):
some small enclaves of people with the ability to prepare,
they can solderraw On. It's a cold comfort, but it's comfort, nonetheless,
and it's not a certainty yet, but it is certainly
on the horizon. So what do you think, man, I
feel like our next episode in this series should be.

(01:09:07):
So we've talked about the facts and the crazy things
that could happen. I think a lot of us in
the audience right now are wondering after learning this, well,
holy shit, what should I do? How can me and
my loved ones survive a nuclear war? And all these implications?
Do I feel like it's worth a follow up episode?

Speaker 4 (01:09:26):
Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:09:28):
You know, one of the things we talked about with
Garrett Graft when we had him on a while ago,
talked about, you know, like underground bases, bunkers, nuclear war,
all that stuff we talked about in the Nuclear Football.
We also talked about the fact that the US president,
whoever is acting US president, whether that's the president or
the president, dies, then you know, it goes down that

(01:09:49):
chain of command. That single human being is the only
person on the planet who can decide if the US
launches nukes, and no advisor, vice president, no senator, no congressman,
no anybody can have any say. No general can have
any say on whether or not the nukes get.

Speaker 3 (01:10:10):
Launched unless that general, due to massive disaster, is now
the top dog because the chain of command technically goes
all the way down.

Speaker 4 (01:10:19):
Oh for sure.

Speaker 2 (01:10:20):
But that's what I mean. But that guy, that one
general then is the person.

Speaker 3 (01:10:25):
And that, you know, that's it reminds me. I think
I shared this story with you guys. Canmer was on
era off air, it's probably off air, but I remember
being so impressed with a local politician when I was
as a very younger iteration, and the guy told me
exactly how many people had to die for him to

(01:10:49):
automatically become president of the United States, and it was
a lot, but he knew the exact number, and I was,
you know, in retrospect, I'm still so fascinated by that dude,
who has long since passed, but I'm a little scared
that he knew the exact number.

Speaker 4 (01:11:08):
Yeah, that is scary.

Speaker 3 (01:11:09):
It makes you think about people and their pursuit of
power and the dehumanizing effects of that.

Speaker 2 (01:11:17):
But well, it's weird that the continuity of government plans
are available. Anybody can read them, like the chain of
custody and all that other stuff, and anybody can read
the nuclear deterrence plans that the US has in place.
It's just as Amy Jacobson found, it's something we don't
talk about, like, we just don't talk about it anymore.

(01:11:38):
It just kind of gone away because we're so far
removed from World War Two now, the thought of nuclear war,
no matter how hot any of these other conflicts get,
it's just kind of we we put it away. It's
that's not really going to happen, because if it does happen,
it's over.

Speaker 3 (01:11:56):
Well. With that in mind, I'm trying to and on
some kind of comfort or some kind of good note,
I want to shout out the work of Brian Martin,
his critique of nuclear extinction published in the Journal of
Peace Research. It may be worth your time to read
if you want to see some of the folks who

(01:12:17):
are challenging the dystopian assumptions or several of those dystopian
assumptions at play. We'd also love to hear your personal
take on the idea of full scale nuclear war. We'd
love to hear any firsthand experience you have in related fields,
and we'd love to hear from you anyway you wish

(01:12:37):
to find us. You can find us online on YouTube, Instagram,
all the social medis people sip where conspiracy stuff show
or some derivation of conspiracy stuff. You can also give
us a call on a telephonic device, or as long
as there an emp doesn't hit, you can also email
us at our good old fashioned email address.

Speaker 5 (01:12:58):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (01:12:58):
Our number is one eight three three STDWYTK. It's a
voicemail system. Call in, give yourself a nickname and let
us know within the message if we can use your
name and message on the air. If you want to
send us an email, we are the.

Speaker 3 (01:13:10):
Entities that read every piece of correspondence we receive. Be
well aware, yet unafraid. Sometimes the void writes back. Would
especially love to have a bit of a book club.
Recommend your favorite nuclear disaster works of film or fiction.
Thinking things like Canton Go for Leebowitz the day after tomorrow. Hey,
you hit us to your favorites conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:13:51):
Stuff they Don't Want You to Know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio, app,
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