What nuclear annihilation could look like

“The survivors would envy the dead.”

by Sean Illing, Jun 23, 2024

How often do you think about all the ways the world could end?

As the host of The Gray Area, I find myself engaged in this macabre exercise more than most. We’ve done episodes on runaway AI and climate change and extinction panics. One of the few topics we haven’t covered, however, is nuclear war. Which is surprising because this scenario is near the top of basically every list of existential threats — and now feels newly salient with recent news involving North Korea, Iran, and China.

Annie Jacobsen is a reporter and the author of a new book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I read a lot of books for the show and this one stuck with me longer than any I can recall. It’s a book that clearly wants to startle the reader, and it succeeds.

Jacobsen walks you through all the ways a nuclear catastrophe might unfold, and she gives a play-by-play breakdown of the terrifying choreography that would ensue in the minutes immediately after a nuclear missile launch.

So I invited Jacobsen on The Gray Area to talk about what a nuclear exchange would really look like and how perilously close we are to that reality. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Sean Illing

I suspect the image most of us still have of nuclear bombs is the image of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but that was a long time ago. How much more powerful are the thermonuclear weapons we’re talking about today?

Annie Jacobsen

To give you an idea of a thermonuclear weapon, I went to one of the ultimate sources, a 93-year-old nuclear weapons engineer named Richard Garwin, probably the most famous nuclear weapons engineer, physicist, presidential adviser, still alive. Garwin drew the plans for the very first thermonuclear weapon. Its code name was Ivy Mike; it’s on the cover of my book. It was 10.4 megatons.

So consider that the Hiroshima bomb that you referenced was 15 kilotons and then think about 10.4 megatons. It’s about 1,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs detonating at the same time from the same center point. Garwin explained it to me in the simplest of terms when he asked me to visualize this fact: A thermonuclear weapon uses an atomic bomb as its fuse inside of the weapon. That’s how powerful it is.

Sean Illing

Paint the picture for me, as you do in the opening pages of the book, where you imagine a nuke is dropped on Washington, DC. What happens next?

Annie Jacobsen

So with a 1-megaton bomb on Washington, DC, what happens in the very first millisecond is that this thermonuclear flash expands into a ball of fire that is one mile of pure fire. It’s 19 football fields of fire.

Then the fireball’s edges compress into what is called a steeply fronted blast wave — as dense wall of air pushing out, mowing down everything in its path three miles out, in every direction, because it is accompanied by several-hundred-mile-an-hour winds.

It’s like Washington, DC, just got hit by an asteroid and the accompanying wave. When you think about this initial 9-mile diameter ring, imagine every single engineered structure — buildings, bridges, etc. — collapsing.

There’s also a thermonuclear flash that sets everything on fire and melts lead, steel, and titanium. Streets nine miles out transform into molten asphalt lava. The details are so horrific; it’s important to keep in mind these are not from my imagination. These are sourced from Defense Department documents because the Atomic Energy Commission and the Defense Department have been keeping track of what nuclear bombs do to people and to things ever since the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of 1945.

Sean Illing

When all that happens, we’re in what you call “Day Zero,” and then the nuclear winter begins. What does that look like?……………………………………………………………………….. more https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/356044/nuclear-annihilation-annie-jacobsen