This is How The World Ends

First, you have to know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes. You will know when it comes; we hope it never comes. But get ready; it looks something like this.

In 1947, an international group of researchers called the Chicago Atomic Scientists began publishing a magazine titled "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists." This group of scientists had previously worked on the Manhattan Project, a World War II research and development undertaking tasked with producing the world's first nuclear weapons. They succeeded in their research and ended up creating two atomic warheads: Fat Man and Little Boy.

The cover of the first edition of the bulletin included a clock in the background with the minute hand at 7 minutes before midnight. To many people, this may just seem like another normal clock, not representing anything special. But this clock is quite the opposite. This isn't any normal clock; this clock represents utter anthropogenic global catastrophe. This might be confusing to hear, so let me word it like this: The clock represents total obliteration by the hands of mankind.

Since published in 1947, the bulletin has updated the minute hand of the clock every year. The hand can move both forwards and backwards and does so according to many factors: nuclear tension, global warming, and many other things. In 1947, the clock was at 7 minutes to midnight. In 1963, it was at 12 minutes; in 1991, 17 minutes. But today, in 2018, we aren't 20 minutes away, we aren't 10 minutes away, we aren't 5 minutes away; we're 2 minutes away. 2 minutes from midnight, 2 minutes from complete obliteration.

For you, Liv, today, when discussing the destructive power of nuclear weapons or asteroids or any large-scale detonation, we tend to measure them by how much TNT is needed to produce an equivalent explosion. For example, Fat Man and Little Boy, the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, were at the time the most powerful and destructive weapons ever made. Fat Man was a plutonium bomb and had a blast yield of over 21 kilotons, over 21,000 tons of TNT. Little Boy, on the other hand, was a uranium bomb and had a blast yield of over 15 kilotons.

However, these explosions didn't exactly reach their full potential. See, Fat Man was jam-packed with about 62 kg of plutonium, but when it detonated over the city of Nagasaki, only about 1 kg of that material actually fissioned—a little over 16%. Not bad. Little Boy, on the other hand, was a lot worse; see, it contained over 64 kg of enriched uranium. However, whenever dropped over Hiroshima, less than 1 kg of that uranium actually fissioned. That's a little over 1%. Even though neither of these bombs lived up to their full potential, the fissioning of less than 2 kg of plutonium and uranium was enough to kill over 200,000 people.

People used to live here, and then in a blink of an eye, they're ghost towns. And that was 1945. Since then, over 125,000 nuclear weapons have been made that are much, much more powerful than both Fat Man and Little Boy combined. In 1961, the Soviet Union detonated a hydrogen bomb over the remote Siberian wilderness. This bomb had a yield of not 15,000 tons, not 21,000 tons, not even 100,000 tons; it had a yield of over 50 million tons of TNT.

The bomb has many names: Project 7000, product code 202, RDS 220. But the majority of people know this as the Tsar Bomba. When the Tsar Bomba was detonated, the mushroom cloud from the explosion exited the layer of the atmosphere that we live in and stretched far into the mesosphere. The mushroom cloud was over 64 km high—that's over seven Mount Everests stacked on top of each other. The explosion could be seen from over 300 km away, and the shock wave from the blast broke window panes nearly 1,000 km away from the explosion.

The shock wave circled the planet three times before it finally died out. And this wasn't even the most powerful version thought of; the bomb was actually initially planned to be 100 megatons, which amounts to 100 million tons of TNT. It was eventually decided against, as a full 100 megaton explosion could have easily sent the world into a global nuclear winter. However, the fact that...