Two Minutes to Midnight
First, you'll have to know what happens when an atomic bomb explodes. You will know when it comes. We hope it never comes. Ready, it looks something like this.
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 Two, were at the time the most powerful and most destructive weapons ever made. Fat Man was a plutonium bomb and had a blast yield of over 21 kilotons or 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 six and a half kilograms of plutonium, but when it detonated over the city of Nagasaki, only about one kilogram 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 kilograms of enriched uranium. However, whenever dropped over Hiroshima, less than one kilogram 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 kilograms 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, there are ghost towns. And that was 1945, and 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 7,000, Product code 0-2 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 kilometers high— that's over seven Mount Everests stacked on top of each other. The explosion could be seen from over 300 kilometers away, and this shock wave from the blast broke window panes nearly 1,000 kilometers 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 the bomb was theorized and nearly became a reality is truly terrifying. Superimposing the 100-megaton explosion over popular cities around the globe really puts the destruction into perspective.
If 10 of these bombs were detonated over the world's most populated cities, the casualties start to become horrifying. The use of just ten of these bombs on those specific cities could cause almost as many deaths in just one day as there were fatalities from the combined total of every war in the 20th century, from just ten of these bombs.
Today, however, in 2018, there are an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world on standby, waiting to be launched at any moment. If or when these bombs are used, it won't just be one. It won't be ten; it will be all of them. See, if two countries that have access to nuclear weapons end up in a conflict, and that conflict escalates to the point where these nukes are used, there's no reason for either side to hold back.
Because if one side fires one nuke towards the other, why would the other side only send one back? There isn't some written rule that says you have to play fair. No, not at all. It's quite the opposite. Studies have been conducted on the idea of a regional nuclear war between the two countries of Pakistan and India. Not only would deaths be inevitable from just that region, this would affect every last person on the planet.
These countries have about 200 nukes combined. If all of these weapons were used and pinpointed to the right cities, it's more than likely that you could see upwards of more than 100 million casualties in just those countries alone. The fallout from these weapons—that is, the radiation that has spread throughout the air after the bombs go off—would be enough to finish off most of the population of those countries if anyone was even alive after the initial impact.
But that's only the beginning of the problem. The smoke and dust from these bombs will spread much further than just India and Pakistan. Nuclear fallout would make its way into the atmosphere and end up coating the planet in a layer of smoke and dust. This would ultimately block out most of the sun's rays that reach the planet, which would end up causing the failure of plants and crops that all humans and life need to survive.
Black rain would fall from the sky—rain polluted with radiation and dust. The fallout from these bombs would cause even more casualties than the initial explosions themselves, from only 200 nukes. Compare this 200 to the total number of nuclear weapons in the world today, and you'll find that it's barely over 1%. 1% of the entire nuclear arsenal of the planet, in perfect circumstances, is enough to cause over 1 billion deaths.
In 2008, at Oxford University, the Future of Humanity Institute conducted a survey among participants at the university, asking them to make their best guess at the chance of possible extinction-level events before 2100. The results of this survey actually covered the threat of a nuclear Armageddon and placed the estimates of at least 1 billion people dead by the hands of nuclear weapons at 10 percent and placed the odds of complete human extinction by nuclear weapons at 1 percent by 2100.
1% doesn't seem that high, though—one in a hundred chance. But think about this: the chance of you dying in an airplane accident is one in 11 million. The chance of you dying by lightning is one in 84,000. The chance of humanity being wiped out by nuclear weapons is more likely than you dying from almost anything else, other than heart disease and cancer.
This 1% assumes the worst scenario possible. The conflict you hear about more often involves the countries of the United States and Russia, who respectively own over 90 percent of the nukes that exist today. If, for some reason, these two countries went to war with each other, the results definitely wouldn't be good. Should the United States and Russia go into a full-scale nuclear war, with both sides throwing everything they have at each other, this may as well be the end of civilization as you know it.
See, the goal of a war of that magnitude isn't for any one side to win. It's to make sure the other side loses. And the best way to make sure that the other side loses is not to wait to see them stand next to you on the podium, but rather take them out of the picture completely. And that's exactly what the goal of this war would entail. On top of the massive number of nukes dropped on major cities across both countries, agricultural centers, hospitals, schools, and many more facilities would be destroyed to ensure that both sides endure the most suffering.
Both sides know that this isn't a game that has a pause button. That once you pick up the controller, you can't put it back down. Once a nuclear warhead is confirmed to have been sent to either side, the idea of a nuclear holocaust becomes a reality. Today, the Doomsday Clock is the lowest that it has ever been, and should we leave the issues at hand unchecked, the clock will inevitably keep ticking forward.
And the book "Reasons" by the person's author Derek Perfect posed the following question: compare these three outcomes. Peace, a nuclear war that kills 99 percent of the world's population, or a nuclear war that kills 100 percent of the world's population—could be worse than one and three, could be worse than two. But the question is, which is the greater of these two differences?
If we find ourselves in a full-scale nuclear war, is it even worth trying to survive? Because in the end, if you survive, no one will be there waiting for you. The global nuclear winter that would come from this would leave almost every major city uninhabitable for years to come.
The 1983 movie "WarGames" is set in America during the midst of the Cold War. It discusses many possible outcomes of nuclear wars of various magnitudes, and there is a quote that states—and I find that that really fits the situation: "The only way to survive and come out on top at the end of the day is not to play the game in the first place. Because should you participate, the clock ticks over to midnight."