“I know not with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.” – Albert Einstein

Nuclear Armageddon, the atomic holocaust, death by radioactive mushroom dicks penetrating the skies. Whichever sobriquet you bestow nuclear warfare, the final outcome is mass annihilation never before seen in all of human history.

Broad Strokes

Ever since Peter Oppenheimer and his Manhattan Project cronies blew up Pandora’s atomic box on July 16^th, 1945, humanity has held the power to potentially wipe itself from existence.

Currently there are approximately 15,000 nuclear warheads worldwide (click here for a list of how many bombs each nuclear capable country has) and roughly 4,500 cities and urban areas around the world with populations over 100,000 people.

This means that, if we were so inclined, we could drop 3 nuclear bombs per city and in an instant thoroughly wipe out nearly half of the world’s population. And that is to say nothing of the further deaths caused by radiation, the ensuing nuclear winter and the 1,500 warheads we would still have left to use.

How Nuclear War Will Start (Full Article)

What would happen if World War 3 started tomorrow? For better or worse it does not much matter which country strikes first in nuclear warfare. When nuclear missiles are launched other countries will be able to detect them before they ever touch ground and will likely launch their own stockpile of nuclear missiles.

The first strikes will be high altitude EMP attacks. Electromagnetic pulses containing tens of thousands of volts per meter will fry vital electronics and power grids. Next command and control centers as well as nuclear launch facilities will be targeted. Major cities will be vaporized, the strategic value being the ability to annihilate military facilities and a country’s ability to recover post-war.

Power of a Nuclear Bomb

Nuclear bombs vary in destructive capabilities. Today hydrogen bombs are the gold standard of mass destruction. Utilizing nuclear fusion as opposed to the atomic bomb’s nuclear fission, hydrogen bombs have a destructive capacity over 1,000 times greater than the atomic bomb.

The United States’ crème de la crème is the B83 which has a maximum yield of 1.2 megatons. This makes the B83 sixty times more powerful than the “Fat Man” which was the atomic bomb dropped over Nagasaki in 1945. According to the Nuclear Archive the US currently has 650 B83s in “active service.”

Yet as powerful as the B83 is, it pales to the destructive preeminence of the Soviet Union’s Tsar Bomb. On October 30, 1961 the Soviet Union detonated the largest thermonuclear blast in the history of the world.

The Tsar Bomb, which aptly translates to “The King of All Bombs”, clocked in at 50 megatons and yielded a blast roughly 2,500 times more powerful than that of the Fat Man. It had a fireball that reached a diameter of 4km (2.5 miles), a mushroom cloud that rose over 60 km (40 miles) into the atmosphere, a blast wave felt over 1,000 km (over 620 miles) and a shockwave felt 4,000 km away (nearly 2,500 miles).

To put that into perspective, if the “Little Boy” (the bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima in 1945) were to be detonated in New York City today, then approximately 264,000 lives would be lost with an additional 512,000 people injured. The “Tsar Bomba,” on the other hand, would kill more than 7.6 million people while injuring an additional 4.2 million.

Thankfully the Tsar Bomb was a one-off constructed and detonated as a publicity stunt to showcase the military prowess of the Soviet Union at the time. Weighing 27 tons and with a size of 8 meters x 2 meters, it is too large to be considered “operational.”

Long-Term Effects of Nuclear War (Full Article)

As much as being atomized by a nuclear blast would put a damper on one’s day, the real global impact and where the most lives will be lost will be in the aftereffects of the initial bombings.

Nuclear weapons produce ionizing radiation which has an incredibly deleterious impact on those exposed. Nuclear radiation contaminates the environment and sickens or kills anyone in its path.

And the effect is not always immediate. Yes, those nearest the blast will suffer the most substantially and most quickly, but there will still be long-term health consequences for those further out including cancer and genetic damage.

In fact, physicians predict that approximately 2.4 million people will eventually die from cancers due to the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons from 1945-1980.

Beyond the radioactive cellular and genetic degeneracy, it is highly theorized that the most lethal effect of the nuclear holocaust is actually, in fact, the ensuing nuclear winter.

Nuclear Winter

Nuclear bombs beget nuclear firestorms which beget giant plumes of black carbon smoke. As these plumes of black smoke get heated by the sunlight they are lofted like insidious hot air balloons high above any rainclouds that would otherwise wash out the smoke. The speed of high altitude jet streams spreads this smoke across the stratosphere of the entire northern hemisphere in a matter of days.

This smoke coverage acts like a terrible giant blanket that, instead of keeping you warm, blocks out the sun and freezes everything under its dismal domain. Farmland in Kansas is estimated to freeze 20 degrees centigrade (40 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer while other areas in the northern hemisphere will cool nearly twice as much [3]. A recent study concluded that “5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China.”

What Can You Do When S#*t Hits The Fan (Full Article)

Let’s be frank, if you are above ground and in the blast radius of a nuclear bomb then the only thing of you remaining is your shadow.

Do you want angry ghosts? Because this is how you get angry ghosts.

But let’s say you’re not immediately broken down to your base molecular components. What can you do that can even give you a shot at survival?

• Chance favors the prepared, and though you may not be in a financial position to join the world’s elite in buying luxury bunkers (that’s ominous), having an emergency kit and a family plan will absolutely increase your odds of coming out of this on top.
• Find Shelter. Stay indoors! Underground if you can manage it, or at the center of a bottom floor of a large building. If your house has a basement use that, if not then just keep indoors and stay away from the windows.
• If you were outside during the blast. Immediately strip down and shower to wash off any potential fallout radiation. This goes for you and anyone else staying with you including pets.
• Preserved Foods. Only eat preserved foods or anything that could not have been contaminated by the blast.
• Stay Tuned. Keep monitoring the television or radio for more information and instructions from emergency response officials.