What Would a US-Russia Nuclear War Look Like

What would happen if there was a full-scale nuclear war between

Russia and the United States?

Based on non-classified data, the aftermath might go something

like this.

When one side launches nuclear missiles, the other side detects

them and fires back before impact.

US submarine-launched ballistic missiles from west of Norway

start striking Russia after about ten minutes, and Russian

ones from north of Canada start hitting the US a few minutes later.

The very first strikes are high-altitude EMP attacks,

frying electronics and power grids by creating an

electromagnetic pulse of tens of thousands of volts per meter.

The next strikes target command and control, as well as nuclear launch

facilities.

Land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles take about half an hour to

arrive. Major cities are targeted, both because they

contain military facilities and to stymie the enemy's

post-war recovery.

Some cruise missiles take hours to reach their target.

Each impact creates a fireball about as hot as the core of the

sun, followed by a radioactive mushroom cloud.

These intense explosions vaporize people nearby and

cause fires and blindness further away.

The fireball expansion then causes a blast wave that damages

buildings, crushing nearby ones.

The United Kingdom and France have nuclear capabilities

and are obliged by

NATO's Article 5 to defend the US,

so Russia hits them, too.

Firestorms engulf many cities where storm-level winds

fan the flames, igniting anything that can burn, melting

glass and some metals, and turning asphalt into flammable hot

liquid. But the explosions, the electromagnetic pulse, and

the radioactivity aren't the worst part.

Nuclear winter is, caused by the black carbon smoke

from the nuclear firestorms.

The Hiroshima atomic bomb caused such a firestorm, but today's

hydrogen bombs are much more powerful.

A large city like Moscow, with almost fifty times more people,

can create much more smoke.

And a firestorm sends plumes of black smoke up into the

stratosphere, far above any rain clouds

that would otherwise

wash out the smoke. This black smoke gets heated by

sunlight, lofting it like a hot air balloon for up

to a decade.

High-altitude jet streams are so fast that it takes only a few

days for the smoke to spread across much of the northern hemisphere.

In the meantime, Earth gets freezing cold, even during the summer,

with farmland in Kansas cooling by about twenty degrees centigrade

or forty degrees Fahrenheit

and other regions cooling almost twice as much.

A recent scientific paper estimates that over five billion people could

starve to death, including around ninety-nine percent of

those in the United

States, Europe,

Russia,

and China.

We obviously don't know how many people will survive a nuclear war,

but if it's even remotely as bad as scientists think, then it has no

winners, merely losers.

It's easy to feel powerless, but the good news is that there is

something you can do to help. Please share this video,

because the more people know about nuclear war, the less likely it is

that we'll start one.