Nuclear War Between U.S. and Russia (2019 Simulation)

the United States and Russia have more than 12,000 nukes combined over 3,000 of those can be launched within 15 minutes notice we avoided annihilation in the Cold War but what if an all-out nuclear war happened today how would it escalate based on current military strategy how many minutes would we have and how many people would die will simulate the apocalypse in today's episode subscribe if you haven't already or glad you're with us Princeton's program on science and global security along with Alex wellerstein of the Stevens Institute of Technology have created a new simulation for a plausible escalating war between the US and Russia we won't keep you in suspense any longer here's their four minute simulation [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] more than 30 million people would die immediately and twice that many would be injured as the video points out deaths would rise as nuclear fallout settles this occurs when residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere falls back to earth the long-term effects of an all-out nuclear exchange between the US and Russia would be severe agriculture would be significantly reduced for at least a year likely more anyone surviving the war in the affected countries would face destroyed supply lines limited water food and near or below freezing conditions more recent estimates suggest that even after Arsenal reductions from the US and Russia nuclear winter remains essentially a certainty a July study from Rutgers calculated that fires from burning structures following the blast would inject 300 billion pounds of soot into the atmosphere this would push temperatures below freezing in the summertime in the northern hemisphere reducing planting season by 90 percent global average surface temperatures would fall by 9 degrees Celsius rainfall would also drop meaningfully near the equator it would take several years before surface light from the Sun was even half what it was before the war and complete recovery would take a decade there's no cheery conclusion here with thousands of nuclear weapons on standby such a scenario is terrifyingly possible and even if we avoid intentional war there's always the chance of an accident in 1960 us early warning systems reported long-range Russian missiles were launched with 99.9 percent certainty it turned out to be a false alarm for moon light two years later US missile operators in Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 warheads but the order didn't include instructions to go from DEFCON 2 to DEFCON 1 as would ordinarily occur the crew asked command if they should switch to DEFCON 1 and the launch order was canceled it was a mistake on their end in 1995 the launch of a weather rocket from Norway triggered Russian early warning radar it had the launch characteristics of a high-altitude electromagnetic pulse weapon Russian forces went on full alert president Boris Yeltsin activated his nuclear command suitcase to authorize a full retaliation thankfully no more launches were detected and the alarm was canceled at the last minute the list goes on there have been at least 20 false alarms over the past 50 years the only way to ultimately reduce this risk is to ban nuclear weapons entirely see the video description for more on efforts to do this we could spend an entire other episode on these close calls and probably well in the future in the meantime you can read more about them in the study linked below subscribe and hit the notification bell for future videos like this

Channel: It's Bloody Science!

Views: 771,756

Rating: 4.6965938 out of 5

Keywords: Plan A, Princeton SGS, effects of nuclear war, nuclear war aftermath, nuclear war scenario, nuclear war timeline, nuclear war scenario simulation, realistic nuclear war scenario, nukemap, US Russia nuclear war, siop-62 targets, oplan 8044, nuclear winter, climate effects of nuclear war, Greenland Moonrise Incident, 1995 Norwegian Rocket Incident

Id: 9rXXMDGhjUs

Length: 7min 21sec (441 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 23 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

It always amazes me that in 1865 we used single shot rifles in war, while only 80 years later we had nuclear bombs that could be dropped from airplanes and destroy total cities

[u/Rhaedas]

Might as well link Kurzgesagt's recent video on what a nuke does to a city. You would think being cute animation this wouldn't be graphic, but it is.

Also, the movie By Dawn's Early Light had a similar escalation by a rogue state that triggered automatic responses. It showed how little time it would take to go from a normal day to "wtf just happened?" to...well...

[u/Fins_FinsT]

And a simulation from NASA GISS' ModelE back from 2007 suggests that after such an exchange, there would be global crop failure for at least one, but most likely several years due to massive amounts of smoke from all those cities going up and staying up in high stratosphere for over 5 years. Leading to nearly 7 billion total death count, - i.e. nearly everybody. Very few percent could possibly make it through those years.

And from what i know, good chances are that after those initial years of nuclear winter, ice and snow albedo feedbacks would kick in with overwhelming force - as the smoke layer in high stratosphere would gradually thin and disappear, sun rays which once again would be reaching Earth surface with full force - will not come to the Earth as we know it, with lots of dark water, dark soil and dark forests. Nope, instead, they'll be hitting lots of white snow and ice, thus mostly being reflected. The process is likely to - what a pun! - snowball towards Earth which is completely covered by ice and snow.

Which "Snowball Earth" state actually happened in the (distant) past, and lasted for ~25 million years. Back then, the only survivors of that event - were few kinds of single-celled organisms in dark under-ice conditions.

There is a reason no humans ever managed to make a living on top of an ice sheet (in Greenland or in Antarctica) other than having lots of things they need being transported in from elsewhere. So all-out thermonuclear exchange - is likely to mean complete human extinction everywhere, no less.

And i imagine, if it'd happen, those who'd survive longer than most - will envy ones who died right away.

[u/MagnumDongJohn]

There are many, many times we have come close to this scenario; the shocking truth is Nuclear war will most likely be caused by an accident more than actual warfare.

I remember doing a project on Nuclear Disarmament for my degree, we almost wiped our entire existence out over a single faulty computer chip in 1979.

9 November 1979

A computer error at NORAD headquarters led to alarm and full preparation for a nonexistent large-scale Soviet attack. NORAD notified national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski that the Soviet Union had launched 250 ballistic missiles with a trajectory for the United States, stating that a decision to retaliate would need to be made by the president within 3 to 7 minutes. NORAD computers then placed the number of incoming missiles at 2,200.

Strategic Air Command was notified, and nuclear bombers prepared for takeoff. Within six to seven minutes of the initial response, satellite and radar systems were able to confirm that the attack was a false alarm. It was found that a training scenario was inadvertently loaded into an operational computer. Commenting on the incident, U.S. State Department adviser Marshall Shulman stated that "false alerts of this kind are not a rare occurrence. There is a complacency about handling them that disturbs me." In the months following the incident there were three more false alarms at NORAD, two of them caused by faulty computer chips.

[u/chicompj]

I often forget about the risks of nuclear war, but as the video explains, the after effects of nuclear winter would be devastating on the climate. For the people who end up surviving in the Northern Hemisphere and even for those in the Southern Hemisphere, temperatures are predicted to drop by 9C globally for about a decade, per the most recent peer-reviewed research

[u/alwaysZenryoku]

Cool... now do India and Pakistan.

[u/monkeyneedsamouth]

Another way of looking at this is to say that nuclear suicide would be a really bad option. It's not severe enough, with the arsenal we have. If we had ten thousand more warheads like we've got, globally, we might be able to end it all for everybody, overnight.

I'm speaking strictly in hypotheticals, from the pragmatic standpoint that the brief suffering of such a conflagration would be trivial compared to the suffering we will endure for generations as we collapse and trudge towards extinction, otherwise. What I'm saying is that even if we reached the point of wanting to, as would be expressed in such acts of war, it's not a viable method. It would reduce the population, and ensure that all who survive suffer much more.

I think it's also inevitable. As a species, we are just so good at creating more unnecessary and protracted suffering, if it means we can go on rejecting the aspects of reality we find unappealing. There's no way we won't use them, unless or until we work past this fundamental issue with our selves in sufficient numbers to "make it stick", and I don't think the time remaining affords us much chance of that.

[u/Alpheus411]

We're at two minutes to midnight for the last 2 years. I think they'll take it to 1.5 for 2020.