Simulation used with permission via Princeton SGS (https://sgs.princeton.edu) and The Nuclear Secrecy Blog (http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com)
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 allout nuclear war happened today?
Princeton’s Program on Science and Global Security, along with Alex Wellerstein of the Stevens Institute of Technology, have created a new realistic nuclear war simulation for a plausible escalation between the U.S. and Russia. The war would occur in phases, quickly escalating as targets changed from tactical locations to cities.
More than 30 million people would die immediately, and twice that many would be injured. Deaths would rise as nuclear fallout settles — this occurs when residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere falls back to Earth. The longterm effects of an allout nuclear exchange between the U.S. and Russia would be severe.
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%. Global average surface temperatures would fall by 9 degrees Celsius. And in the U.S., they’d drop 20 degrees C below normal in the Summer, and 35 degrees below normal in Russia.
"PLAN A," Princeton SGS: https://sgs.princeton.edu/thelab/plana
"Nuclear Winter Responses to Nuclear War Between the United States and Russia in the Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model Version 4 and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies ModelE," Coupe et al (2019): https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.c...
"Selfassured destruction: The climate impacts of nuclear war," Robock et al (2015): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/...
"Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences," Robock et al (2007): http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf...
"A Model for the Probability of Nuclear War," Baum, de Neufville, Barrett (2018): https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...
It's Bloody Science! LLC created the narration and editing of this video, aside from the Plan A simulation in the middle of it. That was developed by Alex Wellerstein, Tamara Patton, Moritz Kütt, and Alex Glaser with Bruce Blair, Sharon Weiner, and Zia Mian, plus sound by Jeff Snyder. All other images, sounds, music and video clips are freely available in the public domain or Creative Commons licenses, or are licensed via Powtoon software or the YouTube Audio Library.
Select declassified U.S. nuclear test footage used with express permission from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a Department of Energy national security laboratory. See the full playlist of newly declassified U.S. nuclear tests here: • LLNL Atmospheric Nuclear Tests
Footage of Operation Hardtack I Nutmeg, Operation Teapot Turk and Operation Dominic Harlem are under Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercialShareAlike 4.0 license per here: https://www.llnl.gov/copyrightandreuse
Song no. 1: Fresno Alley, Josh Lippi & The Overtimers — freely available for use and monetization in the YouTube Audio Library.
Song no. 2: Beyond the Lows, The Whole Other — freely available for use and monetization in the YouTube Audio Library.