Recently people are blithely discussing the high possibility of Putin finally realizing that Russia has lost the “war” with Ukraine, and decides to start a nuclear war with the West out of anger and spite. Then there are two possibilities – One is that one of his close friends allows him to “spend more with his family” and the other is discussed in an essay that is copied below. I hope that Bob Anderson allows me to post this since it is that important for everyone to read.
Bob
Anderson
Advocate
for digital privacy for over 25 years
How many people would survive (globally) the first 30 days after a full on nuclear war/Armageddon?
Everything you read about nuclear war goes something like this…
It will be unimaginably horrible. Everyone will die, or want to. The End.
Well hang on, we can understand it better than that …
It will be the worst thing we’ve ever experienced, but the human picture will not turn completely black. So let’s talk about the aftermath, not only in the following days, but also in the months and years to come.
As you read this, please bear in mind that these are generalizations based on averages across a lot of research on the topic. This is not a scientific paper replete with references, it’s a generalized narrative … your dosage may vary.
Also, the initial part of this answer describes some pretty awful things, bad enough that you might want to stop reading. However, I urge you to press on, it does gradually get better.
First though, by “full on nuclear war / Armageddon” I take you to mean that everyone who has nuclear weapons uses them according to their worst-case strategic war planning. The USA and Russia attempt to wipe each other out, drawing in many NATO countries including the UK and France. Israel lights up the middle east, and Pakistan and India go all-out against one another. China goes after Japan and others, and North Korea attempts to incinerate South Korea, also lobbing a few at Japan just for good measure.
That’s a lot of bombs …
Just how many nuclear weapons are there?
Nine countries possess a total of approximately 14,655 nuclear weapons and the capacity to deliver many of them to their intended targets …
Country — total warheads (Wikipedia)
United States — 6,450
Russia — 6,850
United Kingdom — 215
France — 300
China — 280
India — 140
Pakistan — 150
North Korea — 20
Israel — 250 (estimated)
It’s important to understand that most nuclear powers will hold a significant fraction of their weapons in reserve for second and possibly third strikes, so even in an all-out attack not all weapons will be used. It’s also important to know that most countries have more weapons in inventory than they have the capacity to deliver to targets. Plus there will also be losses due to successful preemptive and counter-strikes, and several other reasons why the actual number of devices detonated will be less than the total number of devices available, perhaps on the order of 60% of the total, or about 8,800.
Sadly, that means even after the launch of an all-out attack, the threat of future nuclear annihilation will not disappear … perhaps as many as 4,000 unused weapons will remain under the tattered control of various governments and their military units. So even after an “all-out” nuclear war, the sobering fact is that the threat will not disappear. This will play a role in the years to come.
A world turned upside down …
When you look at the list of nuclear powers a striking fact jumps right out: The vast majority of the weaponized states and their targets are located in the northern hemisphere. That has profound implications, as we’ll soon see …
In the northern hemisphere, within 30 days the casualty rates in places like the USA, Western Europe, India, Pakistan, China and Japan could approach 40% from direct blast effects, thousands of massive fires, and the immediate social chaos.
However, in the southern hemisphere the casualty rates will be much lower, perhaps about 5% in the first 30 days, primarily from the erosion of social control systems as everyone scrambles to prepare and protect themselves.
That asymmetry — the fact that the northern hemisphere has been devastated while leaving most of the southern hemisphere nearly untouched by blasts and fires — will rapidly lead to massive waves of immigration coming from the north as survivors by the millions attempt to flee the initial horrors.
It won’t save them …
Remember, just as it’s illegal for central and south Americans to enter the USA without permission, the same is true in reverse. A wall on our southern border would quickly become a prison as Mexico orders its army, police forces and thousands of ordinary citizens immediately to kill anyone attempting to breach it to enter Mexico illegally. All pretense of fairness or international law would disappear within hours.
Much the same would be true in the surviving parts of South-East Asia, Indonesia, much of Africa, and places like New Zealand or New Guinea. They would all defend their borders and themselves with deadly force. It will be shoot-on-sight regardless of circumstance or age - old people, kids, it wouldn’t matter.
30 days later …
After 30 days the global casualty rate will be on the order of about 20% of humanity, or roughly 1.5 billion people, mostly in the northern hemisphere.
About half of them, 750 million worldwide, will die in the first few hours of the direct effects. The other half, another 750 million, will die from sickness and violence in the following few weeks. For example, in all of the major target countries — places like the USA, India, Italy or France, to name just a few — there will be no doctors, no electricity, no police. There will be no law.
All the norms of society will disappear literally in a flash. Snowflakes will melt instantly, it will be purely survival of the vicious. And as bad as that is, it’s during the next few months that things truly turn to shit …
The following months … Nuclear Winter
The nuclear blasts will be unspeakably horrible, but many people will survive the initial onslaught. Instead, it’s the fires and smoke that will eventually kill far more people through starvation and disease than all the nuclear detonations combined.
Depending on yield, a single nuclear weapon detonated as an airburst (most would be) will have a blast radius of 1–3 miles. Nothing within that survives. The energy is so great and moves so fast that you wouldn’t even feel it, you’ll be incinerated faster than your nerves can signal your brain, leaving nothing but your shadow against the concrete.
It’s at the circumference of each blast that things get truly horrible … fires will ignite instantly in a full circle around each blast over land. Anything combustible will ignite — buildings by the thousands, trees, cars, gas tanks, everything that can burn. And that’s just from one blast. Major metropolitan areas will be sprinkled with detonations intentionally targeted so that the fires they ignite merge into huge firestorms, by design.
Imagine everything from San Diego to Los Angeles all on fire at once, stretching inland for 50 miles. Everything from Bangor Maine south to Virginia burning. Much of southern England on fire. A third of Japan. Half of India. Much of western Europe. Even places like Auckland, New Zealand will be targeted just to deny military refuge. You get the picture.
These fires will kill at least as many people as the initial blasts, and there will be no one to put them out. They will burn for weeks until they run out of fuel at natural boundaries like rivers or are finally extinguished by weather.
World-wide the fires will inject enough smoke and ash into the atmosphere to turn noon to twilight in the middle latitudes of the northern hemisphere. No one knows how fast the atmosphere will cleanse itself — estimates range from months to several years — but what we do know is that it will cause the collapse of the food chains we survive on, for years.
The northern oceans will likewise be devastated by the lack of sunlight, which will kill off most of the plankton at the base of the marine food chain.
What about the southern hemisphere?
There’s an atmospheric region circling the globe called the tropical convergence zone which acts as something of a barrier between the northern and southern hemispheres. Overall it will prevent very roughly half of the smoke and particulate matter from homogenizing south of the equator.
That will still be awful, but whereas in the north sunlight after 2 months may drop to 20% of normal, in the southern hemisphere it may be quite a bit better, and by the time you reach the southern temperate zones, it may be only a 40 or 50% reduction, not 80%. Bad, yes, very bad, but with care some agriculture will still be possible, albeit at seriously reduced yields.
Fisheries will likewise be less impacted, especially in the southern-most oceans — they will still be able to produce a significant amount of food. Nothing close to normal, maybe only 25% of previous harvests. Badly injured, but not dead.
Millions in the southern hemisphere will still die, but hundreds of millions will be able to squeeze by and survive.
How about radiation?
Few people assess the implications and effects of radiation accurately. That’s understandable — it’s a complex topic that has been so oversimplified by mass media that when you say the word radiation, people’s minds jump instantly to mutant cockroaches the size of alligators, or flesh-eating creatures emerging from glowing green swamps.
The radioactive aftermath of a large nuclear war will be a very serious problem, especially in the general areas of detonations and for miles downwind. For most of the planet the background levels will increase a hundredfold, cancer rates and birth defects will skyrocket, and life expectancy will drop significantly. But unless you were near enough to one of the explosions to receive a high dose, it won’t kill you. At least not right away.
For example, from 1945 to 1963 the United States detonated hundreds of nuclear weapons in the deserts of the southwest (Wikipedia), many close enough to Las Vegas that the tops of the mushroom clouds were visible from the strip. Altogether, worldwide there have been two thousand tests. (Side note: There’s a morbidly fascinating YouTube video showing every nuclear bomb test on a map over time, it runs for 14 minutes. Search YouTube for video “LLCF7vPanrY”.)
Yes, you read that correctly, we’ve already detonated a couple thousand nukes, about a third of them as atmospheric explosions. The difference is it was done over (or under) sand or water where nothing can burn.
Of much greater concern will be whatever remains of the world’s 100+ nuclear power plants … it’s likely that they will be targets themselves, further increasing the total background radiation and definitely poisoning hundreds of square miles downwind of each. Even the ones that remain intact will shut down, and then be subject to gradual leaks of radiation for a long time as their containment buildings degrade and neutron flux weakens the primary reactor housings.
Even worse, almost all spent fuel for each reactor in most countries has been stored on-site awaiting a more permanent solution. These are still radioactive, and are kept in spent fuel storage ponds, safe within deep swimming-pool-like structures filled with water. With no one around to maintain them, the protective water will evaporate and they too will slowly begin to leak radiation.
The cumulative effect from the bombs and leaking reactors will increase the overall average radiation most survivors are exposed to by a factor of 100, or more in many cases. Some isotopes decay very fast, others are very long-lasting. The net effect will be greatly increased cancer rates over the years and decades to come, and a significant reduction in life expectancy, say by an average of 10 - 15 years.
What about survivalists (the ‘preppers’), how will they make out?
A few of the very best-prepared will do okay, maybe about one percent, but most will be as screwed as the rest of humanity, it will just take a little longer.
The thing about most ‘preppers’ is, they tend to emphasize preparedness in the areas of their personal fascinations in life, while simultaneously neglecting things that don’t interest them.
I actually met a family of survivalists last year, and it was a fascinating study in tunnel vision …
The head of the family is a weapons expert and a proud gun owner. After I was sworn to secrecy, he and his two grown sons showed me their ‘bug out’ facility. Chests puffed, they proudly displayed a frightening collection of firearms and ammunition, and explained in great detail how they had trained the entire family, kids included, how to shoot anything approaching their facility, aiming withering fire from various exposed portals of their mostly underground deep-woods hideout.
But when I asked about respirators against the smoke, and emergency oxygen tanks as the massive fire swept through the forest, all I got was blank stares.
Likewise when they proudly showed me their 2,500 gallon water tank … I asked if they had drilled a well, and how they planned to extract and filter water once the tank ran dry. Nothing. The same when I asked if they had a Geiger counter, or medical reference textbooks. Nada. And the same when I asked if they knew how to set a broken leg, or which antibiotic to use for a toothache, or a lung infection.
Finally, when I asked just how long they thought their little group of 5 adults and 7 kids would have the stamina to hold out against hundreds of survivors from ‘the big city’, who would also be armed to the teeth, amidst nervous looks they again assured me of the effectiveness of their arsenal.
And just to vent some of that building testosterone, they blasted off a couple of hundred rounds in a frustrated ejaculation by gunpowder. (Side note: let me make it clear that although I’m no expert, I’m conversant, comfortable and capable with firearms, when properly regulated they do have a place in civil society.)
The reality is that most survivalists use preparedness as a justification to pursue personal obsessions in magnified ways. In those specific areas they are well-prepared, but in vital but boring things they are as ill-equipped as any of us.
Case in point — in areas requiring advanced skills, such as medicine, energy or agriculture, they simply ignore all the problems they can’t answer, as if no one will get sick or shot, machines miraculously run forever and crops practically grow themselves.
That said, true survivalists know better. These are people who have prepared comprehensively and deeply across the entire spectrum of needs; people who realize that a dozen members is not enough, and have created much larger groups with diverse skills. Unless a nuke drops within 10 miles, they actually do stand a pretty good chance of emerging a few years later.
And make no mistake, it will take several years for the sky to clear enough for agriculture to resume without special assistance.
Recovery …
How many will make it past the first few years is anyone’s guess, but here are some very round numbers expressed as 5-year survivor percentages:
North America: 8%
Central America: 44%
South America: 55%
Western Europe: 12%
Eastern Europe (including Russia): 6%
Middle East: 19%
Africa: 42%
China: 27%
India: 22%
Southeast Asia: 40%
Australia / Oceania: 45%
Note that these are extremely approximate ‘guesstimates’. Numerous factors could make the survival rates higher or much lower, including time of year, how many warheads actually detonate, variations in targeting philosophies (military, civilian, both), human resiliency, national and personal preparedness, weather conditions and a lot else.
For example, for North America the 5-year survival might be as high as 10% or 12%, or as low as 1% or 2%. The numbers above are to provide a sense of magnitude. They are nothing more than my best guesses, taking into account current levels of industrialization, social systems and a lot of other factors.
Disease alone will become a major killer, as will contaminated water. With countless millions of unburied bodies — people, cows, cats, you name it — a laundry list of deadly bacteria will make a massive comeback. That bacterial blossom alone will kill a few hundred million before eventually extinguishing itself after a couple years (because the bodies decay to the point that they are no longer a bacterial food source).
The bottom line …
Somewhere between 50% and 80% of humanity will die, and the bulk of the world’s surviving population will inhabit the southern hemisphere 5 years later. This will be beyond horrible, but it will not be anywhere close to an extinction.
So what then?
Very gradually the remaining vestiges of governments and their shredded military will begin to restore a crude sort of order. The first bits of civil organization and recovery will occur within a year, but there won’t be the resources to do much … governments in most northern-hemisphere countries will be forced by cynical pragmatism to wait until the number of survivors drops to something they can manage.
Human ingenuity will counter some of these problems. For example even if sunlight is only 50% of normal after 6 months, the clever use of mirrors to illuminate greenhouses will help small but significant bands of people to survive.
Everything will be under martial law for many years to come. It will take a generation or two before people see any kind of municipal restoration, even things as basic as running water or electricity, let alone hospitals.
But recovery will come. Agriculture will return, science will not forget how to make antibiotics, very little knowledge will be lost. The nuclear power plants will be entombed. Children will be born, educated, and new engineers and doctors will graduate. Manufacturing will return. Eventually we’ll even see the internet reborn, and yes, it will have cat videos. Gradually over the next 50 to 75 years the world will mostly recover.
Unfortunately, it will continue to live under the threat of further nuclear exchanges. Maybe, just maybe, then at last we can all agree to get rid of the damn things, once and forever.
And finally …
No doubt this answer will trigger criticisms, questions and comments, mostly about people’s specific circumstances. Let me anticipate some of them …
Yes, it’s possible you will be in an area that suffers no direct blast effects and does not burn. Yes, it’s possible you’ll be able to scavenge successfully for enough years to survive. And yes, it’s possible you’ll be able to defend yourself against the starving hoards.
For all I know, you could survive 8 years on a thousand cases of Campbell’s soup jam-packed in a tornado shelter.
Humans are astonishingly resourceful, some will make it through even the most difficult circumstances. But in the northern hemisphere most will not.
And that’s just the point … any of these exceptions are possible, but none are likely. This narrative is about averages and aggregate effects, not about specific circumstances. I welcome your comments.
Bob Anderson
