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What a Nuclear Apocalypse Would Actually Look Like (NOT Like Movies)
What a Nuclear Apocalypse Would Actually Look Like (NOT Like Movies)
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Untertitel (167)
0:00
A never-ending nuclear winter, a Mad Max desert hellscape, or a wasteland full of mutated zombies?
0:06
Movies promise all three. But the real answer is much harder to survive. This is everything
0:11
Hollywood gets WRONG about the nuclear apocalypse! Let’s start with the big moment - the detonation.
0:17
You’ve seen it in every movie that features a nuke going off. First comes the thermal
0:21
blast. A 100 million degree Celsius (180 million degree Fahrenheit) fireball that is accompanied
0:24
by a bright flash of light - one that could seriously damage your eyes if you look at
0:28
it without proper protection. Then there’s a shockwave of crushing air pressure and winds,
0:33
along with a surface burst that cuts a huge crater into the ground.
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And that’s still not the worst part.
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But we know what you’re really thinking. You shelled out for that vintage,
0:43
lead-lined fridge as part of your doomsday prepper strategy - ignoring
0:47
the whole ‘poisonous lead near your food’ issue. So could you hide in that thing and
0:51
ride out the blast like Indiana Jones in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull?
0:54
Haven’t seen it? Don’t worry, it’s completely forgettable. But no,
0:57
you could not survive a nuclear blast in a fridge. This is where the movie logic
1:02
falls apart. For starters, you’d actually need the lead encasing you to be several
1:05
feet thick to provide any meaningful protection from radiation. Even then,
1:09
you’d likely still get cooked by the initial thermal blast, and then there’s the shockwave.
1:14
That would be traveling at the speed of sound. So your cooked body would be launched into the air
1:18
and then come hurtling back down at around 760 miles per hour (1,223 kph). Anything
1:23
that was left of you would be reduced to a fine liquid paste. Though really, you’re unlikely to
1:28
have even gotten that far. The fridge was likely mostly annihilated in the thermal blast itself.
1:33
But let’s just say it wasn’t, so we can demonstrate another thing
1:36
that movies get wrong about nuclear explosions.
1:39
The shockwave actually has two phases. One positive - that’s when the wave flows out. This is
1:44
the part the movies show. And one negative - where it flows back in. This is the part they don’t.
1:50
That’s because the blast creates a low-pressure bubble at its center, sucking debris back in
1:55
after the initial shockwave throws everything outward. Even if you somehow got blown out,
2:00
odds are you’d just get dragged straight back in. So if the blast itself doesn’t kill you,
2:05
Hollywood usually implies you’ve made it. The explosion fades, the dust and debris settles,
2:11
and survivors crawl out into a post-apocalyptic city. But that’s just a scriptwriter’s fantasy.
2:16
The reality is a lot more destructive… and terrifying.
2:20
A nuclear explosion doesn’t end with one blast - it starts thousands of fires at once. The thermal
2:25
pulse ignites anything flammable within miles - cars, buildings, trees… they’re all going up
2:31
in flames. Everything will be burning all across the city… and all at the same time.
2:36
These blazes eventually merge into massive firestorms that create their own hurricane-force
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winds, pulling in oxygen, debris, and people. The city starts consuming itself.
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It happened in Dresden and Tokyo during World War II - and nuclear weapons are
2:50
extremely effective at triggering it. This is the part movies rarely show.
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Because surviving the blast doesn’t mean safety - it often means being trapped in a burning city
2:59
where the air itself becomes a weapon. There’s no barren wasteland. The immediate aftermath is heat,
3:05
smoke, collapsing buildings, and walls of fire. And this is only the first few hours.
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But let’s go Hollywood and say you weren’t blown up or completely vaporized in the opening salvo.
3:16
You might be wondering who fired first? Movies love the idea that once the first nuke flies,
3:20
the rest are automatic. And if you believe movies like Dr. Strangelove or HBO miniseries like By
3:25
Dawn’s Early Light, a U.S. first strike would automatically trigger Russia’s nuclear response.
3:30
It's called the Dead Hand, and it means the world would be doomed to a radioactive hell.
3:36
Except…that doesn’t really sum up the true nature of the Dead Hand.
3:41
It’s just a version of it to make movies feel more dramatic. For starters, the Dead Hand was
3:46
never a real designation in Russian military doctrine - it was a cool term cooked up by
3:51
author David E. Hoffman in 2009 for his book of the same name. What the Russians actually had was
3:56
called the Perimeter System. It was developed in the 1980s when they were worried a sudden American
4:01
nuclear attack might take out their central command, leaving them unable to retaliate.
4:05
Rather than the automatic “Doomsday Machine” everyone is panicking about in Strangelove,
4:10
the Perimeter System was actually more of an emergency backup. It ensured that
4:14
Russia wouldn’t immediately lose all leverage in the event of a surprise
4:17
attack. And this system was always human-activated, not automatic. So
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nuclear war isn’t an unstoppable machine - it’s still driven by human decisions.
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It’s not just the blast radius you have to
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worry about - because there’s another favorite movie trick.
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If you see that big, white mushroom cloud looming on the horizon,
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you might start to worry about fallout - just like every online commenter claims
4:40
should’ve happened to Gotham at the end of The Dark Knight Rises .
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But this is where we’ve got to give Christopher Nolan some credit.
4:47
When Batman detonates the nuclear weapon that was used to hold the city hostage,
4:50
the mushroom cloud is white. It’s formed out of all the water particulates evaporating under
4:55
the immense heat and force of the explosion. Unless Gotham City got really unlucky with the
5:00
wind direction, they’d actually be safe, and wouldn’t need to worry about fallout at all.
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Which raises an important question: What actually is fallout?
5:08
Put simply, radioactive fallout is debris irradiated by the blast of a nuclear explosion,
5:13
which is then carried a great distance by the force of the explosion itself. It means
5:17
the danger doesn’t stop at ground zero. In other words, a powerful enough bomb
5:21
could spread radioactive dust far beyond the blast site - enough to deliver fatal radiation
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doses several cities away. Batman’s over-water detonation and the relatively low range of the
5:31
bomb itself meant the citizens of Gotham wouldn’t be seeing their hair fall out in a week or two.
5:35
So, where’s the myth in all this? Because there is one.
5:39
Given the bomb in the movie has a stated blast radius of 6 miles (9.6 km), there’s
5:42
no way Batman would have gotten out of the danger zone in time.
5:45
Hollywood - and video games - suggest that surviving a nuclear apocalypse
5:49
means hiding in elaborate fallout shelters for generations while the radiation outside
5:53
slowly decays. But that’s just another one of those big, fat nuclear myths.
5:58
And here’s why it doesn’t hold up.
6:00
Fallout shelters are actually designed to be occupied for about two weeks. If
6:03
a nuclear bomb drops on top of you, you’d need to be miles underground to survive it.
6:08
Fallout shelters are not designed to help you survive the blast of a nuclear weapon. They
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just shield you from the radioactive fallout itself while it’s still lingering in the air.
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So surviving the blast and the fallout means humanity has a chance. Or do they?
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From our time seeing countless movies - from Mad Max to Hell Comes to Frogtown - we know
6:27
that the nuclear apocalypse would lead to surviving humans having freakish,
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mutant babies. Or worse, ones that can’t even survive birth itself.
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Would the mutant inherit the earth, or would we not be able to breed at all?
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As you’ve probably already guessed, that’s another myth right there, and it’s been
6:42
disproven by science. To quote a 1991 study titled The Children of Atomic Bomb Survivors:
6:47
A Genetic Study, “The present results show that there are no statistically significant
6:52
increases in the frequency of chromosome abnormalities among the children of the exposed.”
6:57
But what about animals and other creatures?
6:59
From the giant insect movies of the 1950s and ’60s to Godzilla himself,
7:04
Hollywood has promised that nuclear power creates monsters. But is there any truth to that?
7:09
Thankfully - in the bleakest way possible - we have Chernobyl and Fukushima as real-world test
7:14
cases for what long-term radiation does to life. Severe mutations would not be
7:18
becoming freakishly large or getting atomic breath. Real life is much crueler. Instead,
7:23
they’d be getting aggressive, cancerous tumors. So animals with extreme genetic mutations as a
7:28
result of radiation exposure often just end up dying painful and quick deaths.
7:33
But there are more subtle and less dangerous mutations out there, too. In the words of Prof
7:37
Timothy Mousseau, a biological scientist who’s spent 25 years studying ecosystems at nuclear
7:42
disaster sites, “There are… mutations that have small or partial effects,
7:46
and so they don’t kill the organism. You might see individuals with extra digits,
7:50
strange growths or asymmetries where one leg or wing is longer than another.”
7:54
Some animals do adapt to better handle being in a more radioactive environment - Chernobyl
7:59
tree frogs have on average 44% darker skin than their non-Chernobyl cousins,
8:04
because it helps them better process ionising radiation. But we’re sorry to tell you that
8:09
you almost definitely won’t be getting any Incredible Hulk-style radioactive superpowers.
8:13
But thermal blasts and fallout aren’t the only things you need to worry about.
8:17
What about the classic trope of nuclear apocalypse movies:
8:20
the electromagnetic pulse or EMP? Would a nuke going off really cause electrical chaos?
8:26
The answer is… “IT DEPENDS!”
8:28
The EMP effect of a nuclear weapon only works if it’s detonated high up enough in the atmosphere.
8:33
It’s a key plot point in the James Bond movie and basis for an iconic video game,
8:37
GoldenEye. Russian satellites would detonate nuclear weapons in the upper atmosphere and
8:41
fry the electronics in key tactical areas. But would that kind of nuclear assault actually work?
8:47
You’ll be relieved to hear, visions of cars stopping dead in the streets and entire power
8:51
grids shutting down are a Hollywood exaggeration. Power grids are built with a large number of
8:56
redundancies for this particular scenario, as well as more mundane power outages. You likely
9:01
wouldn’t see widespread damage to power plant transformers. So even if the grid was disabled,
9:06
in a worst case scenario it could be back up within a couple of months with dedicated
9:10
work - provided we’re not all dead from a thermal blast or fallout, of course.
9:14
Speaking of what the world would look like after a big nuclear blast, do Fallout and
9:18
Mad Max have it right? Will we spend the nuclear post-apocalypse driving custom hot rods through
9:23
an endless desert, firing Vietnam War era guns at each other while wearing BDSM gear?
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This is another matter where the experts are inclined to disagree with the Hollywood
9:32
movie magic makers out there. In contrast to the dusty desert battles of post-apocalyptic movies,
9:38
scientists believe the world would get much colder. In an all-out nuclear war,
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up to 150 million tons of smoke could be thrown into the atmosphere, cooling the planet into
9:47
a new ice age - one with dangerously high UV levels. So, it’d be the worst of both worlds.
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And if you’re a true Mad Max fan,
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you’re probably thinking this already. The nuclear apocalypse happens after Mad Max 2,
9:59
where a nuclear war triggers a nuclear winter that eventually gives way to a nuclear summer.
10:04
The general consensus is that this brand new, even worse ice age wouldn’t be a seasonal affair.
10:09
It’d likely last for around 30 years according to some estimates. So if we’re thinking realism,
10:14
then Mad Max would need to be a senior citizen in the latter movies, or more realistically still,
10:19
a frozen-over corpse. This would make the real result of a mass nuclear war a lot like
10:24
the ones depicted in grimmer, less action-focused nuclear war movies like The Day After and Threads.
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However, nothing is simple when it comes to the end of the world.
10:33
The production of massive amounts of black smoke isn’t disputed.
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But the exact effects on global weather and the environment are
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so unprecedented that no one knows how much the planet would change.
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In the words of RAND nuclear policy researcher, Dr. Edward Geist, “The main thing to keep in
10:48
mind… is that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what a real nuclear war would
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be like. ,The only real-world case we have… is the atomic bombings of Japan at the end of WWII and we
10:59
have good reason to doubt that nuclear weapons use in today’s environment would be similar.”
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For context, the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki
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in the 1940s were equivalent in power to about 20 million tons of TNT. The modern Tsar Bomba,
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the largest nuclear weapon that currently exists, is closer to 50 million tons. As Geist said,
11:18
so much of the theory we’ve been discussing comes from the template set by those two fateful bombs,
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and extrapolating based on the data of modern nuclear arsenals.
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So could all of this really turn into a true planetary apocalypse? A nuclear
11:31
winter. A permanently scarred Earth. And if so, how many nukes would it actually take?
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One bomb wouldn’t do it. Even a small nuclear war wouldn’t necessarily end the
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world. The real danger starts with hundreds of nuclear weapons raining down on cities.
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A full-scale U.S.-Russia nuclear war, involving thousands of warheads,
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is one of the few scenarios scientists think could realistically cause enough smoke to be
11:54
launched into the atmosphere. And while that doesn’t mean Earth becomes uninhabitable,
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it could make supporting billions of people impossible. Hollywood shows the
12:03
end of the world in an instant. But really, civilization fails before the planet does.
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The real danger was never mutant zombies, endless deserts, or cinematic doomsday machines.
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A full-blown nuclear war would be slower - and far more devastating than Hollywood.
12:18
Now check out “This Is How You Actually Survive a Nuclear Attack”, or watch this instead!
