The aftermath

What would life look like after a global nuclear war? Would underground bunkers work? What would we do for food? What about radioactive snow?! In this episode of ⁠Are We Doomed?⁠, reporter Ben Bradford tries to find out. Guest: Ben Bradford, host of ⁠Are We Doomed?⁠ For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:30Speaker 00

  This is Unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton, and today we have an episode from a show called Are We Doomed? The show is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Every episode, the host, Ben Bradford, digs into a potentially terrible doomsday scenario. And the thing about terrible doomsday scenarios is that they are really fun to make up stories about, right? We have lots of great TV and movies and books telling us what the various ends of the world might look like. But I have always personally been curious about what we actually know, about how doomsday scenarios might play out. What is hype? What is real? What we don't know for sure? And what I appreciate about "Are We Doomed?"

• 2:15Speaker 00

  is that even though we will never know exactly what the end of the world as we know it will look like, Ben speaks to various researchers who are trying to figure things out. And so here is Ben Bradford and one potentially terrible doomsday scenario.

• 2:35Speaker 02

  You realize you're hearing air raid sirens. Your phone, which is on silent, suddenly blares. It's an emergency alert. Nuclear missiles inbound. This is not a test. This is not a test. You stare until a text from a friend jolts you into action. If we follow the roadmap of countless TV shows, novels, video games, what we do next is clear. We scurry down a ladder and clamp the hatch on a fallout shelter. Maybe ramshackle, maybe decked out. We hunker in a gloomy underground, peeling open cans of food, maybe for months, maybe for years, waiting.

• 3:20Speaker 03

  To come up to the surface one day and restart civilization.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  When we do reemerge, we join a sandy wasteland of sheet metal and cannibals.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  This is Thunderdome. Death is listening.

• 3:38Speaker 02

  It's not great, but at least it's exciting. I love post-apocalypse movies. Mad Max, The Road, Snowpiercer, the Waterworld live show, really good. I think there's something entrancing about a future wasteland. It's like a blank slate for a filmmaker to create a new world, but with little Easter eggs for us. A character has a spy class, and we know it was a soda bottle, and then he gets chainsawed.

• 4:05Speaker 02

  These depictions, though, if you ask, especially studiers of nuclear war and fallout, are not exactly realistic. And I have a question. We've known since our first episode how easy it could be to start nuclear war. If the missiles do launch, if the air raid sirens really do go off, then what? There are bunkers and fallout shelters. Do they work? Who would go into them? How long might one actually be down there? If you survived, what world would you actually walk back into? Die in times here. Not that one. I think a really common answer is, well, I'll just be dead, so I don't have to worry

• 4:50Speaker 02

  about it. If you're in that camp, I got some rough news. In an actual nuclear scenario, the best estimates are that while a horrific, unfathomable number of people die, a lot remain alive. And then...

• 5:03Speaker 05

  Given the option, in human history, most people choose live.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  So today, you and me, we're gonna survive nuclear war. From finding shelter to figuring out what our post-nuclear world really looks like. It will be deeply unpleasant, and not in a Mad Max way.

• 5:23Speaker 05

  A really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  This is Are We Doomed?, a production Nuanced Tales, part of the NPR network. I'm post-apocalyptic Ben Bradford.

• 5:41Speaker 02

  Rewind to where all this started. The air raid sirens screech. Our phones blare with emergency alerts. Missiles are inbound. This time, it's not a Hollywood movie. So if we're gonna survive, it's not initially about pluck. It's about location.

• 5:58Speaker 05

  Where are you located?

• 5:59Speaker 02

  I'm in Los Angeles.

• 6:00Speaker 05

  Oh, sure.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I assume that I'm dead, but we can discuss. This is Alex Wellerstein, nuclear weapons historian, author, developer of a detailed organ trail-like video game on the subject of survival and what it would be like. Alex says, in all-out global nuclear war, every major city is a prime target.

• 6:20Speaker 05

  I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, but like, New York City. Our assumption is that New York City is glassified.

• 6:27Speaker 02

  Cheery. But Alex says, "I am not necessarily dead, nor are you, even if you're a New Yorker."

• 6:33Speaker 05

  Even the most sort of destructive assumptions of the Cold War, where we assume the Soviet Union was just trying to like, just take out Americans, essentially. It's still concluded that you could have 40% surviving, or something like that. That's not nobody.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  That is not nobody. So Alex thinks it's a mistake to assume we wouldn't survive the blast.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Depending on where you're living, depending on where the weapon is targeted, depending on where it goes off, you might be hopeless. But Los Angeles is large, as you know. If the bomb actually lands on you, you're toast. But they can miss. If it lands five, 10 miles in the other direction, you might, you might not be fully toasted. You might be just a little, you know, warmed.

• 7:19Speaker 02

  "We'd like to avoid being warmed," Alex says. "That means shielding ourselves from the three deadly presents a nuclear weapon brings."

• 7:28Speaker 05

  "There's gonna be heat, there's gonna be blasts, there's gonna be radiation."

• 7:33Speaker 02

  "The heat reaches the temperature of the sun, the blast crushes concrete buildings like walnuts, and the radiation melts our DNA. If we're outside the zone of certain death, but inside the reach of any of these three presents, we're gonna need shelter. But where?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  In the early days of atomic weapons, people worried about bombs equivalent to those the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They dug conventional bomb shelters. Radiation, Alex says, was the smallest concern."

• 8:06Speaker 05

  "If you're close enough that the radiation is gonna affect you, the blast and the fire are probably a bigger deal anyway."

• 8:12Speaker 02

  But countries continued to build new bombs, bigger bombs, missiles.

• 8:17Speaker 05

  "The weapons are now hundreds of times bigger, can be even thousands of times bigger. But the new effect is going to be fallout."

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Clouds of radiation would now sweep far from a blast site.

• 8:28Speaker 05

  "And this is caused by the immense amount of radioactive contamination that these weapons have. It's gonna affect the suburbs, it's gonna affect agriculture. And so the idea is, that doesn't happen instantly. That will take several hours for that radiation to make its way across."

• 8:47Speaker 05

  And so you have this window of time in which you can maybe do something about it.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  So more people dug deeper, even farther from the projected blast sites. They didn't just look to shield from potential blasts. They looked to seal themselves away from radiation.

• 9:04Speaker 05

  So this is what gets us to the fallout shelter.

• 9:08Speaker 02

  The fallout shelter.

• 9:11Speaker 02

  In the early 1960s, Life magazine gushed on its cover. 97 out of 100 people can be saved with fallout shelters. That was wildly optimistic. President John F. Kennedy called for more than $200 million to build public shelters, equivalent to almost $2.5 billion today.

• 9:29Speaker 05

  The United States government had the option to build lots of public shelters.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  But that's not what we ended up with.

• 9:36Speaker 05

  Because it's really expensive.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  It's hard to get that a pencil out.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, right.

• 9:40Speaker 02

  Even $200 million could have only housed a tiny fraction of the populace.

• 9:45Speaker 05

  Presidents looked at this and said, I would rather spend that money on something else, like the interstate highway system.

• 9:52Speaker 02

  So Alex says the government's message and strategy shifted.

• 9:56Speaker 05

  So what they do is what we always do in the United States when we like have a public health problem, but we don't want to fund it, which is that we encourage you to take responsibility for your own health. And, and we do that by just telling you like, you should just build your own shelter. We're not going to do it.

• 10:13Speaker 02

  It's of course your job to protect your family from global thermonuclear war.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  It's your job.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  For a hot minute, the backyard fallout shelter was big business.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  There's for-profit enterprises that will sell you prefab shelters. There's a whole little shelter industry.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  Save your family from deadly nuclear fallout.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  You can picture the result, the hole in the ground in the backyard, ladder leading into the merc, canned food on green metal shelves, a studio apartment for the apocalypse. People did dig these and still do, but Alex says there were never that many.

• 10:50Speaker 05

  In general, it's a pretty small number of people who actually build a shelter. It's really hard to do. It's expensive and it's coming out of your pocket.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  There was other digging. The government may not have chosen to house all its citizens, but it has created some bunkers.

• 11:08Speaker 05

  These are real purpose-built shelters.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  Alex has visited one in Massachusetts.

• 11:13Speaker 05

  It's outside the borders of what they think destroyed Boston would be.

• 11:18Speaker 02

  Half an hour from the city, the State Emergency Management Agency uses this bunker as its current headquarters.

• 11:24Speaker 05

  Like, it takes you underground and it's got like a big door and everything.

• 11:27Speaker 02

  These are the real Michelin star bunkers, the country clubs of anti-radioactivity.

• 11:32Speaker 05

  They have all sorts of facilities. They have a morgue.

• 11:36Speaker 02

  But they're also very exclusive.

• 11:38Speaker 05

  They're designated for different parts of the government to basically be whisked away to so that they can do what's called continuity of government. So the idea is that they'll survive and somehow run the country from down underneath a destroyed mountain.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Your best bet to get in is to be like the undersecretary of education. It didn't have to be this way. We could have dug ourselves large public shelters. Other countries did. Switzerland still assigns every citizen a spot in a public fallout shelter. Finland and Sweden created some real first-class facilities with gyms and classrooms and ball courts. Even the US's great Cold War rival dug far more than we did.

• 12:21Speaker 05

  The Soviet Union, they did more state-run projects. Big surprise, right? Like, that's kind of their jam.

• 12:29Speaker 02

  But Alex says there were legitimate reasons to not do this kind of building. The Soviets could probably only have housed about 20% of their enormous population.

• 12:38Speaker 05

  It's not clear that even they thought that was going to be very effective.

• 12:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:42Speaker 05

  It's too expensive to build an extra city for all of your people.

• 12:47Speaker 02

  Not only are you digging a new city under your current city, you have to stock that unused city with food and water for its theoretical inhabitants. It's a lot. This all matters, not as some dusty history lesson. It matters for us today, as we escape from the missiles, scrambling for shelter in the aftermath. We need to figure out where to go. With few backyard shelters or expensive public bunkers, lawmakers did provide one other option. If we weren't going to build new structures, we would at least recycle.

• 13:19Speaker 05

  They start a program to identify spaces that could be used as shelters, existing spaces.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  In the 1960s, military surveyors hunted for places we'd already built or dug, rooms that with minor adjustments and the right supplies could stand in to provide some protection from radiation.

• 13:37Speaker 05

  Some underground basement that was identified by a survey as like, yeah, this meets the minimum requirements for like what a fallout shelter would be. It's made out of this, it's got this many stories above it, it's got this and that.

• 13:49Speaker 02

  Cities and towns prepared an untold number of these kinds of makeshift shelters. Los Angeles identified more than 1,000 sites. If you walk through New York City today, you can still see signs, faded yellow and black placards featuring the radiation symbol and the words fallout shelter. So, the air raid sirens howl, our phones blare, missiles screech. We stagger through city streets among panicked masses, literally racing from the imminent heat blast and subsequent fallout. We happen to spot one of those yellow and black placards and follow the arrows until we reach the end where they're pointing, and we find... nothing. All of these shelters are defunct.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  New York is taking down its placards, although there's confusion over even what agency is responsible for that. Los Angeles stopped maintaining its shelters decades ago, and an inspector in the 1970s, per the LA Times, found food had rotted, medicine that hadn't been stolen had coagulated. Chicago, the situation's similar.

• 14:52Speaker 05

  There was a time in which people thought the only way we can deal with nuclear war is to basically dig. And what happened is they basically concluded that they didn't want to dig anymore, and the only way they're going to deal with nuclear war was to threaten to unleash on everybody else if it comes our way.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  Deterrence became the sole defense strategy.

• 15:12Speaker 05

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:15Speaker 02

  We prevent war by pointing our weapons at each other. But we're not planning anymore, not really, for what happens after if we ever pull the trigger. On one hand, that makes sense. We don't plan for what to do if the universe spontaneously collapses either, even though it's theoretically possible and we will cover it. It's just too destructive. On the other hand, the lack of planning for nuclear war would leave millions and millions of people, possibly you and me, on our own, holding the bag.

• 15:44Speaker 05

  We don't have that much provided for us.

• 15:47Speaker 02

  However, good news. You and I are going to survive. We're going to spot our own shelter, hunker down in it, and emerge into a new world.

• 16:04Speaker 00

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• 18:56Speaker 02

  The missiles crash and explode over our cities, over our military sites. In the area of each explosion, heat melts everything down to its atoms. Fires burst out spontaneously miles into the distance. The blast force pushes the world flat around it. And then, nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein says, something that looks like snow begins to fall. It sounds almost peaceful after all the fire and brimstone.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  But it's really radioactive debris. It's basically pulverized earth that has been impregnated with the remains of nuclear fission. And it's like snow that's dusting down. And that snow is radioactive, right? So it's shooting out little particles.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  For days, winds carry the snow to all kinds of regions that weren't directly targeted.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  So if we're not atomized by the heat or crushed by the blast, even if we're far away from all of it, we gotta avoid the snow, the fallout. Theoretically, that's what all these fallout shelters were for. Although I wonder, was that real? Would they actually work? Was this just like a psychological thing? Or is this something that's like, oh yeah, actually for the four people who actually make it into these things, they're probably gonna be okay.

• 20:15Speaker 05

  Um, it depends on how much radiation, but the, the science behind them is pretty straightforward. Every time those little particles hit something else, they basically stop. If it's possible, you'd like a wall to absorb that or the dirt to absorb that and not you.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  You don't want to be the wall. You want other walls.

• 20:34Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  Alex says, when you get down to it, the fallout shelter is pretty much that simple.

• 20:40Speaker 05

  It's just stuff that's going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb. So every foot of dirt you have, every brick you have, steel, lead, obviously these are very dense things. A bunch of water, water is actually pretty good at absorbing lots of radiation. It's relatively dense.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  A decent shelter could cut down the amount of radiation tenfold. A really good one, 50 fold.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Does that help you? It depends how much is coming in in the first place. If what's coming in is 50 times more than what would kill you, you're still dead.

• 21:14Speaker 02

  Roasted internally by the radiation.

• 21:17Speaker 05

  Or you might just get sick.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Radiation poisoning that we recover from. But still, if we're trying to survive, our best hope is walls, lots of walls. Let's map two scenarios of where we might find them. Rewind, our phones blare, missiles are in the sky. The air raid sirens actually do not screech because in most places they do not work anymore. We're not looking for a backyard shelter because unless we're Jim the Prepper, we have our own, there aren't that many, and plus, it's rude to go into people's backyards. We're not ending up in a government bunker unless we have very, very special clearance. But perhaps, perhaps, our local emergency services scramble heroically. They put together makeshift shelters, as they do in hurricanes, or earthquakes, or wildfire.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  Maybe they fill one of those sites first identified back in the 1960s, where we know it will cut radiation exposure. So we're hurriedly ushered inside a dank, disused, moldy, office basement, other strangers packing with us. The door bolts shut. Outside, the poisoned snow begins to fall.

• 22:22Speaker 05

  Dusting down.

• 22:24Speaker 02

  Everything gets very still and quiet. Then, what? Alex Wallerstein says if our shelter is anything like the old government plans, we're in for a bad time.

• 22:39Speaker 05

  Some of this stuff looks dire. I mean, some of these American plans for public shelters are things like, alright, we'll make a room and we'll just like, fit 20 people in this room even though it's not very big.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  We will sleep uncomfortably, if we sleep at all.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Oh, you can rest on a cot that's two foot from somebody else's butt.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  We drink bottled water and eat canned food, or MREs, that the emergency personnel were able to leave with us. But what's worse is the plumbing situation.

• 23:07Speaker 05

  The most horrific thing, I really love this. They basically made, in the United States, what they call sanitation kits.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:15Speaker 05

  They're like a cylinder, right? And you open them and they have a toilet lid that can go on them.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 23:22Speaker 05

  And they have some chemicals and some plastic bags.

• 23:24Speaker 02

  Here's your toilet.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Because you gotta go to the bathroom.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:27Speaker 05

  And these things are squalid and disturbing.

• 23:30Speaker 02

  Princeton University ran an experiment in the late 1950s. They put a family in a basement fallout shelter for two weeks. Other than boredom, their biggest challenge was the odor of the chemical toilet. That was with only four of them.

• 23:43Speaker 05

  And then there's a line on it that says like, this accommodates 50 people. And you're just like, this is the worst porta potty you can imagine.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  I don't want to make light of nuclear Armageddon. This sanitation product is obviously not the worst thing about nuclear war, not even close, but it kind of feels like it is.

• 24:02Speaker 05

  It makes it really concrete what surviving means in this circumstance, right? And that's why I like these examples.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 24:09Speaker 05

  It's not abstract. It's not like a blinding light or, you know, it's not a post-apocalyptic Mad Max thing. It's like a really terrible toilet, the worst toilet of your entire life.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  This is really why I was interested in this episode. More than any news you can use, even though we are surviving nuclear war, this is a story about what the reality would feel like should we ever launch these weapons. A lot of people would have to adjust quickly to new circumstances and humans do that. You may remember a few years ago, this first in a century pandemic swept through and suddenly everyone was wearing cloth masks, wiping down groceries. In nuclear war, how would our lives adjust? What would that be like?

• 24:52Speaker 05

  Things like toilets, really the definition of the mundane and banal.

• 24:58Speaker 02

  And yet, for a lot of us, the actual experience is probably not even getting that horrifying toilet because remember, the makeshift shelter is unlikely. More likely, no one's coming for us.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  Scenario two.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Phone. Missiles. Scramble.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Alex says, without an official shelter, we're going to have to be flexible.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  My advice for people, sometimes people ask me like, oh, where would you go? And it's like, I don't, I don't, when is this happening? What are the odds I'm going to be sitting in the perfect location when something happens?

• 25:33Speaker 02

  I'm imagining Jim the prepper, who really put the labor into digging out his stocked up shelter, finding out the end of the world is happening while he's on a work trip.

• 25:40Speaker 05

  What's better is to know what to look for. You could reason your way to the best option in front of you.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  Alex says, we grab a go bag from our home or our car and we're very simply looking to get away from the snow.

• 25:54Speaker 05

  Assume the outside world is basically poison, and poison that can go through walls, but it gets weakened by every wall it goes through.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  So we want as many walls as we can find to catch the fallout, so that our bodies are not the wall.

• 26:07Speaker 05

  It's better to be inside. You know, you want to be in the center of a building, and ideally, the bigger the building is better. Underground is even better.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  A basement might work well. An underground parking garage could be even more effective.

• 26:20Speaker 05

  So that if you were in this situation, you'd be like, oh, there's an underground parking lot over there. Let's go there.

• 26:27Speaker 02

  We do. We run down the ramps to the lowest floor of this garage.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  This is currently essentially the official guidance here in Los Angeles. You're on your own. Find shelter. Have a go-bag with food and water. Stay there and wait. I think in my head, it's like you're down there for years. Now we're mole people. What is it actually?

• 26:52Speaker 05

  So definitely not years.

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Alex says how long we have to stay in our parking lot with god knows what kind of food or water, and not even a squalid chemical toilet, depends on the size of the bomb, our location, and therefore, the amount of radioactivity.

• 27:06Speaker 05

  So fish and products have a pretty regular decay curve. Every, basically, seven hours you're in there, the intensity is going down by a factor of 10.

• 27:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 27:18Speaker 05

  Two weeks is sort of the maximum that anybody thought in the Cold War would probably be necessary. And that's probably overkill.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Got it. We're down in our garage. A week, two weeks. Surprisingly reasonable. You might dare think manageable. Still, during those days underground, it's dark. Our flashlights run out of batteries. Our phones, unless we keep them off, run out of batteries. We may not know how much time's passed. But eventually, we chance it. We climb out to view the new world.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Congratulations, you have survived nuclear war. Everyone thought you were gonna die, but you didn't. Alex says, now, to continue surviving, we walk.

• 28:05Speaker 05

  Being able to leave does not mean you can just like go back to your regular life and still live there. The area may be too radioactive to be habitable.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 28:13Speaker 05

  But there's a difference between like, safe enough to walk through, and like, safe enough to live in 24 hours a day, constantly being exposed with vulnerable populations like pregnant women and children, you know?

• 28:28Speaker 02

  And so Alex says, unless we're packing a Geiger counter that tells us it's safe, we walk. We seek an area away from fallout, away from the toxic ash from burnt homes and buildings. We walk away from our leveled cities or towns, away from the fires and the deadly white snow. And as we walk, looking for our next shelter, we notice the sky. It's unusually dark. The wind gains a new bite.

• 28:55Speaker 04

  It will stay there for years, over the whole globe.

• 29:00Speaker 02

  And then, and only then, do we reach the most unpleasant part of surviving nuclear war.

• 29:13Speaker 01

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• 29:54Speaker 02

  While we were underground, the poison snow fell. And also, fires burned.

• 29:59Speaker 04

  There were city fires, big fires.

• 30:02Speaker 02

  Lily Shaw, a climate scientist at Rutgers, specializes in what happens to the planet, and in an important way, us, after nuclear war. I asked her to pick up the story from where we left off emerging from our smelly shelters, beginning to walk.

• 30:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, I will try my best.

• 30:21Speaker 02

  We walk past ashes.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  If the nuclear war targeted cities, then the city will burn.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  The fires burned hot, and they burned slow. We can see what happened. The buildings, with their wood frames, their insides stuffed with flammable furniture, were like kindling. Occasionally, a gas line exploded. More fire. Electricity shortened. More fire. There was no one above ground to put them out. No fire department. So, the ashes now stretch for hundreds of miles. Some may still be smoldering as we walk because they burned so long.

• 30:54Speaker 04

  I'm not sure how long, how many days, but probably, I would guess, days. Depends on how large the city is.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  We look up at the sky. It's dark. This is going to be our big problem. It's also a result of these fires.

• 31:09Speaker 04

  When the city burns, it will heat up the air, and all the air will rise.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  It rises so fast, it creates low pressure underneath, essentially, a giant vacuum cleaner into the sky. In fact, if someone had managed to survive the nuclear explosion, they could have felt the oxygen sucked straight out of their lungs by this pressure. So, the vacuum also sucks in the ash from our buildings and our people, straight upward.

• 31:37Speaker 04

  It's black carbon, we call it.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  The literal ashes of our civilization continue to ascend above the clouds.

• 31:44Speaker 04

  It will go high above where the weather happening.

• 31:48Speaker 02

  Above the rain.

• 31:49Speaker 04

  It cannot be washed out by precipitation.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  And Lily says that means it's going to hang there, just soaking up the sun.

• 31:57Speaker 04

  It's in, we call it, a stratosphere, and it will stay there because there's no rain to bring it down.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  If we're in an all-out global nuclear war, the results we're witnessing as we walk, the soot in the sky, has happened to pretty much every major city in the northern hemisphere. Hundreds. Even if you were far from any missile blast or any fallout zone in a region that was not a target, a country that was not involved, your sky would turn dark too. And it stays dark.

• 32:27Speaker 04

  So the soot will start to spread out.

• 32:30Speaker 02

  A darkened haze globally.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right.

• 32:34Speaker 02

  And it happens in...

• 32:36Speaker 04

  Well, if you're talking about globally, then it's probably just two to three weeks.

• 32:43Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 32:43Speaker 04

  Will be covering the whole globe.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  Lily says the murky sky enveloping the globe is not just aesthetically displeasing. What would happen then?

• 32:54Speaker 04

  The sunlight reaching the surface, then we're going to have a cooling effect.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  We're not talking about a refreshing breeze or "congrats, we reversed global warming." We're talking cold.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  The first year, you will see it already. Like, in the summer, the temperature will drop by more than 15 degrees Celsius. Summer temperature will be low freezing.

• 33:17Speaker 02

  Below freezing in the summer. And then it gets colder than that. A deep freeze. And it stays that way. More or less for five to 10 years.

• 33:26Speaker 04

  That's why we get this name "nuclear winter."

• 33:32Speaker 02

  If we have found a new community after walking from our temporary shelter, we are impoverished but alive. If one year passes, we have a new problem. A bigger problem than any we've faced yet. Fire, force, fallout. The problem is not freezing, not that we need a coat. It's that we have to grow food in the frozen ground. And this is really why I've called Lily, because she is the expert on what happens to our food in this scenario. There would quickly not be much of it. You put together a table for a report on famine that would follow nuclear war. And Lily, it's terrifying. It has these two...

• 34:14Speaker 02

  Columns of outputs that are based on the size of nuclear war. You know, one is the direct fatalities, the number of people killed by blasts and radiation. It's unbelievable. And then there's the second column that is even more unbelievable. What is that second column?

• 34:34Speaker 04

  Well, yes, that is the second column. That is like the population starving due to like the food shortage. And that is like, it's much, much bigger. 10 times bigger or 15 times bigger.

• 34:52Speaker 02

  A common estimate projects an all out global nuclear war would pretty much instantly take out 360 million people, roughly the equivalent of deleting the entire United States. Two years later, though, famine would kill 5 billion. That's like wiping the entire continent of Asia off the map. 60% of the entire Earth's population. So that means when surviving nuclear war, we're much less likely to die in the blast than to starve to death after.

• 35:21Speaker 04

  That's like the biggest worry after a nuclear war.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  I'm just wondering, like, if you remember how you felt as you kind of put that together doing this research. You know, I mean, it's just, it's hard to comprehend and it is just so terrifying.

• 35:43Speaker 04

  I know, I feel the same way. Like, when I finished the calculation and when I got the number 5 billion, I was shocked and I, I double-checked, double-checked and double-checked because that's like a number I feel I'm afraid, I just cannot really look at that number.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  In the post-apocalypse movie, the handful of disheveled survivors of the blasts have a ready solution to the oncoming food crisis. They raid gas stations or live in supermarkets, crack open a cream of mushroom one night, scoop out a handful of Vienna sausages the next. Canned food from the before times seems to outnumber the mouths to feed. Lilly says the reality is the opposite. How soon would this become a problem?

• 36:30Speaker 04

  Well, the food storage, probably the longest, can survive for like a couple of months.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  Couple of months.

• 36:36Speaker 04

  That's it. Four months. Yeah, four months. That's it.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  If you personally want to hoard five years of canned food, well, here's the suggestion on the Missouri Department of Homeland Security's website for what you'll need each day. A can of an animal protein, a can of beans, a can of fruit, so peanut butter, half a sleeve of crackers, a package of dried fruit, two cans of vegetables, or vegetable juice, a can of evaporated milk, a box of shelf-stable milk, gallon of water, per day. That's gonna take some real estate to store. And if you're in an area that requires any kind of fleeing from blasts or fallout, well, good luck bringing it with you.

• 37:14Speaker 02

  One other option: we could walk to a place that can still grow food. In her research, Lilly put together a map. She shaded in red countries that simply would not be able to grow enough food to sustain their surviving populations. That's most of the world. But there are a few green spots: Australia, New Zealand, a bit of South America, and one tiny dot in the northern hemisphere: Iceland, a fast harvester of fish. We could try to navigate to these places. I hope someone knows how to sail. Except Lilly says even the green spots are mirages. She says her report and that grim map have a flaw that makes them too optimistic.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Like New Zealand: green because it'd still be warm enough to grow food. But Lilly says, how are they gonna maintain their soil?

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Big problem over there is the fertilizer they are using is from other countries.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  The fertilizer industry is probably not thriving in countries devastated by nuclear war. So New Zealand is unlikely to keep getting shipments it needs.

• 38:18Speaker 04

  They won't. They won't.

• 38:20Speaker 02

  Iceland would still have enough fish, but reaching them when the temperatures drop is gonna be a challenge.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  All those places are covered with sea ice.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  There are countless other problems you could add: destroyed electric grids, radiation-blasted crops, mass migration from devastated countries, people like us, putting further pressure on whatever food does get grown. All which means 5 billion starving is almost certainly a massive underestimate.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  By the way, we wouldn't emerge unscathed even from a smaller regional nuclear war that would seem not to touch us, say between India and Pakistan.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  That was like the first paper I published on this topic.

• 39:01Speaker 02

  And the result? Nuclear winter. Less severe than global nuclear war would create, but enough to kill crops in the US and in China. Lilly calculated a 10 to 20% drop in global food production.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  The drop is larger than all the past historic variations.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  The world has never experienced that level of a drop in its global food production.

• 39:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 39:25Speaker 02

  So, the result there on even a regional war halfway around the globe?

• 39:29Speaker 04

  2 billion people starving.

• 39:31Speaker 02

  Humans could fight back. In the year after nuclear war, in a race against the onset of nuclear winter, we could look to grow more resilient foods.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  Such as potato?

• 39:42Speaker 02

  We might expand our diets, incorporating other plants to a greater degree.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Like seaweed.

• 39:48Speaker 02

  Or duckweed, that floating green weed that grows on stagnant ponds. Delicious. We could incorporate insects or grubs. Delicious. We could slaughter our livestock and eat their food to boot. Delicious. Um, what do you think about that?

• 40:04Speaker 04

  I don't want living in that world. For sure.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, I just feel it will be a horrible, horrible life and experience.

• 40:16Speaker 02

  We know in very real terms what it would mean to actually survive nuclear war. No fun sheet metal cars, no glorious battles for oil, no shutting ourselves away for the duration to be delighted or appalled by the strange cultures that emerged without us. This is thunderdome. And, at least for most of us, no flash of light freeing us from the burden of our earthly bodies. In the reality, billions of people, most people, including many here in the US, would survive the cellphone warnings, the missiles incoming, the deadly snow. Some of us would shelter, some of us wouldn't need to. We would walk outside, cities leveled, and then we would suffer a miserable journey from bad toilets to starvation.

• 41:01Speaker 02

  But nuclear historian Alex Wallerstein also thinks that's why this story is useful, maybe even containing the seed of a solve.

• 41:11Speaker 05

  It would be much better not to have nuclear war. We'll just put that out there in the first place. That's not the best.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  He thinks if we want our nations and our political leaders to avoid pushing the red buttons that can destroy the world, a good way is to impress what it really means.

• 41:28Speaker 05

  The flash a light thing, where it's just over for you, that's so easy and clean. That's just you not having any more obligations. That's its own kind of fantasy. The reality is so much darker. And that, I think, can compel one to take more seriously the idea that we should not get in that position in the first place.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  If we want to stop nuclear war from ever happening, one of our best hopes may be this: to stop imagining how it ends and start picturing what it means to survive.

• 42:13Speaker 02

  Are We Doomed is a production of Nuanced Tales. I'm Ben Bradford, creator and showrunner. Our producer is Lindsay Kilbride, editor Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer Jay Sebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes, we are on YouTube, are by Alborz Kamalazad. Theme music composed by Dylan Dajonay. Are We Doomed is distributed by the NPR network. Big thanks to Dan McCoy, Kalia Ali, and the rest of the team at NPR for all they do. And most of all, thank you for exploring the apocalypse with us.

• 43:11Speaker 01

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• 43:50Speaker 05

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