The aftermath

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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 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. You realize you're hearing arid sirens. Your phone, which is on silent, suddenly blayers. 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 fallen shelter. Maybe ramshackle. Maybe decked out. We hunker in a gloomy underground, peeling open cans of food. Maybe for months. Maybe for years. Waiting. To come up to the surface one day and restart civilization. When we do reemerge, we join a sandy wasteland of sheet metal and cannibals. This is Thunderdown. Death is listening. 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 spyglass, and we know it was a soda bottle, and then he gets chainsawed. These depictions, though, if you ask especially study years 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? Dying 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 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, given the option in human history, most people choose live. So today, you and me, we're going to 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. A really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life. This is Are We Dimped, a production of Nuance Tales, part of the NPR network. I'm Post-Apocalyptic Ben Bradford. 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 going to survive, it's not initially about pluck. It's about location. Where are you located? I'm in Los Angeles. Oh, sure. 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. I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, but like New York City, our assumption is that New York City is glassified. Cheery. But Alex says, I am not necessarily dead, nor are you, even if you're a New Yorker. Even the most sort of destructive assumptions over 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. That is not nobody. So Alex thinks it's a mistake to assume we wouldn't survive the blast. 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 5, 10 miles in the other direction, you might not be fully toasted. You might be just a little, you know, warmed. We'd like to avoid being warmed. Alex says that means shielding ourselves from the three deadly presents a nuclear weapon brings. There's going to be heat. There's going to be blast. There's going to be radiation. 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 going to need shelter. But where? In the early days of atomic weapons, people worried about bombs equivalent to those the U.S. dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They dug conventional bomb shelters. Radiation, Alex says, was the smallest concern. If you're close enough that the radiation is going to affect you, the blast and the fire are probably a bigger deal anyway. But countries continued to build new bombs, bigger bombs, missiles. The weapons are now hundreds of times bigger, can be even thousands of times bigger. But the new effect is going to be fallout. Clouds of radiation would now sweep far from a blast site. And this is caused by the immense amount of radioactive contamination that these weapons have. It's going to affect the suburbs, it's going to 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. And so you have this window of time in which you can maybe do something about it. 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. So this is what gets us to the fallout shelter. The fallout shelter. 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. The United States government had the option to build lots of public shelters. But that's not what we ended up with. Because it's really expensive. It's hard to get that to pencil out. Yeah, right. Even $200 million could have only housed a tiny fraction of the populace. Presidents looked at this and said, I would rather spend that money on something else, like the interstate highway system. So Alex says the government's message and strategy shifted. 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 we do that by just telling you, like, you should just build your own shelter. We're not going to do it. It's of course your job to protect your family from global thermonuclear war. It's your job. For a hot minute, the backyard fallout shelter was big business. There's for profit enterprises that will sell you prefab shelters as a whole little shelter industry. Save your family from deadly nuclear fallout. You can picture the result, the hole in the ground in the backyard, ladder leading into the murk, 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. 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. There was other digging. The government may not have chosen to house all its citizens, but it has created some bunkers. These are real purpose built shelters. Alex has visited one in Massachusetts. It's outside the borders of what they think destroyed Boston would be. Half an hour from the city, the state emergency management agency uses this bunker as its current headquarters. Like it takes you underground and it's got like a big door and everything. These are the real Michelin star bunkers, the country clubs of anti-radio activity. They have all sorts of facilities. They have a morgue. But they're also very exclusive. 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. Your best bet to get in is to be like the under secretary 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 U.S.'s great Cold War rival Doug far more than we did. The Soviet Union, they did more state run projects. Big surprise, right? Like that's kind of their jam. 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. It's not clear that even they thought that was going to be very effective. Yeah. It's too expensive to build an extra city for all of your people. 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. They started a program to identify spaces that could be used as shelters, existing spaces. 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. 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. Cities and towns prepared an untold number of these kinds of makeshift shelters. Los Angeles identified more than a thousand 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. 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 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. 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 it on everybody else if it comes our way. Deterrence became the sole defense strategy. Mm-hmm. 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, 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. We don't have that much provided for us. 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. Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's odoo.com. 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. Sounds almost peaceful after all the fire and blood sounds almost peaceful after all the fire and brimstone. But it's really radioactive debris. 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. For days, winds carry the snow to all kinds of regions that weren't directly targeted. 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. It depends on how much radiation, but 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. You don't want to be the wall, you want other walls. Exactly. Alex says when you get down to it, the fallout shelter is pretty much that simple. It's just stuff that's gonna 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 radiations, relatively dense. A decent shelter could cut down the amount of radiation 10-fold, a really good one, 50-fold. 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. Roasted internally by the radiation, or you might just get sick, 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 in 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. 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 poison snow begins to fall. Dust thing down. 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. 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. We will sleep uncomfortably if we sleep at all. Oh, you can rest on a cot that's two foot from somebody else's butt. 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. The most horrific thing, I really love this, they basically made in the United States, what they're called sanitation kits. They're like a cylinder, right? And you open them and they have a toilet lid that can go on them. And they have some chemicals and some plastic bags. Here's your toilet. Because you got to go to the bathroom. And these things are squalid and disturbing. 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. And then there's a line on it that says like, this accommodates 50 people. And you're just like, this is the worst port-a-potty you can imagine. 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. It makes it really concrete what surviving needs in this circumstance, right? And that's why I like these examples totally. 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. 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 and wiping down groceries. In nuclear war, how would our lives adjust? What would that be like? Things like toilets. Really the definition of the mundane and banal. 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. Scenario two. Phone. Missiles. Scramble. Alex says without an official shelter, we're going to have to be flexible. My advice for people, sometimes people ask me, like, oh, where would you go? It's like, I don't, when is this happening? What are the odds I'm going to be sitting in the perfect location when something happens? 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. What's better is to know what to look for. You could reason your way to the best option in front of you. 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. The suit in the outside world is basically poison, and poison that can go through walls, but it gets weakened by every wall it goes through. So we want as many walls as we can find to catch the fallout, so that our bodies are not the wall. 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. A basement might work well, and underground parking garage could be even more effective. 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. We do. We run down the ramps to the lowest floor of this garage. 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? So definitely not years. 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. 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. Two weeks is sort of the maximum that anybody thought in the Cold War would probably be necessary, and that's probably overkill. 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 has passed, but eventually we chance it. We climb out to view the new world. Congratulations. You have survived a nuclear war. Everyone thought you were going to die, but you didn't. Alex says now to continue surviving, we walk. 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. Okay. 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. 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. It will stay there for years over the whole globe. And then, and only then, do we reach the most unpleasant part of surviving nuclear war. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run and grow your business with easy customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions that actually save you time from startups to scale-ups, online, in-person and on-the-go. Shopify is made for entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com. While we were underground, the poison snow fell and also, fires burned. There are city fires, big fires. 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. Yeah, I will try my best. We walk past ashes. If the nuclear war targeted cities, then the city will burn. 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 kindling. Occasionally, a gas line exploded. More fire. Electricity shorted. 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. I'm not sure how long, how many days, but probably I will guess days. Depends on how large the city is. 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. When the city burns, it will heat up the air and all the air will rise. 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. It's black carbon, we call it. The literal ashes of our civilization continue to ascend above the clouds. It will go high above where the weather happening. Above the rain. It cannot be washed out by precipitation. And the lily says that means it's going to hang there, just soaking up the sun. It's in, we call it, stratosphere and it will stay there because there's no ring to bring it down. 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. So, the soot will start to spread out. A darkened haze globally. Yeah, that's right. And it happens in... Well, if you're talking about globally, then it's probably just two to three weeks. Wow. We'll be covering the whole globe. Lily says the murky sky enveloping the globe is not just aesthetically displeasing. What would happen then? The sunlight reaching the surface, then we're going to have a cooling effect. We're not talking about a refreshing breeze or congrats we reversed global warming. We're talking cold. 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. 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 ten years. That's why we get this name nuclear winter. 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 columns of outputs that are based on the size of nuclear war. 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? Well, yes. That is the second column. That is the population starving due to the food shortage. That is like, it's much, much bigger. 10 times bigger or 15 times bigger. 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. That's like the biggest worry after a nuclear war. 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. I know. I feel the same way. Like, when I finished the calculation and when I got the number of 5 billion, I was shocked and 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. 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. Lily says the reality is the opposite. How soon would this become a problem? Well, the food storage probably the longest can survive for like a couple months. Couple months. That's it. Four months. Yeah, four months. That's it. 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, a can of butter, half a sleeve of crackers, a package of dried fruit, two cans of vegetables, a can of evaporated milk, a box of shelf-stable milk, a gallon of water per day. That's going to 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. One other option. We could walk to a place that can still grow food. In a research, Lily put together a map. She shaded it 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 Lily says even the green spots are mirages. She says her report and that grim map have a flaw that makes them too optimistic. Like New Zealand. Green because it'd still be warm enough to grow food. But Lily says how are they going to maintain their soil? Big problem over there is the fertilizer they are using is from other countries. The fertilizer industry is probably not thriving in countries devastated by nuclear war. So New Zealand is unlikely to keep getting shipments it needs. They won't. They won't. Iceland would still have enough fish. But reaching them when the temperatures drop is going to be a challenge. All those places are covered with sea ice. 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 five billion starving is almost certainly a massive underestimate. 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. That was like the first paper I published on this topic. And the result? Nuclear winter. Less severe than global nuclear war would create. But enough to kill crops in the US and China. Lily calculated a 10 to 20% drop in global food production. The drop is larger than all the past in historic variation. The world has never experienced that level of a drop in its global food production. Yeah. So the result there on even a regional war halfway around the globe. Two billion people starving. 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. Such as potato. We might expand our diets, incorporating other plants to a greater degree. Like seaweed. 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. What do you think about that? I don't want to leave that word for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I just feel it will be a horrible, horrible life and experience. 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 emerge without us. This is thunder down. 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 U.S., would survive the cell phone 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. But nuclear historian Alex Wallerstein also thinks that's why this story is useful. Maybe even containing the seed of a solve. 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. 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. The flash of 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. 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. Are We Doomed is a production of Nuance Talies. I'm Ben Bradford, creator and showrunner. Our producer is Lindsay Kilbride, editor Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer Jay Siebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes we are on YouTube are by Alborz Kamalazad. The music composed by Dylan Dajanay. 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. We hope you enjoyed this video. If you did, please like and subscribe. Thanks for watching.