What would happen if there was a global nuclear war?

This question seems to be on many people’s minds nowadays.

A lot of people have already answered this question. Some of them quite aptly so. Others not so much. As always, the Truth is Out There. But like precious gold, it has to be dug up, melted, decanted, refined, and then exposed to the light of day.

Otherwise, everything you hear or see or read, including my own words, is just an opinion.

But as I studied piles and piles of reports about atomic weapons, from inception, including chemical and physical processes, costs, weaponization, delivery systems, explosive geometry, evolution, placement, R&D, I developed a more pregnant notion of what is it that humanity is dealing with today.

I listened and continue to listen to experts, but I am increasingly creating my own path of discovery in this respect. Their factual opinions have helped change my mindset from a doom and gloom attitude to a slightly more relaxed, yet still apprehensive, state of mind. I still fear such an eventuality but at least now, am confident that humanity will endure, after an initial brutal but limited in time, setback.

As more and more websites and enterprises seem to want to sell you on the possibility of either escaping from the afflicted Northern Hemisphere to the Global South, or make you hunker down in a bunker like in the upcoming Amazon Fallout series, I must beg to differ.

Some of us will die. A lot would buy the proverbial ticket. The lucky ones in a flash of light. The less lucky in a tornado of wind, fire, and ionizing radiation. Most of these people are city dwellers or have the misfortune to live on top or near a missile silo. These people are goners.

Now, the unlucky ones will take not days, or weeks, but months and in some cases years to succumb to a combination of radiation exposure, disease, cannibalism, murder, slow starvation, food poisoning, and lack of medical care.

There will also be people, who having come out of the Shadow of the Valley of Death, will emerge as natural born survivors. Such people will be able to survive on less than most. They will adapt, and they will flee away from wind patterns. They will choose locales that have clear flowing water and has sunlight. Although for the first two years, canned foods will replace all grown fresh food due to sunlight being blocked by gigatons of pulverized ash particles clouding the skies.

Personally, I am not so sure I would want to survive and live in a post-nuclear apocalyptic environment. So, on this front, I agree and mirror Nikita Khrushchev’s opinion that “the survivors would envy the dead.”

To make a very long story short, this is what I think. This is the worst-case scenario, i.e., multiple rounds of ICBM strikes amounting to 65–75% of atomic arsenals. In layman’s terms, we are talking about 7,000 strikes almost all in the northern hemisphere. If more than 200 strikes hit south of the equator, our collective goose is cooked.

The prevailing wind patters are such that they insulate and isolate both hemispheres from exterior interference pretty nicely. This is why you can have a nuclear war between the Northern Big Boys of the Nuclear Club and still be able to sip a pina colada in say, Tahiti, or Christmas Island, or Vanuatu, and even in Hawaii, which is north of the Line. Provided of course, it was spared from destruction.

However, given that Pearl Harbour is the Home of the US Pacific Fleet, I give Hawaii a low score of -1,000,000 in terms of chances of coming out unscathed.

But enough with the Intro.

This is what I think will happen in a major nuclear exchange north of the Line:

1. Depending on the size, intensity and spread of the nuclear exchange, as well as the prevailing seasonal weather patterns, the world would go from a ‘healthy’ 7.5 billion humans to as little as 750 million, within 5–15 years.
2. Current economic patterns will be altered, and most will vanish. But some will only bend and subside only to recover after the fallout and ‘nuclear winter’.
3. Fallout will render large swaths of land inhospitable, irradiated, and economically unusable. Nuclear winter will kick in under this worst-case scenario killing off massive amounts of fauna and flora of the biosphere. This stage will last from Year 1 throughout Year 7–10.
4. The large amount of nuclear ash and soot preventing normal sunlight cycle will have fallen back to Earth by Year 10. The natural recovery of the habitat will be the direct driver for a boom in human population due to re-emerging resources. Which in turn will serve as a primer for the economic, technological, and societal take-off that will follow starting in Year 15.
5. By Year 20 post-nuclear war, the Earth’s population will have reached critical mass. For the purposes of this exercise, let us consider 1 billion humans as critical mass for starting back on the road to recovery to pre-WW3 levels. So, given that it took Human Sapiens Fossilis & Sapiens approximately 130,000–160,000 years to reach 1 billion (1804), and that it only took another 123 years to reach 2 billion (1927), and 33 years to reach the next step in the ladder, I believe it is safe to say that modern medicine and technology can help us cut corners and shave at least half of the time required to reach 7.5 billion (1 bn – 7.5 bn in 215 years)
6. In conclusion: humanity will take cca. 100 years to recover to pre-WW3 population levels, which we know to correspond to their equivalent in terms of the economy, society, culture, technology, the whole nine yards.
7. This setback will be but a hiccup in evolutionary terms and it might well provide humanity with the much needed lesson that our future cannot be found under the cloud of nuclear mushrooms, but beyond our little planet and among the stars. (“To infinity and beyond!”)
8. Without WW3 and nuclear warfare, who can say whether humanity might ever be motivated enough to reach out and explore the universe or not. Chances are that unless we are prodded on a monumental scale by some highly disturbing and conscience-altering event, we the people of the Earth may never abandon our evolutionary indolence and near-sightedness and follow our manifest destiny in the cosmos!