The Current Nuclear Arsenal: What We’ve Got#

Right now, there are 15,000 nuclear weapons on Earth.

• The US and Russia hold the lion’s share, each having around 7,000.
• France, China, the UK, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea collectively own about 1,000 between them.

To grasp how much destructive power this is, let’s put it in perspective.

• There are roughly 4,500 cities or urban areas worldwide with populations of at least 100,000.
• Cities vary in size, so let’s figure we need about three nuclear bombs on average to completely wipe out one city.
• With our current stockpile, we could actually destroy every single city on the planet.
• This would likely kill over three billion people, which is roughly half of humanity, instantly.
• And get this – we’d still have 1,500 nuclear weapons left over. That’s what the experts call “overkill.”

So, yeah, we can confidently say we’ve got a ton of nuclear weapons, and they can cause a whole lot of damage.

Scenario 1: Exploding All 15,000 Existing Weapons#

Okay, let’s imagine we pile up all 15,000 bombs and push the button.

• We’ll drop this massive pile right in the middle of the Amazon rainforest, just to show nature who’s boss.
• All these warheads, stacked up messy-like, would actually fit into a small warehouse.
• A typical US warhead packs the punch of 200,000 tons of TNT.
• So, 15,000 warheads equal the power of three billion tons of TNT.
• To picture that scale, that’s enough energy to rebuild the entire island of Manhattan, every building and skyscraper included, using nothing but stacks of TNT.
• The closest natural event we can compare this energy to is a volcano.
• One of the deadliest eruptions ever recorded was Krakatoa in 1883. That blast was so strong it wiped out 70% of the island and nearby areas, killing tens of thousands and affecting the world for days.
• Our nuclear pile contains 15 times the energy of the Krakatoa eruption.

So, let’s finally press the button… Three, two, one.

Immediate Effects:

• In just one second, a fireball 50 kilometers across appears, vaporizing absolutely everything in its path.
• It creates a blast wave that flattens 3,000 square kilometers of forest.
• Every living thing within 250 kilometers will start to burn.
• The explosion will be heard literally around the world, with the pressure wave circling the Earth tens of times over the next few weeks.
• Millions of tons of burnt-up material are shot high into the atmosphere.
• The mushroom cloud reaches the outer edges of the stratosphere, bumping right up against space itself.

Aftermath:

• Once things settle down a bit, you’re left with a crater about ten kilometers across at the center.
• The worst fires the planet has seen in thousands of years spread out, burning forests and cities throughout South America.
• Then comes the unpleasant stuff:
  • Extremely radioactive material kills things very fast.
  • A large area, several kilometers around the crater, becomes uninhabitable.
  • Hundreds of kilometers downwind also become uninhabitable due to fallout.
  • A lot of the fallout gets carried super high by the mushroom cloud and spread around the planet.
  • The total amount of radioactive material in the environment worldwide doubles. This isn’t quite the end of civilization, but we’d probably see more cancer for a while.
  • Some particles hang out at the edge of space for years, causing a nuclear winter. This might lower global temperatures by a few degrees for a few years.

Overall, this explosion would be pretty awful, especially if you’re in South America, particularly Brazil. The Amazon rainforest is pretty much gone, which isn’t great for anyone. But, human life would go on.

Scenario 2: Exploding All Possible Nuclear Weapons (Using Earth’s Uranium)#

Okay, but what if we decided to go bigger? What if humanity mined every single bit of uranium on Earth and built as many nuclear bombs as possible?

• Estimates say there are about 35 million tons of uranium in the Earth’s crust.
• That’s enough to power human civilization for over 2,000 years, or to build millions of nuclear warheads.
• For the sake of argument, let’s say we build a pile with the power equivalent to 10 billion Hiroshima bombs.
• This pile would form a cube about three kilometers high.
• It contains roughly the same amount of energy as the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
• Except, this time, it’s also nuclear.

Three, two, one…

Immediate Effects:

• Our pile explodes in a fireball so big it stretches high into the sky, visible from half of South America.
• The power is so immense the ground simply splashes like water, forming a crater 100 kilometers across.
• Bedrock the size of entire mountain ranges is vaporized instantly.
• Thousands of tons of material are shot away so fast they’re ejected into space. Some leaves Earth forever, while most of it falls back down.
• This falling material comes down as hot, burning debris.
• It heats the atmosphere to oven-like temperatures, killing most large animals.
• Global firestorms erupt all over the world.

Wider Global Effects:

• The Earth’s crust rings like a bell hit hard, creating global earthquakes stronger than anything in recorded history. Cities worldwide are decimated.
• Hurricane-force winds flatten every single tree in South America.
• Wildfires consume the entire continent.
• The rich amount of hydrocarbons in the Amazon burn up, forming ash.
• This ash is thrown into the atmosphere, darkening the sky and stopping sunlight from reaching the surface.
• Global temperatures plummet to near freezing worldwide.
• The resulting global winter could last for decades.
• This leads to the extinction of every large animal species, humans included.
• We could also mention that every corner of the planet is covered in radioactive fallout, but honestly, at this point, it doesn’t matter much anymore.

This is, simply put, humanity’s extinction event.

The Aftermath for Potential Survivors and the Planet#

• The astronauts on the International Space Station might get a great view for a little while, but it’s pretty likely that the spray of rocks blasted into orbit would destroy the station.
• Those lucky enough to be in bunkers or deep underwater in submarines might survive the longest. But eventually, they’d run out of food and have to venture outside.
• What they’d find is a world turned into a charred, freezing, radioactive wasteland.

The planet itself? It doesn’t really care at all.

• After just a few million years, the scars from the explosions heal up.
• Life starts thriving again, arguably doing even better than when humans were around.

If intelligent life ever shows up again later on, they might be able to piece together what happened.

• When they study geology, they’d find a really weird, thin layer of rock spread all over the world.
• This layer would be full of radioactive elements like uranium and the nasty things it decays into, mixed up with rare earth metals and plastics that humans used.
• They would probably be very, very confused by what they found.