The Story Begins: One Explosion in a Major City#

Picture this: It’s the middle of downtown in a big city. People are doing their normal things – going to work, studying, lost in their thoughts. Right in this everyday scene, a nuclear weapon is detonated. For a moment, time seems to freeze.

Phase 1: The First Fraction of a Second#

This happens within less than a second.

• Millisecond Mark: A ball of plasma, hotter than the surface of the Sun, appears.
• Growing Fireball: This ball rapidly grows into a fireball that gets to be more than 2 kilometres across.
• Inside the Fireball: Everything and everyone within this ball is simply gone. Think about dripping water onto a super hot pan – you hear a sizzle, and then it’s just… nothing. Most buildings, cars, trees, those weird sculptures you see downtown, and people – all just evaporated.

Then comes the light and heat:

• The Flash: An incredibly intense wave of light washes over the city instantly, like a tsunami of light. If your head happens to be pointed towards the explosion, you’ll be blinded for a few hours.
• The Thermal Pulse: This bright light creates a thermal pulse, a wave of intense heat. It’s so hot and powerful that it burns everything up to 13 kilometres away from where the bomb went off.
• Burning Everything: This means that in an area covering 500 square kilometres, anything that can burn starts burning. That includes plastic, wood, fabric, hair, and skin. If you were within reach of this heat pulse, one second you’re just going about your day, the next second, you’re on fire.

Phase 2: A Few Seconds Later#

This phase happens in a few seconds.

• Late Realization: Most people will only start to notice something is terribly wrong now. But by this point, it’s already too late for hundreds of thousands of people.
• The Shockwave: Right after the light and heat comes the shockwave. The heat and radiation from the fireball created a huge bubble of superheated, super-squished air. Now, this bubble is exploding outwards, fast.
• Faster than Sound: This wave moves faster than the speed of sound, creating winds stronger than the worst hurricanes and tornadoes you can imagine.
• Total Destruction: Regular buildings can’t stand up to this. Most big buildings within a kilometre of the fireball are basically ground into dust down to their foundations. Only buildings made with heavy steel-reinforced concrete might survive, and only partially.
• Nature’s Response: In parks nearby, where maybe retirees were feeding the ducks just moments before, trees that were blackened and smoking from the heat now snap like tiny toothpicks.
• People Outdoors: If you were outside when the shockwave hit, you’d be tossed away like a tiny speck of dust in a tornado.
• Collapsing Houses: As the shockwave travels outwards, it gets weaker, but it’s still incredibly powerful. Houses in an area of about 175 square kilometres collapse as if they were just piles of cards. Tens of thousands of people who didn’t have time to react are trapped inside.
• Spreading Fires: Gas stations explode, and fires spread rapidly through all the fallen buildings and rubble.
• The Mushroom Cloud: In the minutes that follow, a mushroom cloud starts rising kilometres into the sky. It’s made of what’s left of the fireball, plus tons of dust and ash pulled up from the ground. It casts a dark shadow over the ruined city.
• Wind and Oxygen: As the cloud rises, it violently sucks in fresh air from around the city. This gusting wind can destroy even more damaged buildings. On the flip side, all that fresh air provides plenty of oxygen for the fires.
• Firestorm Potential: What happens next really depends on the city. If there’s enough stuff to burn (fuel), the many fires might join up and turn into a massive firestorm. This firestorm would burn everything in its path – the rubble, everyone trapped inside, and even people trying desperately to run away.
• Distant Danger: Even as far as 21 kilometres from the blast, people just like you might be rushing to their windows to take pictures of the strange mushroom cloud they see rising. They won’t realize that the shockwave is still heading towards them. It’s about to hit, shattering their windows and sending a blizzard of sharp glass flying everywhere.

Phase 3: The Hours and Days After#

This phase starts in the coming hours and days.

• No Help Coming (Not Quickly): We’re used to the idea that no matter how bad a disaster is, help will show up eventually. This time is completely different. A nuclear explosion isn’t just one natural disaster; it’s like every major disaster happening all at once, but much, much worse.

• Mass Casualties: There are hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions, of people with serious injuries. We’re talking bad cuts (lacerations), broken bones, and severe burns. In the first few minutes and hours, thousands more will die just from these injuries.

• Trapped and Suffering: Countless people are trapped in collapsed buildings, just like in an earthquake. Others are blinded by the intense flash, deafened by the blast wave, and can’t even try to escape because the streets are completely blocked with rubble and debris. They’re terrified, confused, and have no idea what happened or why it happened to them.

• Healthcare Destroyed: Most likely, many hospitals have been flattened, just like all the other buildings. Most doctors, nurses, and other medical staff are either dead or injured, just like everyone else.

• Radiation Danger: Survivors who might have been lucky enough to be in a metro tunnel or just happened to be in a spot where they weren’t burned or physically hurt aren’t out of danger yet. Depending on the bomb, where it exploded, and even the weather, a horrible black rain can start falling. This is radioactive ash and dust coming down, covering everything and everyone.

• The Invisible Threat: Then comes the radiation. It’s invisible, dangerous, and silent. Every breath survivors take carries tiny poison particles into their lungs.

• Radiation Sickness: Over the following days, the people who got the highest amounts of radiation exposure will start to die.

• Breakdown of Society: There will be no help right away – maybe not for hours, or even days. Regular life and systems just stop working when the basic infrastructure is completely destroyed. Roads are blocked, train tracks are twisted and unusable, airport runways are covered in debris. There’s no running water, no electricity, no way to communicate with anyone, and nowhere to buy supplies.

• Outside Help Challenges: Help from nearby cities will have a really hard time even getting into the disaster area. And even if they can get close, the radioactive contamination makes it risky to get too deep into the affected zone.

• You’re On Your Own: After a nuclear attack like this, basically, you are on your own.

• The Survivors’ Struggle: So, slowly, people will start to climb out of the rubble. They’ll be on foot, covered in radioactive fallout, carrying only whatever tiny bit they managed to hold onto. They will be slow, in pain, deeply traumatized, and they will desperately need food, water, and medical help, fast.

• Long-Term Damage: The damage from a nuclear weapon doesn’t just stop when the fires finally burn out and the smoke clears away.

• Overwhelmed Hospitals (Nearby): Hospitals in cities near the explosion site, but not directly hit, will be completely overwhelmed. They just don’t have the equipment or the staff to deal with tens or hundreds of thousands of severely injured patients all at once.

• Future Health Problems: In the weeks, months, and years after, many of the people who survived the initial blast and fallout will still get sick and die later from cancers, like leukemia.

The Reality of Humanitarian Response#

Here’s something really important that governments often don’t want you to think about: There is no serious humanitarian response possible for a nuclear explosion.

• No Real Help: There’s simply no way to really help the immediate victims of a nuclear attack on this scale.
• Not a Normal Disaster: This isn’t just a hurricane, a wildfire, an earthquake, or even a nuclear power plant accident. It is all of those things at once, and it is worse than any single one.
• Nobody is Ready: No nation on Earth is prepared to deal with something like this effectively.

The Current Danger#

Things have changed recently. Over the past few years, world leaders are again openly and publicly talking about using nuclear weapons against each other. Many experts who study this think the danger of a nuclear strike is now higher than it has been in decades.

Governments tell their own people that having nuclear weapons is good for us, but bad when anyone else gets them. They say it’s somehow needed to threaten other countries with mass destruction just to keep ourselves safe. But does that really make you feel safe?

The Real Risk: Mistakes Happen#

It only takes a small group of people with power to make a terrible decision, to go crazy or act rogue. It could be a tiny mistake, a simple misunderstanding, and a catastrophe of unimaginable size could be unleashed.

Remember how we started? Exploding stuff in videos can be fun. Exploding things in real life, though… yeah, not so much.

Is There a Solution?#

Yes, there is. The only way to truly solve this is by getting rid of all nuclear weapons everywhere and making a promise to never build them again.

• Global Agreement: Back in 2017, a big step was taken. Almost two-thirds of all the countries in the world, supported by hundreds of groups working to help people (civil society organizations), and the International Red Cross and Red Crescent movement, all agreed to create a treaty to prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons.
• The Weapons Are the Problem: It’s not really about which country has the weapons and which country doesn’t. The weapons themselves are the fundamental problem.
• Immoral and Dangerous: They are deeply wrong (immoral), and they pose a danger to the very existence of all of us (an existential threat).
• Demand Change: No matter what country you’re from, no matter what your politics are, we need to demand that these weapons disappear forever.
• Pressure is Key: This won’t just happen on its own; it needs pressure from people like us.

If you want to help create that pressure, there are things you personally can do.

• Learn More: Visit notonukes.org to learn more about nuclear weapons and find out what you can do to help get rid of them.

(Ignore the ending music and duck sounds, that’s just video stuff too).