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00:01Nuclear war would forever split human history into anything that happened before and the post-war apocalypse.
00:10In the worst case, mass fires consume everything within tens of thousands of square kilometers, killing hundreds of millions within hours.
00:18But the worst part comes after that.
00:22Nuclear war could trigger a nuclear winter that might kill billions, maybe even completely collapsing our civilization.
00:30How does it work? And what would it look like?
00:34Fire causes winter.
00:37When a nuclear weapon is detonated, a bubble of gas hotter than the sun is forced into existence, so hot that everything within kilometers immediately begins to burn.
00:47The terror bubble expands rapidly, filling the sky over its target, creating a devastating shockwave that causes most of the immediate destruction.
00:54Basically, you break a lot of stuff and set it on fire.
00:59And in the worst case, this turns into a firestorm that consumes everything and everyone on the ground.
01:05Right after the explosion, a gigantic mushroom cloud rises over the destruction like a demon throning over its perverse work.
01:12But in the following hours, a far more deadly cloud forms.
01:16The fire burning cities, forests or fields heats up so much air that it creates its own microclimate and wind system.
01:24Hot air and hot smoke rise, pulling in fresh air from the surroundings and fresh oxygen stoking the flames even more.
01:31This creates an updraft and forms a colossal pyrocumulonimbus cloud that carries the soot and aerosols from the flames high into the stratosphere.
01:42Under normal conditions, the soot rising from a big fire is quickly washed out by rain.
01:47But a pyrocumulonimbus cloud can reach altitudes well above the height where rain clouds form.
01:52Once above the tropopause, there's simply no weather to remove soot from the atmosphere, so it can stay aloft for years.
02:00If this happens to a single city, it's a tragedy, but a fairly local one.
02:05But in a full-scale nuclear war, warring nations following the cold logic of mutually assured destruction could use hundreds or even thousands of nuclear weapons all at once,
02:14creating hundreds of firestorms, sending up to 150 million tons of soot, a cube the size of a skyscraper, directly into the stratosphere.
02:24In the next few days and weeks, the soot begins to blanket the earth at high altitudes, absorbing light high above the ground and preventing sunlight from reaching the surface.
02:34This is not like science fiction where the sky turns dark and the sun disappears.
02:38Winter is what happens when just a little less sunlight hits the ground, and now suddenly, a lot less sunlight gets through.
02:46Yesterday, the world was normal.
02:49Today, nuclear winter begins.
02:52Winter causes hunger.
02:55How bad nuclear winter would be is still an active area of research.
03:00It all hinges on one thing.
03:02How much stuff will burn really hot?
03:04How many firestorms would be caused by the heat of the explosions?
03:08This depends on many factors, from the materials a city is made of, to the time of the year, if a forest is nearby, and so on.
03:16So, just keep in mind, we're working with some assumptions.
03:19Here's the good news.
03:21Nuclear winter is not permanent, and definitely no new ice age.
03:26The effects on the climate only last as long as the soot remains in the atmosphere, which is at most a decade or so until it clears out and temperatures normalize.
03:34The bad news is that this causes almost immediate climate change within a few weeks.
03:39It disrupts our climate system faster than any living being can adapt to.
03:44In this new climate, our seasons are suddenly all wrong.
03:48Winters are much longer, summers shorter and colder, or gone altogether.
03:53This also means less evaporation over the oceans, which means less rain, and maybe large-scale droughts.
03:59This is bad, because our food eats the sun.
04:03Without good summers and enough rain, growing seasons shrink, or even collapse.
04:08The majority of humanity lives in an area called the mid-latitude, a strip of land that has the ideal temperature for our species.
04:15Not just because it's not too hot or cold, it's also where the plants we eat grow best.
04:19The vast majority of the food we eat stems from a few highly efficient crops that are mostly produced in a few very agriculturally productive regions, like the US Great Plains or Ukraine.
04:30From these bread and rice baskets of the world, they get traded and shipped around the world.
04:35In the worst case of a full-scale nuclear war, the temperatures in the mid-latitudes will probably stay below freezing for several years.
04:44Nothing at all can grow under these conditions, and the world's bread baskets would suddenly turn empty.
04:50If food production crashes, the world's food producers would very likely ramp up prices, or even stop selling food to other countries, if they're still able to farm their fields at all.
05:00It's easy to calculate how many people can be alive on Earth.
05:05You take all the calories we can produce, and divide them by what the average person needs to survive.
05:10If you have more people than calories, then within a few weeks, you don't anymore.
05:15Humanity has only a few weeks' supply of crops and food, not enough to survive this drastic drop in production.
05:22But the climate is not the only issue.
05:24Modern industrialized agriculture is a complex affair that relies on functioning supply chains to provide unthinkable amounts of industrially produced fertilizer and chemicals to kill weeds and vermin.
05:36Massive numbers of specialized modern machinery is plowing, sowing, harvesting, and distributing.
05:41After a nuclear war, especially if the countries that produced the food were part of the nuclear exchange, there may simply be no more fuel, fertilizer, or machine parts, because there are no more oil refineries, ports, and other essential infrastructure left, damaging global food production even more.
05:59OK, so now that we've set the stage, let's look at what science says about the actual wars that could happen.
06:05Actual nuclear war
06:08Today, there are two main conflicts that scientists think about when making calculations of nuclear winter, a nuclear war between India and Pakistan, and one between the US and Russia.
06:18The most likely smallish nuclear exchange would be fought today between India and Pakistan, with relatively low-yield weapons.
06:25Even in a pretty mild nuclear war like this, the immediate explosions would kill around 27 million people, which is horrible enough.
06:35In just a few hours, more people would die than in all of World War I.
06:39The ensuing fires would not cause a nuclear winter, but a mild nuclear autumn.
06:44But even this would disrupt the climate, and thereby global agriculture, enough to starve up to 250 million people worldwide.
06:54Unfortunately, India and Pakistan are in an arms race, and have been increasing the number and power of warheads in their arsenal.
07:00The next stage of escalation would be war with hundreds of nuclear weapons, the bombs and fires destroying many major population centers, and killing over 100 million people.
07:12A war on this scale would cause a nuclear winter that would damage global agriculture enough to cut the available calories for humanity in half.
07:20The number of people that starve to death would be as high as 2 billion.
07:23One in four humans alive today.
07:28The worst-case scenario is a full-scale global war between NATO nations and Russia, or China, which also continues to build its nuclear arsenal.
07:38In a war between a former, future and current superpower, thousands of nuclear weapons could be detonated.
07:44In a scenario with around 4,400 nuclear weapons, 360 million people would perish right away.
07:51We have no other event to even compare the death and destruction to.
07:56It's like humanity dropping an asteroid on itself.
07:59The nuclear wind that follows such an apocalyptic war would tank human calorie production by as much as 90%.
08:06Not only would almost all of our agriculture take an immediate and deadly hit, the climate would take at least a decade to recover.
08:12Because a war like this would specifically hit the world regions that produce most of the food for humanity, recovery will be much, much harder than with other conflicts.
08:22Within two years, the global death toll from starvation could rise to about 5 billion.
08:28In mid-latitude countries like Russia, China, Canada, the US, and much of Europe, only a few percent of the population might survive.
08:35Humanity will never be the same again.
08:39While nowhere is truly safe, some nations in the southern hemisphere may fare well enough to endure while the rest of the world collapses.
08:47All the nuclear weapon states are in the northern hemisphere, so a few countries like Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina may be able to endure for a bunch of different reasons.
08:55Their nuclear winter would be milder, they have a lot of livestock that would not be as affected as crops, so they would probably stop exporting food and focus on keeping their own people alive, assuming they aren't invaded for their food by other starving nations.
09:11It's safe to say that the world would become extremely unpleasant for a long time, and it's impossible to know how many people would have died when the nuclear winter ends.
09:19In the worst case, human civilization could collapse, and the survivors would be thrown back thousands of years, slowly trying to recover a world full of scars and graves.
09:31Eventually, when they've rebuilt civilization, would they ever build nuclear weapons again?
09:39We know for sure that we need to do anything we can to make sure nuclear war never happens.
09:44This video was supported by Open Philanthropy.
09:47If you want to know what you can do to reduce the risk of nuclear war, you can either support expert organizations, or become a citizen expert yourself and learn more.
09:57We've compiled a list of further reading and expert recommendations in the info box, and our sources doc for you.
10:03Thank you so much for helping us clear out the Kurzgesagt warehouse for our big move.
10:08But, watch out, sometimes, creepy things are hiding behind those boxes.
10:12Wild dread appears.
10:15What will you do?
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10:41The birds will be moving the last boxes to the new warehouse soon, so grab a notebook, plushie, pin, or poster before the moving sale ends, or before dread gets a hold of them.
10:53The birds really appreciate it.
10:55Yeah, but, walk a damn deep inside.
10:56The birds woo!
10:57And the birds will be squash.
10:58The birds will be
11:21your age who can ever trust in the news.