Ivana Hughes

But the really scary thing that we do know is

and this comes from the kinds of war games that take place in Washington all the time, is that because we now live in a world with 12,500 nuclear warheads, it doesn't just end with one war.

nuclear warhead being used on one city.

We not only have all of those warheads, we also have things like intercontinental ballistic missiles, which can actually carry multiple warheads at once, deliver them all to the same target.

So you might, if you wanted to attack New York City, you might explode one in Times Square, but you might explode one, you know, on the Upper West Side and another in

a constellation of explosions.

And the war games in Washington suggest that 100% of the time, one nuclear weapons explosion, regardless of how it starts, an accident, a misfire,

calculation, a deliberate use.

It all ends in the full blown nuclear war.

And part of the reason why it all ends in the full blown nuclear war is that the kind of kinds of structures we've built, the kinds of policies that we have on this are such that you just you you

pretty much just follow the protocol.

And the protocol is that you attack.

The United States has something called launch on warning.

And that means that if we think we're being attacked, even though we haven't absorbed an attack, even though we haven't actually, you know, seen the attack,

A warhead has exploded in one of our cities.

We launch an attack.

And these decisions are made in a matter of minutes.

This is described really kind of with amazing clarity in the book by N.U.

Jacobson, Nuclear War Scenario, which describes exactly minute by minute how nuclear war starts.

and can start, and then what happens for the next 72 minutes, and then sort of these long-term consequences of nuclear war, and I can talk about some of them.