Ivana Hughes

That's the duration of a war between the United States and Russia.

In Annie's book, the scenario is that basically the US gets attacked by a kind of lone warhead coming from North Korea, attacking Washington, D.C.

That's an intercontinental ballistic missile, which we detect within seconds.

of the launch.

And then there's a second, in her scenario, there's a second warhead being exploded, launched from a submarine in the Pacific and exploding in Diablo Canyon, which is a nuclear power plant in Southern California.

In that scenario, the U.S.

then responds to, knows it's being attacked by North Korea, in a matter of minutes makes a decision to attack North Korea.

I think the response is something like 82 nuclear warheads.

But the route that the warheads take from our ICBM silos is,

in the Midwest, in the Dakotas and so on, the route goes over Russia.

And in Annie's book, the scenario is such that the U.S.

can't communicate fast enough with the Russian leadership.

And Russians now think they're under attack because they're detecting these warheads coming their way.

And so they launch an attack, a thousand nuclear warheads, and then the U.S.

responds in turn and attacks the United States.

And these kinds of...

in sort of estimates of what would happen, the number of casualties, people who would die and so on, in a US-Russia full-blown nuclear war.

The current estimate, and this is based on slightly more than a thousand warheads from each direction, and it's equivalent to about one third of the current arsenals.

The number of casualties

casualties from the moment of the explosions is on the order of 360 million people.