Ivana Hughes

And that's nothing but the deaths from, you know, you were either incinerated or, you know, you were, your body was

broken into who knows how many pieces by the shockwave.

That's not even including deaths from radiation, which would occur over some period of time, of course, very intensely in the immediate aftermath, but then also over time.

And then there is the business of what such a nuclear war represents.

would actually do to the environment of the planet.

And there, it's not just about local effects.

Now we get into the global effects.

So back to my initial assertion that nuclear weapons sort of defy rules of time and space,

The time aspect is these radiation impacts that can really, the radiation contamination that can last for decades, hundreds, even thousands of years for certain radioactive isotopes.

The spatial aspect is that, of course, there is a local problem.

impact of the nuclear explosion.

But in the case of a nuclear war, the impact becomes global.

And there are at least two different ways in which this happens.

One way is called nuclear winter.

I can explain what that is.

And the other is ozone layer destruction.

And these are actually things that we've known

About both of them for a long time, although I will say that more recently we've had much better simulations, just much more computer power, much more sort of ability to really figure out what that would look like.

So nuclear winter is the idea that following a nuclear war, there would be such widespread fires everywhere that would burn

things like everything that's in the city and produce so much soot that would go up into the atmosphere and block incoming sunlight.