Max Tegmark

by some of the top researchers who've been studying nuclear winter for a long time.

And what they basically did was they combined climate models with food, agricultural models.

So instead of just saying, yeah, you know, it gets really cold, blah, blah, blah, they figured out actually how many people would die in different countries.

And it's pretty mind-blowing.

So basically what happens is the thing that kills the most people is not the explosions, it's not the radioactivity, it's not the EMP mayhem, it's not the rampaging mobs foraging food.

No, it's the fact that you get so much smoke coming up from the burning cities into the stratosphere that...

spreads around the earth from the jet streams.

So in typical models, you get like 10 years or so where it's just crazy cold.

And during the first year after the war and their models, the temperature drops in Nebraska and in the Ukraine, bread baskets, you know, by like 20 Celsius or so, if I remember.

No, yeah, 20, 30 Celsius, depending on where you are.

40 Celsius in some places, which is, you know, 40 Fahrenheit to 80 Fahrenheit colder than what it would normally be.

So, you know, I'm not good at farming.

But if it's snowing, if it drops below freezing pretty much most days in July, that's not good.

So they worked out, they put this into their farming models.

And what they found was really interesting.

The countries that get the most hard hit are the ones in the Northern Hemisphere,

So in the US, and one model, they had about 99% of all Americans starving to death.

In Russia and China and Europe, also about 99%, 98% starving to death.

So you might be like, oh, it's kind of poetic justice that both the Russians and the Americans

99% of them have to pay for it because it was their bombs that did it.