The Tucker Carlson Show
Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity
17 Oct 2025
It’s a measure of their insanity that leaders around the world are seriously considering nuclear war. Ivana Hughes of Columbia on what that would mean. (00:00) How Powerful Are Nuclear Weapons? (09:46) What Would Happen if a Nuke Detonated Over Times Square? (24:56) Ozone Layer Destruction (29:08) How Many Times Have We Launched Nuclear Weapons? (33:57) The Horrifying Effects of Radiation (41:29) Is Nuclear Testing Infecting Our Food and Causing Cancer? (1:06:16) North Korea’s Nuclear Program (1:19:59) Are World Leaders Calling for Nuclear War? Paid partnerships with: Hallow prayer app: Get 3 months free at https://Hallow.com/Tucker SimpliSafe: Visit https://simplisafe.com/TUCKER to claim 50% off a new system. There's no safe like SimpliSafe. Preborn: To donate please dial #250 and say keyword "BABY" or visit https://preborn.com/TUCKER Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Full Episode
Thank you, Professor, for doing this. Let me start with the most simple of all questions. How are nuclear weapons different from conventional weapons?
Nuclear weapons are different from conventional weapons in many ways. One of the things that I like to say is that they really defy the kind of concept of both space and time. And let me explain what I mean by that. If you have a conventional weapon and you explode it over a city or wherever, that explosion is going to have an impact in that local place.
And it's going to have that impact in time. And then you could come back and clean up the area and rebuild and so on. Nuclear weapons are not like that.
A nuclear explosion in one place, in one location, and in one split moment of time can have both global effects and it can have impacts over actually even thousands of years through the effects of radiation and the kind of radioactive isotopes that get deposited in the environment.
But there are sort of a number of ways in which even a single nuclear weapon explosion can be incredibly dangerous and devastating. And then there are a number of impacts in which a nuclear war, in which many nuclear weapons are used, can be... obviously quite clearly much more devastating.
So the thing that people know about nuclear weapons is that one nuclear weapon can be much more powerful than any kind of chemical explosion. So for example, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago. 80 years ago, almost exactly, had what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT. Now, these bombs were made out of uranium and plutonium, uranium for the Hiroshima bomb.
and plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb. But when we describe their energy yield, we describe it in terms of the equivalent amount of chemical explosive that you would need. So that's where the 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNTs, how much you would have needed of chemical explosive to produce the energy equivalent to that explosion. And that in and of itself is huge.
And just to give you one kind of point of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing, which I'm sure you remember, it was actually the first year that I was living in the United States. It was in April of 1995. And it was a devastating event. It was the equivalent of two and a half tons of TNT.
So Timothy McVeigh had filled the Ryder truck with chemical explosives, lit it up outside of a federal building, killed people. 168 people, including 19 children in the daycare center. And there was damage in a radius of up to, I think, 16 blocks, something of that order. So absolutely an incredible and devastating event. At the same time, that explosion was 6,000 times more
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