The destructive force of nuclear weapons is devastating and despite the long peace since World War II, the threat of an all-out nuclear war has never gone away.
Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the possibility of the world’s superpowers entering into a back and forth nuclear bombardment has once again resurfaced.
Taking experience from the past (Hiroshima and Nagasaki), we all know how devastating one nuke can be but most of us might still fail to grasp just how catastrophic it would be should a full-on state of nuclear warfare ever start.
If you are curious about how an all-out nuclear war will affect humanity, Princeton University in the U.S. has provided some insights into the most possible outcome thanks to a stimulation conducted by the university’s Science and Global Security (SGS) program.
The stimulation was conducted in 2019 and was given the title “PLAN A”. The stimulation predicts just how the war will begin, how and from where the world’s nukes would be deployed, and just how high the death toll could climb as the war waged on.
It also estimated that within just hours of the conflict beginning, 90 million individuals would be dead or severely injured, and this is based on the event where only one single “warning shot” is sent by Russia against an opposing military base operated by U.S.-NATO forces.
The stimulation begins in the context of a conventional conflict, where Russia hopes to halt the U.S.-NATO advance with a nuclear warning shot from a base near the city of Kaliningrad. Following that, NATO retaliates with a single tactical nuclear air strike.
The first strike will then trigger a series of events that would see the warring sides deploy hundreds of nuclear weapons in an attempt to out-nuke each other. The death toll will then climb rapidly as the conflict moved into different stages.
In the first phase, the stimulation expects Russia to destroy NATO bases all over Europe with 300 nukes, while NATO would respond with 180 of their own. As a result, there will be 2.6 million dead within the first three hours.
The next phase called the “Counterforce plan” where most of Europe’s military forces destroyed and the U.S. being forced to send 600 missiles against Russia and causing an estimated 3.4 million deaths within just 45 minutes.
After dealing so much damage to each other, both sides will then enter the “Countervalue plan” to severely maim each country’s resources. This would then see their 30 most populated cities and economic centres get hit by 5 to 10 warheads each, with the death toll during this phase proving to be the most frightening of all, with 85.3 million dead within 45 minutes.
The stimulation suggested that there would still be leftover nukes available following the cataclysm, which could drive the numbers up even higher.
Despite it being just stimulation and things could have happened differently, its events are actually very much within the range of possibility. However, we would hope that this will never come true and would remain just a stimulation.
