# Most Replayed Moment: Here's What Happens When A Nuclear Bomb Drops! These Countries Will Be Safe!

An episode of [The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1291423644), 16 Jan 2026, 23 min.

Audio: https://pdst.fm/e/pscrb.fm/rss/p/mgln.ai/e/1390/claritaspod.com/measure/p.podderapp.com/2544644999/mgln.ai/e/1651/episode.flightcast.com/01KESKJJZ2841RBPGRMXZS3SRV.mp3

Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journalist and bestselling author known for deep reporting on national security, military strategy, and the real-world mechanics of catastrophe. In today’s Moments episode, she breaks down, in sourced detail, what nuclear war would actually look like - minute by minute - after the first weapon hits. Annie also discusses why nuclear war isn’t inevitable - and how leadership, public pressure, and policy decisions can move the world away from escalation. Listen to the full episode here! Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/o5WB6zSFTZb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/CrgvazVFTZb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Annie Jacobsen: https://www.anniejacobsen.com/

## Transcript

[0:00] If I was a fly on the wall, not that there would be a wall left, what would I, and I was
[0:10] looking at America or the UK after it had been struck, struck by these nuclear bombs,
[0:15] by thousands of, you know, Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons, what would I see,
[0:20] what would the visuals be in those minutes after the strike?
[0:23] I describe the first bomb in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon, it's a one megaton
[0:28] thermonuclear bomb.
[0:30] In painstaking horrific detail, all sourced from defense department documents, defense
[0:35] scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and
[0:40] to humans, and it's horrifying.
[0:43] But on top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light, which is 180 million degrees, which
[0:49] catches everything on fire in a nine mile diameter radius, on top of the bulldozing effect
[0:55] of the wind and all the buildings coming down, and more fires igniting more fires, on
[1:00] top of the radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks
[1:07] if they happened to have survived, on top of all of that, each one of these fires creates
[1:12] a mega fire that is a hundred or more square miles.
[1:17] And so essentially, in essence, what do you see?
[1:20] Well, in the scenario at minute 72, a thousand Russian nuclear weapons land on the United
[1:26] States.
[1:27] And so it just becomes a conflagration of fire.
[1:31] It's just fire, fires burning, fires 100, 200 square mile fires burning.
[1:39] And then we move into nuclear winter.
[1:42] And that's sort of the day new month of the book where I tell you about nuclear winter
[1:48] from the point of view of one of the original scientists who wrote that original nuclear
[1:54] winter paper with Carl Sagan back in 1983.
[1:58] And his name is Professor Brian Tune, and he spent the decade since working with the state
[2:03] of the art climate modeling systems that can now precisely tell us what nuclear winter
[2:09] will look like.
[2:10] Because I've always thought, you know what, nuclear war wouldn't be that bad.
[2:12] If, you know, Russia launched a thousand of their nuclear bombs at the United States
[2:16] and I was here in New York where I am now, I would die instantly so I wouldn't really
[2:20] know it happened.
[2:22] Is that true?
[2:23] I think you would want to die instantly.
[2:24] I mean, there's a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, the former premier of the Soviet Union,
[2:30] and he said, after nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead.
[2:37] Because there is, right, there is this sense of if you survived, I mean, there is no more
[2:45] law and order.
[2:46] There is no more rule of law.
[2:48] There is no government.
[2:50] Craig Vjugate made that very clear.
[2:52] The bunkers that the people in the military command and control centers would be in, let's
[2:57] say, the secret bunkers, not the ones that are targets that Russia is going to take out
[3:01] that I read about in the book, but the smaller ones.
[3:04] Those are going to only function for as long as there's gasoline to run the diesel and
[3:09] the diesel generators.
[3:11] And then those people are going to have to come out and who's left?
[3:15] It's man returning to the most primal, most violent state as people fight over the tiny
[3:24] resources that remain.
[3:26] And by the way, they're all malnourished.
[3:29] Everybody's sick and most people have lost everything and everyone they know.
[3:35] How's that going to feel?
[3:37] It's going to feel as you describe here on page 277, there are a thousand flashes of
[3:43] light super heating the air in each ground zero to 180 million degrees Fahrenheit, a thousand
[3:49] fireballs each more than a mile in diameter, a thousand steeply fronted blast waves, a thousand
[3:57] walls of compressed air, a thousand American cities and towns where all engineered structures
[4:04] in five, six or seven miles radius, change physical shapes, collapse and burn, a thousand
[4:09] cities and towns with molten asphalt streets, a thousand cities and towns with survivors
[4:13] impaled to death by flying debris, a thousand cities and towns filled with tens of millions
[4:18] of dead people with tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third degree burns,
[4:23] people naked, tattered, bleeding and suffocating, people who don't look or act like people anymore.
[4:33] Across America and Europe, hundreds of millions of people are dead and dying while hundreds
[4:37] of military aircraft fly circles in the air until they run out of fuel.
[4:42] I mean that is, that is some visual.
[4:47] How many people would be dead or dying do you think after those 72 minutes?
[4:54] Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs, no question.
[5:01] The number that I think is very interesting to think about comes from Professor Tune and his
[5:07] team who wrote a paper for nature recently, 2022 and sort of updated nuclear winter idea based
[5:17] around food. And the number that they have is five billion people would be dead.
[5:24] The population of the planet currently is about eight billion?
[5:28] So there'd be three billion people still alive.
[5:32] Where shall I go to be one of the three billion?
[5:35] I was just in New Zealand and Australia.
[5:38] That's exactly where you'd go.
[5:39] Although according to Tune, those are the only places that could actually sustain agriculture.
[5:46] I was there two weeks ago, not even two weeks ago, maybe 10 days ago, I was in New Zealand and
[5:51] in Australia. And at that time, I think Iran attacked Israel.
[6:01] I was kind of happy.
[6:02] You were in the right place at the right time.
[6:04] I was kind of happy for where I was located.
[6:06] I was thinking, I actually remember talking to my friends and I pulled up a map.
[6:10] I was trying to see how far away I was from everything.
[6:13] I was thinking if, because World War III started training on Twitter, I was thinking if it does
[6:17] break out now, I think I'm probably pretty well placed.
[6:20] Is that the place to be today?
[6:21] That is. That is. According to Professor Tune, I mean, he was so generous with me. He shared
[6:26] a lot of his slide shows that he has for his students. And that is really pretty much what's left.
[6:32] I mean, because most of the world is certainly the mid-latitudes would be covered in these,
[6:38] sheets of ice, the freshwater bodies.
[6:42] Places like Io and Ukraine would be just snow for 10 years.
[6:47] And so agriculture would fail. And when agriculture fails, people just die.
[6:53] And on top of that, you have the radiation poisoning because the ozone layer will be so damaged
[7:01] and destroyed that you can't be outside in the sunlight. And so people will be forced to live
[7:10] underground. And so you have to imagine people living underground, fighting for food everywhere,
[7:17] except for New Zealand and Australia. There was also another interesting detail that he shared with
[7:23] me that 66 million years ago, an asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs and something
[7:34] like 70% of the known species. And Professor Tune compared nuclear war to that situation.
[7:44] And so when you really think about it, and again, this was also echoed by Craig Fugate,
[7:49] FEMA's director, you think about it, there's nothing we can do about an asteroid, at least not right
[7:58] now. And yet there is something that nuclear war is a man-made threat. And therefore, it has to
[8:07] be a man-made solution. What is the solution? I really believe that people motivate other people.
[8:16] It's like a fundamental truth on the smallest scale and on the biggest scale. And so there's one
[8:22] person who is incredibly powerful, and that is the president of the United States, for better or for
[8:27] worse, it's just the way it is. And so in the same way that the president has presidential soul
[8:32] authority to start a nuclear war, the president also has a very powerful pen with which he can write
[8:38] executive orders and EO. And the story I tell on the hopeful note goes like this. When I was in high
[8:45] school in 1983, there was an ABC TV movie called The Day After. And it showed a fictional war between
[8:55] the United States and then Soviet Russia. It was horrific and terrifying, okay? A hundred million
[9:02] Americans watched it. A hundred millions Americans. It was like the third of the population.
[9:08] And I think it was half the population then. President Reagan was one of those Americans. He had
[9:16] a private screening at Camp David. His advisors told him not to watch it. He did watch it. Before that
[9:24] president Reagan was a hawk. He was pro nuclear weapons. His position was the more nuclear weapons
[9:31] the better. He was the one putting nuclear weapons in space with the Star Wars program, the SDI
[9:37] program, okay? He couldn't have been more pro deterrence supremacy. He saw The Day After and he
[9:47] changed his position. He wrote in his White House journal that he became greatly depressed,
[9:54] his words. And he reached out to Gorbachev. And then they had a recovic summit, a summit in Iceland,
[10:02] Reagan and Gorbachev. And through communication, right? Through both of them realizing this is madness,
[10:12] realizing what could happen, seeing The Day After and realizing, my God, this cannot happen.
[10:18] And they famously issued a statement that said, the joint statement between the two of them said,
[10:23] a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought. And the result of the recovic summit was that
[10:32] the world has gone from 70,000 nuclear warheads. That was the all time high. 70,000. Why do you need
[10:43] 70,000 nuclear warheads? That's what there were in 1986. And now here we are because of the
[10:50] reductions, because of the treaties, thanks to those two, 12,500 approximately, nuclear warheads.
[10:59] That is the movement in the right direction. And it came from a dramatic story being told.
[11:07] And it came from the president taking action because people would not stand for this anymore.
[11:14] There were massive protests. Do you believe we can ever get to zero?
[11:18] Honestly. That is for the disarmament experts. I like to stay in my lane as a storyteller,
[11:24] as an investigative journalist. I like to give you the dramatic fast read and then pass the baton
[11:33] to those who have been working on that issue for decades because boy are they qualified.
[11:39] I just had the great fortune of being invited to Brussels where I was part of a nuclear expo.
[11:45] And there were members of the European Parliament in the audience. And there were all these
[11:51] disarmament people there. And I learned a lot about all of these groups. And they have the answer.
[11:58] And they are the ones that should be asked that question. And they are doing a lot to get us there.
[12:04] I went on chat GPT a couple of months ago and I asked it. I said, could you play out a scenario
[12:09] where the world ends? Because an artificial intelligence basically gets leaked out of the computer that
[12:16] it was born out, born on. And the scenario that it played out involved a nuclear war.
[12:22] Because halfway, I think it was in step three or four. It says that the AI basically takes control
[12:28] of the nuclear warheads or at least some of them. And then it kind of launches them at other
[12:34] countries. And hearing chat GPT say that. And in step three or four, use nuclear weapons as a way
[12:46] to kind of make the world extinct. It felt plausible.
[12:50] Okay. So I'm going to push back against that. Which is by no means right. I'm not right.
[12:55] But we're just having a sort of theoretical conversation here.
[12:58] Chat GPT is gathering its information. So I would argue that chat GP has got a lot of
[13:03] information from the Terminator movie. Okay. There is that in the zeitgeist of what happens.
[13:09] Then I want you to consider that the communication systems in nuclear command and control,
[13:16] which is actually nuclear command control and communication. The ability for NC3 to communicate
[13:24] with the actual weapons is so profoundly classified that I don't have access to it.
[13:29] But I'm going to give this to you as an idea. What I do know and learned reporting nuclear
[13:34] war scenarios, fascinating detail that stands as an analogy, at least for me, which is how analogue
[13:42] our ballistic missile systems are because of the exact fear that you describe or that chat GPT
[13:49] described back at you. And will they stay that way forever? Probably not. But are they that way
[13:57] right now from what I understand? Yes. Our submarine launched ballistic missiles that are just so
[14:06] the technology behind them. And I delineate it for the reader. It's astonishing that you can
[14:11] launch a missile from underwater. It can breach the surface. It's after burners take off. And then
[14:19] it begins its trajectory, you know, boost phase, mid course phase, terminal phase hits the target.
[14:27] This is incredible. And how does it get there? You might ask. I asked. It gets there by star-sighting.
[14:38] Oh, really? So you realize there's this little panel that opens up in the ballistic missile.
[14:44] And there are other ways that it's navigating. But the primary mean of navigation is star-sighting.
[14:52] I mean, you just have to really stop and go, oh, first of all, it's actually a really interesting
[14:57] concept that the most advanced potentially civilization ending ballistic missile is guiding itself
[15:06] to its target by this ancient concept, like that our hunter gather ancestors used, which is
[15:15] looking at the stars. It's looking at the stars and then navigating using them.
[15:22] And that's meant to be a defense against a system, an enemy taking control of your nuclear weapons.
[15:30] The issue we have is that there's potentially 9 or 10 different nuclear powers, and they don't
[15:37] all have the same systems. So if we get to the point of age, which a lot of people almost see
[15:42] as the singularity, almost you can't see past that moment where there is a new being amongst us,
[15:48] that is capable of thinking faster and more expansively and more intelligently than humans at
[15:53] those things we don't, I think it might look at our systems as childs play, maybe not our systems,
[15:59] but maybe it'll look at North Korea systems as childs play. It might be able to put that VCR
[16:03] into the system and play out the nucleus simulation that tricks those people into believing they're
[16:08] being attacked in that. Yes. Which is maybe time for the answer to your question of should we be
[16:15] at zero, right? So what you have presented, which would be the whole point of somebody like me
[16:21] writing a book that somebody like you would read of a younger generation and begin having these
[16:26] conversations with their colleagues and their thought leaders and the people that could maybe
[16:32] influence public policy and saying, well, that would be a very good reason to have zero nuclear
[16:37] weapons. Or, you know, everybody gets 10, I'm making that up. But right? Yeah. Because if you have
[16:43] 12,500 nuclear weapons, it's better than 70,000, but there's way too many for an artificially
[16:52] intelligent, you know, triggers scenario like you're talking about.
[16:58] Are you optimistic? Optimistic about, I mean, I am an optimistic person by nature. And so
[17:09] do you think there will be a nuclear war in the course of humanity?
[17:14] I wrote this book as the optimistic, hopeful person that's saying, read this and realize
[17:30] that a man-made problem has a man-made solution.
[17:34] Earlier, you talked about there being high consequence and low probability. But the more the
[17:39] years tick on, that probability increases by nature of there being this mad king at some point.
[17:44] So, you know, and that's what I think. So I was asking myself, eventually, if we play this forward,
[17:50] I don't know, a thousand years, what is most likely to cause the end of humanity? Is it a mad
[17:57] king somewhere who doesn't want that, you know, he realizes that he's going to either die, he's got
[18:01] cancer, he realizes that, you know, he's got some sickness and he doesn't really want his son to
[18:06] take power, he starts getting a bit agitated, maybe he has some kind of psychosis, gets a frenzy,
[18:11] I don't know, decides to, in his dying days to let a couple of these things fly, is that
[18:18] eventually going to happen? The laws of probability, the laws of averages say that the longer we're here,
[18:22] the longer we have these weapons, the higher the probability.
[18:27] I mean, I leave that to people like you to think about and talk about because I do, and I am
[18:33] fascinated that I find that people of your generation ask that question a lot more than perhaps
[18:39] people of my generation and older. Like that was not a mindset that people necessarily
[18:45] had and talked about. And I think that has to do with the confluence of events that you talk about.
[18:49] First of all, people have access to information in a manner they didn't, you know, 30, 40 years ago,
[18:56] or it took a lot more effort. And also that there are these incredible new threats that you're
[19:01] talking about that are that you cannot overlook. And so you would think that it's time to kind of,
[19:07] and then not a polyanna, but you have to move away from seeing everyone and everything as an enemy.
[19:13] And moving toward, it's fine to have adversaries. Having opponents is, you know,
[19:20] sportsmen have opponents, right? But everyone being an enemy and having, you know, wars,
[19:27] escalating around the world, it seems as if what you are saying is there has to be a fundamental
[19:36] shift in what people are considering important. But war has always existed and it's existed as long
[19:43] as humans have. So it makes me think that war is just part of humans trying to coexist. And all
[19:49] of the things that are hardwired into us are such for status and ego and reproduction and resources
[19:55] and survival, result in war, like they result in recessions. So I read a lot about the origin
[20:01] of war, like it's a debate, no one, you know, but it is discussed. And the anthropologists,
[20:06] I think, have the most interesting sort of thoughtful concepts around it, which I'll share with you,
[20:11] which is this, because yes, technically there has always been war. And one of the debates is,
[20:16] you know, did war begin with civilization or were hunter-gatherers warring. But more interesting
[20:22] to that, I think, is about the anthropologists who studied in the 60s, the hunter-gatherer tribes,
[20:28] like in the Amazon, when there were still access to them. And they were sort of, you know,
[20:33] they were unaffected by civilization at all. And they could look at how they perceived enemies.
[20:41] And an interesting idea came out of that, which makes me think about optimists versus pessimists,
[20:47] right, sort of, or rather those who trust versus those who are suspicious, that no matter if a
[20:53] hunter is outhunting, you know, that's part of a hunter-gatherer tribal environment. And he comes
[21:00] across another person. Obviously, that person is either threatening, or that person is someone
[21:07] to team up with against the greater threat. And the anthropologists do not know why it is that
[21:15] some people interpret this person with suspicion and then might kill him, and others would interpret
[21:23] that person as a teammate. And so if we don't know how human, you know, is it genetics? Like how do
[21:32] people either fall on one of those two sides? But what we do know is that people can learn to think
[21:41] differently. You talk with half your guests on the podcast about this. People can be trained,
[21:48] not, you know, propagandized, but people can learn to think differently. So if you're me who
[21:54] is a hopeful person and wants to see the positive side of even my dark reporting, because that's
[22:03] a better choice for me and for my family. I train myself to find, if you will, the silver lining.
[22:10] Or rather, if that's too polyannish, to find the way in which how do I look at the person coming
[22:17] at me as someone who could be on my team, or even an opponent, but not an enemy that I would have to kill?
[22:25] What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen
[22:31] to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.

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