How To Survive a Nuclear War

Summary

Are We Doomed? (NPR Network)

Episode: “How To Survive a Nuclear War”

Date: May 19, 2026
Host: Ben Bradford
Guests: Alex Wellerstein, nuclear weapons historian; Lily Shaw, climate scientist at Rutgers

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Episode Overview

In this episode, host Ben Bradford tackles the realities of surviving a nuclear war—debunking post-apocalyptic movie myths and exploring the scientific and historical truth behind fallout shelters, survival chances, and the aftermath of a nuclear exchange. With insights from nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein and climate scientist Lily Shaw, the episode confronts society’s lack of preparation, the grim logistics of surviving both blast and fallout, and the devastating consequences of nuclear winter and famine.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Myth vs. Reality of Nuclear Apocalypse

• Movies and pop culture ("Mad Max," "The Road," etc.) present a stylized, exciting version of the apocalypse, but experts say that’s far from the truth (00:28–03:16).
• Quote – Ben Bradford:
  "When we do re-emerge, we join a sandy wasteland of sheet metal and cannibals. …But with little Easter eggs for us—a character has a spyglass, and we know it was a soda bottle. And then he gets chainsawed." (00:28–01:31)

2. How “Survivable” Is a Nuclear War?

• Even with Cold War-level destruction, studies projected that around 40% of people would survive the initial attack (04:26).

• Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
  "Even the most sort of destructive assumptions of the Cold War... still concluded that you could have 40% surviving." (04:26)

• Survival depends on location: Dead center on a target, you’re “toast”; some people in sprawling cities might only be “a little warmed” (04:50).

• The three main dangers are heat, blast, and radiation (05:22).

3. Evolution and Limitations of Fallout Shelters

• Early shelters were based on misconceptions about the types and sizes of atomic weapons; as weapons grew in yield, fallout became the greatest threat (06:05–06:17).

• Government plans in the US fell short—public bunkers were limited as funding was redirected elsewhere (Interstate Highway System, etc.) (07:22–09:47).

• Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
  "We encourage you to take responsibility for your own health... you should just build your own shelter. We’re not going to do it." (07:50)

• Notable segment: The era of backyard “prefab” shelters was brief and affected only a tiny minority (08:11–08:54).

• Some purpose-built government bunkers exist, but they’re for officials for “continuity of government,” not regular citizens (09:01–09:47).

• Other countries invested more: Switzerland, Finland, Sweden—all built extensive public shelters, but even the Soviet Union could only have housed 20% of their population (10:14–10:31).

4. Makeshift and Defunct Fallout Shelters

• US strategy shifted to identifying existing spaces (basements, underground structures) that could serve as fallout shelters with modifications (11:12).
• Even major cities labeled many such spaces, but nearly all are now defunct; food and medicine have long since rotted (12:46–13:03).
• Quote – Ben Bradford:
  "We stagger through city streets among panicked masses... we happen to spot one of those yellow and black placards... and we find nothing." (12:46)

5. “Deterrence” as Default Survival Strategy

• The real plan: Prevent nuclear war from happening at all, since dealing with the aftermath is logistically and politically impossible (13:03–13:05).
• Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
  "There was a time in which people thought the only way we can deal with nuclear war is to basically dig. … They basically concluded that they didn't want to dig anymore and the only way they were going to deal with nuclear war was to threaten to unleash it on everybody else." (12:46)

6. How Fallout Shelters Actually Work

• Radiation drops off rapidly with more mass between a person and the fallout; dirt, brick, steel, or even water can offer protection (16:57–17:23).
• Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
  "It’s just stuff that’s going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb." (17:03)
• A decent shelter can reduce exposure tenfold, the best up to fiftyfold, but intense exposure may still be lethal (17:28–17:41).

7. What Survival Would Actually Feel Like

• Scenario 1: Huddled in a government-identified shelter (e.g., basement or parking garage), conditions are squalid and cramped.

  • Princeton 1950s experiment showed that even with just four people, the worst challenge was the toilet’s stench (19:53).
  • Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
    "They basically made in the United States what they called sanitation kits. …This accommodates 50 people. …This is the worst porta Potty you can imagine." (19:30, 20:07)

• Scenario 2: Most would have to improvise, seeking whatever space offers the most shielding. Official guidance is basically "find shelter, stay put, and wait" (22:10–23:15).

  • Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
    "Assume the outside world is basically poison, and poison that can go through walls, but it gets weakened by every wall it goes through." (22:17)
  • Duration: Typically, 1 to 2 weeks underground suffices for most fallout to decay (23:41).

8. Emergence Into the Aftermath: Nuclear Winter

• Fires following a nuclear strike generate “black carbon” that ascends to the stratosphere, blocks sunlight, and plunges temperatures globally (26:30–30:02).

  • Quote – Lily Shaw:
    "The first year... the temperature will drop by more than 15 degrees Celsius. Summer temperature will [be] below freezing." (29:42)

• Effects are swift: Within 2–3 weeks, skies darken planet-wide (29:11–29:12).

9. Starvation—the Real Threat

• Blast and fallout might kill hundreds of millions, but famine from nuclear winter could kill billions (30:09–32:40).

  • Key fact: About 360 million would die immediately from explosions; famine within two years could take 5 billion lives (31:28).
  • Quote – Lily Shaw:
    "That's like the population starving due to the food shortage. That's like... much, much bigger. 10 times bigger or 15 times bigger." (31:10)

• Food stores would last no more than a few months (33:12).

• Survival “havens” like New Zealand and Iceland are deceptive—global trade collapses, fertilizer shortages, and sea ice make them inaccessible or unsustainable (34:40–35:06).

10. No One Is Truly Safe—not Even in a “Regional” War

• Even a localized conflict (e.g., India-Pakistan) could cause a 10-20% drop in global food production, enough to starve up to 2 billion people (35:38–36:06).
  • Quote – Lily Shaw:
    "The drop is larger than all the past historic variation." (35:51)

11. Is There Any Way to Adapt?

• Possible but grim adaptations: growing resilient crops (potatoes, seaweed, duckweed) and eating insects, livestock fodder, or grubs (36:11–36:53).
• Quote – Lily Shaw:
  "I just feel it will be a horrible, horrible life and experience." (36:47)

12. The Real Message & Memorable Closing Thoughts

• Surviving the immediate aftermath entails not “heroic wanderings” but misery and deprivation.
  • "This is Thunderdome." (Lily Shaw, 37:07)
• Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
  "It would be much better not to have nuclear war. We’ll just put that out there." (37:48)
• Avoiding nuclear war should be paramount—not because everyone would be “instantly vaporized,” but because most would survive only to face suffering far worse.
  • Quote – Alex Wellerstein:
    "The flash of light…is its own kind of fantasy. The reality is so much darker and that, I think, can compel one to take more seriously the idea that we should not get in that position in the first place." (38:04)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

| Time | Speaker | Quote | |-------------|----------------|-------| |01:25 | Lily Shaw | "This is Thunderdome. Depth is listening." | |02:55 | Alex Wellerstein | "And then, given the option in human history, most people choose live." | |04:26 | Alex Wellerstein | "Even the most sort of destructive assumptions of the Cold War... still concluded that you could have 40% surviving." | |07:50 | Alex Wellerstein | "We encourage you to take responsibility for your own health... you should just build your own shelter. We’re not going to do it." | |12:46 | Ben Bradford | "We stagger through city streets among panicked masses... we happen to spot one of those yellow and black placards... and we find nothing." | |17:03 | Alex Wellerstein | "It’s just stuff that’s going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb." | |19:30 | Alex Wellerstein | "[Sanitation kits] are squalid and disturbing." | |29:42 | Lily Shaw | "The first year you will see it already like in the summer the temperature will drop by more than 15 degrees Celsius. Summer temperature will [be] below freezing." | |31:10 | Lily Shaw | "That's... the population starving due to the food shortage. That's like... much, much bigger. 10 times bigger or 15 times bigger." | |36:47 | Lily Shaw | "I just feel it will be a horrible, horrible life and experience." | |37:48 | Alex Wellerstein | "It would be much better not to have nuclear war. We’ll just put that out there." | |38:04 | Alex Wellerstein | "The flash of light…is its own kind of fantasy. The reality is so much darker..." |

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Important Timestamps

• 00:28 – Setting the scene: sirens, incoming missiles, survival myths introduced
• 03:51 – What determines your survival? Location, luck, odds
• 04:13–05:12 – Dangers of nuclear blasts explained
• 06:10–07:02 – Early shelter designs vs. modern fallout risk
• 09:01–10:31 – “Country club” government bunkers, shelter policy choices worldwide
• 11:12–12:46 – Repurposed civilian fallout shelters and their present uselessness
• 17:03–17:23 – How walls and mass shield against fallout
• 19:02–20:45 – Sanitation hardships in shelters; Princeton fallout shelter experiment
• 22:10–23:49 – Modern survival advice: find mass, wait it out, not “years” underground
• 26:30–30:09 – Nuclear winter: soot, sunblock, temperature plummet explained
• 31:10–33:16 – Famine estimates, food stores’ limits, myth-busting post-nuke food supplies
• 34:40–35:06 – Why “safe” zones (New Zealand, Iceland, etc.) aren’t truly safe
• 35:34–36:01 – Even a regional nuclear war = mass starvation
• 36:11–36:53 – Grim menu adaptations for survival post-blast
• 37:09–38:24 – Concluding reflections: we should fear survival, not fantasize about it

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Tone & Style

• Dry, wry humor (quips about “Thunderdome,” “the worst toilet of your life”)
• Clear-eyed, scientific explanations
• Honest, sobering, occasionally harrowing
• Realism over sensationalism—dispels popular myths and refuses to glamorize disaster

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Summary Takeaway

“How To Survive a Nuclear War” dissects popular misconceptions and reveals the harsh, unromantic truth of nuclear survival: your chance of instant annihilation is far lower than your chance of enduring hardship, starvation, and ecological disaster. The episode urges listeners and policymakers alike to internalize that prevention is the only truly survivable strategy, and that survival is not the adventure seen in culture—but a deeply unpleasant, avoidable ordeal.

Transcript

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[Ben Bradford]

You realize you're hearing air raid sirens. Your phone, which is on silent, suddenly blares. It's an emergency alert. Nuclear missiles inbound. This is not a test. This is not a test. You stare until a text from a friend jolts you into action. If we follow the roadmap of countless TV shows, novels, video, what we do next is clear. We scurry down a ladder and clamp the hatch on a fallout shelter. Maybe ramshackle, maybe decked out. We hunker in a gloomy underground, peeling open cans of food, maybe for months, maybe for years, waiting to come up to the surface one day and restart civilization. When we do re emerge, we join a sandy wasteland of sheet metal and cannibals.

[Lily Shaw]

This is Thunderdome. Depth is listening.

[Ben Bradford]

It's not great, but at least it's exciting. I love post apocalypse movies. Mad Max, the Road, Snowpiercer, the Waterworld Live Show. Really good. I think there's something entrancing about a future wasteland. It's like a blank slate for a filmmaker to create a new world, but with little Easter eggs for us, a character has a spyglass and we know it was a soda bottle. And then he gets chainsawed. These depictions, though, if you ask especially studyers of nuclear war and fallout are not exactly realistic. And I have a question. We've known since our first episode how easy it could be to start nuclear war.

[Lily Shaw]

Oopsie.

[Ben Bradford]

If the missiles do launch, if the air raid sirens really do go off, then what? There are bunkers and fallout shelters. Do they work? Who would go into them? How long might one actually be down there? If you survived, what world would you actually walk back into? Dying times here, not that one. I think a really common answer is, well, I'll just be dead, so I don't have to worry about it. If you're in that camp, I got some rough news. In an actual nuclear scenario, the best estimates are that while a horrific, unfathomable number of people die, a lot remain alive.

[Alex Wellerstein]

And then, given the option in human history, most people choose live.

[Ben Bradford]

So today, you and me, we're gonna Survive nuclear war. From finding shelter to figuring out what our post nuclear world really looks like. It will be deeply unpleasant, but and not in a Mad Max way.

[Alex Wellerstein]

A really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life.

[Ben Bradford]

This is Are We Doomed? A production of Nuance Tales, part of the NPR network. I'm post apocalyptic Ben Bradford. Rewind to where all this started. The air raid sirens screech. Our phones blare with emergency alerts. Missiles are inbound. This time it's not a Hollywood movie. So if we're going to survive, it's not initially about pluck. It's about location.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Where are you located?

[Ben Bradford]

I'm in Los Angeles. Oh, sure, yeah, yeah. I mean, I assume that I'm dead, but we can discuss it. This is Alex Wellerstein, nuclear weapons historian, author, developer of a detailed organ trail like video game on the subject of survival and what it would be like. Alex says in all out global nuclear war, every major city is a prime target.

[Alex Wellerstein]

I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, but like New York City, our assumption is that New York City is glassified.

[Ben Bradford]

Cheery. But Alex says, I am not necessarily dead, nor are you, even if you're a New Yorker.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Even the most sort of destructive assumptions of the Cold War, where we assume the Soviet Union was just trying to like just take out Americans essentially, it's still concluded that you could have 40% surviving or something like that. That's not nobody.

[Ben Bradford]

That is not nobody. So Alex thinks it's a mistake to assume we wouldn't survive the blast.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Depending on where you're living, depending on where the weapon is targeted, depending on where it goes off, you might be hopeless. But Los Angeles is large, as you know. If the bomb actually lands on you, you're toast. But they can miss. If it lands 5, 10 miles in the other direction, you might not be fully toasted. You might be just a little, you know, warmed.

[Ben Bradford]

We'd like to avoid being warmed. Alex says that means shielding ourselves from the three deadly presents a nuclear weapon brings.

[Alex Wellerstein]

There's going to be heat, there's going to be blasts, there's going to be radiation.

[Ben Bradford]

The heat reaches the temperature of the sun. The blast crushes concrete buildings like walnuts, and the radiation melts our DNA. If we're outside the zone of certain death, but inside the reach of any of these three presence, we're going to need shelter. But where? In the early days of atomic weapons, people worried about bombs equivalent to those the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They dug conventional bomb shelters. Radiation, Alex says Was the smallest concern.

[Alex Wellerstein]

If you're close enough that the radiation is going to affect you, the blast and the fire are probably a bigger deal anyway.

[Ben Bradford]

But countries continued to build new bombs, bigger bombs, missiles.

[Alex Wellerstein]

The weapons are now hundreds of times bigger, can be even thousands of times bigger. But the new effect is going to be fallout.

[Ben Bradford]

Clouds of radiation would now sweep far from a blast site.

[Alex Wellerstein]

And this is caused by the immense amount of radioactive contamination that these weapons happen. It's going to affect the suburbs, it's going to affect agriculture. And so the idea is that doesn't happen instantly. That will take several hours for that radiation to make its way across. And so you have this window of time in which you can maybe do something about it.

[Ben Bradford]

So more people dug deeper, even farther from the projected blast sites. They didn't just look to shield from potential blasts. They looked to seal themselves away from radiation.

[Alex Wellerstein]

So this is what gets us to the fallout shelter.

[Ben Bradford]

The fallout shelter. In the early 1960s, Life magazine gushed on its cover, 97 out of 100 people can be saved with fallout shelters. That was wildly optimistic. President John f. Kennedy called for more than $200 million to build public shelters, equivalent to almost $2.5 billion today.

[Alex Wellerstein]

The United States government had the option to build lots of public shelters, but

[Ben Bradford]

that's not what we ended up with

[Alex Wellerstein]

because it's really expensive.

[Ben Bradford]

It's hard to get that to pencil out.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Yeah, right.

[Ben Bradford]

Even $200 million could have only housed a tiny fraction of the populace.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Presidents looked at this and said, I would rather spend that money on something else, like the interstate highway system.

[Ben Bradford]

So Alex says the government's message and strategy shifted.

[Alex Wellerstein]

So what they do is what we always do in the United States when we, like, have a public health problem, but we don't want to fund it, which is that we encourage you to take responsibility for your own health. And we do that by just telling you, like, you should just build your own shelter. We're not going to do it.

[Ben Bradford]

It's of course, your job to protect your family from global thermonuclear war.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It's your job.

[Ben Bradford]

For a hot minute, the backyard fallout shelter was big business.

[Alex Wellerstein]

There's for profit enterprises that will sell you pref. Shelters is a whole little shelter industry. Save your family from deadly nuclear fallout.

[Ben Bradford]

You can picture the result. The hole in the ground in the backyard ladder leading into the merc. Canned food on green metal shelves. A studio apartment for the apocalypse. People did dig these and still do. But Alex says there were never that many.

[Alex Wellerstein]

In general, it's A pretty small number of people who, yeah, actually build a shelter. It's really hard to do. It's expensive and it's coming out of your pocket.

[Ben Bradford]

There was other digging. The government may not have chosen to house all its citizens, but it has created some bunkers.

[Alex Wellerstein]

These are real purpose built shelters.

[Ben Bradford]

Alex has visited one in Massachusetts.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It's outside the borders of what they think destroyed Boston would be half an

[Ben Bradford]

hour from the city. The state emergency management agency uses this bunker as its current headquarters.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Like it takes you underground and it's got like a big door and everything.

[Ben Bradford]

These are the real Michelin Star bunkers, the country clubs of anti radioactivity.

[Alex Wellerstein]

They have all sorts of facilities.

[Ben Bradford]

They have a morgue, but they're also very exclusive.

[Alex Wellerstein]

They're designated for different parts of the government to basically be whisked away to so that they can do what's called continuity of government. So the idea is that they'll survive and somehow run the country from down underneath a destroyed mountain.

[Ben Bradford]

Your best bet to get in is to be like the undersecretary of education. It didn't have to be this way. We could have dug ourselves large public shelters. Other countries did. Switzerland still assigns every citizen a spot in a public fallout shelter. Finland and Sweden created some real first class facilities with gyms and classrooms and ball courts. Even the US's great Cold War rival dug far more than we did.

[Alex Wellerstein]

The Soviet Union, they did more state run projects. Big surprise, right? Like that's kind of their jam.

[Ben Bradford]

But Alex says there were legitimate reasons to not do this kind of building. The Soviets could probably only have housed about 20% of their enormous population.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It's not clear that even they thought that was going to be very effective. Yeah, too expensive to build an extra city for all of your people.

[Ben Bradford]

Not only are you digging a new city under your current city, you have to stock that unused city with food and water for its theoretical inhabitants. It's a lot. This all matters not as some dusty history lesson. It matters for us today as we escape from the missiles scrambling for shelter in the aftermath, we need to figure out where to go. With few backyard shelters or expensive public bunkers, lawmakers did provide one other option. If we weren't going to build new structures, we would at least recycle.

[Alex Wellerstein]

They start a program to identify spaces that could be used as shelters, existing spaces.

[Ben Bradford]

In the 1960s, military surveyors hunted for places we'd already built or dug rooms that with minor adjustments and the right supplies could, could stand in to provide some protection from radiation.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Some underground basement that was identified by a survey as, like, yeah, this meets the minimum requirements for, like, what a fallout shelter would be. It's made out of this. It's got this many stories above it. It's got this and that.

[Ben Bradford]

Cities and towns prepared an untold number of these kinds of makeshift shelters. Los Angeles identified more than a thousand sites. If you walk through New York City today, you can still see signs faded yellow and black placards featuring the radiation symbol and the words fallout shelter. So the air raid sirens howl, our phones blare, missiles screech. We stagger through city streets among panicked masses literally racing from the imminent heat blast and subsequent fallout. We happen to spot one of those yellow and black placards and follow the arrows until we reach the end where they're pointing, and we find nothing. All of these shelters are defunct. New York is taking down its placards, although there's confusion over even what agency is responsible for that. Los Angeles stopped maintaining its shelters decades ago. An inspector in the 1970s, per the LA Times, found food had rotted. Medicine that hadn't been stolen had coagulated. Chicago, the situation's similar.

[Alex Wellerstein]

There was a time in which people thought the only way we can deal with nuclear war is to basically dig. And what happened is they basically concluded that they didn't want to dig anymore and the only way they were going to deal with nuclear war was to threaten to unleash it on everybody else if it comes our way.

[Ben Bradford]

Deterrence became the sole defense strategy.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Mm.

[Ben Bradford]

We prevent war by pointing our weapons at each other. But we're not planning anymore, not really, for what happens after if we ever pull the trigger. On one hand, that makes sense. We don't plan for what to do if the universe spontaneously collapses either, even though it's theoretically possible and we will cover it. It's just too destructive. On the other hand, the lack of planning for nuclear war would leave millions and millions of people, possibly you and me, on our own, holding the bag.

[Alex Wellerstein]

We don't have that much provided for us.

[Ben Bradford]

However, good news. You and I are going to survive. We're going to spot our own shelter, hunker down in it, and emerge into a new world.

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[Ben Bradford]

the missiles crash and explode over our cities, over our military sites. In the area of each explosion, heat melts everything down to its atoms. Fires burst out spontaneously, miles into the distance. The blast force pushes the world flat around it. And then nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellerstein says something that looks like snow begins to fall. Sounds almost peaceful after all the fire

[Alex Wellerstein]

and brimstone, but it's really radioactive debris. It's basically pulverized earth that has been impregnated with the remains of nuclear fissures. And it's like snow that's dusting down. And that snow is radioactive, Right? So it's shooting out little particles for days.

[Ben Bradford]

Winds carry the snow to all kinds of regions that weren't directly targeted. So if we're not atomized by the heat or crushed by the blast, even if we're far away from all of it, we gotta avoid the snow, the fallout. Theoretically, that's what all these fallout shelters were for. Although I wonder, was that real? Would they actually work? Was this just like a psychological thing, or is this something that's like, oh, yeah. Actually, for the four people who actually make it into these things, they're probably gonna be okay.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Um, it depends on how much radiation. But the. The science behind them is pretty straightforward. Every time those little particles hit something else, they basically stop. If it's possible, you'd like a wall to absorb that or the dirt to absorb that and not you.

[Ben Bradford]

You don't want to be the wall, you want other walls.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Exactly.

[Ben Bradford]

Alex says when you get down to it, the fallout shelter is pretty much that simple.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It's just stuff that's going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb. So every foot of dirt you have, every brick you have steel, lead. Obviously, these are very dense things. A bunch of water Water is actually pretty good at absorbing lots of radiation. It's relatively dense.

[Ben Bradford]

A decent shelter could cut down the amount of radiation tenfold. A really good one, 50 fold.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Does that help you? It depends how much is coming in in the first place. If what's coming in is 50 times more than what would kill you, you're

[Ben Bradford]

still dead, roasted internally by the radiation.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Or you might just get sick.

[Ben Bradford]

Radiation poisoning that we recover from. But still, if we're trying to survive, our best hope is walls. Lots of walls. Let's map two scenarios of where we might find them. Rewind. Our phones blare. Missiles are in the sky. The air raid sirens actually do not screech, because in most places, they do not work anymore. We're not looking for a backyard shelter, because unless we're Jim the Prepper and we have our own, there aren't that many. And plus, it's rude to go into people's backyards. We're not ending up in a government bunker unless we have very, very special clearance. But perhaps, perhaps. Our local emergency services scramble heroically. They put together makeshift shelters as they do in hurricanes or earthquakes or wildfire. Maybe they fill one of those sites first identified back in the 1960s, where we know it will cut radiation exposure. So we're hurriedly ushered inside a dank, disused, moldy office building basement. Other strangers pack in with us. The door bolts shut. Outside, the poisoned snow begins to fall.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Dust thing down.

[Ben Bradford]

Everything gets very still and quiet. Then what? Alex Wellerstein says if our shelter is anything like the old government plans, we're in for a bad time.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Some of this stuff looks dire. I mean, some of these American plans for public shelters are things like, all right, we'll make a room, and we'll just like, fit 20 people in this room, even though it's not very big.

[Ben Bradford]

We will sleep uncomfortably, if we sleep at all.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Oh, you can rest on a cot that's two foot from somebody else's butt.

[Ben Bradford]

We drink bottled water and eat canned food or MREs that the emergency personnel were able to leave with us. But what's worse is the plumbing situation.

[Alex Wellerstein]

The most horrific thing. I really love this. They basically made in the United States what they called sanitation kits. They're like a cylinder, right? And you open them, and they have a toilet lid that can go on them. Oh, and they have some chemicals and some plastic bags. Here's your toilet because you gotta go to the bathroom.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah.

[Alex Wellerstein]

And these things are squalid and disturbing.

[Ben Bradford]

Princeton University ran an experiment in the late 1950s. They put a Family in a basement fallout shelter for two weeks. Other than boredom, their biggest challenge was the odor of the chemical toilet that was with only four of them.

[Alex Wellerstein]

And then there's a line on it that says, like, this accommodates 50 people. And you're just like, this is the worst porta Potty you can imagine.

[Ben Bradford]

I don't want to make light of nuclear Armageddon. This sanitation product is obviously not the worst thing about nuclear war. Not even close, but it kind of feels like it is.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It makes it really concrete what surviving means in this circumstance. Right. And that's why I like these examples totally. It's not abstract. It's not like a blinding light or, you know, it's not a post apocalyptic Mad Max thing. It's like a really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life.

[Ben Bradford]

This is really why I was interested in this episode more than any news you can use. Even though we are surviving nuclear war, this is a story about what the reality would feel like should we ever launch these weapons. A lot of people would have to adjust quickly to new circumstances. And humans do that. You may remember a few years ago, this first in a century pandemic swept through, and suddenly everyone was wearing cloth masks, wiping down groceries in nuclear war. How would our lives adjust? What would that be?

[Alex Wellerstein]

Like, things like toilets, really the definition of the mundane and banal.

[Ben Bradford]

And yet for a lot of us, the actual experience is probably not even getting that horrifying toilet. Because remember, the makeshift shelter is unlikely. More likely, no one's coming for us. Scenario two phone missiles scramble. Alex says without an official shelter, we're gonna have to be flexible.

[Alex Wellerstein]

My advice for people. Sometimes people ask me like, oh, where would you go? And it's like, I don't, I don't. When is this happening? What are the odds I'm gonna be sitting in the perfect location when something happens?

[Ben Bradford]

I'm imagining Jim the prepper who really put the labor into digging out his stocked up shelter. Finding out the end of the world is happening while he's on a work trip.

[Alex Wellerstein]

What's better is to know what to look for. You could reason your way to the best option in front of you.

[Ben Bradford]

Alex says we grab a go bag from our home or our car and we're very simply looking to get away from the snow.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Assume the outside world is basically poison, and poison that can go through walls, but it gets weakened by every wall it goes through.

[Ben Bradford]

So we want as many walls as we can find to catch the fallout so that our bodies are not the wall.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It's Better to be inside. You know, you want to be in the center of a building. And ideally, the bigger the building is, better. Underground is even better.

[Ben Bradford]

A basement might work well. An underground parking garage could be even more effective.

[Alex Wellerstein]

So that if you were in this situation, you'd be like, oh, there's an underground parking lot over there. Let's go there.

[Ben Bradford]

We do. We run down the ramps to the lowest floor of this garage. This is currently essentially the official guidance here in Los Angeles. You're on your own. Find shelter. Have a go bag with food and water. Stay there and wait. I think in my head, it's like, you're down there for years now. We're mole people. What is it? Actually?

[Alex Wellerstein]

So definitely not years.

[Ben Bradford]

Alex says how long we have to stay in our parking lot with God knows what kind of food or water and not even a squalid chemical toilet depends on the size of the bomb, our location, and therefore the amount of radioactivity.

[Alex Wellerstein]

So fission products have a pretty regular decay curve. Every basically seven hours you're in there, the intensity is going down by a factor of 10.

[Ben Bradford]

Okay?

[Alex Wellerstein]

Two weeks is sort of the maximum that anybody thought in the Cold War would probably be necessary, and that's probably overkill.

[Ben Bradford]

Got it. We're down in our garage a week, two weeks. Surprisingly reasonable, you might dare think manageable. Still, during those days underground, it's dark. Our flashlights run out of batteries. Our phones, unless we keep them off, run out of batteries. We may not know how much time has passed, but eventually, we chance it. We climb out to view the new world. Congratulations. You have survived nuclear war. Everyone thought you were gonna die, but you didn't. Alex says now to continue surviving, we walk.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Being able to leave does not mean you can just, like, go back to your regular life and still live there. The area may be too radioactive to be habitable. Okay, but there's a difference between, like, safe enough to walk through and, like, safe enough to live in 24 hours a day, constantly being exposed with vulnerable populations like pregnant women and children, you know?

[Ben Bradford]

And so Alex says, unless we're packing a Geiger counter that tells us it's safe, we walk. We seek an area away from fallout, away from the toxic ash, from burnt homes and buildings. We walk away from our leveled cities or towns, away from the fires and the deadly white snow. And as we walk, looking for our next shelter, we notice the sky. It's unusually dark. The wind gains a new bite.

[Lily Shaw]

It will stay there for years, over the whole globe.

[Ben Bradford]

And then, and only then, do we reach the most unpleasant part of surviving nuclear war.

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[Ben Bradford]

While we were underground, the poison snow fell and also fires burned.

[Lily Shaw]

There's city fires, big fires.

[Ben Bradford]

Lily Shaw, a climate scientist at Rutgers, specializes in what happens to the planet and in an important way, us after nuclear war. I asked her to pick up the story from where we left off, emerging from our smelly shelters, beginning to walk.

[Lily Shaw]

Yeah, I will try my best.

[Ben Bradford]

We walk past ashes.

[Lily Shaw]

If the nuclear war targeted cities, then the city will burn.

[Ben Bradford]

The fires burned hot and they burned slow. We can see what happened. The buildings with their wood frames, their insides stuffed with flammable furniture were like kindling. Occasionally, a gas line exploded more fire. Electricity shortened. More fire. There was no one above ground to put them out, no fire department. So the ashes now stretch for hundreds of miles. Some may still be smoldering as we because they burned so long.

[Lily Shaw]

I'm not sure how long, how many days, but probably, I would guess days depends on how large the city is.

[Ben Bradford]

We look up at the sky. It's dark. This is going to be our big problem. It's also a result of these fires.

[Lily Shaw]

When the city burns, it will heat up the air and all the air will rise.

[Ben Bradford]

It rises so fast it creates low pressure underneath, essentially a giant vacuum cleaner into the sky. In fact, if someone had managed to survive the nuclear explosion, they could have felt the oxygen sucked straight out of their lungs by this pressure. So the vacuum also sucks in the ash from our buildings and our people straight upward.

[Lily Shaw]

It's black carbon, we call it.

[Ben Bradford]

The literal ashes of our civilization continue to ascend upon above the clouds.

[Lily Shaw]

It will go high above where the weather happening, above the rain. It cannot be washed out by precipitation.

[Ben Bradford]

And Lilly says that means it's going to hang there, just soaking up the sun it's in.

[Lily Shaw]

We call it Stratosphere and it will stay there because there's no rain to bring it down.

[Ben Bradford]

If we're in an all out global nuclear war, the results we're witnessing as we walk. The soot in the sky has happened to pretty much every major city in the northern hemisphere. Hundreds. Even if you were far from any missile blast or any fallout zone in a region that was not a target, a country that was not involved, your sky would turn dark too. And it stays dark so the soot will start to spread out a darkened haze. Globally.

[Lily Shaw]

Yeah, that's right.

[Ben Bradford]

And it happens in.

[Lily Shaw]

Well, if you're talking about globally, then it's probably just a two to three weeks will be covering the whole globe.

[Ben Bradford]

Lilly says the murky sky enveloping the globe is not just aesthetically displeasing. What would happen then?

[Lily Shaw]

The sunlight reaches the surface, then we're going to have a cooling effect.

[Ben Bradford]

We're not talking about a refreshing breeze or congrats, we reversed global warming. We're talking cold.

[Lily Shaw]

The first year you will see it already like in the summer the temperature will drop by more than 15 degrees Celsius. Summer temperature will below freezing, below freezing

[Ben Bradford]

in the summer and then it gets colder than that, a deep freeze. And it stays that way more or less for five to 10 years.

[Lily Shaw]

That's why we get this name, nuclear winter.

[Ben Bradford]

If we have found a new community after walking from our temporary shelter, we are impoverished but alive. If one year passes, we have a new problem, a bigger problem than any we've faced yet. Fire, force, fallout. The problem is not freezing. Not that we need a coat. It's that we have to grow food in the frozen ground. And this is really why I've called Lily because she is the expert on what happens to our food in this scenario. There would quickly not be much of it. You put together a table for a report on famine that would follow nuclear war. And Lily, it's terrifying. It has these two columns of outputs that are based on the size of nuclear war. One is the direct fatalities, the number of people killed by blasts and radiation. It's unbelievable. And then there's this second column that is even more unbelievable. What is that second column?

[Lily Shaw]

Well, yes, that is the second column. That is like the population starving due to the food shortage. That is like it's much, much bigger. 10 times bigger or 15 times bigger.

[Ben Bradford]

A common estimate projects an all out global nuclear war would pretty much instantly take out 360 million people. Roughly the equivalent of deleting the entire United States. Two years later though, famine would kill 5 billion. That's like wiping the entire continent of Asia off the map. 60% of the entire Earth's population. So that means when surviving nuclear war, we're much less likely to die in the blast than to starve to death after.

[Lily Shaw]

That's, like, the biggest worry after a nuclear war.

[Ben Bradford]

I'm just wondering, like, if you remember how you felt as you kind of put that together, doing this research. You know, I mean, I. It just. It's hard to comprehend, and it is just so terrifying.

[Lily Shaw]

I know. I feel the same way. Like, when I finished the calculation and when I got the number 5 billion, I was shocked. And I double checked, double check, and double check because that's like, a number I feel. I'm afraid I just cannot really look at that number.

[Ben Bradford]

In the post apocalypse movie, the handful of disheveled survivors of the blasts have a ready solution to the oncoming food crisis. They raid gas stations or live in supermarkets, crack open a cream of mushroom one night, scoop out a handful of Vienna sausages the next. Canned food from the before times seems to outnumber the mouths to feed. Lily says the reality is the opposite. How soon would this become a problem?

[Lily Shaw]

Well, the food storage, probably the longest, can survive for, like, a couple months.

[Ben Bradford]

Couple months?

[Lily Shaw]

That's it? Four months? Yeah, four months. That's it.

[Ben Bradford]

If you personally want to hoard five years of canned food, well, here's the suggestion on the Missouri Department of Homeland Security's website for what you'll need each day. A can of an animal protein, a can of beans, a can of fruit, some peanut butter, half a sleeve of cracker, package of dried fruit, Two cans of vegetables or vegetables. A can of evaporated milk, box of shelf stable milk, Gallon of water per day. That's gonna take some real estate to store. And if you're in an area that requires any kind of fleeing from blasts or fallout, well, good luck bringing it with you. We could walk to a place that can still grow food. In her research, Lily put together a map. She shaded it in red. Countries that simply would not be able to grow enough food to sustain their surviving populations. That's most of the world. But there are a few green spots. Australia, New Zealand, a bit of South America. And one tiny dot in the northern hemisphere. Iceland. A fast harvester of fish. We could try to navigate to these places. I hope someone knows how to sail. Except Lily says even the green spots are mirageous. She says her report and that grim map have a flaw that makes them too optimistic. Like New Zealand green because it'd still be warm enough to grow food. But Lilly says how are they going to maintain their soil?

[Lily Shaw]

Big problem over there is the fertilizer they are using is from other country.

[Ben Bradford]

The fertilizer industry is probably not thriving in countries devastated by nuclear war. So New Zealand is unlikely to keep getting shipments it needs.

[Lily Shaw]

They won't. They won't.

[Ben Bradford]

Iceland would still have enough fish. But reaching them when the temperatures drop is going to be a challenge.

[Lily Shaw]

All those places are covered with sea ice.

[Ben Bradford]

There are countless other problems you could add. Destroyed electric grids, radiation, blasted crops, mass migration from devastated countries. People like usputting further pressure on whatever food does get grown. All of which means 5 billion starving is almost certainly a massive underestimate. By the way, we wouldn't emerge unscathed even from a smaller regional nuclear war that would seem not to touch us, say between India and Pakistan.

[Lily Shaw]

That was like the first paper I published on this topic.

[Ben Bradford]

And the result? Nuclear winterless. Severe than global nuclear war would create, but enough to kill crops in the US and China. Lilly calculated a 10 to 20% drop in global food production.

[Lily Shaw]

The drop is larger than all the past historic variation.

[Ben Bradford]

The world has never experienced that level of a drop in its global food production.

[Lily Shaw]

Yeah.

[Ben Bradford]

So the result there on even a regional war halfway around the globe, 2

[Lily Shaw]

billion people starving humans could fight back

[Ben Bradford]

in the year after nuclear war. In a race against the onset of nuclear winter, we could look to grow more resilient food foods such as potato. We might expand our diets, incorporating other plants to a greater degree, like seaweed or duckweed, that floating green weed that grows on stagnant ponds. Delicious. We could incorporate insects or grubs. Delicious. We could slaughter our livestock and eat their food to boot. Delicious. What do you think about that?

[Lily Shaw]

I don't want living that work for sure.

[Ben Bradford]

Yeah, yeah.

[Lily Shaw]

I just feel it will be a horrible, horrible life and experience.

[Ben Bradford]

We know in very real terms what it would mean to actually survive nuclear war. No fun sheet metal cars. No glorious battles for oil. No shutting ourselves away for the duration to be delighted or appalled by the strange cultures that emerge without us.

[Lily Shaw]

This is Thunderdome.

[Ben Bradford]

And at least for most of us, no flash of light freeing us from the burden of our earthly bodies. In the reality, billions of people, most people, including many here in the US would survive the cell phone warnings, the missiles incoming, the deadly snow. Some of us would shelter. Some of us wouldn't need to. We would walk outside, cities leveled. And then we would suffer a miserable journey from bad toilets to starvation. But nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein also thinks that's why this story is useful, maybe even containing the seed of a solve.

[Alex Wellerstein]

It would be much better not to have nuclear war. We'll just put that out there in the first place. That's not the best, he thinks.

[Ben Bradford]

If we want our nations and our political leaders to avoid pushing the red buttons that can destroy the world, a good way is to impress what it really means.

[Alex Wellerstein]

The flash of light thing where it's just over for you, that's so easy and clean, that's just you not having any more obligations. That's its own kind of fantasy. The reality is so much darker and that, I think, can compel one to take more seriously the idea that we should not get in that position in the first place.

[Ben Bradford]

If we want to stop nuclear war from ever happening, one of our best hopes may be to stop imagining how it ends and start picturing what it means to survive. Next time on Are We Doomed? The Internet? Can we blow it up? We don't know how to exist in a pre Internet world anymore. If you think there's value in what you're hearing, please share this show with everyone. We're new and your good word is the absolute best way for even more listeners to find us and ensure we can keep doing this. And if you're really wanting to do more to help, you can become a [e-mail] support and get access to our bonus episodes and discuss with our burgeoning community and me. That's Dunpod.com support. Are we doomed? Is a production of Nuanced Tales created and run by me, Ben Bradford. Our producer is Lindsey Kilbride. Our editor is Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer, Jay Sebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes at YouTube.com have Are We Doomed? Pod are by Al Kamalasak, the music composed by Dylan Dagenet. The show is distributed by the NPR network. Big thanks to Dan McCoy, Kalia Ali and the rest of the team at NPR for all they do. And most of all, thank you. You are making this worth.

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