The aftermath

Summary

Podcast Summary: Unexplainable x Are We Doomed? – "The Aftermath"

Airdate: May 18, 2026
Host: Ben Bradford (with the Unexplainable team: Byrd Pinkerton, Noam Hassenfeld, Julia Longoria, Meradith Hoddinott)
Featured Guests:

• Alex Wellerstein (nuclear weapons historian)
• Lily Shaw (climate scientist, Rutgers)

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Overview of the Episode's Theme

This joint episode of Unexplainable and Are We Doomed? dives deep into what would actually happen if global nuclear war erupted and you survived the initial blasts. Rather than the action-packed, anarchic “Mad Max”-style scenarios portrayed in pop culture, the episode explores the grim, mundane, and profoundly unpleasant realities that would define survival in the aftermath of nuclear conflict. By consulting scientists and historians, host Ben Bradford seeks to separate myth from fact, and explores why understanding the real consequences is crucial to prevention.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Reality of Survival Rates

• Initial Assumptions vs. Reality: Pop culture commonly suggests a nuclear apocalypse is synonymous with near-total extinction, but Alex Wellerstein points out survivability is higher than most think—even in targeted cities, “you could have 40% surviving or something like that. That's not nobody.” (06:14)
• Geographical Lottery: Survival depends heavily on where you are at the moment of attack (“Where are you located?” [05:39]).

2. The Three Deadly Threats: Heat, Blast, Radiation (07:09)

• Heat: Comparable to the Sun’s temperature at ground zero.
• Blast: Can destroy concrete buildings effortlessly.
• Radiation/Fallout: Initially less concern with early bombs, but as weapons grew bigger, "the new effect is going to be fallout," with radioactive “snow” contaminating wide areas far beyond blast zones (07:57; 17:34).

3. Fallout Shelters: History and Myths

• Shelter as Symbol: Early government optimism (e.g., Life magazine's "97 out of 100 people can be saved") gave way to fiscal and logistical reality. Most U.S. citizens never got access to public shelters; the government shifted the burden to private citizens (“It's your job.” [09:59]).
• Lack of Preparedness: Existing public “fallout shelters” were often just repurposed basements—today, most are defunct, never maintained, or had rotted supplies (13:29-14:34).
• Exclusive Bunkers: Government and elite have access to specialized, well-stocked bunkers for ‘continuity of government’ (11:13), but “they’re very exclusive” (11:15).

4. What Would Surviving Actually Look Like?

• The Science of Sheltering: Survival from fallout depends on maximizing shielding; “stuff that's going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb” (18:52). Dense materials like dirt, brick, water, or steel are key.
• Improvised Shelters: Most survivors' realistic options would be dank office basements or underground parking garages—“the official guidance here in Los Angeles. You’re on your own.” (24:39)
• The Horror of Sanitation: “The most horrific thing…sanitation kits…they’re squalid and disturbing.” (21:19) Surviving means enduring “the worst toilet of your entire life” (22:14, repeated 05:03 & 22:34 as a memorable refrain).

5. Duration of Sheltering

• Not Years, But Weeks: Contrary to Mad Max visions, survivors likely wouldn’t need to hunker underground for years—“two weeks is sort of the maximum that anybody thought in the Cold War would probably be necessary, and that’s probably overkill” (25:19).

6. Emerging Into a Changed World

• The "Snow": Fallout drifts for days after initial explosions; venturing out too early is lethal (17:34-19:12).
• Nuclear Winter:
  • Soot from citywide fires is lofted above the clouds into the stratosphere, forming a haze that cannot be rained out (29:41-30:01).
  • Global sunlight blocked within weeks, temperature drops 15°C+ the first summer, below freezing, then deeper freeze for 5–10 years (“That’s why we get this name, nuclear winter.” 31:30).
  • Direct fatalities from blasts/radiation (~360 million), but famine from agricultural collapse (upwards of 5 billion dead, or ~60% of the global population; 32:55).
  • Even regional wars could trigger global famine (two billion could starve after an India-Pakistan conflict, 37:32).

7. The Real Risk: Starvation, Not Immediate Death

• Food Storage Is No Panacea: “The food storage probably the longest can survive for like a couple months…four months, that’s it.” (34:33-34:43)
• “Green Zones” Illusion: Models that mark places like New Zealand as food-safe ignore dependence on global fertilizer, supply chains, and sea routes—rendering even these havens vulnerable (36:07-36:22).
• Mass Migration and Resource Collapse: Survivors would walk for days, seeking food and safety, straining any remaining infrastructure; 5 billion starved is “almost certainly a massive underestimate.” (36:33)

8. The Value of Facing Reality

• Incentive to Prevent Nuclear War: “The flash of light thing, where it’s just over for you, that’s so easy and clean…The reality is so much darker and that I think can compel one to take more seriously…that we should not get in that position in the first place.” (Alex Wellerstein, 39:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Insistence on Survival:
  • “Given the option in human history, most people choose live.”
    (Alex Wellerstein, 04:43)
• On Fallout Shelters:
  • “It's your job [to protect your family from nuclear war].”
    (Alex Wellerstein, 09:59)
• The Mundanity of Surviving:
  • “A really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life.”
    (Alex Wellerstein, 05:03, 22:14)
• On Nuclear Winter:
  • “Summer temperature will [be] below freezing 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, 31:18)
• On the Scale of Famine:
  • “A common estimate projects... the blast [would] pretty much instantly take out 360 million people... Two years later though, famine would kill 5 billion. That’s like wiping the entire continent of Asia off the map.”
    (Ben Bradford, 32:55)
• The Takeaway:
  • “It would be much better not to have nuclear war. We'll just put that out there in the first place.”
    (Alex Wellerstein, 39:15)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Introduction & Pop Culture Myth-Busting: 02:15–04:50
• What Survival Might Actually Mean: 04:50–07:57
• History & Economics of Fallout Shelters: 08:45–12:28
• Current U.S. "Shelter Strategy": 13:00–14:34
• What It’s Like Inside a Shelter (Sanitation, Food, Boredom): 20:35–22:34
• Improvised Survival, What To Do If Attacked: 23:33–25:38
• Emerging After the Blast: Fallout, Soot, Nuclear Winter: 28:02–31:30
• Starvation is the Real Threat, Even in “Safe” Regions: 34:07–36:22
• Food Chain Collapse, No Silver Bullet: 36:33–37:32
• Political Ramifications and The Episode’s Message: 39:15–39:51

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Tone & Final Thoughts

The episode’s tone is a mix of dark realism, dry wit, and candid scientific explanation. Both guests and host routinely undercut pop culture tropes with blunt, sometimes bleak facts (“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.” [38:20]).

Above all, both the historical reality and scientific projections make clear: The fantasy of a neat, cinematic apocalypse lets us off the hook. The real aftermath of nuclear war would be a slow, painful, communal disaster filled with extreme deprivation, billions of deaths by starvation, and no easy heroes or clean endings. That knowledge itself, they argue, is a powerful reason to ensure the red buttons are never pushed—and to reimagine prevention, not survival, as the real obsession.

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Listen for:

• Clear-eyed myth-busting on nuclear survival rates and the realities of U.S. (non-)preparedness.
• Intense, vivid description of the post-attack landscape—not a “Mad Max” wasteland, but a dark, freezing, hungry world.
• Specific, practical advice (if you must survive): get as many walls as possible between you and fallout, stay put for at least a week, and bring food/water—but don’t expect your journey to be anything like the movies.
• The core message: Real prevention starts with abandoning comforting apocalypse fantasies and confronting the miserable truth of what “surviving” nuclear war actually means.

Transcript

[Ben Bradford]

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[Alex Wellerstein]

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[Ben Bradford]

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[Bird Pinkerton]

This is unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton, and today we have an episode from a show called Are We Doomed? The show is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Every episode, the host, Ben Bradford, digs into a potentially terrible doomsday scenario. And the thing about terrible doomsday scenarios is that they are really fun to make up stories about, right? We have lots of great TV and movies and books telling us what the various ends of the world might look like. But I have always personally been curious about what we actually know about how doomsday scenarios might play out. What is hype? What is real, what we don't know for sure. And what I appreciate about Are we Doomed? Is that even though we will never know exactly what the end of the world as we know it will look like, Ben speaks to various researchers who are trying to figure things out. And so here is Ben Bradford and one potentially terrible doomsday scenario.

[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, novel video games, 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,

[Bird Pinkerton]

waiting to come up to the surface

[Shopify Sponsor]

one day and restart civilization.

[Ben Bradford]

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 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 Nuanced 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.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Oh, sure, yeah. Yeah.

[Ben Bradford]

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, even

[Alex Wellerstein]

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 gonna 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 have. 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.

[Lily Shaw]

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.

[Amazon Sponsor]

Support for the show comes from Amazon. There are the things you can plan for a first birthday party, a movie marathon, a renter friendly bathroom reno. And then there are the things you can never plan for. A surprise rainstorm, A Blu Ray player calling it quits. Stick on tiles that looked way better on the package for all things planned and unplanned. Amazon has you covered. You'll find low prices on everyday essentials and last minute lifesavers. Shop Amazon and save on Essentials. Save the Everyday.

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Support for the show comes from Shopify. Every worthwhile journey starts with a handful of what ifs, but one day you'll be able to look back and realize that all those what ifs were small steps towards turning your dream into a thriving business. Shopify can help you get there. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all ecosystems commerce in the US join them and turn those what ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com Vox Business go to shopify.com Vox Business that's shopify.com VoxBusiness.

[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 and brimstone.

[Alex Wellerstein]

But it's really? Radioactive debris, basically pulverized Earth that has been impregnated with the remains of nuclear fission. 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]

It depends on how much radiation. But 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. 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, used, moldy office 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. Okay? 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. Yeah. 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 and 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. Okay, 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 going to 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.

[Bird Pinkerton]

Girl, Winter is so last season. And now spring's got you looking at pictures of tank tops with hungry eyes. Your algorithm is feeding you cutoffs. You're thirsty for the sun on your shoulders, that perfect hang on the patio sundress. Those sandals you can wear all day and all night. And you've had enough of shopping from your couch. Done. Hoping it looks anything like the picture when you tear open that envelope. It's time for a little in person spring treat. It's time for a trip to Ross. Work your magic.

[Ben Bradford]

While we were underground, the poisoned 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 walk 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]

The problem 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 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.

[Lily Shaw]

Globally, yeah, that's right.

[Ben Bradford]

And it happens in.

[Lily Shaw]

Well, if you're talking about globally, then it's probably just two to three weeks.

[Alex Wellerstein]

Wow.

[Lily Shaw]

We'll 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.

[Ben Bradford]

Summer temperature will below freezing, below freezing 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 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. 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, 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, 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. So peanut butter. Half a sleeve of cracker. Package of dried fruit. Two cans of vegetables or vegetables. A can of evaporated milk. A box of shelf stable milk. Gallon of water per day. That's going to 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. One other option. 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 mirages. 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 countries.

[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 winter. Less 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. Yeah, so the result there on even a regional war halfway around the globe.

[Lily Shaw]

Two billion people starving.

[Ben Bradford]

Humans could fight back in the Year after nuclear war, in a race against the onset of nuclear winter, we could look to grow more resilient for 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 live in that world for sure. Yeah, yeah. 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. This is done the down 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.

[Ben Bradford]

He thinks 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. Are we Doomed? Is production of nuanced tales. I'm Ben Brattle Bradford creator and showrunner. Our producer is Lindsay Kilbride, editor Tracy Samuelson, engineer and sound designer Jay Sebold. Our fully animated YouTube episodes we are on YouTube are by Alborz Kamalazad. Theme music composed by Dylan Dagenet. Are We Doomed? 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 for exploring the apocalypse with us.