‘Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.’– Robert Frost
Nuclear fire. Nuclear ice.
Three quarters of a century ago war ended in two brilliant flashes of light as two cities were immolated in fires not unlike that of our sun. Estimates of the death tolls from Hiroshima and Nagasaki range between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand. Many of them instantly vaporized, shadows burned into concrete, in far less than the blink of an eye. Many of them suffering enormously, trapped in an apocalyptic hellscape, and unable to be reached by proper medical care. Some died decades later due to cancer, or some other long term toxic effect of our greatest machines of war. Every last one of these souls – man, woman, and child – all of their deaths stand as stark allegory for the injustice we’re ready to serve to ourselves – self extinction. May we all work to serve the memory and honor of these dead by finding some path to avoid this outcome.
The weapons used then are very frankly rudimentary and tiny in explosive yield compared to modern warheads. The device used on Hiroshima had an estimated yield of fifteen thousand tons of TNT equivalent power. Nagasaki suffered a blast of twenty one thousand tons equivalent power. These were delivered by bombers, taking hours. And they could be recalled up until the point of weapon release. Modern warheads are chiefly delivered with missiles, with flight times of about half an hour, and crucially having no ability to be recalled once fired. Modern weapons also vary considerably in yield: the typical United States warhead ranges from ninety kilotons to four hundred fifty kilotons; the typical Russian warhead ranges between one hundred kilotons and eight hundred kilotons. Each of these powers has tested devices of significantly higher yields. Each of these powers has thousands of warheads on ready to launch delivery systems, monitoring each other twenty four hours per day, every day, since these damned things were brought into this world.
Each nuclear super power has what’s called a ‘triad’ of delivery systems. SLBMs, or submarine launched ballistic missiles make up the sea based forces. The ICBMs, or inter continental ballistic missiles, constitute the land based forces. And the strategic bombers round out this trio of mechanical horror, comprising the air based forces. Each of these delivery systems was built to add strategic depth and redundancies into an assured ability to initiate a devastating counter launch against any possible surprise attack. This cold war theory has a grim name: mutually assured destruction, or MAD. This machine we built in the cold light of game theory logic has humanity trapped in a system in which we can effectively end global civilization in a little less than an hour. The flight times for ICBMs are more or less one half an hour – launch, counter launch, strike and counter strike all conceivably in under sixty minutes. The fate of humanity irrevocably sealed over lunch break. With the bombers echoing apocalypse a few hours later.
Modern speeds of delivering these weapons are only one of the more disturbing facts in this stew of surreal ugliness. The bombs we dropped to end World War II were the first, primitive designs. They were based only upon fission, and in some grotesque sense could be considered prototypes for what was to come. These days we have thermonuclear weapons which can level whole cities with one detonation. These are bombs within bombs – they use a fission core to achieve the temperatures needed to initiate the fusion reaction. Modern arsenals have pulled back from the multi megaton yields of the cold war, in favor of better accuracy of delivery systems. Even in the apocalypse, logistics reigns supreme: you get more bang for your buck using multiple smaller warheads, than one big one.
In the very first moments of a nuclear detonation, measured in mere microseconds (a micro second is one millionth of a second), the nuclear reactions generate a phenomenal amount of energy based on Einstein’s most famous equation: e=mc2. This creates an enormous amount of light, and heat, and pressure. None of which is content to stand still. This level of energy can blind people miles away. Many witnesses of nuclear blasts have described them as another sunrise. But to focus on the light and ignore the heat and the pressure (not to mention the toxic death stew of radioactive materials) would be like trying to ignore the freight train running you over because the horn was blowing. Nuclear war planners adjust the height of detonation for their desired effects. Hard targets (enemy ICBM silos, or command and control bunkers, purpose hardened to withstand near hits) get ground bursts – which is what it says on the tin: the warhead detonates near or at ground level. Soft targets – cities themselves, for instance, are hit with air bursts with an altitude calculated for maximum kill based on warhead yield, spreading out the energy to greatest effect.
A soft target like the city of Chicago is essentially leveled by the sheer power we’ve harnessed in these weapons. The effects of an 800 kiloton air burst are not subtle. The immediate dead would be about six hundred and fifty thousand. These are the lives consumed in the blink of an eye. This is about the same number of people who live in Vermont, the state I was born in. Those who are immediately wounded will weigh in at somewhat under a million, and make no mistake: with the grid down and civilization gone, all medical aid, all aid of any kind – no one is coming. These people are in need of a level of care only the hospitals recently turned to rubble can provide. But these are only the first few moments of this literal wave of destruction. The enormous pressures generated at detonation expand out without relenting, without remorse. The sustained wind speeds at the hypocenter (the point centered directly below the fireball) are insane, making a category five hurricane look like a purring kitten.
At twenty psi over pressure (twenty pounds per square inch more than the atmosphere already pushes you) essentially all buildings and infrastructure are turned to rubble. The tallest, strongest buildings, the iconic sky scrapers often used to symbolize the American dream, will be turned into warped skeletons of burnt black steel as if a monument to death itself. With an 800kt warhead detonated just over a mile in altitude, that’s about 1.6 miles in radius, or eight square miles of city that just no longer exists. The five psi overpressure radius is about 3.6 miles, covering about 42 square miles. Residential and commercial buildings will be damaged beyond use, many of them collapsing. Industrial super structures might stand, or at least collapse into something more recognizable than in the inner city. The two psi ring extends out to 6.4 miles, covering about 130 square miles of city. Your windows turn into high velocity razor sharp shards, but the building itself may stand if it’s robust enough – though electric wires and gas lines get broken, torn, and twisted.
One should think that the broken wreckage of a modern city, with electrical and gas lines mangled, broken, and spraying sparks or gas all over, sometimes in close proximity, would be a fire hazard leading to its own methodical annihilation of the city. But the 100 million degree burst of energy isn’t content for such meandering, slow processes. The thermal pulse travels out at near light speed, and there’s a circle of simultaneous fire for miles around. The wreckage creating the fire hazard is a snail in comparison, and really just another fuel source. The fires start to heat the air, sending it up at dizzying speeds, and consequently sucking in new air – new fuel – for its ravenous all consuming hunger. If you were ‘lucky’ enough to be unscathed underground, out of the immediate blast and light, the firestorm above you might just suck out all the oxygen from where you’re trying to hide.
These fires ultimately create a kind of fire hurricane, with wind velocities rivaling or even exceeding a class five. But unlike hurricanes when they hit land, this isn’t losing energy, it’s gaining it: as the streets melt the asphalt itself catches fire, with no five-year-old boys around to pretend to jump over or through it. The initial blast damage crushed the city beneath it. The fire-hurricane storm system scours everything, plucking it clean of anything burnable. Purifying the entire landscape into one, giant, total, vision of pure horror. Lofting the ashes of human civilization into the stratosphere, where it will float for years, potentially decades, blotting out the sunlight that has given the earth life sustaining sustenance, plunging the planet into an anthropogenic ice age.
A year passes, and the war fires have long since gone cold. Every day is dark and bleak, the sun and its warmth a faded and distant memory. The world has turned to ice, plummeting vast regions that once contained the flotsam and jetsam of modernity — agriculture, schools, libraries, sports stadiums — into a frozen hellscape of ice sheets and multiple feet of snow. No bird song, no animals playing, just the utter cold, and the absolute silence and stillness of death. The survivors remaining at this point don’t merely face a total systemic collapse of civilization. The world they live in is now actively hostile towards them on the raw, visceral level of thermodynamics itself. What little food they may be able to scavenge will be frozen and inedible unless they can also miraculously find enough firewood to stay warm even one more day. But in this kind of world, every day is a mountain of struggle, every day is a trap that may yet be sprung on the living. A world where dreaming of all the modern comforts of living may be torture, a kind of nightmare, as it would only signify proof that what has been lost will never be seen again.
Epilogue
United States – July 16th 1945
Russian Federation – August 29th, 1949
United Kingdom – October 3rd, 1952
France – February 13th 1960
China – October 16th 1964
India – May 18th 1974
Pakistan – May 28th 1998
North Korea – October 9th 2006
Israel – ?
As of my writing this in April of 2026 there are nine nations which possess somewhere between a combined 12,000 to 13,000 nuclear weapons of various designs and yields – and treaties between nuclear powers are non-existent or in tatters. Command and control failures and other near misses or accidents aren’t just cold war mythology, they’ve been a persistent fact of warhead life since we first built them. Current geopolitical instability only points towards a regime of radicalized nuclear proliferation. And as with all technologies, the further we advance, the easier it becomes to acquire. In short, the state of ‘the game’ is almost comically precarious. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has set their doomsday clock to a mere 85 seconds to midnight, the closest it has ever been.
The more sobering truth in all of this is how woefully incomplete this essay is forced to be, by the nature of the beast itself. The cold war as such extended from 1949 to 1991, the brief US monopoly on nuclear weapons punctuated by the long, slow, cold tensions of ideologies clashing while disguised as nations. And our sleep walking through the decades since has done no favors for anyone’s peace of mind. But perhaps the more vicious form of incompleteness of this essay is what I’ve left out regarding the real potential for multiple cascade failures across both our civilizational infrastructure and the environmental impacts.
The peer-reviewed literature is incomplete because we have collectively chosen a policy of blindness — whether through inaction or a perverse addiction to ignorance — though this is not for a lack of trying. Real and admirable work has been done to study the secondary and tertiary effects of ozone depletion and crop failures, but our knowledge seriously lags regarding such things as the systemic effects of grid failures on our nuclear power plants outside of the immediate blast zones. How many people are truly ready to live without the modern tools and infrastructure we’ve built? No modern agriculture. No modern power generation. No modern global trade or supply lines. No modern communications or transport. No modern medicine. No modern education.
It’s easy to look at all of this and feel overwhelmed. But our collective inaction doesn’t have to mean personal inaction, and all collective actions ultimately start with a chain of personal actions. Most reading this will live in the United States, and therefore have a lever available to them that billions do not: the constituent phone call to Congress. Every conversation raises awareness, and awareness of an issue is not only the first necessary precondition towards solving it, it is among the most powerful of forces we have to wield as a species. In these conversations we can discuss why we still have decision systems we built decades ago, giving sole authority to launch to one person. We can discuss what kind of futures we want for our children, and their children. And isn’t that the power we wield, right here, right now? The power to decide that our children have a future.
Discussions don’t have to be just person to person, either. We can join our voices in solidarity with everyone else across the globe who want humanity to choose life. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (www.icanw.org) is a fantastic place for activists to join their voices. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (thebulletin.org) is a wonderful educational institution. And both the Arms Control Association (armscontrol.org) and the Future of Life Institute (futureoflife.org) provide explicit policy proposals we can strive to advance.
What Frost doesn’t say in his poem is that we don’t have to choose fire; we don’t have to choose ice. It would be foolish to blind ourselves to the amount of work we need to put in to clean up our own mess. But it would be even more foolish to forget that fundamentally it is our own mess. We built these demon devices – we can choose to unbuild them, too. We can refuse to succumb to the inertia of the seemingly inescapable. We can begin – here, now, today – to build the future we want to see, rather than continue sleepwalking into annihilation. As Frost points out so poetically, death comes in multiple flavors. Yet so too does life.