The day of the war dawns like any other. There is no warning, and across New York people are beginning their daily routines. No air raid sirens wail and no early-warning messages flash on screens. Cars are being backed out of garages in the suburbs, while kids wearing colorful backpacks wait for school buses outside the shops. Harassed moms stuff sandwiches into packed lunches while a million espresso machines grind on kitchen counters. Outside an inner-city school, a group of 10-year-old girls wait to cross the road.
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Looking up at the sky, one of the girls sees a brief metallic flash high up near the sun, far above the chrome spire of a Midtown skyscraper. She does not know it, but she has seen a re-entry vehicle from a 5 megaton (Mt) intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and has only a few seconds left to live. Thinking about an upcoming maths test she has been working hard for, she looks down when the road-crossing signal turns to green. The girls are not even halfway across when the bomb explodes.
Across the city a brilliant white light, thousands of times brighter than the desert sun at noon, floods the scene from above. Everyone who looks at it is blinded. Rebounding from clouds and within the atmosphere, the light is visible from hundreds of kilometers away, and even projects an unearthly glow through the curtains of the Oval Office and into the White House itself. The light contains both intense heat and a flux of neutrons and gamma rays that pulverizes the DNA of any living creatures not protected by several inches of concrete. Within a few hundredths of a second, a fireball roughly the width of Manhattan Island spreads across the tops of the buildings about 1.5km off the ground.
Everyone and everything—schoolgirls, trees, animals, everything except steel and concrete—is flash-vaporized within a 10km2 area. The schoolgirls and office workers, bike couriers and early shoppers leave slight shadows on the street crossing, their remains just ash that was a few seconds earlier living humans, loved, nurtured and cared for. Most parents never know their children are dead; entire families vanish from the earth forever. As far as 25km from the new ground zero, every person caught in the open suffers third-degree burns. Charred clothing leaves pattern burns on backs and arms, while exposed skin is so scorched that within a few hours it will peel off bleeding flesh in strips like bacon.
There is no other option: every monstrous crime requires a proportionate—or better still, a punishing—response.
Within a few seconds, the blast wave has begun to level the city. Under the fireball, even concrete skyscrapers are devastated, while within 10km in every direction residential buildings are blown apart as the explosive shock sweeps over them. People are killed in multiple ways: thrown against walls, blown through windows, lacerated by flying glass, impaled by metal debris, or their bodies simply torn apart. Some parents survive fatal injuries for long enough to worry about their children as they bleed out, their guts spilled in front of them, but there is no one to tell them that their kids never made it to school and have disappeared from the face of the earth. Within a few minutes, over 1 million people have been killed outright or fatally injured.
Then the fires begin. As if doused with gasoline, every piece of flammable material exposed to the heat rays burns. As the fires gain in intensity they start to combine, and gusty winds begin to blow into the city from all directions as the heated air rises. It follows the path of the fireball, which has transformed into a gigantic white mushroom cloud, wider than the whole city, the top of which is flattening out as it reaches ever higher in the atmosphere. As smoke from below pumps into it, a sooty darkness descends, and black rain falls in a 50km plume towards the north-east, into Connecticut and across Long Island. The rain contains radioactive particles, fission products from the bomb and dust and dirt sucked from ground zero, which will be deposited as lethal fallout over the surrounding area.
In the remains of New York there are alarms, screams and the noise of raging fires, but compared to the everyday white noise of the city it seems deathly quiet. The lightly injured lie where they fell or stagger in no particular direction, for there is nowhere left to go. Car alarms wail pointlessly in shattered vehicles, and some other sirens sound, but there are no emergency services to cater to 5 million walking wounded, and in any case within a few hours the first symptoms of radiation sickness will begin to show. The fatality toll from this one blast will reach 2 million, but because of events yet to unfold, no one will ever count New York’s dead.
*
From coast to coast the United States is in utter chaos. The internet goes down, and people scramble to figure out old analogue televisions and radios to try to catch any broadcast news. The story is shouted over fences, across shop floors and into open car windows. Nuclear war has begun. Everyone is stunned. Is this a joke? Some huge prank? But eventually the reality seeps in and normal life stops, as everyone begins to flee—home, to school, wherever makes most sense in the moment. In the rest of the world too, the word is beginning to flood in—a nuclear explosion on the US East Coast, details sketchy, all broadcast links down, more to follow.
In Washington the president is being bundled downstairs and into the White House bunker under the East Wing. He is about to make a decision on retaliation that could prescribe the instant death of hundreds of millions of people and destroy the habitability of the only known living planet in the universe. The awareness that 10,000 years of human civilization could be about to end with a single word from him suffuses his conscious mind, combined with the animal fear of his own immediate demise, and concern for his family, who are not with him. Military leaders are already connected to the situation room by remote link; they too have friends, homes and families, but they have rehearsed this moment many times and silently remind themselves that professionalism requires them to keep cool heads.
Some national security officials accompany the president down into the bunker. As they hurry underground, they inform him that the fortified control room is not dug deep enough to survive a direct nuclear attack, and that if more missiles are incoming, he could have as little as six minutes to make a decision about retaliation before the American military command structure is decapitated and they are all killed. Even surviving an immediate blast would simply leave them trapped under 20m of rubble. A better command position would be in the air aboard Air Force One, but there is no time to scramble a launch. Fortunately the secretary of defense is with the president, in anticipation of a now-cancelled routine morning meeting. Walking quickly but silently behind him, an aide-de-camp carries a fat black briefcase known as the “nuclear football.” It contains launch options and targeting decisions if the president decides to order the use of US nuclear forces. The secretary of defense has already privately decided this is the only acceptable strategy and is mentally preparing to argue her case.
“Why in all hell did we not see this missile coming?” asks the president to the military Joint Chiefs of Staff as they assemble around a long table with screens at one end. “Where did the damn thing even come from? What about our early-warning systems? Our missile defenses? All those goddam satellites that cost so many billions?” The Joint Chiefs do not know, and cannot even confirm that the detonation was not accidental. Communications links with the early-warning stations, which are supposed to always be up, seem to be down. However, the experts believe no US Air Force aircraft was flying warheads over the city at the time, as such a thing is never authorized and not part of any common procedure. “It sure as hell wasn’t one of our nukes,” they chorus defensively. The US Strategic Command (StratCom) technical people chime in: “As an airburst, it must have been delivered by missile, and thus likely originated from Russia or China. Both must therefore be considered targets in any retaliation.”
The president demands to know: “Could it be a rogue operator? Or North Korea? Or the start of an all-out strike ordered from Moscow or Beijing or both?” The Joint Chiefs again do not know. There is no time to use the famed Moscow hotline, and in any case the president is not inclined to waste precious time consulting with hostile foreign leaders who have long been threatening to destroy his country. He will make this decision alone. The president’s security adviser is the lone voice of restraint in the room. “A single missile from Russia,” he says, “would likely have been intended to signal restraint in the ongoing geopolitical crisis, rather than escalation. The Russians call it ‘escalate to de-escalate,’” he informs the room. The president is infuriated at this twisted logic. “How,” he asks, “can restraint be signaled by killing 2 million people on a weekday morning?” “Because it was not 200 million,” responds the security adviser quietly. There is a pause as this sinks in.
Then a voice reminds the president that there are just a few minutes for deliberation because early-warning systems, now back online, suggest dozens more missiles are incoming. However, an ongoing software malfunction—possibly related to recent AI upgrades—means this information may not be accurate. The president asks for advice, and the Joint Chiefs disagree with each other. The fog of war is already obscuring deliberations in the bunker. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, representing the US Army, advises an immediate full-scale launch to get nuclear assets away before they are destroyed on the ground by the presumed incoming missile salvo. “We’re sitting ducks,” he shouts. They’ve hit us once, what are we waiting for? The vice-chairman, representing the Navy, disagrees, but he has less to protect, as his missile-bearing submarines are somewhere out at sea and thus invulnerable to any incoming warheads.
However, the secretary of defense points out that this may not matter much if command and control ceases to exist, because any launch order to the Navy’s nuclear subs will never arrive once Washington has been wiped off the map. The president cannot believe no one has thought of this before. The Joint Chiefs, talking over each other now due to lack of time, remind the president that these issues were covered in the standard nuclear briefing conducted immediately after his inauguration 18 months earlier, and that, in fact, hardened military facilities do exist that can get submarine-launched ballistic missiles away, but they still need presidential authorization. There is no time to resolve the debate, given that two minutes remain until incoming missiles arrive—if the early-warning system is correct, that is.
The White House bunker already seems uncomfortably hot, as if too many people have squeezed into the room. Everyone is sweating, though most feel horribly cold. Fingers shake and toes tap under the table. “The vice-president is on his way,” someone shouts. The president asks for quiet and motions for the nuclear football to be opened. “Has a decision been made?” ask the Joint Chiefs, suddenly united over in the Pentagon war room. The president demurs, placing his hands over his face. Beads of sweat are running down his forehead. He murmurs something, but it is not audible. Valuable seconds tick by. Breaking with military protocol and constitutional doctrine, the secretary of defense suggests a vote of those present, to share the moral burden. The president shakes his head, lots of voices are raised and order in the room begins to break down.
This is the defense secretary’s moment to assert control. “Mr President!” she shouts over the rising clamor, “if we do not respond, it is tantamount to surrender. The US must never surrender to aggression. We must fight back while we still can, or there will be no world left worth saving after democracy is snuffed out.” The president responds at last: “I cannot order the deaths of 200 million people alone, or I will be rightly condemned as the worst criminal in history, worse than Hitler, Stalin or Genghis Khan.” He begs: “Who am I even supposed to kill, when I don’t know who launched the missile?”
The defense secretary reminds him that the incoming salvo can only have come from Russia or China, and retaliation must target them both. She tells him he will not be alone: all those present will issue the order jointly, and moreover it would be criminal not to do so because then only millions of Americans would die, and die in vain while dictators triumphed. This would be worse than losing World War II, she concludes. “Remember your oath of office,” says an admiral, unbidden, somewhere off to the side. “You’re sworn to protect the Constitution and our republic!” Heads nod; no one disagrees. Everyone has doubts, but no one voices them. No one wants to be the voice of weakness, of surrender, of caution.
And so, by tacit consensus, a decision is made. An intern rushes sobbing from the room; no one turns their head. Thus, the deaths of a thousand million will avenge the death of 1 million. The aide-de-camp who follows the president always carrying the nuclear football speaks for the first time.
With the calm hands of a well-trained soldier, he enters the targeting options on the president’s behalf, and he wants to make it clear that the order can only be stopped if rescinded within 30 seconds. The Pentagon responds over the line: “Is the launch order confirmed?” With shaking hands the president consults the “nuclear biscuit,” a little plastic card kept in the inside pocket of his suit, reading out the letters to a hushed room. “Is this final?” ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The president nods, barely perceptibly, and on this gentle, solemn nod the future of the biosphere and human civilization turns.
Perversely, things are easier now, because a decision is made and all everyone has to do is follow procedure. No one has singular responsibility for the coming genocide; all they have to do is obey orders. Launch codes and target coordinates are issued, with gathering momentum, to missile silos across the continental US; in each silo, operators on opposite sides of the same underground room turn their switches simultaneously, as they have been drilled to do a thousand times. Everyone has trained for this moment and quietly hoped it would never come, but now it has, they are focused on doing their jobs.
They have no other options—they must execute orders, not question them. The concrete blast doors on missile silos rumble as they open, and smoke pours from 400 igniting Minuteman III rocket engines across Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. Within a minute the Pentagon reports back to the White House: the Minuteman IIIs are in the air. Every missile carries a W87 warhead, delivering a 300 kiloton (kt) yield, 20 times larger than the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. The warheads will each kill an estimated 1 million people in their targeted cities. It is done. Russia and China will be obliterated. In the White House bunker, no one speaks. The sound of impending mass death is merely silence.
Within 10 minutes, similar war room convenings are taking place in Moscow and Beijing. Neither is aware that they have attacked the United States, but the United States is now surely attacking them. They too must respond, or their own cities will burn in vain. Their urgent messages denying responsibility for the initial attack on the United States have not got through official diplomatic channels in time, or were not believed—they do not know which. There are news agency reports, moreover, that the missile that incinerated the American city was launched by a North Korean sub, or even some rogue general following the recent coup in Pakistan. India too now puts its forces on high alert, and Pakistan arms its remaining warheads in response. It has no submarines and does not want its nuclear capability eliminated by an all-out attack from Delhi.
Thus similar scenes to that in Washington play out in four other capitals. The ultimate decisions have an air of inevitability about them: it is much easier to say yes than no, far better to be avenged in death than to die a coward who was too scared to push the button. Humanity’s blood is up; Homo sapiens evolved as a warring species, ever eager to level an opponent’s cities, from Troy to Tokyo, in anger, retaliation or revenge. There is no other option: every monstrous crime requires a proportionate—or better still, a punishing—response. Anything less would reward the attacker and allow unprovoked aggression to win the day.
While the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Bomb never went away; we just stopped thinking about it.
Once the detonations begin, the logic of escalation is inexorable. Capital cities are obliterated within the first wave, taking national governments with them, and after that submarine captains, airbase commanders and silo operators are largely on their own. They still have plenty of firepower: a single US submarine carrying 144 warheads of 100kt yield each can generate 42 million casualties in a well-planned attack on Russia, or 119 million if it strikes at more densely populated Chinese cities. In reality the death tolls are lower, but only because each side is now exhausting options for large city targets. After the first few hundred missiles the new detonations are beginning to overlap, like hole punches running out of paper. The initial Minuteman III salvo represented only one-third of the US nuclear arsenal; now the remaining two-thirds, totaling more than 1,500 warheads, are deployed in a second-strike retaliation against Russia and China, who have themselves launched an all-out counter-strike response to the initial American attack.
The United States in a political sense has already ceased to exist. One surprise has been just how many weapons were sent to targets in Washington DC and other major cities: the capital alone experienced nearly 30 nuclear explosions. Moscow, targeted by the US, has seen more than 100. In military parlance, this is just “bouncing the rubble.” In America, after the first 1,000 weapons have detonated, about half the national population has already been within 5km of a ground zero, and a quarter of the urban population has been killed outright. In some ways, they are the lucky ones—as we will see, over time almost no one will survive. In total, with more than 4,000 nuclear explosions in all the targeted countries, 770 million casualties have been generated by the time the war ends. The atmosphere is empty of missiles, but it is not over. Now a further horror is beginning to unfold.
*
This scenario is terrifying, but it is not going to happen…is it? Most of us are scared at some level about the prospect of nuclear war but prefer to believe we will never witness such a thing. We are wrong. The risk of a civilization-ending thermonuclear conflict has been estimated to be roughly around 1 per cent a year. Of course this is just a guesstimate, and the probability changes all the time as superpower tensions wax and wane. But this is a rough average. This seems reasonable if you consider all the historical near misses, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to technical malfunctions, all of which we will examine in more detail later.
As Martin Hellman (a professor emeritus at Stanford University) warned in a 2021 article, this compounding of a small annual risk means that “a child born today may well have less-than-even odds of living out his or her natural life without experiencing the destruction of civilization in a nuclear war.” I will not go too deeply into the maths, but suffice to say that while 1 per cent per year does not compound to 100 per cent in a century (probability is not additive in that sense), it does work out at a century-scale risk of about 63 per cent, so roughly two-thirds. That is the less-than-even odds Hellman was talking about.
Nuclear weapons were invented in 1945. Thus, we have already been lucky for 75 years, and using the calculation above, we would expect to have a two-thirds risk of seeing worldwide catastrophic nuclear war before 2045. The philosopher Carl Lundgren, applying Bayes’s theorem to the probability problem, estimates a likelihood—in Cold War-type geopolitical conditions—of one nuclear war every 74 years, a remarkably close number to this. If these academics are right, we may already be living on borrowed time, even without the escalating tensions of our current world—between China and the US over Taiwan, India and Pakistan over Kashmir, Israel and Iran over Palestine, and Russia and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) over Ukraine—that most experts acknowledge have now put us as close to nuclear conflict as during even the most dangerous periods of the Cold War.
The world was incredibly lucky to avoid nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, when for a critical 13 days the odds of nuclear conflagration (as judged in the immediate aftermath by President Kennedy himself) were perhaps as high as one in three. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, accompanied by noisy nuclear saber-rattling by the Russian President Vladimir Putin, raised the risk to higher levels than most of us have experienced in our lives.
The specter of The Bomb hangs over us once again, just as it did from the 1950s to the 1980s. But while the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, The Bomb never went away; we just stopped thinking about it. Now is the time to start again. We must destroy The Bomb, before it destroys us.
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Adapted from Six Minutes to Winter: Nuclear War and How to Avoid It by Mark Lynas. Used with the permission of the publisher, Bloomsbury Sigma, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing. Copyright © 2025 by Mark Lynas.
