Doomsday: 10 Ways the World Will End (2016) s01e04 Episode Script
Nuclear War
Half the world is aflame as the horrors of war explode on a scale unparalleled in history.
The nuclear nightmare that has haunted man for decades has finally come true.
- It's explosion, chaos, disorder, death, destruction.
- There wouldn't be life as we know it.
- Western civilization as we know it now, will be, for all practical purposes, wiped out of the map.
A global cataclysm, not of nature, but at the hands of mankind itself.
Will you be ready? When Doomsday strikes, can any of us survive? In August 1945, nuclear war became a reality when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on cities in Japan.
Seven decades later, the arsenals of the great powers are 140,000 times more powerful.
What would happen if a nuclear war broke out today? - You want to hole up somewhere with a lot of supplies.
Somewhere, preferably, heavily protected.
- This is a long-term, horrible, horrible catastrophe.
- It would be the worst thing ever to happen in human history.
It's a typical morning in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Tourists crowd around the world-famous Liberty Bell.
- The normal citizen would not have much warning.
Weighing more than 2,000 pounds, the imposing bell seems indestructible, despite its famous crack.
- The light is blinding.
The bell itself is blistering and boiling, and then everything is gone.
The tourist hasn't seen any of this after that initial flash, because the tourist themself is gone.
It's the moment people across the world have feared for more than 70 years.
An incident between the United States and Russia has escalated Plunging the world into nuclear war.
Ignition.
The first nuclear explosions of the war aren't aimed at bringing down buildings or killing people.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles are launched high into the atmosphere where they explode 300 miles above the United States, Europe, and Russia.
Their purpose is to destroy electronics.
- If you set off a nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere, you can produce an electromagnetic pulse that can disable electronics all around a huge area of the earth.
- [It's not easy to telc.]
The electromagnetic pulse or EMP, shoots massive currents through electronic circuits creating chaos.
All over the Southern Hemisphere, emails and texts from the north suddenly stop.
- Hello? Hello? Hello? The interconnected world is beginning to unravel.
On highways from the United States to Canada and from Western Europe to Russia, traffic comes to a standstill as many electric circuits in cars are fried.
The confusion is compounded because some electronic devices are disabled and some are not.
- Some cars just stop.
This will create wholesale chaos on a major thoroughfare, and traffic will be snarled for hours, possibly even days.
- It seems like some kind of spooky, crazy thing is going on.
But it's not just bedlam on the highways.
People everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere are faced with unexpected crises.
The pilot of a passenger jet starts his initial descent into Brussels, Belgium When things suddenly start to go wrong.
- It's not going to be immediately obvious to a pilot what has gone on, except a lot of the electronic equipment on this jet is going to either fail or be disrupted.
As the world headquarters for NATO, Brussels is a prime target for Russia's EMP disruption.
The pilots can't get a signal from flight control.
Unable to land, they are running out of fuel and options.
While the public at large is in a state of mass confusion, both the American and Russian armies are operating at full-speed.
Their electronic systems hardened against the electromagnetic effects of the atmospheric nuclear explosions.
The major nuclear powers unleash their arsenals.
There are about 15,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
5,000 in storage are due to be dismantled.
The rest remain weapons of war.
- Out of the 10,000 nuclear weapons that are in the possession of the military, roughly 1,800 are on alert, ready to go on top of ballistic missiles under a short notice.
The overwhelming amount of nuclear weapons on alert are U.
S.
and Russian.
Britain and France have a few.
Britain has about 40.
France has about 50 that are on alert.
There are no other nuclear weapon states that have nuclear weapons on alert.
While all of Britain's and France's warheads are on submarines, the U.
S.
and Russia have missiles both on subs and on land.
Land missiles are based deep in the heartland of each country.
And while both sides have them in silos, only Russia deploys mobile launchers.
These weapons are designed to kill and destroy on an unthinkable level.
- If you make the rocket very large, and you can make nuclear warheads very small, you don't have to limit yourself to just one warhead per missile.
Some missiles have as many as ten warheads, each one 50 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
- In the first strike you're gonna have something in the order of 600 to 700 ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads from both countries flying against each other.
The first signs that you're likely to get before any official news, are gonna be coming from Twitter and Facebook and other Internet sites as people that are in the paths of these missile silos are gonna start reporting that there are a lot of rockets taking off nearby.
Planet Earth erupts into nuclear war.
For every person, every family, the global conflict becomes intensely personal.
Where will our next meal come from? Will there be water to drink? Will radiation kill me? Can I hide? Will mankind come to its senses and halt this self-destruction, or is this the beginning of our final chapter? Ignition.
What would happen if a global nuclear war broke out today? Would you survive? American and Russian nuclear warheads fill the skies above our planet as the unthinkable has started, World War III.
These missiles of mass destruction will take 10 to 30 minutes to reach their targets.
- The first cities that would be hit are cities that have important military and civilian leadership and command structure in them; Washington D.
C.
; Moscow.
You would have enormously devastating consequences.
It's hard to visualize, unless you've seen pictures of the destruction that happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two bombs that were dropped over Japan.
And those were puny weapons compared to the large yield warheads that are on ballistic missiles.
The nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 was only 3% as powerful as each of the warheads heading for Washington D.
C.
, and today's technology allows for exact marks to be hit.
- In Washington D.
C.
, the most likely targets to be hit very early on include the White House and the Pentagon.
While nuclear bombs are often exploded in the air, the White House and Pentagon are targeted for ground bursts detonating on the surface to destroy underground war rooms and executive shelters.
- If you want to do the most damage underground, you set off a ground burst.
It makes a crater and destroys bunkers.
The Russian missile aimed at the White House is exactly on target.
- A 500-kiloton warhead attack on the White House would create a fireball with a diameter of one mile.
Inside the fireball, temperatures reach more than 10 million degrees, instantly killing everyone it touches.
- It's like the center of the sun.
Everything inside of the fireball is incinerated.
You are vaporized.
You are instantly one with the universe.
The blast pressure outside the fireball is almost as deadly.
- It throws things into you.
It throws you into things.
- You can have bones break And it could even rip the skin off your bones.
- And it's going to be letting out huge amounts of heat energy.
Just the heat alone from this is gonna be able to give people third degree burns over a diameter of 5 1/2 miles.
Buildings and structures are not spared either.
The Washington Monument, 555 feet tall, crumbles.
- The marble and granite blocks of the Washington Monument will break apart under high pressure.
They'll pulverize.
They'll turn to dust.
The crystalline structure of granite, while making it strong under gravity, blows apart under high pressure.
Even a dozen miles beyond the blast and the heat, the light robs eyewitnesses of their sight.
- If you're standing far away from a nuclear explosion that you don't get killed instantly, you can still be blinded because the flash of light is extraordinary, and it will just put your retinas right out.
The blindness only lasts a few minutes, but these people won't live long enough to get their sight back.
- From one ground burst explosion in Washington D.
C.
, about 300,000 people would be killed.
Now imagine more than a dozen of these explosions going off all over the city.
At virtually the same time as Russian bombs hit Washington, the U.
S.
, Britain, and France strike Moscow with 80 warheads.
The city becomes a field of flaming wreckage, and a million people are dead almost instantly.
- It's not just boom, yay.
Its boom, boom, boom, boom, cloud, cloud, explosion, chaos, disorder, death, destruction.
It's a hellscape.
- After the initial salvo, the second tier of targets will include nuclear weapon storage sites and industries that support the nuclear war.
Among those targets are cities like Philadelphia where people are still unaware that a war is underway.
Here is where the tourists viewing the Liberty Bell become victims of war.
The carnage is massive, and this is just the beginning.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, warheads now target America's allies.
In Brussels, NATO Headquarters is among the targets hit.
Just three miles away, the airport is also destroyed, stranding a plane about to land.
- A large jetliner needs over a mile of runway to land.
If there are no runways, you can't land a Boeing in a field.
- You don't carry a lot of extra fuel 'cause it's heavy.
So now there's a ticking clock, and you've got to get that plane down, and there's nowhere around.
At any given time, there are about 10,000 aircraft in the air around the world.
Thousands, like this one, suddenly have no place to land, and hundreds of miles above, more warheads streak through space.
Ordinary people become aware of the terror.
They rush to find cover, no one knowing where the bombs will fall next.
If they are outside target cities, can they survive? Is anyplace on the planet really safe? Consider the unthinkable, a nuclear war spreads across the world.
Is everyone doomed, or will some of us survive? Across the U.
S.
, Russia, and Europe, capitals, major cities, and military bases have already been destroyed.
Millions are dead.
Word of the war spreads, and outside the initial strike zones from Siberia to Southern Italy, people run to take shelter.
In Kansas, America's heartland, the first occupants arrive at a unique high-end survival bunker lavishly outfitted from the remains of a silo that once housed an Atlas rocket, America's first intercontinental ballistic missile.
- There aren't very many fallout shelters anymore, but people have decked out these missile silos into these luxury apartments.
- They cost more than $1,000,000, they have five years' worth of food, they've got hydroponic growing systems, and apparently 70 people That's a community Can live for five years and wait for the worst to blow over.
- It's not impossible to imagine creating a bunker where people could live for five years.
Would they be happy? I don't know.
Depends on the people, probably, and how nice the bunker is.
But not everyone in America's Midwest has access to underground bunkers.
Those without are in peril.
As more than 400 Russian warheads begin detonating in powerful ground bursts to destroy missile silos buried deep under the surface.
- Ground bursts are the worst for nuclear fallout because you're exploding something on the ground, and you're getting all this radioactive material mixed in with the dirt, and it gets launched up into the air.
The deadly radioactive clouds begin drifting toward population centers.
At Whiteman Air Force Base an hour outside of Kansas City, Missouri, the crews manning 18 B-2 stealth bombers are rushing to take off.
Along with B-52s, they are the only bombers designated to drop nuclear bombs.
This makes them prime targets, leaving American commanders only one option.
- Scatter the planes.
Disburse them to other airports around the country that are out of reach or haven't been destroyed yet.
The planes are scrambling just as the Russian warhead hits.
It's too late.
Meanwhile, in Europe, another NATO capital comes under fire as an 800-kiloton bomb reaches the city of Rome.
With 50 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, it explodes in an airburst A blast set to detonate before the warhead hits the ground.
- If you want the maximum destruction you have an airburst.
You detonate the nuclear weapon above a city and then it creates this massive shockwave that destroys everything underneath it.
Inside the three-mile blast zone stands the 2,000-year-old Colosseum.
- It's built of unreinforced concrete; It's just gonna get blown to dust.
There will be 500 mile an hour winds that then will just scatter this dust everywhere.
Less than one hour into nuclear war, it's already the deadliest day in human history.
A thousand warheads have taken 25 million lives, and worse is yet to come.
The missiles now take aim at major population centers where the only goal is to kill.
In 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs in Japan, an indelible sign of what is possible.
What if nuclear war broke out today? Could we survive? A fiery hell is crossing the face of the Earth as almost 2,000 ominous nuclear mushrooms scar the landscapes of the U.
S.
, Europe, and Russia.
Tens of millions are dead in a lethal tide that stuns most survivors into a blinding fear.
World War III has suddenly turned the great powers into wounded giants populated by desperate refugees with no place to go.
For those not instantly killed in the initial assaults, survival takes presence of mind.
Put aside the horror.
Concentrate.
Stockpile food.
Stash away as much water as you can.
Stay inside.
Take care of your own.
Underground in Kansas, 70 survivors in a well-provisioned bunker know they are in for the long haul.
They are prepared to defend themselves from outsiders.
But what if the unexpected happens? - What if one of them has some sort of episode? What if they have a mental breakdown? I would really like to know how far they've thought of all of the different contingencies because if just one comes up that is unsolvable, you're losing those 70 people.
Meanwhile, there are survivors in the air too.
As Brussels burns, a passenger jet heads north toward Hemiksem hoping that this insignificant town will have somewhere to land.
- The pilot has, actually, a really, really good option.
If you remember the Miracle on the Hudson, large jetliners are actually really good gliders.
The fuel tanks are empty.
With no runway in sight The pilot eases the jet down on the River Scheldt.
For the moment, the passengers and crew are safe, but their struggle for survival in the nuclear ashes is only just beginning.
The death toll pushes past 100 million as thousands of square miles are left smoldering where cities and military bases once stood.
- Look back at the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If you just multiply that by millions, you can imagine the aftermath of a global nuclear exchange.
- My grandfather told me about landing in Hiroshima after the bomb.
He was on a medical ship, and what really struck him was the smell of char, and death, and destruction.
He said he'd never smelled anything like it.
And seeing the destruction, it shook him to his core.
And yet, those who die in thermonuclear fireballs may be the lucky ones.
Any survivors will have to face the terrible aftermath of the widespread destruction A nuclear winter.
What happens to a world after the destruction of a total nuclear war? Can any of us survive? Cities from America to Europe to Asia have been destroyed.
In the U.
S.
and Russia especially, the death toll is enormous.
- You would imagine well over 100 million people in each country have been killed.
The way nuclear wars might evolve, it is hard to imagine that it would be limited.
And the deadly effects are not confined to cities destroyed by bombs.
When Russian warheads struck American missile silos in the northern mountain states, radioactive fallout began taking a massive toll.
- Wind patterns would carry it and drop it on huge areas of the country, so there would essentially be no safe place to go.
Duluth, Minnesota.
A small city of 86,000 was just one of many places directly in the path of the deadly clouds, and people here began to die from radiation sickness.
- Radiation sickness is when your organs and tissues that are necessary to keep you running, your nervous system, and your blood If they absorb enough radiation, they're gonna start going offline.
Suddenly all sorts of things start to go wrong.
You'll get lots of little blood spots, things that look like burns on the body.
Vomiting.
Your hair falls out.
Your body just stops functioning, and it's a slow, painful, awful death.
A veil of grief for the loss of friends and family compounds the struggle survivors now face for the basics; Food, water, and shelter And residual radiation will kill for decades.
- To have some idea of what's gonna happen in the future after these cities are ruined, think of Chernobyl.
There were cities nearby that were evacuated.
Today they're really overgrown with vegetation and animals are just roaming freely there.
That's what it's gonna be across huge swaths of North America, for example.
The world now settles into a deep gloom as the skies go dark.
The bombs started massive fires that sent 50 million tons of soot into the air.
- What happens is it goes up into the atmosphere, and it's quickly spread around the world by the wind.
And so the result is almost no sunlight gets to the ground.
The soot from the massive nuclear fueled fires block so much sunlight that it plunges the world into a sudden nuclear winter.
- This is an ice age with fallout, with radiation.
Everything is going to be damaged in some way or another.
Scientists say a nuclear winter will freeze the Earth for about two decades.
- The onset of this winter is shocking.
This is a long-term, horrible, horrible catastrophe that would happen in the case of a global thermonuclear war.
The sudden cold destroys world agriculture.
The war has already killed more than 200 million people, and now far more are doomed.
- We're talking billions of people who will die from starvation as a result of this.
- In a scenario where we have a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere The U.
S.
, Russia, Europe You're gonna get the biggest effects of nuclear winter.
The Southern Hemisphere countries will be less affected.
- You can imagine a country like Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, where you would have a greater chance of survival after a nuclear war.
- Let's say humanity survives.
Where do we go from there? Would we be able to keep cultures? Would we be able to keep art? Will we have learned our lesson? These are huge, huge questions that it's interesting to think about, but also terrifying.
Will civilization endure through a nuclear winter, or is mankind condemned to a cold, dark death? Ignition.
What happens if the most powerful nations in the world unleash their nuclear weapons in an all-out war? Would humanity survive? Two decades later, the fiery destruction of nuclear war has left half the planet in ruins And nearly 90% of the world's population has died off.
In Kansas, the old Atlas silo that was converted into a luxury fallout shelter still stands firm But it's long been abandoned.
It was stocked with five years' worth of food, and 70 people survived inside for a time.
- Could you make a bunker to ride out a nuclear attack? Sure.
Just make the assumption that nobody's gonna come help you for a very long time, if ever.
Can you do that? Sure.
Can you do that for the whole country? No.
- Say a handful of people do make it, and they're in one of these shelters, and it's time for them to venture back out onto the surface.
They will be entering into a completely unfamiliar terrain.
Everything they knew of would be gone.
The Earth eventually begins to thaw from its nuclear winter.
The winds break up the global cloud cover, letting sunlight back in, and the planet slowly warms.
With the passage of time, the world's decimated population grows, slowly.
A century later, the ruins of abandoned cities are overgrown by weeds as nature eventually reclaims them.
Survivors in the warringg countries become refugees, driven to head for warmer climates.
- People will migrate.
Knowing that perhaps Brazil won't be as affected, a lot of people are gonna move from the States, from the barren states to Brazil or, maybe, Australia.
- We already see how refugees operate today.
Countries are devastated by war, and people have to leave with nothing but the shirts on their back, so they walk huge distances or they get on a boat and risk their life trying to cross a sea that is very treacherous.
But when you have nothing left to lose, you might as well risk it all.
For 5,000 years, empires rose and fell.
Only ruins remain of the Maya, ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
But while these civilizations vanished, mankind did not.
- Nobody really knows how many people could survive a nuclear winter, but I'm a little bit of an optimist.
I think humans are incredibly crafty, and we've come a long way since our cave-dwelling ancestors.
We're really smart.
We've got a lot of this knowledge written down.
The scientific method allows us to quickly pick up from where we left off.
We now know how to make progress much faster.
We know how not to fool ourselves.
- Will enough people survive? We're guessing that between 1,000 and 10,000 humans would have enough of a variety that we could kick-start the human race again.
But if they were able to, you know, hold on and survive, you could have a birth of a new super-culture, which would be really cool.
The nuclear nightmare that has haunted man for decades has finally come true.
- It's explosion, chaos, disorder, death, destruction.
- There wouldn't be life as we know it.
- Western civilization as we know it now, will be, for all practical purposes, wiped out of the map.
A global cataclysm, not of nature, but at the hands of mankind itself.
Will you be ready? When Doomsday strikes, can any of us survive? In August 1945, nuclear war became a reality when the United States dropped two atomic bombs on cities in Japan.
Seven decades later, the arsenals of the great powers are 140,000 times more powerful.
What would happen if a nuclear war broke out today? - You want to hole up somewhere with a lot of supplies.
Somewhere, preferably, heavily protected.
- This is a long-term, horrible, horrible catastrophe.
- It would be the worst thing ever to happen in human history.
It's a typical morning in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Tourists crowd around the world-famous Liberty Bell.
- The normal citizen would not have much warning.
Weighing more than 2,000 pounds, the imposing bell seems indestructible, despite its famous crack.
- The light is blinding.
The bell itself is blistering and boiling, and then everything is gone.
The tourist hasn't seen any of this after that initial flash, because the tourist themself is gone.
It's the moment people across the world have feared for more than 70 years.
An incident between the United States and Russia has escalated Plunging the world into nuclear war.
Ignition.
The first nuclear explosions of the war aren't aimed at bringing down buildings or killing people.
Intercontinental ballistic missiles are launched high into the atmosphere where they explode 300 miles above the United States, Europe, and Russia.
Their purpose is to destroy electronics.
- If you set off a nuclear weapon in the upper atmosphere, you can produce an electromagnetic pulse that can disable electronics all around a huge area of the earth.
- [It's not easy to telc.]
The electromagnetic pulse or EMP, shoots massive currents through electronic circuits creating chaos.
All over the Southern Hemisphere, emails and texts from the north suddenly stop.
- Hello? Hello? Hello? The interconnected world is beginning to unravel.
On highways from the United States to Canada and from Western Europe to Russia, traffic comes to a standstill as many electric circuits in cars are fried.
The confusion is compounded because some electronic devices are disabled and some are not.
- Some cars just stop.
This will create wholesale chaos on a major thoroughfare, and traffic will be snarled for hours, possibly even days.
- It seems like some kind of spooky, crazy thing is going on.
But it's not just bedlam on the highways.
People everywhere in the Northern Hemisphere are faced with unexpected crises.
The pilot of a passenger jet starts his initial descent into Brussels, Belgium When things suddenly start to go wrong.
- It's not going to be immediately obvious to a pilot what has gone on, except a lot of the electronic equipment on this jet is going to either fail or be disrupted.
As the world headquarters for NATO, Brussels is a prime target for Russia's EMP disruption.
The pilots can't get a signal from flight control.
Unable to land, they are running out of fuel and options.
While the public at large is in a state of mass confusion, both the American and Russian armies are operating at full-speed.
Their electronic systems hardened against the electromagnetic effects of the atmospheric nuclear explosions.
The major nuclear powers unleash their arsenals.
There are about 15,000 nuclear warheads in the world today.
5,000 in storage are due to be dismantled.
The rest remain weapons of war.
- Out of the 10,000 nuclear weapons that are in the possession of the military, roughly 1,800 are on alert, ready to go on top of ballistic missiles under a short notice.
The overwhelming amount of nuclear weapons on alert are U.
S.
and Russian.
Britain and France have a few.
Britain has about 40.
France has about 50 that are on alert.
There are no other nuclear weapon states that have nuclear weapons on alert.
While all of Britain's and France's warheads are on submarines, the U.
S.
and Russia have missiles both on subs and on land.
Land missiles are based deep in the heartland of each country.
And while both sides have them in silos, only Russia deploys mobile launchers.
These weapons are designed to kill and destroy on an unthinkable level.
- If you make the rocket very large, and you can make nuclear warheads very small, you don't have to limit yourself to just one warhead per missile.
Some missiles have as many as ten warheads, each one 50 times as powerful as the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.
- In the first strike you're gonna have something in the order of 600 to 700 ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads from both countries flying against each other.
The first signs that you're likely to get before any official news, are gonna be coming from Twitter and Facebook and other Internet sites as people that are in the paths of these missile silos are gonna start reporting that there are a lot of rockets taking off nearby.
Planet Earth erupts into nuclear war.
For every person, every family, the global conflict becomes intensely personal.
Where will our next meal come from? Will there be water to drink? Will radiation kill me? Can I hide? Will mankind come to its senses and halt this self-destruction, or is this the beginning of our final chapter? Ignition.
What would happen if a global nuclear war broke out today? Would you survive? American and Russian nuclear warheads fill the skies above our planet as the unthinkable has started, World War III.
These missiles of mass destruction will take 10 to 30 minutes to reach their targets.
- The first cities that would be hit are cities that have important military and civilian leadership and command structure in them; Washington D.
C.
; Moscow.
You would have enormously devastating consequences.
It's hard to visualize, unless you've seen pictures of the destruction that happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the two bombs that were dropped over Japan.
And those were puny weapons compared to the large yield warheads that are on ballistic missiles.
The nuclear bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 was only 3% as powerful as each of the warheads heading for Washington D.
C.
, and today's technology allows for exact marks to be hit.
- In Washington D.
C.
, the most likely targets to be hit very early on include the White House and the Pentagon.
While nuclear bombs are often exploded in the air, the White House and Pentagon are targeted for ground bursts detonating on the surface to destroy underground war rooms and executive shelters.
- If you want to do the most damage underground, you set off a ground burst.
It makes a crater and destroys bunkers.
The Russian missile aimed at the White House is exactly on target.
- A 500-kiloton warhead attack on the White House would create a fireball with a diameter of one mile.
Inside the fireball, temperatures reach more than 10 million degrees, instantly killing everyone it touches.
- It's like the center of the sun.
Everything inside of the fireball is incinerated.
You are vaporized.
You are instantly one with the universe.
The blast pressure outside the fireball is almost as deadly.
- It throws things into you.
It throws you into things.
- You can have bones break And it could even rip the skin off your bones.
- And it's going to be letting out huge amounts of heat energy.
Just the heat alone from this is gonna be able to give people third degree burns over a diameter of 5 1/2 miles.
Buildings and structures are not spared either.
The Washington Monument, 555 feet tall, crumbles.
- The marble and granite blocks of the Washington Monument will break apart under high pressure.
They'll pulverize.
They'll turn to dust.
The crystalline structure of granite, while making it strong under gravity, blows apart under high pressure.
Even a dozen miles beyond the blast and the heat, the light robs eyewitnesses of their sight.
- If you're standing far away from a nuclear explosion that you don't get killed instantly, you can still be blinded because the flash of light is extraordinary, and it will just put your retinas right out.
The blindness only lasts a few minutes, but these people won't live long enough to get their sight back.
- From one ground burst explosion in Washington D.
C.
, about 300,000 people would be killed.
Now imagine more than a dozen of these explosions going off all over the city.
At virtually the same time as Russian bombs hit Washington, the U.
S.
, Britain, and France strike Moscow with 80 warheads.
The city becomes a field of flaming wreckage, and a million people are dead almost instantly.
- It's not just boom, yay.
Its boom, boom, boom, boom, cloud, cloud, explosion, chaos, disorder, death, destruction.
It's a hellscape.
- After the initial salvo, the second tier of targets will include nuclear weapon storage sites and industries that support the nuclear war.
Among those targets are cities like Philadelphia where people are still unaware that a war is underway.
Here is where the tourists viewing the Liberty Bell become victims of war.
The carnage is massive, and this is just the beginning.
Across the Atlantic Ocean, warheads now target America's allies.
In Brussels, NATO Headquarters is among the targets hit.
Just three miles away, the airport is also destroyed, stranding a plane about to land.
- A large jetliner needs over a mile of runway to land.
If there are no runways, you can't land a Boeing in a field.
- You don't carry a lot of extra fuel 'cause it's heavy.
So now there's a ticking clock, and you've got to get that plane down, and there's nowhere around.
At any given time, there are about 10,000 aircraft in the air around the world.
Thousands, like this one, suddenly have no place to land, and hundreds of miles above, more warheads streak through space.
Ordinary people become aware of the terror.
They rush to find cover, no one knowing where the bombs will fall next.
If they are outside target cities, can they survive? Is anyplace on the planet really safe? Consider the unthinkable, a nuclear war spreads across the world.
Is everyone doomed, or will some of us survive? Across the U.
S.
, Russia, and Europe, capitals, major cities, and military bases have already been destroyed.
Millions are dead.
Word of the war spreads, and outside the initial strike zones from Siberia to Southern Italy, people run to take shelter.
In Kansas, America's heartland, the first occupants arrive at a unique high-end survival bunker lavishly outfitted from the remains of a silo that once housed an Atlas rocket, America's first intercontinental ballistic missile.
- There aren't very many fallout shelters anymore, but people have decked out these missile silos into these luxury apartments.
- They cost more than $1,000,000, they have five years' worth of food, they've got hydroponic growing systems, and apparently 70 people That's a community Can live for five years and wait for the worst to blow over.
- It's not impossible to imagine creating a bunker where people could live for five years.
Would they be happy? I don't know.
Depends on the people, probably, and how nice the bunker is.
But not everyone in America's Midwest has access to underground bunkers.
Those without are in peril.
As more than 400 Russian warheads begin detonating in powerful ground bursts to destroy missile silos buried deep under the surface.
- Ground bursts are the worst for nuclear fallout because you're exploding something on the ground, and you're getting all this radioactive material mixed in with the dirt, and it gets launched up into the air.
The deadly radioactive clouds begin drifting toward population centers.
At Whiteman Air Force Base an hour outside of Kansas City, Missouri, the crews manning 18 B-2 stealth bombers are rushing to take off.
Along with B-52s, they are the only bombers designated to drop nuclear bombs.
This makes them prime targets, leaving American commanders only one option.
- Scatter the planes.
Disburse them to other airports around the country that are out of reach or haven't been destroyed yet.
The planes are scrambling just as the Russian warhead hits.
It's too late.
Meanwhile, in Europe, another NATO capital comes under fire as an 800-kiloton bomb reaches the city of Rome.
With 50 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb, it explodes in an airburst A blast set to detonate before the warhead hits the ground.
- If you want the maximum destruction you have an airburst.
You detonate the nuclear weapon above a city and then it creates this massive shockwave that destroys everything underneath it.
Inside the three-mile blast zone stands the 2,000-year-old Colosseum.
- It's built of unreinforced concrete; It's just gonna get blown to dust.
There will be 500 mile an hour winds that then will just scatter this dust everywhere.
Less than one hour into nuclear war, it's already the deadliest day in human history.
A thousand warheads have taken 25 million lives, and worse is yet to come.
The missiles now take aim at major population centers where the only goal is to kill.
In 1945, the United States dropped two atomic bombs in Japan, an indelible sign of what is possible.
What if nuclear war broke out today? Could we survive? A fiery hell is crossing the face of the Earth as almost 2,000 ominous nuclear mushrooms scar the landscapes of the U.
S.
, Europe, and Russia.
Tens of millions are dead in a lethal tide that stuns most survivors into a blinding fear.
World War III has suddenly turned the great powers into wounded giants populated by desperate refugees with no place to go.
For those not instantly killed in the initial assaults, survival takes presence of mind.
Put aside the horror.
Concentrate.
Stockpile food.
Stash away as much water as you can.
Stay inside.
Take care of your own.
Underground in Kansas, 70 survivors in a well-provisioned bunker know they are in for the long haul.
They are prepared to defend themselves from outsiders.
But what if the unexpected happens? - What if one of them has some sort of episode? What if they have a mental breakdown? I would really like to know how far they've thought of all of the different contingencies because if just one comes up that is unsolvable, you're losing those 70 people.
Meanwhile, there are survivors in the air too.
As Brussels burns, a passenger jet heads north toward Hemiksem hoping that this insignificant town will have somewhere to land.
- The pilot has, actually, a really, really good option.
If you remember the Miracle on the Hudson, large jetliners are actually really good gliders.
The fuel tanks are empty.
With no runway in sight The pilot eases the jet down on the River Scheldt.
For the moment, the passengers and crew are safe, but their struggle for survival in the nuclear ashes is only just beginning.
The death toll pushes past 100 million as thousands of square miles are left smoldering where cities and military bases once stood.
- Look back at the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If you just multiply that by millions, you can imagine the aftermath of a global nuclear exchange.
- My grandfather told me about landing in Hiroshima after the bomb.
He was on a medical ship, and what really struck him was the smell of char, and death, and destruction.
He said he'd never smelled anything like it.
And seeing the destruction, it shook him to his core.
And yet, those who die in thermonuclear fireballs may be the lucky ones.
Any survivors will have to face the terrible aftermath of the widespread destruction A nuclear winter.
What happens to a world after the destruction of a total nuclear war? Can any of us survive? Cities from America to Europe to Asia have been destroyed.
In the U.
S.
and Russia especially, the death toll is enormous.
- You would imagine well over 100 million people in each country have been killed.
The way nuclear wars might evolve, it is hard to imagine that it would be limited.
And the deadly effects are not confined to cities destroyed by bombs.
When Russian warheads struck American missile silos in the northern mountain states, radioactive fallout began taking a massive toll.
- Wind patterns would carry it and drop it on huge areas of the country, so there would essentially be no safe place to go.
Duluth, Minnesota.
A small city of 86,000 was just one of many places directly in the path of the deadly clouds, and people here began to die from radiation sickness.
- Radiation sickness is when your organs and tissues that are necessary to keep you running, your nervous system, and your blood If they absorb enough radiation, they're gonna start going offline.
Suddenly all sorts of things start to go wrong.
You'll get lots of little blood spots, things that look like burns on the body.
Vomiting.
Your hair falls out.
Your body just stops functioning, and it's a slow, painful, awful death.
A veil of grief for the loss of friends and family compounds the struggle survivors now face for the basics; Food, water, and shelter And residual radiation will kill for decades.
- To have some idea of what's gonna happen in the future after these cities are ruined, think of Chernobyl.
There were cities nearby that were evacuated.
Today they're really overgrown with vegetation and animals are just roaming freely there.
That's what it's gonna be across huge swaths of North America, for example.
The world now settles into a deep gloom as the skies go dark.
The bombs started massive fires that sent 50 million tons of soot into the air.
- What happens is it goes up into the atmosphere, and it's quickly spread around the world by the wind.
And so the result is almost no sunlight gets to the ground.
The soot from the massive nuclear fueled fires block so much sunlight that it plunges the world into a sudden nuclear winter.
- This is an ice age with fallout, with radiation.
Everything is going to be damaged in some way or another.
Scientists say a nuclear winter will freeze the Earth for about two decades.
- The onset of this winter is shocking.
This is a long-term, horrible, horrible catastrophe that would happen in the case of a global thermonuclear war.
The sudden cold destroys world agriculture.
The war has already killed more than 200 million people, and now far more are doomed.
- We're talking billions of people who will die from starvation as a result of this.
- In a scenario where we have a nuclear war in the Northern Hemisphere The U.
S.
, Russia, Europe You're gonna get the biggest effects of nuclear winter.
The Southern Hemisphere countries will be less affected.
- You can imagine a country like Argentina, Brazil, South Africa, where you would have a greater chance of survival after a nuclear war.
- Let's say humanity survives.
Where do we go from there? Would we be able to keep cultures? Would we be able to keep art? Will we have learned our lesson? These are huge, huge questions that it's interesting to think about, but also terrifying.
Will civilization endure through a nuclear winter, or is mankind condemned to a cold, dark death? Ignition.
What happens if the most powerful nations in the world unleash their nuclear weapons in an all-out war? Would humanity survive? Two decades later, the fiery destruction of nuclear war has left half the planet in ruins And nearly 90% of the world's population has died off.
In Kansas, the old Atlas silo that was converted into a luxury fallout shelter still stands firm But it's long been abandoned.
It was stocked with five years' worth of food, and 70 people survived inside for a time.
- Could you make a bunker to ride out a nuclear attack? Sure.
Just make the assumption that nobody's gonna come help you for a very long time, if ever.
Can you do that? Sure.
Can you do that for the whole country? No.
- Say a handful of people do make it, and they're in one of these shelters, and it's time for them to venture back out onto the surface.
They will be entering into a completely unfamiliar terrain.
Everything they knew of would be gone.
The Earth eventually begins to thaw from its nuclear winter.
The winds break up the global cloud cover, letting sunlight back in, and the planet slowly warms.
With the passage of time, the world's decimated population grows, slowly.
A century later, the ruins of abandoned cities are overgrown by weeds as nature eventually reclaims them.
Survivors in the warringg countries become refugees, driven to head for warmer climates.
- People will migrate.
Knowing that perhaps Brazil won't be as affected, a lot of people are gonna move from the States, from the barren states to Brazil or, maybe, Australia.
- We already see how refugees operate today.
Countries are devastated by war, and people have to leave with nothing but the shirts on their back, so they walk huge distances or they get on a boat and risk their life trying to cross a sea that is very treacherous.
But when you have nothing left to lose, you might as well risk it all.
For 5,000 years, empires rose and fell.
Only ruins remain of the Maya, ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome.
But while these civilizations vanished, mankind did not.
- Nobody really knows how many people could survive a nuclear winter, but I'm a little bit of an optimist.
I think humans are incredibly crafty, and we've come a long way since our cave-dwelling ancestors.
We're really smart.
We've got a lot of this knowledge written down.
The scientific method allows us to quickly pick up from where we left off.
We now know how to make progress much faster.
We know how not to fool ourselves.
- Will enough people survive? We're guessing that between 1,000 and 10,000 humans would have enough of a variety that we could kick-start the human race again.
But if they were able to, you know, hold on and survive, you could have a birth of a new super-culture, which would be really cool.