Presumably a strategic bomber drops a low-yield nuke on an area near the Polish city of Zagan, which is a potential site for a US/NATO base, currently empty.
And the entire scenario begins quite unlikely – Russia’s nuclear doctrine does not have a “preemptive strike” policy, the only country that has such a policy is the US, and why it would simply drop a nuke on a civilian area is also questionable.
But, who knows, though, the Russians are “evil,” so anything and everything should be expected.
“This project is motivated by the need to highlight the potentially catastrophic consequences of current US and Russian nuclear war plans. The risk of nuclear war has increased dramatically in the past two years as the United States and Russia have abandoned long-standing nuclear arms control treaties, started to develop new kinds of nuclear weapons and expanded the circumstances in which they might use nuclear weapons,”
the description of Princeton’s SGS outlines.
How it essentially manages to get the situation wrong from the first 30 seconds of a 4-minute video is puzzling. Regardless, yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin has warned that Russia would retaliate with nuclear strikes if the US were the first to launch them (or another adversary), and its doctrine also states that.
To repeat, the only country with nuclear warheads, that also has a “preemptive” nuclear strike policy is the US, and this video begins in a situation that Moscow assumes Washington’s war-time doctrine. Russia, in 1993, did drop its “no first use policy,” but its 2010 doctrine only suggests that nuclear weapons would be used in response to an adversary using them first. Any other suggestions that it could resort to such weapons first comes down to speculation.
It should furthermore be mentioned that the idea of the project and the “reference point” was the 1983 movie “War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, in which he accidentally triggers a nuclear war.
Regardless, after the nuclear warning shot is launched, all hell breaks loose and the video estimates that 34 million people would die in Europe in under 5 hours. Most of those people would die during the initial 45-minute window.
A further 60million would be injured by the blasts.
The nuclear strike is launched from Kaliningrad to stop a NATO/US advance through western Europe. Immediately after, NATO and Russia exchange 480 nuclear strikes via aircraft.
Europe is destroyed just hours later, and the US fires 600 warheads from its land and submarine bases at Russia’s nuclear forces.
Russia retaliates with missiles launched from silos and submarines.
With the aim of blocking the other side’s recovery, Russia and Nato each obliterate one another’s 30 most populated cities using five to ten warheads on each town.
This exchange plays out how the war would develop.
It leads to around 91.5million causalties across the entire conflict. That includes 31.4million fatalities, and 57.4million injuries.
Renata Dwan, director of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research, warned in May that all states with nuclear weapons are modernising them, increasing the threat of apocalypse. The world appears to be closer to nuclear than ever before.
She said it’s important “to recognise that the risks of nuclear war are particularly high now, and the risks of the use of nuclear weapons, are higher now than at any time since World War Two”.
As a result of such a scenario, the radioactive fallout from the nuclear disaster would cause additional deaths and injuries.
Studies also suggest that, even with a limited nuclear engagement, Earth’s atmosphere
would cool dramatically, driving famine, refugee crises, additional conflicts, and more deaths.
The simulations of the fatalities were made with Alex Wellerstein’s
NUKEMAP, in which everybody can simulate blowing up any location on Earth, with estimations of casualties, fallout and so on.
For those who want an even more realistic experience, there’s also NUKEMAP VR, which lets users blow up a location on Earth, while watching it through their
virtual reality headset.
The future, truly, is now.
What’s important to note is that any large-scale conflict between the United States and Russia will have a devastating impact on Europe. In this light, it remains unclear why some European states support the withdrawal of the US from the INF Treaty and thus create conditions for the deployment of US short-range missiles there.
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