The nuclear threat is an international issue involving many countries, including the United States. Nine countries possess nuclear weapons—Russia, China, the United Kingdom, France, India, Pakistan, Israel, and North Korea. The total global stockpile of nuclear warheads is close to 13,000 weapons. Roughly half of these are kept on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched within a few minutes after a presidential order. The warheads on a single US nuclear-armed submarine have seven times the destructive power of the two atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
The explicit or implicit nuclear threats made by some of these states in recent months and weeks—for example, President Trump’s “fire and fury” warning to North Korea and Russia’s putting its strategic forces on “high alert”—are startling for those who thought that such rhetoric was confined to Cold War days and had become historical curiosities. But it is important to remember that nuclear weapons are not just about deterrence or the destruction of society, they are an existential threat to humanity and could cause incalculable suffering worldwide.
The severity of the harm that would result from a global nuclear war depends on both the number and size of nuclear explosions, their locations and altitudes, and other factors that determine blast effects and secondary effects, such as radioactive fallout, electromagnetic pulse (EMP), and climatic changes. These events would disrupt basic infrastructure and cause massive disruption of food production, causing hunger, disease, and death among survivors and their descendants.