Nuclear war expert reveals how 60% of humans could die in first 72 minutes of attack if WW3 broke out

If you’ve ever got all worked up about the prospect of surviving a nuclear war, don’t bother – as more than half of us wouldn’t last that long anyway.

That’s according to Annie Jacobsen, an investigative journalist and author who has dedicated her career to informing the public about ‘war, weapons, national security and government secrets’.

She’s penned several books on these topics, including The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top Secret Military Research Agency, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016.

The committee at Columbia University which dole out the annual awards described her work as a ‘brilliantly researched account’, proving just how much weight Jacobsen’s words hold.

Last year, she published another book titled Nuclear War: A Scenario, which – as I’m sure you may have guessed – runs through a hypothetical timeline of what would happen in the event of a nuclear war.

It’s based around the idea of North Korea launching all-out war on the United States with a surprise nuclear attack, before the rest of the world is quickly dragged into a deadly international conflict.

Essentially, she reckons that weapons of mass destruction would be fired off left and right, killing hundreds of millions of people in a mere few hours.

In Nuclear War: A Scenario, Jacobsen explains how the civilisation as we know it would be decimated in a window of just 72 minutes, while sharing a minute-by-minute account of what Armageddon might look like.

Obviously, this is just the journalist’s theory – but given the fact it’s based on her endless research of this specific subject, she’s probably made a half-decent guess.

Speaking to Politico last year, Jacobsen explained: “It takes 26 minutes and 40 seconds for a ballistic missile to get from a launchpad in Russia to the East Coast of the United States. That was true in 1959-60 when [nuclear physicist and former Pentagon scientist] Herb York first had the analysis done, and it’s true today.

“Ballistic missile technology hasn’t changed the laws of gravity. No matter what you do, that still is that window to launch to your target. Pyongyang is 33 minutes because it’s a little bit different geographically.”

After these devastating weapons are launched and countries begin to retaliate, Jacobsen hypothesises that some humans will only have just over an hour left to live.

She dug further into this theory during an appearance on Steven Bartlett’s podcast, A Diary of a CEO, in May last year.

“I describe the first bomb – in the scenario that strikes the Pentagon, it’s a one mega ton thermonuclear bomb – in painstaking horrific detail,” Jacobsen said in reference to the contents of Nuclear War: A Scenario.

“All sourced from defence department documents, defence scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and to humans…and it’s horrifying.

“On top of the initial flash of thermonuclear light – which is 180 million degrees, which catches everything on fire in a 9 mile diameter radius, on top of the bulldozing effect of the wind and all the buildings coming down, and more fires igniting more fires, on top of the radiation poisoning people to death in minutes and hours and days and weeks if they happen to have survived – on top of all of that, each one of these fires creates a mega-fire that is 100 or more square miles and so, what do you see?

“Well in the scenario, at minute 72, a thousand Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States and so it just becomes a conflagration of fire. It’s just fire. Fires burning, 100-200 square mile fires burning.”

Bartlett asked whether any average person would even have time to realise what was happening in the event of a nuclear war, explaining he presumed he would ‘die instantly’.

“I think you would want to die instantly,” Jacobsen responded. “There’s a quote from Nikita Khrushchev, the former premiere of the Soviet Union, and he said, ‘After nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead’.

“Because there is this sense of…if you survived, there is no more law and order, there is no more rule of law, there is no government.”

She reckons that even people who were spared from these horrors thanks to them having access to secret bunkers wouldn’t last too long, as they will eventually run out of supplies and will have to emerge into the world once again.

Jameson continued: “And who’s left? It’s man returning to the most primal, most violent state, as people fight over the tiny resources that remain. And by the way – they’re all malnourished, everybody’s sick and most people have lost everything and everyone they know. How’s that going to feel?”

Speaking of how many people she thinks would have perished after the first 72 minutes of a global nuclear war, the author added: “Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs, no question.”

Jameson then referenced a 2022 research paper by Professor Owen Toon and Ryan Heneghan, which evaluated the concept of a nuclear winter and how fast food sources would deplete.

“And the number that they have is five billion people would be dead,” she chillingly added – which roughly equates to around 60 percent of the world’s population.

Describing what kind of scene the US could expect in the event of nuclear war in Nuclear War: A Scenario, Jameson warned of ‘fireballs, steeply fronted blast waves and physical structures collapsing and burning’.

She also said to expect people being ‘impaled to death by flying debris’ and ‘tens of millions of unfortunate survivors suffering fatal third degree burns’.

She says New Zealand and Australia would be the best countries to hide out in, as Toon’s paper explained they are the ‘only places that could actually sustain agriculture’.