The Global Famine Aftermath

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That's fetchpet dot com slash save This is unexplainable. I am Bird Pinkerton And today we have an episode from a show called Are we doomed? The show is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Every episode The host, Ben Bradford, digs into a potentially terrible doomsday scenario And the thing about terrible doomsday scenarios is that they are really fun to make up stories about, right? We have lots of great TV and movies and books telling us what the various ends of the world might look like I have always personally been curious about what we actually know about how doomsday scenarios might play out. What is hype but is real What we don't know for sure And what I appreciate about A we doomed is that evenven though we will never know exactly what the end of the world as we know it will look like Ben speaks to various researchers who are tryrying to figure things out And so here has Ben Bradford and one potentially terrible doomsday scenario You realize you're hearing air raid sirens Your phone, which is all silent, suddenly blares It's an emergency alert. Nuclear missiles in them This is not a test. This is not a test You stare until a text from a friend jolts you into action If we follow the roadmap of countless TV shows, novels, video games, what we do next is clear. We scurry down a ladder and clamp the hatch on a fall up shelter, Mbe ramshackled, maybe decked out. We hunker in a gloomy underground, peeling open cans of food, maybe for months, maybe for years Waiting I'll off to the surface one day and restart civilization When we do re emerge, we join a sandy wasteland of sheet metal and cannibals. This is Thunderdone. Deb is listening It's not great, but at least it's exciting I love postpocalypse movies Mad Max, the Road, Snow Piercer. The Water World live show. reallyally good nothing entraning about a future wasteland. It's like a blank slate for a filmmaker to create a new world, but with little easaster eggs for us A character has a spy glass and we know it was a soda bottle He gets chase on These depictions, though, if you ask, especially studies of nuclear war and fallout, are not exactly realistic I have a question We've known since our first episode how easy it could be to start nuclear war the missiles do launch. if the air raid sirens really do go off, then There are bunkers and fallout shelters. Do they work? Who would go into them? How long might one actually be down there? If you survived, what world would you actually walk back into? Dying times here. Not that one I think a really common answer is, well, I'll just be dead, so I don't have to worry about it If you're in that camp, I got some rough news In an actual nuclear scenario, the best estimates are that while a horrific, unfathomable number of people die, a lot remain alive. And then Given the option in human history, most people choose live. So today, you and me, we're gonna survive nuclear war. fromr finding shelter to figuring out what our post nuclear world really looks like. It will be deeply unpleasant and not in a mad max way. A really terrible toilet. The worst toilet of your entire life. This is Are we Doomed, a production nuance Tales part of the NPR network. I'm post apocalyptic Ben Bradford Reewind to where all this started air raid sirens screech Our phones blare with emergency alerts. Missiles are inound This time, it's not a Hollywood movie If we're going to survive, it's not initially about It's about location. Where are you located? I'm in Los Angeles. Oh, sure I mean, I assume that I'm dead, but we can discuss This is Alex Wellerstein, Nuclear weapons historian, author, developer of a detailed organ trail like video game on the subject of survival and what it would be like Alex says, in all out global nuclear war Every major city is a prime target I'm not trying to be pessimistic here, but like New York City Our assumption is that New York City is glassified Chehery. But Alex says, I am not necessarily dead, nor are you, even if you're a New Yorker Even the most sort of destructive assumptions of the Cold War, where we assume the Soviet Union was just trying to like just take out Americans essentially It still concluded that You could have forty percent surviving or something like that That's not nobody is not nobody Alex thinks it's a mistake to assume we wouldn't survive the blast depending where you're living, depending on where the weapon is targeted, depending on where it goes off, you might be hopeless Los Angeles is large, as you know If the bomb actually lands on you, yourre toast, but they can miss. If it lands five, ten miles in the other direction, you might You might not be fully toasted. You might be just a little, you know warmed We'd like to avoid being warmed. Alex says, that means shielding ourselves from the three deadly presence a nuclear weapon brings. There's going to be heat, there's going to be blast, there's going to be radiation The heat reaches the temperature of the sun The blast crushes concrete buildings like walnuts, and the radiation melts our DNA If we're outside the zone of certain death, but inside the reach of any of these three presents, we' G to need shelter Bew early days of atomic weapons, people worried about bombs equivalent to those the US dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki Dug conventional bomb shelters Radiation, Alex says, was the smallest concern. If you're close enough that the radiation is going to affect you, the blasts and the fire are probably a biger deal anyway. Countries continued to build new bombs, bigger bombs, missiles The weapons are now hundreds of times bigger can be even thousands of times bigger The new effect is going to be fallout Clouds of radiation would now sweep far from a blast sight And this is caused by the immense amount of radioactive contamination that these weapons have. It's going to affect the suburbs. it's going to affect agriculture And so the idea is doesn't happen instantly. That will take several hours for that radiation to make its way across. So you have this window of time in which you can maybe do something about it More people dug deeper. Even farther from the projected blast sites, they didn't just look to shield from potential blasts, they looked to seal themselves away from radiation So this is what gets us to the Fallout shelter Fallout shelter In the early nineteen sixties, Life magazine gushed on its cover. ninety seven out of one hundred people can be saved with fallout shelters wildly optimistic. President John F. Kennedy called for more than two hundred million dollars to build public shelters, equivalent to almost two point a half billion dollars today The United States government had the option to build lots of public shelters That's not what we ended up with Because it's really expensive. It's hard to get that pencil out. Yeah, right two hundred million dollars could have only housed a tiny fraction of the populace Pidents looked at this and said I would rather spend that money on something else, like the interstate highway system Alex says the government's message and strategy shifted do is what we always do in the United States when we like public health problem, but we don't want to fund whichich is that we encourage you to take responsibility for your own health. and we do that by just telling you like you should just build your own shelter. We're not gonna do it. It's of course, your job to protect your family from global thermonuclear war Your job for a hot minute B backackyard fallout shelter was big business There's four profit enterprises that will sell you prefab shelters. is a whole little shelter industry. Save your family from deadly nuclear fallouts You can picture the result, the hole in the ground in the backyard, ladder leading into the murk, canned food on green metal shelves, a studio apartment for the apocalypse People did dig these and still do. Alex says there were never that many. In general, it's a pretty small number of people who know. actually build a shelter It's really hard to do. It's expensive and it's coming out of your pocket There was other digging. government may not have chosen to house all its citizens It has created some bunkers These are real purpose built shelters. Alex has visited one in Massachusetts. It's outside the borders of what they think destroyed Boston would be Half an hour from the city, the state emergency management agency uses this bunker as its current headquarters. Like it takes you underground and it's got like a big door and everything. These are the real Michelin star bunkers, the country clubs of anti radioactivity They have all sorts of facilities. they have a morgue But They're also very exclusive they're designated for different parts of the government to basically be whisked away to so that they can do what's called continuity of government. So the idea is that they'll survive and somehow run the country from down underneath a destroyed mountain bet to get in is to be like the under secretary of education It didn't have to be this way have dug ourselves large public shelters. Other countries did, Switzerland still assigns every citizen a spot in a public fallout shelter Finland and Sweden created some real first class facilities with gyms and classrooms and ball courts Even the US's great Cold War rival dug far more than we did The Soviet Union They did more state run projects. bigig surprise, right? Like's that's kind of their job Alex says there were legitimate reasons to not do this kind of building The Soviets could probably only have housed about twenty percent of their enormous population. It's not clear that even they thought that was going to be very effective. Yeah. It's too expensive to build an extra city for all of your people Not only are you digging a new city under your current city unused city with food and water for its theoretical inhabitants. It's a lot This all matters, not as some dusty history lesson It matters for us today, as we escape from the missiles, scrambling for shelter in the aftermath. We need to figure out where to go few backyard shelters or expensive public bunkers Wallmakers did provide one other option We aren't going to build new structures A att least recycle They start a program to identify spaces that could be used as shelters, existing spaces. In the nineteen sixties, military surveyors hunted for places we'd already built or dug Rooms that with minor adjustments in the right supplies could stand in to provide some protection from radiation undernderground basement That was identified by a survey as like, yeah, this meets the minimum requirements for like what a fallout shelter would be. It's made out of this. it's got this many stories above it. it's got this and that Cities and towns prepared an untold number of these kinds of makeshift shelters. Los Angeles identified more than a thousand sites. If you walk through New York City today, you can still see signs faded yellow and black placards featuring the radiation symbol and the words Fallout shelter The id Cyrus Howell phoneess blare missiles screech We stagger through city streets among panicked masses, literally racing from the imminent heat, blast, and subsequent fallout happen to spot one of those yellow and black placards and follow the arrows until we reach the end where they're pointing We find Nothing. All of these shelters are deffunct New York is taking down its placards, although there's confusion over even what agency is responsible for that Los Angeles stopped maintaining its shelters decades ago. An inspector in the nineteen seventies per the LA Times found food had rotted Medicine that hadn't been stolen had coagulated Chicago, the situation similar There was a time in which people thought the only way we can deal with nuclear war is to basically dig And what happened is they basically concluded that they didn't want to dig anymore. and the only way they're going to deal with nuclear war was to threaten to unleash on everybody else if it comes our way deterrence became the sol defense strategy Prevent war by pointing our weapons at each other We're not planning anymore, not really for what happens after if we ever pull the trigger On one hand, that makes sense. We don't plan for what to do if the universe spontaneously collapses either, even though it's theoretically possible. We will cover it. It's just too destructive On the other hand The lack of planning for nuclear war, would leave millions and millions of people, possibly you and me, on our own, holding the bag We don't have that much provided for us. However, Good news. You and I are going to survive. We're gonna spot our own shelter, hunker down in it, and emerge into a new world. Support for this show comes from Shopify Starting a business is not easy. It can come with a lot of self doubt and questions like, what if I fail? or what if nobody buys what I have to sell If you are a small business owner pushing through that self doubt, Shopify wants you to know that it is there to help along the way. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world, and according to their numbers ten percent of all e commerce in the US from household names like Magic spoon to brands just getting started Their design studio lets you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand style. They offer a host of helpful AI tools, plus built in marketing tools to help you create effective email and social media campaigns. And if you ever get stuck, their award winning twenty four seven customer support has your back It is time to turn those what ifs into for shopify today Sign up for your one dollar per month trial today at shhopify. com slash unexplainable. Go to shopify. com slash unexplainable. That is shhopify. com ash unexplainable for the show comes from Quins. 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Go to quinces d. com slash unexplainable for free shipping on your order and three hundred and sixty five day returns. It Now available in Canada too. so that is Q uNcE dot com slash unexplainable for free shipping and three hundred and sixty five day returns. Qince dot com slash unexplainable Missiles crash and explode over our cities, over our military sites In the area of each explosion, melts everything down to its atoms Fires burst out spontaneously miles into the distance Blast force pushes the world flat around. And then Nuclear weapons historian Alex Wellstein says Something that looks like snow begins to fall It Sounds almost peaceful after all the fire and brimstone But it's really radioactive debris. It's basically pulverized earth that has been impregnated with the remains of nuclear fishing And it's like snow that's dusting down And that snow is radioax Right? So it's shooting out little particles For days, winds carry the snow to all kinds of regions that weren't directly targeted atomized by the heat or crushed by the blast, even if we're far away from all of it. We gott to avoid the snow The fallout Theoretically, that's what all these fallout shelters were for I wonder Was that real W they actually work Is this just like a psychological thing? or is this something that's like, oh yeah, actually for the four people who actually make it into these things They're probably going to be okay Um It depends on how much radiation, but the science behind them is pretty straightforward. Every time those little particles hit something else They basically stopp It's possible you'd like a wall to absorb that or the dirt to absorb that and not you. You don't want to be the wall. you want other walls. Exactly Alex says when you get down to it, the fallout shelter is Pretty much that simple It's just stuff that's going to absorb things that you would prefer not to absorb Every foot of dirt you have brick you have, steel, lead, obviously, these are very dense things. A bunch of water. waterater is actually pretty good at absorbing lots of radiation. It's relatively dense A decent shelter could cut down the amount of radiation tenfold. Good one, fifty foold Does that help you? It depends how much is coming in in the first place If what's coming in is fifty times more than what would kill you, you're still dead roasted internally by the radiation. or you might just get sick radiation poisoning that we recover from But still We're trying to survive our best hope is walls, lots of walls Let's map two scenarios of where we might find them Reewind Our phonees blar Missiles are in the sky Aarid sirens actually do not screech because in most places they do not work anymore We're not looking for a backyard shelter because unless we're gym the prepper, we have our own, there aren't that many, and plus it's rude to go into people's backyards We're not ending up in a government bunker unless we have very, very special clearance Perhaps perhaps our local emergency services scramble heroically. They put together makeshift shelters, as they do in hurricanes or earthquakes or wildfire Maybe they fill one of those sites first identified back in the nineteen sixties, where we know it will cut radiation exposure hurriedly ushered inside a dank, disused moldy office basement. Other strangers pack in with us. The door bolts shut Outside. Poisoned snow begins to fall ust thing down Everything gets very still and quiet Alex Wellllerstein says If our shelter is anything like the old government plans, in for a bad time Some of this stuff looks dire. I mean, some of these American plans for public shelters are things like, all right, we'll make a room and we'll just like twenty people in this room, even though it's not very big. We will sleep uncomfortably if we sleep at all Oh, you can rest on a cot that's two foot from somebody else's butt We drink bottled water and eat canned food or MREs that the emergency personnel were able to leave with us What's worse is the plumbing situation The most horrific thing, I really love this. they basically made in the United States what they're called sanitation kits. Okay. They're like a cylinder, right And you open them and they have a toilet lid that can go on. Oh and they have some chemicals and some plastic bags. Here's your toilet. Be you gott to go the bathroom. Yeah. And these things are squalid and disturbing. Princeton University ran an experiment in the late nineteen fifties. They put a family in a basement fallout shelter for two weeks Other than boredom, their biggest challenge was the odor of the chemical toilet Now was with only four of them And then there's a line on it that says like This accommodates fifty people And you're just like, this is the worst porta potty you can imagine Want to make light of nuclear armageddon Sanitation product is obviously not the worst thing about nuclear war, not even close It kind of feels like it is It makes it really concrete what surviving means in this circumstance, right? And that's why I like these examples totally. It's not abstract. It's not like a blinding light or you know, it's not a post apocalyptic Mad Max thing. It's like a really terrible toilet The worst toilet of your entire life This is really why I was interested in this episode More than any news you can use, even though we are surviving nuclear war story about what the reality would feel like Should we ever launch these weapons A lot of people would have to adjust quickly to new circumstances. And humans do that. You may remember a few years ago, this first in a century pandemic swept through, and suddenly everyone was wearing cloth masks and wiping down groceries a nuclear war How would our lives adjust? What would that be like thingsings like toilets really the definition of the mundane banal. For a lot of us, the actual experience is probably not even getting that horrifying toilet. because remember The makeshift shelter is unlikely More likely No one's coming for us Scenario two. Bone, missiles. Scramble Alex says without an official shelter, we're gonna to have to be flexible My advice for people, sometimes people ask me like, oh, where would you go? And it's like, don when is this happening? What are the odds I'm going be sitting in the perfect location when something happens? I'm imagining Jim the Prepper, who really put the labor into digging out his stocked up shelter, finding out the end of the world is happening while he's on a work trip. better is to know what to look for, you could reason your way to the best option in front of you Alex says we grab a go bag from our home or our car, and we're very simply looking to get away from the snow The sven the outside world is basically poison And poison that can go through walls, but it gets weakened by every wall it goes through We want as many walls as we can find to catch the fallout so that our bodies are not the wall. better to be inside. you know, you want to be in the center of a building and ideally the bigger the building is better. Underground is even better basement might work well, an underground parking garage could be even more effective. so that if you were in this situation, you'd be like, o But there's an underground parking lot over there. Let's go there. We do We run down the ramps to the lowest floor of this garage This is currently essentially the official guidance here in Los Angeles You're on your own find shelter Have a go bag with food and water Stay there. And wait I think in my head It's like you're down there for years. Now we're mold people. What is it actually So definitely not yours Alex says how long we have to stay in our parking lot with God knows what kind of food or water and not even a squalid chemical toilet It depends on the size of the bomb, our location, and therefore the amount of radioactivity. So Fishion products have a pretty regular decay curve Every basically seven hours you're in there The intensity is going down by a factor of ten. Okay Two weeks is sort of the maximum that anybody thought in the Cold War would probably be necessary, and that's probably overkill. We're down in our garage, a week surrising reasonable. You might dare think mananageable During those days underground, it's dark. Our flashlights run out of batteries. Our phones, unless we keep them off, run out of batteries We may not know how much time has passed. But eventually Which has it We climb out to view the new world Congratulations. You have survived nuclear war. Everyone thought you were gonna die? But you didn't Alex says now, to continue surviving We walk. Being able to leave does not mean you can just like go back to your regular life and still live there. The area may be too radioactive to be habitable. Okay. But there's a difference between like saafe enough to walk through And like safe enough to live in twenty four hours a day, constantly being exposed with vulnerable populations like pregnant women and children, you know And so, Alex says, unless we're packing a Geiger counter that tells us it's safe, we walk. We seek an area away from fallout, away from the toxic ash from burnt homes and buildings We walk away from our leveled cities or towns, away from the fires and the deadly white snow As we walk lookingooking for our next shelter. We notice the sky It's unusually dark The wind gains a new bite It will stay there for years over the whole globe And then And only then Do we reach the most unpleasant part of surviving nuclear war We've all been there. You pop into the shop for five minutes and all of a sudden you've forgotten where you parked. Car Car Unfortunately, that lost feeling is what it's like trying to manage your policy with other insurers. Here Car, come out, come out wherever you are. Please. With GIico, you can use the app to easily manage all your policies in one place. Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate. It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Gaico while we were underground Poison snow fell And also Fires burned There are city fires, big fires. Lillily Shaw, a climate scientist at Rutgers, specializes in what happens to the planet and in an important way us after nuclear war. Asered to pick up the story from where we left off emerging from our smelly shelters began to walk Yeah, I will try my best. We walk past ashes. If the nuclear were targeted cities, then the city will burn. The fires burned hot and they burned slow. We can see what happened. The buildings with their wood frames, their insides stuffed with flammable furniture were like kindling Occasionally, a gas line exploded. moreore fire. electricity shortened, more fire. There was no one above ground to put them out, No fire department The ashes now stretch for hundreds of miles. Some may still be smoldering as we walk because they burned so long I'm not sure how long, how many days, but probably I would guess days It depends on how large the city is to the sky The startark This is going to be our big problem It's also a result of these fires When the city burns, it will heat up the air and all the air will rise It rises so fast it creates low pressure underneath, essentially a giant vacuum cleaner into the sky In fact, if someone had managed to survive the nuclear explosion, they could have felt the oxygen sucked straight out of their lungs by this pressure The vacuum also sucks in the ash from our buildings and our people straight It's about carbon we call it. The literal ashes of our civilization continue to ascend above the clouds. It will go high above where the weather happening, abbove the rain. It cannot be washed out by precipitation. And the Lily says that means it's going to hang there I'm soaking up the sun It's in we call it a stratosphere and it will stay there because there's no ring to bring it down If we're in an all out global nuclear war, the results we're witnessing as we walk, the soot in the sky has happened to pretty much every major city in the Northern hemisphere. Even if you were far from any missile blast or any fallout zone in a region that was not a target, a country that was not involved, your sky would turn dark too. and stay stark So the soot will start to spread out. A darkened haze Gobally. Yeah, that's right. And it happens in Well, if you're talking about globally, then it's probably just To three weeks. Wow. We'll be covering the whole globe Lillily says the murky sky enveloping the globe is not just aesthetically displeasing. What would happen then the sunlight reaches the surface, then we're going to have a cooling effect. We're not talking about a refreshing breeze or congrats we reversed global warming We're talking The first year you will see it already it. likeike in the summer, the temperature will drop by more than fifteen degrees Celsius. Summer temperature will below freezing. Below freezing in the summer. And then it gets colder than that Preease It stays that way More or less for five to ten years. That's why we get this name nuclear winter If we have found a new community after walking from our temporary shelter, we are impoverished but alive One year passes We have a new problem. Bigger problem than any we've faced yet. Fire, force, fallout problem is not freezing not that we need a coat. is that we have to grow food in the frozen ground And this is really why I've called Lillily She is the expert on what happens to our food in this scenario Be mush of it You put together a table for a report on famine that would follow nuclear war. And Lily, it's terrifying It has these two columns of outputs that are know based on the size of nuclear war. you know, one is direct fatalities, the number of people killed by blasts and radiation It's unbelievable. And then there's this second column. that is even more unbelievable What is that second column Well yes, that is the second column. that is like the population starving due to like the food shortage. That is like It's much, much bigger tenen times speaker or fifteen times speaker? The common estimate projects an all out global nuclear war would pretty much instantly take out three hundred sixty million people, roughly the equivalent of deleting the entire United States Tw years later, though famine. kill five billion wiping the entire continent of Asia off the map sixty percent of the entire Earth's population What that means When surviving nuclear war much less likely to die in the blast. than to starve death after That's like the biggest worry after a nuclear war I'm just wondering like if you remember how you felt as you kind of put that together, doing this research You know, I mean, it just it's hard to comprehend And it is just So terrifying I know. I feel the same way like when I finished the calculation and when I got the number five billion, I was shocked and I I double check, double check and double check Because that's like a number. I feel I'm afraid, I just cannot really look at that number In the post apocalypse movie, the handful of disheveled survivors of the blasts have a ready solution to the oncoming food crisis. They raid gas stations or live in supermarkets, crack open a cream of mushroom one night, scoop out a handful of Vienna sausages the next Led food from the before times seems to outnumber the mouths to feed Lillily says the reality is the opposite How soon would this become a problem Well, the food storage, probably the longest can survive for like a couple months. Couple months. That's it. fourour months. Yeah, four months, That's it If you personally want to hoard five years of canned food, well Here's the suggestion on the Missouri Department of Homeland Security's website for what you'll neede each day can of animal protein, a can of beans, a can of fruit, so peanut butter,alf a sleeve of cracker, package of dried fruit, two cans of vegetables or vegetables, a can of evaporated milk box, of shelf stable milk gallon of water per day. take some realestate to store If you're in an area that requires any kind of fleeing from blasts or fallout, well Good luck, bring it with you One other option Walk to a place that can still grow food In a research, Lillie put together a map She shaded it in red, countries that simply would not be able to grow enough food to sustain their surviving populations. That's most of the world There are a few green spots, Australia, New Zealand, a bit of South America, and one tiny dot in the Northern hemisphere Iceland, a fast harvester of fish. We could try to navigate to these places. I hope someone knows how to sail. Except Lily says Even the green spots are miragas She says her report and that grim map have a flaw that makes them too optimistic. New Zealand green because it'd still be warm enough to grow food But Lily says How are they going to maintain their soil The big problem over there is the fertilizer they are using is from other country the fertilizer industry is probably not thriving in countries devastated by nuclear war New Zealand is unlikely to keep getting shipments it needs. They won't, they won't Iceland would still have enough fish Reaching them when the temperatures drop is going to be a challenge all those places are covered when sea ice Countless other problems you could add, destroyed electric grids, radiation blasted crops, mass migration from devastated countries, people like us, putting further pressure on whatever food does get grown All which means fiveive billion starving. is almost certainly a massive underestimate By the way, we wouldn't emerge unscathed even from a smaller regional nuclear war that would seem not to touch us. sayay between India and Pakistan That was like the first paper I published on this topic And the result Nuclear winter less severe than global nuclear war would create, but enough to kill crops in the US and China Lillily calculated a ten percent to twenty percent drop in global food production The drop is larger than all the past historic varation. The world has never experienced that level of a drop in its global food production. Yeah The result there, on even a regional war halfway around the globe Two billion people starving Humans could fight back In the year after nuclear war, in a race against the onset of nuclear winter, we could look to grow more resilient foods such as potato We might expand our diets, incorporating other plants to a greater degree like seaweed or duckweed, that floating green weed that grows on stagnant ponds It'seliclicious inccorporate insects or grubs Delicious We could slaughter our livestock and eat their food to boot Delicious U What do you think about that I don't want leaving that world P sh. Yeah Yeah, I just feel it will be horrible. horrible life and experience We know in very real terms, what it would mean to actually survive nuclear war No fun sheet metal cars, no glorious battles for oil, No shutting ourselves away for the duration to be delighted or appalled by the strange cultures that emerge without us. This is Sund Done At least for most of us No flash of light freeing us from the burden of our earthly bodies In the reality Billions of people Most people including many here in the U. S, would survive the cell phone warnings, the missiles incoming, the deadly snow Some of us would shelter, some of us wouldn't need to Walk outside Cities leveled And then we would suffer a miserable journey from bad toilets to starvation lear H story Alex Wallerste Also thanks. That's why this story is useful Maybe even containing the seed of a solve. It would be much better not to have nuclear war. We'll just put that out there in the first place. that's not the best He thinks, if we want our nations and our political leaders to avoid pushing the red buttons that can destroy the world, A good way is to impress what it really means The flash a light thing where it's just over for you That's so easy and clean That's just you not having any more obligations. That's its own kind of fantasy. The reality is so much darker And that, I think can compel one to take more seriously the idea that we should not get in that position in the first place If we want to stop nuclear war from ever happening Best hopes may be this immagining how it ends picturing what it means to survive.