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Concerns over a potential global nuclear showdown are escalating as additional countries engage in the US, Israel, and Iran conflict.
Reports suggest that Russia, a nation equipped with nuclear arms, has started assisting Iran by sharing intelligence on US military positions in the Middle East. This development is feared to be a potential catalyst for igniting World War III.
As tensions mount, President Trump has declared that there will be no dialogue with Iran unless it agrees to surrender unconditionally, heightening fears among Americans about the possibility of a nuclear attack on home soil.
A recent in-depth report delved into this dire scenario, offering a bleak outlook on the widespread destruction that could ensue nationwide.
The findings were alarming, predicting that within minutes of a nuclear assault on key cities like New York, Washington, Chicago, and Los Angeles, tens of millions could lose their lives.
The immediate aftermath would bring massive fireballs capable of vaporizing entire city blocks, crippling infrastructure, contaminating water sources and plunging survivors into a toxic, ash-covered landscape.
Experts have warned the global death toll could rise into the billions by the end of the first week, triggering a nuclear winter that would drastically cool the planet.
Agriculture would collapse, ecosystems would be disrupted and the world could regress into a pre-industrial state marked by famine, radiation sickness and the collapse of modern civilization.
The US, Israel, Iran, and Russia have all warned of a catastrophic apocalypse nearing as the crisis in the Middle East spirals towards global war (Stock Image)
Pictured: An explosion in Beirut’s southern suburbs after an Israeli strike on March 6, 2026
As the risk of nuclear war has grown with each passing day, investigative journalist Annie Jacobsen laid out a horrific timeline of what would happen in the days, months, and years after America was nuked.
In her book, Nuclear War: A Scenario, she featured exclusive interviews with world-leading scientists and experts on nuclear winter.
Minutes after nuclear bombs launch: The US is crippled
In her book, Jacobsen wrote about a fictitious scenario where North Korea fired intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at the US.
After detecting the launch, the US would respond by initiating its nuclear attack, sending missiles over Russia and into North Korea.
Russia, an ally of the North Koreans, then ordered a nuclear attack on the US and allied nations.
Thousands of huge fireballs erupt in American cities and towns, and in each location, buildings and monuments collapse as asphalt melts.
Cities would be obliterated. Power grids and nuclear plants melt down, cutting off electricity and energy, and releasing radioactive materials into the air.
Tens of millions of people would die almost instantly as the US would be left crippled.
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Conventional explosives have decimated Iran (Pictured). A nuclear weapon would vaporize most neighborhoods in major cities
A global nuclear war would see an estimated 360 million people die almost instantly after the bombs hit. However, Jacobsen’s book made it clear that these fatalities would be just the beginning.
Her sources claimed five billion would die in the first 72 minutes alone.
Hours after ICBMs make impact: Raging fires burn forests and towns
Wildfires would break out across the northern hemisphere, and nearly everything burns in America, including cities, crops and forests. Rings of fire stretch from 100 to 200 miles from the ‘ground zero’ of each nuclear impact.
Buildings would be set aflame, releasing airborne toxins from their materials. Burning insulation and fiberglass spews cyanides, vinyl chloride, dioxins and furans.
These chemicals damage organs and the nervous system, leading to cancer, neurological symptoms and death.
Forest fires rage in the Western states, with radioactive fallout killing conifers and creating fuel for future blazes.
With the water supply across the country compromised, there would be nothing to fight the flames with, leaving them to burn freely across America.
Days after the attacks, radioactive mushroom clouds filled the air
Radioactive products from mushroom clouds, including Strontium-90, iodine-131, tritium, cesium-137 and plutonium-239, would poison the environment.
These toxic particles damage DNA and have been linked to cancers, retinal and skin chemical burns, bleeding, coma and death.
Whoever has lived past the initial fallout would begin to die from acute radiation sickness and poisoning, which causes nausea, vomiting, fever, dizziness, disorientation, bloody vomit and diarrhea, internal bleeding and infections.
The high levels of radiation in such a short period would cause the insides of people’s bodies to liquefy as their blood vessel lining decays.
The few who survive will suffer chromosomal damage, blindness and sterility.
A nuclear war would destroy cities and towns, crushing buildings and large structures and creating wildfires (Stock Image)
Weeks after nuclear war breaks out: Soot blankets the atmosphere
In the weeks following the ICBM launches, supplies of natural gas, coal in the Earth’s crust and peat bogs – dense wetlands of decayed vegetation – would still be burning uncontrollably.
As cities and forests are engulfed in flames around the world, approximately 330 billion pounds of soot could be released into the upper troposphere and stratosphere – the lowest and second-lowest layers of Earth’s atmosphere, respectively.
The heavy soot blocks the sun’s rays, and the planet’s temperature drastically falls, setting Earth up for a nuclear winter.
Months after missiles hit: Nuclear winter descends on the planet
Climatologist Alan Robock said: ‘The density of soot would reduce global temperatures by roughly 27 degrees Fahrenheit. In America, it would be more like a drop of 40 degrees Fahrenheit, slightly less near the oceans.’
The idea of ‘nuclear winter’ first came to the world’s attention in an article by scientist Carl Sagan in 1983.
The first scientific paper explaining the idea was dismissed by the Pentagon, which called it Soviet disinformation, but further studies revealed many in the military industrial complex knew it was a real risk.
Scientists at the Defense Nuclear Agency wrote that there would be ‘atmospheric trauma’ and ‘serious potential for severe consequences’ after a nuclear exchange.
The sun’s warming rays could be reduced by as much as 70 percent. Temperatures would plunge, with the US and Europe being among the worst-affected areas.
In the Central US, the temperature will not rise above freezing for years, and the lack of sun would kill most of the planet’s vegetation and animal life.
The idea of ‘nuclear winter’ first came to the world’s attention in an article by scientist Carl Sagan in 1983 (Stock Image)
Decades after the fallout: Humans forced back to hunter-gatherers
Prolonged freezing temperatures and lack of sunlight after World War III would reduce rainfall by 50 percent, killing off crops worldwide.
The surviving humans return to a hunter-gatherer state, with millions starving to death and survivors killing each other for the limited food supplies. Humans must scavenge for roots, insects, and the few sources of uncontaminated water.
Years into the fallout, as the world finally unfreezes, millions of thawing corpses poison the water supplies, and survivors along coastlines would find filter-feeding shellfish have been killed off by radiation or are now too radioactive to eat.
Several years later, soot would finally settle, but only after the ozone layer had lost 75 percent of its shielding power. Less protection against the sun’s strong rays leads to deadly sunburns.
A 2021 study on ‘Extreme Ozone Loss Following Nuclear War’ predicted that levels of UV-B would become ‘hazardous to life’ after World War III and force survivors to live in caves.
Humans would also face plagues, with insects multiplying and thawing corpses forming a fertile breeding ground for disease.
Insects are well-placed to survive nuclear war, studies have shown, and as the world warms, insect-borne illnesses would ravage the tiny population of humans left without antibiotics or medications.
Thousands of years after nuclear bombings: All evidence of today’s civilization is erased
Albert Einstein famously said about nuclear war: ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.’
Even as temperatures return to pre-war conditions, any surviving humans of the future, still living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, may never know anything about the people that came before them.
Jacobsen said they may never discover any trace of today’s civilization, and all knowledge of the past would be lost in the disintegrated cities.
‘With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group,’ the author wrote.
‘It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.’
US and Israeli forces killed Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during air strikes on the first day of the war
After the killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Trump warned that ‘the big wave hasn’t even happened. The big one is coming soon.’
So far, US and Israeli forces have conducted a devastating campaign against Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) using laser-guided bombs, fighter aircraft, and submarines, but neither nation has deployed a nuclear weapon.
Both China and Russia, Iran’s allies and economic partners, warned during an emergency UN Security Council meeting that America’s continued strikes could eventually lead to nuclear escalation.
Moscow has publicly called for an end to the war, which it has branded an ‘unprovoked act of armed aggression.’Â
According to the Federation of American Scientists, Russia, the US and China have the three largest arsenals of nuclear warheads ready to launch, respectively.
Their combined stockpiles of more than 8,600 nuclear weapons represent nearly 90 percent of all the weapons of mass destruction currently deployed throughout the world – ensuring that a war between those nations would devastate the planet.