At least 129,000 people were killed in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after two nuclear bombs were dropped over them.
There are roughly 12,700 nuclear weapons still in the world, and only a few instances of them being used for warfare. What would happen if there was a nuclear war?
This is just a hypothetical. The team from AsapSCIENCE breaks down the science of nuclear bombs to predict how likely you would be to survive. In the case of a nuclear blast, you would want to wear white.
There is no clear-cut way to estimate the impact of a single nuclear bomb because it depends on many factors.
There are certain stages of a nuclear bomb blast that can affect your survival. You can explore this chilling interactive to find out how a nuclear blast would spread through the area where you live.
35 percent of the energy of a nuclear blast is released in the form of thermal radiation. The first thing that will hit you is a flash of blinding light and heat.
A form of vision loss called flash blindness can be caused by the light itself.
A 1 megaton bomb, which is 80 times larger than the bomb that exploded over Hiroshima, is the subject of a video by AsapSCIENCE.
People up to 13 miles away would experience flash blindness, and people up to 85 miles away would be temporarily blinded on a clear night.
Those close to the blast are affected by heat. Mild, first-degree burns can occur up to 11 km away, and third-degree burns can affect anyone up to 5 miles away.
White clothes reflect some of the energy of a blast, while darker clothes absorb it, so the distances are variable.
It is unlikely that that will make a difference for those unfortunate enough to be at the center of the explosion.
Humans were almost instantly reduced to the most basic elements, like carbon, because the site of the bomb blast was 300 times hotter than the temperature bodies are cremated at.
There are other effects to consider for those farther away from the center of the blast. The blast of a nuclear explosion can cause sudden changes in air pressure that can cause buildings to fall.
180 metric tons of force on the walls of all two-story buildings would be created by blast waves within a 6 km (3.7 mile) radius of a 1-megaton bomb.
Humans can survive that amount of pressure, but most people would be killed by falling buildings.
The ongoing effects on the planet are longer- lasting than you can imagine, if you somehow survive all of that.
A simulation study published in February found that a nuclear war between the United States and Russia would cause a nuclear winter on Earth.
A recent study found that radioactive carbon from Cold War nuclear bomb tests have been found all the way down in the deepest point of the world's oceans.
There are international treaties in place to stop the spread and use of nuclear weapons, so we hope you don't need to know this information.
The Nuclear Notebook at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists can be used to find out more about the current state of nuclear weaponry in the world.
The original article was published in January. We updated this article in February 2022.
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