If a one megaton nuclear device detonated over Times Square in New York City, the resulting fireball would vaporize everything within a radius of one mile. Lesser but still devastating amounts of damage from the blast, thermal and radiation effects would extend considerable distances further. In the estimate of Ivana Hughes, the Director of Frontiers of Science and Senior Lecturer in Discipline in the Department of Chemistry at Columbia University, one-and-a-half million people would be killed and another two million would be severely injured, mostly with third degree burns where the skin is literally hanging off them. “This would be a site of absolute horror and devastation,” she told Tucker Carlson in an interview posted on Oct. 17. The blast would render New York City uninhabitable for tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years, she said.
Hughes, who is also President of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation and currently serving as a member of the Scientific Advisory Group to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, stressed that a nuclear war won’t end with the first detonation. No matter the scenario—a deliberate first strike, an accident, or a miscalculation—nuclear wargames suggest that “100% of the time, one nuclear weapons explosion ... it all ends in a full-blown nuclear war.”
“It’s a measure of their insanity that leaders around the world are seriously considering nuclear war,” reads Carlson’s kicker for the 106-minute interview, which also covers nuclear winter, what would happen if a nuclear power plant were hit with a nuclear weapon, the ongoing aftereffects of decades of nuclear testing, and finally North Korea’s nuclear program.
