Will the World End in Nuclear Annihilation?

What’s finally going to do us all in, how long is it going to take, and is there anything we can do?

In 1945, only two nuclear weapons were used to kill over a quarter of a million people — today there are over 10,000 nuclear weapons worldwide. And with North Korea claiming that they have nuclear weapons that could reach the United States, it’s normal to worry, at least a little bit, about a nuclear apocalypse.

Negotiations have been made in the past to ban them, but countries who have these powerful weapons obviously weren’t keen on the idea.

Ploughshares Fund President Joseph Cirincione explained that, if only several of these weapons were detonated in somewhere densely populated like South Asia, it could affect the entire planet by lowering the global temperature, killing crops and destabilized the environment.

After Trump’s inauguration, the “Doomsday Clock” which is supposed to calculate how close we are to an apocalyptic state went from three minutes to midnight (which signifies Doomsday) to two minutes and thirty seconds.

Though there have been significant reductions in the numbers of nuclear weapons since the cold war, the threat of nuclear war is still very high — who knows whether someone will ever feel prompted to use one of them.