I don't know if it passed you by, but earlier this week Russia announced it's going to begin building the 'Satan 2' bomb - a 40 Mt nuclear weapon reportedly capable of wiping out an area the size of France.
The RS-28 Sarmat missile, dubbed 'Satan 2', has a top speed of 4.3 miles (7km) per second and has been specifically designed to get past anti-missile shield systems. The missile contains 16 nuclear warheads.
The prospect of that, coupled with the fact the war in Syria has pushed tensions between Russia and NATO to levels unprecedented since the end of the Cold War, has got me worried about snuffing an irradiated death some time soon. Yesterday, I was chilling in my room when I heard a siren and thought that was it.
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Here I was. The four-minute warning. No chance to do all the things I'd wanted to do. To say all the things I'd wanted to say. No future to live the life I'd wanted to live. The Russian bombs were coming.
Luckily, it must have been a burglar alarm or some shit because the bombs never came and here I am. But the thought was terrifying, so in attempt to calm my nerves I decided to have a look into what might happen in the event of a nuclear war. To be honest, I kind of wish I hadn't...
WE'D ALL DIE
Well, maybe not quite, but there's a website called Nukemap that lets you map out potential nuclear holocaust scenarios and they're grim as hell. If Russia really wanted to go to town on us they could do something like this....
I guess that makes the new capital city Plymouth? Credit: Nukemap
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That would wipe out anyone worth killing. Otherwise the Russian's could opt to nuke the major cities of London, Glasgow, Manchester and Birmingham - which would leave at least seven million dead on impact and five million injured, with the fallout likely to kill millions more.
Credit: Nukemap
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One of the main problems of living in the UK is that, being a small country, it doesn't take many nukes to take us out. If you nuke Manchester, for example, you get the four-for-the-price-of-one deal where everyone in Leeds, Sheffield and Liverpool are left with, at the very least, third-degree (the worst kind of) burns.
THERE'D BE NO SIRENS
The UK's nuclear warning system apparently got phased out in 1992 following the fall of the USSR. So, the government would instead contact us all via SMS. Technology allowing the government to send mass messages to us was tested out in Yorkshire in 2013.
Credit: YouTube / atomicarchive
Nobody knows exactly what the message would say, but it would likely be a slightly more official sounding: "We all gonna die lol, tb x."
ONE LAST SHAG?
I know what you're thinking, if death must come then perhaps there will at least be time to experience the pleasures of earthly existence one final time. But it has been reported that we'd probably have around three minutes from the moment the text was received before atomic flames enveloped us all.
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Meaning a nuclear holocaust is probably the only situation where the premature ejaculators among us are the real winners.
GO TO THE WINCHESTER, HAVE A PINT, AND WAIT FOR IT TO BLOW OVER
As I said earlier, it's pretty likely you'd be dead, so it's probably best to stop clinging to a meme. In fact, observers of the Hiroshima nuclear attack in 1945 say that those close to the centre of the blast simply 'disappeared' with none of their remains being found, as blast temperatures are so high.
These are reported the safest places to go in the world in the event of a nuclear holocaust. Image credit: ThisIsInsider.com
Anybody unlucky enough to be included in the bomb's 'fireball' would experience instant death. From there, the nuclear fallout would mean many more would suffer slow, prolonged death as a result of radiation poisoning.
WHAT CAN WE DO TO STOP IT?
In total there are about 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world, owned by a total of nine countries: American, Russia, Britain, France, China, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea. The majority of these are owned by the United States and Russia.
Some nuclear holocaust scenarios are preferable to others. Credit: Nukemap
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It's likely if you live in a major city in the UK that there is a nuclear warhead pointed in your direction at this very second. Russia has a gun to your head and there is quite literally nothing you can do about it. If Putin wishes it: you're dead.
Oh well, it's the Halloween weekend, so I suppose the best thing you can do is put a zombie costume on, get on the razz and try to have a good weekend.
After all, it could be your last...
Featured Image Credit: Nukemap
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