Okay, listen. I know everybody's talking about the Queen. We might do that later, but we're going to do something very, very

counter-cyclical to the news going on right now. We're going to talk about nuclear war very thoroughly.

Bear with me on the intro. It's kind of a grave subject, but I'm going to have jokes later on, trust me.

So let's start out with a hypothetical example

to frame this episode.

Hypothetically, sometime this evening,

India and Pakistan go to war.

Amid rising international tensions, Pakistan launches a preemptive strike against

India in hopes of knocking out their nuclear arsenal.

Because the two nations share a border, there's virtually no time between launch and detection

and it's therefore easier to catch the other country's command structures off guard.

So the incentives are higher for a preemptive strike because if you pull it off, you might disable or at least mitigate the other country's nuclear arsenal. But that doesn't occur. Not surprisingly, both governments have secret nuclear installations with contingencies in place to return fire in the event of preemptive strike.

Both regimes unleash their nuclear arsenals.

Within minutes, India has launched 100 hydrogen bombs and Pakistan is detonated 150.

Estimates of the immediate death toll in this scenario range from 25 to 150 million dead on impact.

Let's split the difference, say 75 million people die instantly,

vaporized.

The good news, if we can call it that, is that their militaries principally attacked

other military installations.

Their strategic goal was not to maximize civilian casualties, it was to knock out the other

army. So despite that massive loss, there are still

over a billion survivors on the subcontinent. But the capitals and economic hubs have been obliterated.

...