Annie Jacobsen: Most Replayed Moment: Here's What Happens When A Nuclear Bomb Drops! These Countries Will Be Safe!

The segment opens with the host asking the author to describe what a 'fly on the wall' would see in the minutes after the United States or the UK had been hit by thousands of Russian or North Korean nuclear weapons. In her answer, the author points to the scenario at the centre of the book. The first weapon to land is a one-megaton thermonuclear bomb aimed at the Pentagon. She says she describes its effects in 'painstaking horrific detail', and that all of it is sourced from Defense Department documents and from defense scientists who have worked for decades to describe precisely what happens to things and to humans.

She then lists the effects as successive layers. First comes an initial flash of thermonuclear light, which she puts at 180 million degrees and says sets everything on fire within a nine-mile-diameter radius. Next is the 'bulldozing effect' of the wind, as buildings come down and fires ignite more fires. Then there is radiation, which kills survivors over minutes, hours, days and weeks. On top of all of this, she says, each of these fires creates a mega fire covering a hundred or more square miles.

The single-bomb picture then widens to the whole scenario. At minute 72, a thousand Russian nuclear weapons land on the United States. The author sums up the result as a 'conflagration of fire', with fires of 100 to 200 square miles burning. The book then moves into nuclear winter, which she covers in a 'day new month' section. That section is told from the point of view of one of the original scientists who wrote the first nuclear winter paper with Carl Sagan in 1983.

That scientist is named in the conversation as Professor Brian Tune (the transcript's spelling). According to the author, he has spent the decades since working with state-of-the-art climate modeling systems that she says can now 'precisely' tell us what nuclear winter will look like. The conversation itself gives no detail of the models or their uncertainties. This confident framing is the author's own characterisation.

The host offers a provocation. He has always thought nuclear war 'wouldn't be that bad', because if Russia launched a thousand bombs at the United States while he was in New York, where he is recording, he would die instantly and 'wouldn't really know it happened.' The author does not dispute the premise. She turns it around and says, 'I think you would want to die instantly.'

after nuclear war, the survivors would envy the dead.

The author attributes this line to Nikita Khrushchev, the former Soviet premier. She uses it to describe a world with no law and order, no rule of law and no government, and says Craig Fugate (transcribed first as 'Craig Vjugate', later as Fugate, FEMA's director) 'made that very clear.' She separates the command-and-control bunkers that Russia would target, which she reads about in the book, from smaller secret bunkers. In her account, even those smaller bunkers would only work for as long as there was fuel for the diesel generators. After that, the people inside would have to come out.