All the Bombs, All at Once
In early 2019, Trump and Kim Jong-un were doing that thing where world leaders compare the size of their nuclear buttons, and the rest of us were either quietly terrified or pretending we’d already rehearsed the apocalypse. Personally, I’d logged enough hours in Fallout, The Division, and Metro 2033 to feel a vague, delusional preparedness—navigating contaminated puddles, fighting things with sticks, keeping strangers’ hands off my inventory. Training, of a kind.
Nuclear tests have been a semi-regular occurrence for decades, particularly in North Korea, whose government describes each underground detonation as a seismic event while everyone else calls it what it is. The last bombs actually dropped on human beings were the American ones—Hiroshima and Nagasaki, August 1945—which killed around 135,000 people on impact and then continued killing for years in the slow-motion aftermath that radiation specializes in.
The question Kurzgesagt decided to answer is: what would happen if you detonated every nuclear weapon on Earth simultaneously? Not spread across cities or continents—all of them, stacked in one place, going off at once. The answer, delivered in Kurzgesagt’s characteristically calm animation style, is stranger and more instructive than the obvious "everything dies." The scale of destruction has a shape, and that shape is not quite what you’d expect.
Kurzgesagt built one of the better science communication channels on YouTube precisely because it refuses to make things either more reassuring or more catastrophic than the data supports. The nuclear video is a good example: it doesn’t flinch from the numbers, but it’s more interested in the physics than the horror. The horror is there. It just doesn’t need embellishment.
You know watching it won’t fix anything. The buttons still exist. The men who want to push them still exist. But there’s something in understanding the actual scale—not the abstracted scale of warhead counts, but the literal, spatial, thermal scale—that at least gives the anxiety somewhere to land. That might be the most honest thing science communication can offer: not comfort, just clarity.