Global Nuclear Catastrophe

A Global Nuclear Catastrophe is a nuclear catastrophe that is a global catastrophe event.

• AKA: Nuclear Holocaust.
• Context:
  • It would likely be due to Nuclear War.
  • It has been avoided by Prudent Collective Choice, Hard Political Work, and a Global Regulatory Mechanism (the NPT) - not by letting technologists and technologist patrons proceed helter-skelter.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • a Local Nuclear Catastrophe, such as a Nuclear Plant Meltdown or a single Nuclear Bomb Explosion (such as Hiroshima nuclear explosion or Nagazaki nuclear explosion).
  • a Global Warming Catastrophe.
  • a Genetically Modified Organism Catastrophe.
• See: Nuclear Warfare, Nuclear Fallout, Nuclear Winter, Extinction, Doomsday Clock, Mutual Assured Destruction.

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References

2014

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/nuclear_holocaust Retrieved:2014-3-14.
  • Nuclear holocaust refers to a possible complete or nearly complete annihilation of human civilization by nuclear warfare. Under such a scenario, all or most of the Earth is made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons in future world wars.

    Nuclear physicists and others have speculated that nuclear war could result in an end to human life, or at least to modern civilization on Earth due to the immediate effects of nuclear fallout, the temporary loss of much modern technology due to electromagnetic pulses, or nuclear winter and resulting extinctions.

    Importantly however, despite modern high civilization being at risk, assuming weapons stockpiles at the previous cold war heights, analysts and physicists have found that billions of humans would nevertheless survive a global thermonuclear war, but there is much debate about how the planet's environment would be affected by it and its consequences for the surviving population.

    Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists visualizes how far the world is from a nuclear holocaust.

    The threat of a nuclear holocaust plays an important role in the popular perception of nuclear weapons. It features in the security concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and is a common scenario in survivalism. Nuclear holocaust is a common feature in literature and film, especially in speculative genres such as science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.

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