Effects of Nuclear War

A militarily plausible nuclear attack, even "limited, " could be expected to kill people and to inflict economic damage on a scale unprecetiented in American experience; a large-scale nuclear exchange would be a calamity unprecedented in human history.

The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by The Manhattan Engineer District (1946)

The Effects of Nuclear War (3.3 Mb pdf)

Worldwide Effects of Nuclear War by U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency

The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

Compiled and edited by Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan

(These files are made available by Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs Program in Science and Global Security)

A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors - as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, "the survivors would envy the dead." For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors.

-President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963

Effects of Nuclear War

The Effects of Nuclear Weapons

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