A global catastrophic risk

Is Fallout a warning for our future? A global catastrophic risk expert weighs in.

What a post-nuclear aftermath could really look like.

By Sam Delgado 

Between the crumbling of trust in our institutions and escalating global conflict, dystopia feels deeply familiar in today’s world. Though there are people and organizations who are working to keep the globe and our humanity intact, it’s normal for us to think of the worst-case scenarios.

Fallout, a recently released show on Amazon Prime based on the popular video game franchise, is the latest exploration of one of these scenarios: survival after nuclear war.

Fallout takes place in two different periods in the Los Angeles area: the moments before nuclear bombs are dropped across the US, and 200 years later. Lucy MacLean (Ella Purnell), the show’s protagonist, is a “vault-dweller” — the term for people who live underground in sealed bunkers created by a company called Vault-Tec. Despite their world’s dark past, Lucy and the community of Vault 33 remain optimistic that one day — when the radioactive levels are low enough on the surface — civilization can restart with their help. But when her father, the leader of their vault, gets kidnapped by people from the surface, Lucy leaves her bunker to bring him back.

As she embarks on her quest to find her dad, Lucy finds that the surface is a hostile place. There’s little to no food or clean water, danger exists around every corner in the form of bandits and mutants, and the lone survivors are cynical and distrustful — especially toward Lucy, whose bunkered life seems easy by comparison. As one disgruntled shopkeeper tells Lucy, “The vaults were nothing more than a hole in the ground for rich folks to hide in while the rest of the world burned.”

Indeed, in our real world, there are wealthy people investing in bunkers in case shit hits the fan, including some big names like Mark Zuckerberg. But what about everyone else? That’s a key message in Fallout: Survival isn’t equitable. And while Fallout is a fictional depiction of nuclear war that’s heavy on the sci-fi, nuclear warfare itself is not off the table in reality. There are also plenty of other existential risks that can shape how we live, like future pandemics, a changing climate causing extreme weather and disasters, and harmful artificial intelligence.

What makes nuclear war particularly terrifying is the devastation it can cause in just seconds — the horrifying damage and loss of life from the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki nearly 80 years ago underscore why we should prevent this from ever happening again. Yet, nine countries are still armed with nuclear weapons, with the US and Russia possessing thousands of nuclear warheads.

So I reached out to Seth Baum, the executive director of the Global Catastrophic Risk Institute, a think tank that analyzes the greatest threats to civilization and develops strategies to reduce these risks. We talked about what the aftermath of a nuclear war could look like in our real world — and also what we should focus on now to prevent this scenario from happening, as well as how we could prepare for it if it does.

“We do actually need to take this seriously, as dark and unpleasant as it is,” Baum said. “It is a very worthwhile thing to be doing because we could really need it. It could be the difference between life and death for a massive number of people.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

After watching Fallout for myself, it feels like an ominous warning. But, of course, it’s also describing an alternate history, and there’s a lot of science fiction in the story. What could an actual post-nuclear world look like for us?

[It] probably would not involve mutants and monsters. Nuclear radiation can cause some mutations, but it probably wouldn’t actually happen like that. But that’s okay, it’s a video game and a TV show, it’s supposed to be entertaining — that’s fine.

The most important thing we can do is to not have a nuclear war in the first place. And that should always be the first option to address the risk of nuclear war. In the event of an actual nuclear war, for people who are in the immediate vicinity of the explosion, there’s not much that can be done. The force of a nuclear explosion is too much. Buildings will be destroyed, people will be killed, that’s just how it’s going to be.

Then for the rest of the world, this is where things get interesting. The plausible nuclear war scenarios would not have nuclear explosions across the whole world. First of all, we just don’t have that many nuclear weapons, which is a good thing. Second of all, much of the world is just not a likely target in any actual nuclear war scenario. You know, I live in New York City, it’s a good chance I would die, right? We are a likely target of nuclear explosions.

But across much of the world, across Latin America, across Africa, large portions of Asia — these are countries that are not involved in any significant disputes with the nuclear-armed countries. There’s only a few nuclear-armed countries, and we tend to have our nuclear weapons pointed at each other and at our close allies, maybe.

So unless you happen to live near [a nuclear missile silo], you’re probably not going to get hit, you’re probably going to survive the immediate attack. Then there are a few things that you’re going to want to look at. The two big global effects are one, nuclear winter, and two, damage to the global economy. If you start removing hubs from the economy, that’s going to have an effect on the rest of the economy. What would that effect be? Well, nobody really knows, we’ve never tried it before. That’s something that every country would have to deal with. At a minimum, there’s going to be some sort of supply chain shocks. Also, nobody’s really studied this in much detail — we could at least try studying it a little bit.

There has been more research on nuclear winter — I’m using the term nuclear winter broadly to refer to all of the global, environmental effects of nuclear war that come from basically the ashes of burning cities and burning other places going up into the stratosphere, which is the second level of the atmosphere, and it stays up there for months, or even years. That can have a variety of effects. One of the biggest being plants don’t grow as much, because it’s colder, it’s darker, there may be less precipitation. So there are some projections and very severe agricultural shortfalls. It could take a lot of effort just to survive, even for countries that had nothing to do with a conflict that caused the war.

How is the US prepared to preserve the lives of its civilians in the event of a nuclear war or other catastrophic events with similar impacts, if at all?

My understanding from this is that we’re just not really prepared to handle this type of situation, that we have some emergency management capabilities, but we push past the reasonable limits of those capabilities pretty quickly in these very extreme scenarios. So would we be able to do some things to help out? Yeah, sure. Would we be able to keep society intact? Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it. This is really just something that we are not currently set up to do.

Frankly, this would be a good thing to invest more in for the United States government and other governments, to invest more in the capabilities of more successfully surviving these extreme catastrophe scenarios. Nuclear war is one of them, it’s not the only one. This is something that we could and, I think, should do better at.

In the show, a select few of the population get to live safely in bunkers underground — those who have access to power and money, generally. In real life even, there’s a community of wealthy people who have invested in bunkers in case of emergencies. How do we ensure shelter and refuge for as many people as possible in these kinds of situations?

Yes, there are wealthy people who are making these preparations. There are also the survivalists, the preppers, who are doing similar sorts of things, often with a much deeper commitment to actually surviving. Having a bunker in New Zealand doesn’t do you very much good if you’re in the United States during the time of the war.

So for people living out in more strategic locations on a permanent basis, those people may be a lot more likely to survive something like a nuclear war, which targets the big cities in ways that it doesn’t matter how much money you have, you can’t survive the nuclear explosion. It just doesn’t work that way.

What does bring benefits is having the resources in place to deal with the aftermath, which for nuclear war could include a combination of food stockpiles, and preparations to continue making food through any agricultural shortfalls with nuclear winter, could include the public health capabilities to manage the effects. If we see significant supply chain shocks, and just general disruption of how a civilization functions, that can create major public health challenges even away from where the attacks occurred. And also, the social and psychological and institutional preparedness. This is a really big challenge — getting people to wrap their minds around and make actual serious plans with institutional weight behind them, to be prepared to deal with this sort of thing.

It’s not easy. This is not something that we like to think about, like to work on, this is not happy stuff, right? It’s tough because most of the time, you don’t need it. In fact, hopefully you never need it. And yet, if something like this happens, and it could happen, then this could be the difference between life and death for a large number of people.

Why is there this ever-present fascination with stocking up on supplies? Whether it’s bunkers or emergency kits, it feels like people can buy their way to safety — I’m curious what you think is the underlying dynamic here?

Well, first of all, it’s just interesting. I’m fascinated by it, even if I myself am a real failure of a prepper. Despite my line of work, I’m actually not personally very good at this, plus I live in Manhattan — my default expectation is that I would just die. I don’t know my way around this stuff. But some people do, and you know, more credit to them for taking on that sort of responsibility. And a lot of this is things that any of us would be well-served by doing even for a much more basic set of catastrophes.

I remember, a few years ago, I went to a meeting of the New York City preppers group. And I was a little disappointed. I was kind of hoping to meet some really crazy, eccentric people. And it just wasn’t. The group was led by a police officer who was just doing this in his spare time, this little public service, and the people there were normal and they were just trying to learn some basics of what to do. And it turned out some of the basic preparations, it’s a lot of the stuff that FEMA recommends people do for basic disaster preparedness.

Now, is that gonna be enough for a nuclear war? Maybe not. For that, you might need something more serious, and some people are trying to do that sort of serious thing. In the event of a nuclear war, that might be the difference between them surviving and then them not surviving. It’s entirely reasonable that there’s some people out there doing it.

For the rest of us, we should, I think, broadly be supportive of this. I wouldn’t look at those people as eccentric crazies — I would look at them as people who are taking the responsibility of ensuring their own survival and their family’s survival across a wide range of scenarios. That’s commendable, and I wish that there was more of a public or communal attitude toward: Can we help all of us to do more along these lines? Because we could end up really needing it.

While the US hasn’t faced any events as deeply catastrophic for our survival as nuclear warfare would be, are there past crises that we can look to and learn from in an effort to prepare for the worst in the future?

This is a major challenge in the study of global catastrophic risk. We don’t really have a lot of data points. I mean, modern global civilization has never been destroyed before, which is a good thing. That’s, of course, a good thing. But for research purposes, it means a lack of data.

What we have to do is make use of what information we do have. And events like the Covid-19 pandemic are one really important source of information. Another we can try to learn from [is] major catastrophes that have occurred across human history. Then also for the local scale disasters that occur on a relatively frequent basis: natural disasters, violent conflicts, and so on. All of this does provide some insight into how human societies respond to these sorts of situations.

The best we can do is take what we do have experience with, what we do have data on, and extrapolate that as well as we can to these other scenarios that have never happened before, and use that as the basis for using our best judgment about how we can survive and cope with it. And along the way, we can perhaps use that as that much more motivation to prevent these scenarios from happening in the first place, which, again, is always the best option.

Ideally, the world never finds itself in a situation as devastating to human life as global nuclear war would be. How do we reduce that risk as best as possible?

There are a lot of small-picture things that can be done, and then there is that one big-picture thing that, in my opinion, is not getting the attention that it deserves.

The small picture things — and in my experience, this is the primary focus of work on nuclear war risk reduction — are just the day-to-day management of nuclear weapons systems and relations between the countries that have them. This was all especially pronounced recently during the most tense moments of the ongoing conflict in Ukraine, and is probably still a day-to-day concern for the people who manage the nuclear weapons systems in Russia, in the United States, and France and the UK. There’s a lot to be done there to prevent things from escalating, and this is important work.

In my opinion, none of this solves the underlying issue: which is that there are these countries that have nuclear weapons, some of them in rather large numbers. And so those nuclear weapons are pointed at each other and may at some point get used. My view is that the only real solution to this is to improve the relations between these countries, enough that they don’t feel that they need the nuclear weapons anymore. Now, that process can include attention to how terrible the aftermath of nuclear war would be that makes countries that much more eager to get rid of these terrible weapons.

But I have a hard time seeing any significant nuclear disarmament without significant improvements in the relations between the countries that have them, the most important of which is Russia.

This is not a quick-fix solution. This is something that, if it’s going to happen, it would probably happen over the decades.