What Happens In The First 72 Minutes Of Nuclear War, According To Author Annie Jacobsen
Annie Jacobsen said this on the Hasan Minhaj podcast. She is the author of “Nuclear War: A Scenario”, published in 2024, which reconstructs the sequence of events following a single nuclear launch minute by minute, built from declassified Defense Department documents and interviews with former military officials.
The physics she describes are real. The fireball core of a 1-megaton warhead reaches temperatures comparable to the interior of the sun. The thermal pulse moves at the speed of light. Flash blindness would occur for anyone within several miles with line of sight. Third-degree burns and spontaneous fires extend well beyond the initial blast radius, potentially 7 to 10 miles depending on conditions, which means fires would spread far beyond what the initial detonation directly ignites.
The vacuum in the mushroom stem is the part most people do not know about. Peak winds in that column can exceed 200 miles per hour, stronger than any hurricane ever recorded. It does not knock buildings over. It pulls them apart and upward. The debris field is compressed former city.
The 1,760 figure is accurate. As of early 2026, the United States has approximately 1,770 deployed strategic warheads, with Russia maintaining a comparable number. Both countries operate on launch-on-warning doctrine, meaning the retaliatory launch is triggered automatically upon confirmed detection of an incoming strike. There is no deliberation window. The doctrine was designed that way on purpose, because a pause would eliminate the deterrent.
Nuclear winter from a full exchange is not speculation. It is modeled science. A complete US-Russia exchange would inject an estimated 150 million tons of soot into the stratosphere through the firestorms it ignites. Sunlight is blocked. Global temperatures drop 5 to 10 degrees Celsius in the Northern Hemisphere, with some interior regions dropping far more.
Agriculture collapses not from the blast but from the cold and darkness that follow. Studies published in Nature Food estimate 2 to 5 billion people at risk of starvation from crop failure alone, not from the weapons themselves.
Jacobsen’s 72-minute figure covers the full arc: launch detection, presidential authorization, missile flight time, detonation, retaliatory launch, and the beginning of the atmospheric chain that leads to winter. ICBM flight time from Russia to US targets is roughly 25 to 35 minutes. Submarine-launched missiles can be faster. The full clock from first launch to the beginning of civilizational collapse fits inside a standard morning meeting.
The reason this has not happened is Mutual Assured Destruction, the same logic Jacobsen’s book is built around. Both sides know exactly what the other can do. The deterrent holds precisely because everyone has war-gamed the outcome and nobody wins. New START, the last remaining arms control treaty between the US and Russia, expired in February 2026. Both sides can now expand their arsenals without limit.
Jacobsen’s book is a documentation of something that has been planned, modeled, and prepared for continuously since 1945, by people who understood exactly what they were preparing.