Eventually it reaches the troposphere, higher than commercial flights. Radioactive particles then spew across everything below as fallout, raining back down on the Earth. A nuclear bomb produces ‘a witch’s brew of radioactive products, which are also entrained in the cloud’, the astrophysicist Carl Sagan warned decades ago. More than a million people are dead…
This story, of what the moments after a nuclear missile launch could look like, is based on facts from exclusive interviews with presidential advisers and declassified documents.