(The Economic Collapse Blog)—We have never been closer to nuclear war than we are right now. If the conflict in Ukraine sparks a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, billions of people could die. This is why so many of us desperately want leaders from both sides to sit down at the negotiating table and try to work out their differences peacefully.
Perhaps a peaceful solution is not possible, but for the good of humanity they should at least make an attempt. Because as things stand right now, all it is going to take is one mistake for the world to be plunged into an unthinkable nuclear cataclysm.
According to author Annie Jacobsen, the U.S. has a network of satellites that is constantly watching for an ICBM launch from one of our enemies…
“The US Defense Department has a early warning system. And the system in space is called SBIRS, a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America’s enemies.”
“So the moment an ICBM launches, they see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM a fraction of a second after it launches. And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, and that’s the US counterattack.
“The reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike.
“That policy, launch on warning, is exactly like it says, it means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.”
In the event of a surprise first strike, there would only be a handful of minutes to get the president out of bed and decide what to do.
Needless to say, the president would not want to launch a counterstrike if it is a false alarm.
Because once the missiles are in the air, there is no calling them back.
When a nuclear warhead explodes, a fireball is created that is unimaginably hot. The following comes from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists…
Microseconds into the explosion of a nuclear weapon, energy released in the form of X-rays heats the surrounding environment, forming a fireball of superheated air. Inside the fireball, the temperature and pressure are so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of bare nuclei and subatomic particles, as is the case in the Sun’s multi-million-degree core.
The fireball following the airburst explosion of a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon—like the W87 thermonuclear warhead deployed on the Minuteman III missiles currently in service in the US nuclear arsenal—can grow to more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter and stays blindingly luminous for several seconds, before its surface cools.
The light radiated by the fireball’s heat—accounting for more than one-third of the thermonuclear weapon’s explosive energy—will be so intense that it ignites fires and causes severe burns at great distances. The thermal flash from a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon could cause first-degree burns as far as 13 kilometers (8 miles) from ground zero.
If you are at ground zero, you will have zero chance of surviving.
According to a study that was conducted several years ago, approximately 34 million people would die during the first few hours of a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
But that would be just the first wave of death.
In the aftermath of a nuclear exchange, radioactive fallout would spread over much of the continental United States…
Using archived weather data over 48-hour periods across a number of dates in 2021 to simulate the expected radioactive plume, the scientists found that the West Coast states were the lowest risk due to a prevailing easterly wind.
However, depending on the exact wind direction, the worst fallout could fall over any part of the U.S. and Canada east of Idaho. Based on weather patterns on December 2, 2021, Chicago, Illinois and D.C., among other population centers, would be in the direct path of a fatal dose of radiation.
In a worst-case scenario, almost all of Montana and North Dakota, as well as parts of Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Kansas would receive a dose more than 10 times what is considered lethal, resulting in deaths in a matter of days. Most of the Midwest would receive a lethal dose, while elsewhere would see deaths occur in weeks.
Radioactive fallout would kill far more people than the initial explosions would.
But the good news is that radiation levels would dissipate fairly rapidly.
So if you are far enough away from a ground zero and you are able to survive the initial tsunami of radioactive fallout, it will eventually be safe to go outside again.
But at that point there will be no more supply chains, people will be fighting for whatever dwindling resources are left, and “famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself”…
As horrific as those statistics are, the tens to hundreds of millions of people dead and injured within the first few days of a nuclear conflict would only be the beginnings of a catastrophe that eventually will encompass the whole world.
Global climatic changes, widespread radioactive contamination, and societal collapse virtually everywhere could be the reality that survivors of a nuclear war would contend with for many decades.
Two years after any nuclear war—small or large—famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself.
Ultimately, nuclear winter will kill more people than anything else.
For those of us that live in the northern hemisphere, it will be exceedingly difficult to grow much of anything once temperatures drop far below normal…
This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.
Can you imagine what our world would look like if such a war actually happened?
Unfortunately, relations between the United States and Russia are the worst that they have ever been, and we are getting closer to a nuclear war with each passing day.
Politicians in the western world assume that the Russians would never risk a nuclear war because the consequences would be so apocalyptic for everyone.
But Russian politicians have warned us over and over again that if we push Russia too far there will be a nuclear war.
And as I detailed in my new book entitled “Chaos”, the Russians have been feverishly preparing to fight a nuclear war for many years.
They know that there are no “winners” in a nuclear war.
But they also know that whoever strikes first will have the best chance of surviving one.
Right now, Russian forces are advancing and Ukrainian leaders are becoming increasingly desperate…
“Western leaders are bracing for the Ukrainian army’s collapse as it has only been able to slow the advance of Russian forces amid weapons and ammunition shortages, the Times writes.
In its editorial, titled ‘It’s time we talked about the fall of Kiev’, the paper points out that ‘contrary to the predominant view that this is a perpetual frozen conflict, with neither side able to win a decisive advantage, the front line is bitterly contested and there is a real risk of Ukrainian forces being pushed back’.
‘This is the nightmare scenario now being contemplated by western policymakers’, the Times notes.
Russia’s advance ‘would obviously be disastrous for the Ukrainians’. ‘It would also confront the West with all manner of tough challenges’, the newspaper says. ‘The consequences of a partial or complete defeat would be calamitous in ways western populations have barely begun to understand. But we have a lazy habit in the comfortable West – away from Europe’s front line in east and south Ukraine – of wishful thinking and being unprepared for bad surprises’, the Times emphasizes.”
Ukrainian officials realize that the only way they can win the war is for NATO forces to intervene, and some western leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron are very open to the idea.
But Vladimir Putin has warned that this will put us one step away from nuclear war, and he has decided to conscript another 150,000 men into the Russian military…
Vladimir Putin has called up another 150,000 men for Russian army conscription, the highest figure for eight years.
This comes as Orthodox priests have been ordered to say prayers in church for the dictator’s victory in the war.
The recruits are aged 18 to 30 and will be conscripted between 1 April and 15 July amid his war against Ukraine.
The Russians are convinced that western leaders want to bring down the Russian government and divide Russia up into a bunch of smaller pieces.
On the other side, politicians in the western world are determined to do “whatever it takes” to keep the Russians from winning in Ukraine.
Both sides are being unreasonable and paranoid, and that is a recipe for disaster.
All it is going to take is one mistake to unleash a nuclear cataclysm, and billions of lives hang in the balance.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
“According to author Annie Jacobsen, . . .”
She is the author who wrote about a Soviet flying saucer with “genetically engineered space aliens” which crashed in Roswell in the 1950s — Soviets must have been really advanced in FLYING SAUCER design back then (and “genetic engineering”) – wonder why they didn’t annihilate us back then?!?!
See any Soviet surveillance balloons overhead?????
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Hahahahahahaha . . .