What is "nuclear holocaust"

n. 1 The envisaged result of a nuclear war or nuclear accident, especially one involving widespread destruction of life and the environment.New Shorter Oxford Dictionary, January 1997, Electronic Version 1.0.03. 2 the possibility of complete annihilation of human civilization by nuclear war.

A nuclear holocaust or nuclear apocalypse would be widespread destruction, possibly causing the collapse of civilization, through the use of nuclear weapons. Under such a scenario, some of the Earth is made uninhabitable by nuclear warfare in future world wars.

Nuclear physicists and theorists have speculated that a thermonuclear war could result in the end of modern civilization on Earth due to the widespread devastation from nuclear blasts, firestorms, and radiation sickness; the temporary loss of much modern technology due to electromagnetic pulses; and the hypothetical long-term effects of a nuclear winter.

Early Cold War-era studies suggested that billions of humans would nonetheless survive the immediate effects of nuclear blasts and radiation following a global thermonuclear war. However, there is much debate about whether nuclear war could indirectly contribute to human extinction via secondary effects, including environmental consequences, societal breakdown, and economic collapse. Additionally, it has been argued that even a relatively small-scale nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan, involving on the order of hundreds of weapons, could cause a nuclear winter and kill more than a billion people.

Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has visualized how far the world is from a nuclear war.

The threat of a nuclear holocaust plays an important role in the popular perception of nuclear weapons. It features in the security concept of mutually assured destruction (MAD) and is a common scenario in survivalism. Nuclear holocaust is a common feature in literature and film, especially in speculative genres such as science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.