This is a work of fiction.
“The Aftermath” by Midjourney AI; my own prompt
The situation was grim. The Ukrainian War, dragging into its fourth year, had essentially illustrated the utter bankruptcy of any idea that a war in the 21st century could have a “winner”. All of Europe had been plunged into a horrific recession caused by enormous military expenditures, sanctions against Russia, massive increases in energy and food costs, and the deindustrialization of its economies, due to reliance on expensive American resources. El Niño had also weighed in, producing two successive years of terrible fires, heat domes, and disastrous crop failures due to drought and flooding. Eighty percent of Ukraine’s population had been killed or displaced. The world was tired of war, but there seemed no way out.
In the war room of the Pentagon, there had been talk since the war began of what had previously been considered unthinkable: deploying “limited” nuclear weapons against another nuclear power. In the fall of 2025 the idea was proposed again. There were new weapons, nuclear but much smaller than the 5,000 full-scale bombs poised to launch against cities in the West and its declared “enemies”, Russia and China. The Taiwan War was also at an impasse, though not nearly as bloody, so far. Something had to be done.
The idea was to deploy the mini-nukes all along the Russian holding lines in Ukraine, essentially a “shock and awe” demonstration that would be carried out with precision, killing the bulk of the Russian armies in Ukraine with minimal “collateral” damage. Proponents said this would so devastate the Russians that they would have no alternative but to withdraw their remaining troops in disarray. And what could the Russians do to retaliate? US intelligence suggested that their small-scale nuclear arsenal was small, and that the grinding war had severely reduced their capacity to deploy it with any speed or accuracy in any case. Besides which, using it would entail killing many of what remained of the Ukrainian citizenry, many of whom were the Russian-speaking people that Russia was presumably trying to “liberate”.
Not only would this end the exhausting and disastrously expensive war, they argued, it would send a message to China that the same kind of precision strike could be used against the Chinese forces located in and around Taiwan, and end the nerve-wracking impasse there.
Much of the Pentagon debate centred on the risk that Russia would respond by launching an all-out world war with its full nuclear arsenal. Most believed that they would never do so. It would result in Russia’s obliteration, and hence be self-defeating, and the Russians were not nihilists, they argued. Others said it was still too great a risk to take, especially if the use of small nuclear weapons by both sides were to explode into even more bloody violence and devastation than had already been seen on the battlefront. And there was always the heightened risk of an error.
The military decided to do a simulation, a table-top exercise, to see what the range of possible outcomes might be and calculate the risk more precisely. The scenario that seemed to work best was a single multi-point strike, rather than a series of provocations that would give Russia the chance and time to respond.
The event that changed everything was a unanimous declaration by the countries of the European Union that they were withdrawing from all further cooperation with the war effort, other than humanitarian aid, and moving to restore trade and energy flows with Russia. The full confession of a CIA insider about how the US had blown up the Nord Stream pipelines three years earlier was the final straw — it was now absolutely clear that the US President knew about and authorized the bombing. The Europeans, exhausted and impoverished by the war and its sanctions, had had enough.
That same day, enraged at the Europeans’ actions, the US President authorized the precision strike by mini-nukes along the full line of Russian positions in Ukraine.
The strategy was to portray the strike as a special offensive by the Ukrainian army, using a battery of new weapons from various Western states, and to celebrate the Ukrainians’ “courage, patience and skill” in waiting for just the right moment to turn the war around.
But when it happened, the Russians, equipped with radiation detectors, quickly realized that the weaponry used was nuclear, and protested to the world and to the UN. Unfortunately, the “precision” strikes were less precise than had been planned, and despite massive propaganda efforts to discount radiation reports as exaggerated “depleted uranium” numbers, Russians at the front were able to conclusively demonstrate that nuclear weapons had been used. The Americans continued to deny this was the case.
The Russians were now in a quandary. Yet another red line had been crossed, with the usual US lies and deceptions. The war had expanded somewhat into Russian territory, as the Americans had previously allowed what were left of the Ukrainian forces to use Western missiles to strike Russian cities near their border in “retaliatory strikes”, and the Russians now knew that the use of US mini-nukes could soon be extended fully into their own country.
The pundits of the day were alarmed. They postulated what the US would have done if Russia had used nuclear weapons on their borders. There was no doubt in their minds. Those who had worked with the Pentagon or CIA knew full well the drills that the US did every month to prepare for all-out nuclear war, and the pretexts in their simulations were eerily close to what the US had just provided to Russia.
Still, they didn’t believe the Russians would be crazy enough to start a full-scale nuclear war against the West just because the US had used “limited” nuclear weapons in the Donbas, on land that Russia had declared, based on referenda of its citizens, to now be a part of Russia. They wouldn’t, would they? It would be suicide.
That was the first miscalculation.
We didn’t know all that back then. Perhaps we still don’t know the whole story. But the next 48 hours were completely chaotic. There was no notice of the strikes, and even when air raid sirens sounded, who knew what to do? Hide in your basement? Flee to the countryside?
From what we can determine now, the bombs killed about 40 million Americans, 30 million Russians, 70 million in the UK/EU, 150 million Chinese, and 100 million in other countries, by various ghastly means. Why the Chinese were targeted (though they retaliated as well) is unknown; perhaps in the panic of the moment it was impossible to reposition or hold back the missiles aimed at them. That toll was about what the forecasters had predicted. But that was just the immediate effects of the blasts.
The immediate problem in the aftermath was the destruction of infrastructure — roads, water pipes, bridges, power and gas lines, and transportation infrastructure essential to any kind of regional or international trade. Without any possibility of this being repaired, most of the large cities all over the world were simply abandoned.
That was the second miscalculation.
More than half the world lived in cities. Three billion people streaming out of the cities after finding them uninhabitable (running out of food and water supplies, and energy supplies for transportation, heat and cooling, within just three days, for example) just could not be accommodated in the rest of the world. We have no toll for the havoc this wreaked on our planet in the months after the blasts, but it was clearly enormous.
That was followed by a host of additional perils — a blackening of the sky with soot for months, the nearly complete destruction of the ozone layer, and torrents of acidic “black rain”. It was always dark almost everywhere for a long time, especially above the Tropic of Capricorn, where half the world’s people lived. Over the next two years, the average global temperature dropped 8ºC to a level far colder than in the ice ages. Needless to say, crop failure in most countries, with almost no sunlight and little water reaching the surface, was close to 100%. I don’t think most people, when they shopped their nearby convenient grocery store before the war, had any idea how complex, fragile and vulnerable the food chain on which they completely depended to stay alive, actually was.
The effect of all of the above over the next two years was the death of over five billion humans, through a combination of starvation, freezing to death, burns, and anarchic violence in the struggle over available food. The total toll was over 99% in much of the area north of the Tropic of Cancer. That too was predicted.
map from Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, based on their most recent research and simulations
The immediate effect of this food, resource, infrastructure, and population collapse, was the collapse of all our centralized political, economic, and social systems. By the end of 2027, the world’s population had plummeted to about two billion, half of us living in just six tropical countries that had been (relatively) spared the effects of the nuclear winter: India, Pakistan (despite the fact they had apparently launched their nuclear arsenals at each other immediately after the US responded to Russia), Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, and the Philippines.
These are basically the last bastions of our global human civilization. We can’t go out in the sun, which would burn us to death in minutes, unless we cover up. It is often unbearably cold, and there is nothing left to burn to heat ourselves — the tropical forests were largely killed by fires, or acid rain, or layers of soot, or frost, and what was left was cut down for burning for warmth. There is no food in the ocean, since the fish couldn’t survive the temperature drop, and what food there is is often contaminated. Disease is everywhere, and there is no capacity to produce any but the most essential medicines. What government we have is totally corrupt.
We sometimes hear about the Remainers in the North — the six million remaining Americans, the twelve million remaining Europeans — whose lives must be more challenging even than ours. They are hunter-gatherers, scavengers roaming from place to place living off canned food and burning whatever they can find to stay warm. But they must be so cold! We hear about them when the large sailing ships are able to navigate their way through the ice floes that have migrated all the way to the equator.
At the end of 2027 there were still two billion humans left on the planet, they say. But the latest estimates now, three years later, are that fewer than a half billion remain. The scientists thought that humans would survive and wait out the hardship and the cold, and use their ingenuity to start again.
That was the third miscalculation.
We humans are inherently and utterly connected to the land. I remember in the pre-war days reading about the collapse of Haiti, where a combination of disasters had killed much of the population, and where almost all the trees in the country, including food trees, had been cut down for burning for warmth. Such madness!, I thought as I read. But now I understand. We have always co-evolved with the land, our home. We are part of the land; it is not our property. Now that we have destroyed the world, destroyed the land, we have destroyed ourselves.
In previous wars, even for those in prison camps, there was a reason to fight, a reason to go on. We had to overcome our shared enemy and rebuild a world that would be a healthy and thriving place for our children.
But now, there is nothing left to fight for. Only a fool would bring children into this devastated world. Every day I hear of the deaths of acquaintances who have just given up the struggle, decided that, even though we have enough food to survive, for now, and we’re told that the climate will eventually improve, that living is just more trouble than it’s worth. When they did the forecasts of human population, they seemed to miss that important fact.
Each of us who are left, mostly, keep and treasure a single gun, with enough bullets to defend ourselves if the gangs attack.
Plus one.
