Effects of Nuclear War

A militarily plausible nuclear attack, even "limited, " could be expected to kill people and to inflict economic damage on a scale unprecetiented in American experience; a large-scale nuclear exchange would be a calamity unprecedented in human history.


A full scale nuclear exchange, lasting less than 60 minutes...could wipe out more than 300 million Americans, Europeans, and Russians, as well as untold numbers elsewhere. And the survivors - as Chairman Khrushchev warned the Communist Chinese, "the survivors would envy the dead." For they would inherit a world so devastated by explosions and poison and fire that today we cannot conceive of its horrors.

President John F. Kennedy, address to the nation on the Limited Test Ban Treaty, 26 July 1963