The Fate of the Earth

If you're looking for a wonderful and informative non-fiction book to read, I suggest you read The Fate of the Earth by Jonathan Schell (1943 - 2014); you'll learn more than you ever wanted to know about nuclear weapons (Although Terminator 2 is a good start).  Here's a excerpt:

        It is possible to picture a nuclear attack of any shape or size.  An attack might use all the weapons at the attacker’s disposal or any portion of them.  It might be aimed at military targets, at industry, at the population, or at all or some combination of these.  The attack might be mainly air-burst, and would increase the range of severe damage from the blast waves, or it might be mainly ground-burst, to destroy hard targets such as land-based nuclear missiles or command-and-control centers, or it might combine air bursts and ground bursts in any proportion.  It could be launched in the daytime or at night, in the summer or in winter, with warning or without warning.  The sequence of events once hostilities had begun also lies open.  For example, it seems quite possible that the leaders of a nation that had just suffered a nuclear attack would be sparing in their response, tailoring it to political objectives rather than to the vengeful aim of wiping out the society whose leaders had lunched the attack.  On the other hand, they night retaliate with all the forces at their disposal, as they say they will do.  Then again, the two sides might expend their forces gradually, in a series of ad-hoc “exchanges,” launched in an atmosphere of misinformation and intellectual and moral disorientation.  The state of mind of the decision-makers might be one of calm rationality, of hatred, of shock, of hysteria, or even of outright insanity.  They might follow coldly reasoned scenarios of destruction to the letter, and exterminate one another in that way.  Or, for all we are able to know now, having at first hardened their “resolve” to follow the scenarios through to the end, the might suddenly reverse themselves, and proceed to the negotiating table after only incompletely destroying one another.  Lacking any experience of what decisions human beings make under full-scale nuclear attack, we simply do know what they would do.

 
                                                                                                                                                   -Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth


The Doomsday Clock.  It is 5 minutes to midnight.