Nuclear Winter

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with many nuclear bombs detonated around the planet. It was no longer a topic of conversation around the dinner table as in years past. Nobody was prepared, including the world's governments. Yet the threat was always real, and the devastation was predictable. The damage was incalculable. Millions died at the points of impact. Nuclear winter spread across the globe. A rapidly cooling climate shocked humanity and all living things...to their death.

This is more than the story of nuclear conflict. It’s about the devastating effects wrought by nuclear winter. Our possible future is seen through the eyes of the Albright family. Hank Albright, a widower and proprietor of the Driftwood Key Inn, is the epitome of the laid-back islander inhabiting the Keys. His brother, Mike, is a homicide detective for the Monroe County Sheriff’s department. Along with his wife, Jessica, a paramedic and member of the sheriff’s department's water emergency team, they become involved in the investigation of a sadistic serial killer.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with many nuclear bombs detonated around the planet. It was no longer a topic of conversation around the dinner table as in years past. Nobody was prepared, including the world's governments. Yet the threat was always real, and the devastation was predictable. The damage was incalculable. Millions died at the points of impact. Nuclear winter spread across the globe. A rapidly cooling climate shocked humanity and all living things...to their death.

This is how the world ends. Not with a bang, but with many nuclear bombs detonated around the planet. It was no longer a topic of conversation around the dinner table as in years past. Nobody was prepared, including the world's governments. Yet the threat was always real, and the devastation was predictable. The damage was incalcuable. Millions died at the points of impact. Nuclear Winter spread across the globe. A rapidly cooling climate shocked humanity and all living things...to their death.

Nuclear Winter enveloped the planet with its relentless barrage of dark, sooty air. With each passing day, more and more people died. In a desperate attempt to give people a chance to survive, some government leaders chose to marshal the assets of their community. It was a polite way of saying take from those who have and give to those who have not.

Eighth-grader Lucy Sandoval has no hope of reaching high school. Blindsided by a terminal cancer diagnosis, she resolves to spend her last moments with the father she never knew. But he disappeared years ago, and Lucy’s mother is tight-lipped about him and their shared past beyond his vague whereabouts. With no help and little to no leads, Lucy’s loses faith, when tragedy strikes and brings her cross-country flight down mid-air.

In 1982, Professors Sagan and Turco made known their discovery of the concept "nuclear winter", a widespread cold and dark, resulting in agricultural collapse and world famine, that would be generated in even a "small" nuclear war. It was a landmark discovery that revealed in the starkest terms how vulnerable our civilization is to the long-term environmental effects of nuclear war.

The world is currently closer to superpower conflict than at any time since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. World War III is a real possibility, and with 12,000 warheads in the arsenals of more than half a dozen countries, we are standing on a nuclear knife edge. Despite receiving very little attention, nuclear war is a far greater threat to humanity's immediate survival than climate change. While climate heating threatens humanity over many decades, nuclear war could destroy civilisation in just a few hours.

It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient: heavy water, which is produced in Norway's Vemork, the lone plant in all the world that makes this rare substance. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers push production into overdrive. For the Allies, the plant must be destroyed.

Sixty-six million years ago an asteroid as large as Mt. Everest hit what is now the Yucatan Peninsula at a speed ten times faster than the fastest rifle bullet. Debris from the impact blew into space, re-entered the atmosphere as a swarm of shooting stars that burned the global forests and grasslands, leaving behind a thin global layer containing rock from the asteroid and from Mexico, and smoke from the fires. This layer marks one of the greatest extinctions in Earth history including not just dinosaurs, but also fish, plankton, ammonites, and plants making up about 75% of the known species.