Nuclear holocaust

Nuclear holocaust refers to a possible nearly complete annihilation of human civilization by nuclear warfare. Under such a scenario, all or most of the Earth is made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons in future world wars.

Nuclear physicists and others have speculated that nuclear war could result in an end to human life, or at least to modern civilization on Earth due to the immediate effects of nuclear fallout, the temporary loss of much modern technology due to electromagnetic pulses, or nuclear winter and resulting extinctions.

Importantly however, despite modern high civilization being at risk, assuming weapons stockpiles at the previous cold war heights, analysts and physicists have found that billions of humans would nevertheless survive a global thermonuclear war. In the aftermath, "the living would envy the dead."

Since 1947, the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists visualizes how far the world is from a nuclear holocaust.

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, especially in speculative genres such as science fiction, dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction.

Etymology and usage
The English word "holocaust", derived from the Greek term "holokaustos" meaning "completely burnt", is commonly defined as "a great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire."

Possibly the first printed use of the word "holocaust" to describe an imagined nuclear destruction appears in Reginald Glossop's 1926 novel The Orphan of Space: "Moscow ... beneath them ... a crash like a crack of Doom! The echoes of this Holocaust rumbled and rolled ... a distinct smell of sulphur ... atomic destruction." In the novel, an atomic weapon is planted in the office of the Soviet dictator who, with German help and Chinese mercenaries, is preparing the takeover of Western Europe.

In the 1960s, the word principally referred to nuclear destruction. After the mid-1970s, when the word "holocaust" became closely associated with the mass murder of Jews during the Nazi regime, references to nuclear destruction have usually spoken of "atomic holocaust" or "nuclear holocaust".