A Nuclear holocaust is the possibility of a nearly complete annhilation of human civilization by nuclear warfare and weapons . Under this scenario, all or most of the Earth is made uninhabitable by nuclear weapons in future world wars or possibly world war 3.
A common definition for the word "holocaust" is "great destruction resulting in the extensive loss of life, especially by fire." The word is derived from the Greek term "holokaustos" meaning "completely burnt." Possibly the first printed use of the word "holocaust" to describe an imagined nuclear destruction is Reginald Glossop's 1926: "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 1960s the principal referent of the unmodified "holocaust" was nuclear destruction. Since the mid 1970s the capitalized term "Holocaust" has been closely associated with the Nazi mass slaughter of Jews (see Holocaust) and "holocaust" in its nuclear destruction sense is almost always preceded by "atomic" or "nuclear".
Nuclear physicists and authors have speculated that nuclear holocaust 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 loss of much modern technology due to electromagnetic pulses, or nuclear winter and resulting extinctions.
Nuclear holocaust in popular culture
The theme is widely used in dystopian fiction books, films, and video games.
One of the first depictions of a nuclear holocaust is included in Olaf Stapledon's celebrated Last and First Men (1930). Unlike the post-1945 treatment of the subject, where the disaster is almost invariably the outcome of a war between states, Stapeldon depicts this holocaust as the result of class war between an arrogant ruling class and downtrodden miners in a future civilization. Abuse of the newly-discovered Atomic power source leads to what would now be called a chain reaction engulfing the entire world, so that "of the two hundred million members of the human race, all were burnt or roasted or suffocated - all but thirty-five, who happened to be in the neighborhood of the North Pole" (and from whom humanity is eventually regenerated for many more millions of years of existence).
Throughout the Cold War, nuclear holocaust was something many people in the developed world were afraid of because of a perceived likelihood of it occurring. The topic became somewhat less common after the collapse of the Soviet Union, however, as many of the works created during the Cold War were primarily just commentary on that conflict. Asiatic work that deals with the theme and western work influenced by it often borrow much imagery from American atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima during World War II in 1945. To this date, those bombings and the failure of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1986 remain the only nuclear disasters from which authors and screenwriters can draw real world experience with the aftermath of such instances.Authors, directors, and game designers have approached the topic from a variety of angles and in every major media. Novels such as the Hugo Award-winning A Canticle for Leibowitz tell of a reemerging civilization several hundred years after the bombs fell, likening the civilization of the North American survivors to that of the dark ages in Europe. In other works, such as the Fallout series of video games, nuclear holocaust is used as a backdrop to a dystopian tale of mutant monsters and beasts. In many of these works, a partly forgotten nuclear holocaust. I picked this artical because it explains what a nuclear holocast is.