Dylan Murray
For several years now, a mysterious entity known as 'Jeff' has continued to come up in conversations regarding nuclear arsenals across the globe.
But who is this unknown figure and what do they have to do with nuclear weapons?
Well, this is all because of a graph which was released several years ago by CNN.
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Credited to the Federation of American Scientists, the graph features nine countries that possess nuclear warheads and then a tenth entity, known simply as 'Jeff'.
Plagued with the fear of potential nuclear war, everyone would prefer to know exactly who has access to nuclear warheads - and how much damage they could possibly do with them.
However, while 'Jeff' has less than ten nuclear warheads at their disposal, that hasn't stopped the general public from growing curious about their identity.
In fact, the graph itself has sparked recurring conversations and debates on social media over the years, with hundreds - if not thousands - of people asking the question: Who is Jeff, and why does 'he' have nuclear warheads?
While some may first think that the graph is informally talking about some unknown world leader or even just some random guy, it turns out that all of those theories are completely false.
Instead, it turns out that Jeff isn’t the name of an individual, but rather an acronym of an organization within the world of nuclear energy.
Joint Evaluated Fission and Fusion Project, or JEFF for short, is a group that produces nuclear data as a part of the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency.
As the name suggests, they specialize in both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion and are made up of scientists from several different countries throughout the world.
Furthermore, their 'possession' of actual nuclear weapons was also perhaps an error made exclusively by this graph - as no piece of data released by the Federation of American Scientists in recent years has included JEFF whatsoever.
So luckily, there’s no need to fear a mysterious man named Jeff that could aid in total atomic annihilation.
Instead, one must have faith that the nine slightly less mysterious countries that possess nuclear warheads – Russia, the US, China, the UK, France, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and India – don’t do anything too rash anytime soon.
After all, it would take just 100 of the known 12,100 nuclear warheads to launch the world into a nuclear winter that would likely destroy the world as we know it.
So here's hoping.