These are the 'only two countries that would survive' if World War 3 broke out using nuclear weapons

Fresh conflicts involving the world's nuclear powers have raised the dreaded prospect of a potential World War Three breaking out, with all its deadly, deadly, consequences for mankind.

Not only have America and Israel, both nuclear powers, gone to war with Iran in the past week, but as missiles were flying to and from Tehran, the Taliban in Afghanistan started its own brutal war with nuclear-armed Pakistan.

While these conflicts are in themselves terrifying for the people in the Middle East living under regular bombardment, the ever-increasing entanglement of nuclear powers in escalating wars raises the prospect of total armageddon.

Peer-reviewed research publish in Nature indicates that a nuclear war would likely wipe out five billion people in fireballs that reach 100 million degrees Celsius and a nuclear winter that would blanket every corner of the Earth - apart from two very lucky countries.

Two countries would make it through a nuclear apocalypse (Getty Stock Image)

Armageddon expert Annie Jacobson, author of Nuclear War: A Scenario, used scientific papers and defense experts to find out what would happen if the Great Powers started slinging the 12,000 nuclear weapons held in the world's arsenals.

"Hundreds of millions of people die in the fireballs, no question," the investigative journalist explained on Steven Bartlett's The Diary Of A CEO podcast.

But the true devastation is happened upon the people who survive these devastating blasts and their radioactive fallout. Jacobson said that after this, three billion people would be left alive, but that life would be completely unrecognizable.

"Places like Iowa and Ukraine would be just snow for 10 years, and so agriculture would fail. When agriculture fails, people just die," she said, before Bartlett raised the question of where could even be safe in such a scenario.

It turns out that people living in New Zealand and Australia are likely the only ones to make it through the nuclear winter, with Jacobson stating that the Nature study shows that these might be the only place where you can grow food, or even go outside.

You wouldn't even be able to go outside because the ozone layer would be gone (Getty Stock Image)

Setting off thousands of modern nuclear warheads, most of which are 50 times more powerful than the ones dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would eviscerate the thin layer of gas that protects us from the sun's deadly radiation.

Jacobson described: "On top of [a nuclear winter], you have the radiation poisoning, because the ozone layer would be so damaged and destroyed that you can't be outside in the sunlight."

With sunlight itself becoming deadly for mankind, except for the Aussies and Kiwis, the few remaining people left on the rest of the planet will be left to scrounge an existence in the dark.

"People will be forced to live underground," she added. "So you have to imagine people living underground, fighting for food, everywhere except for in New Zealand and Australia."

With this bleak outlook for the future of humanity, Jacobson pointed out that nuclear armageddon would not be like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs and 70 percent of all species on Earth.

That is because we have the power to stop nuclear proliferation and the wars that threaten humanity's continued existence, even if at the moment that looks about as possible as stopping an asteroid.

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