A global team of astrophysicists and nuclear strategists has released a startling hypothetical analysis: what would happen if humanity detonated every nuclear warhead on Earth on every planet in the solar system? The answer, according to a detailed breakdown from the popular science explainer series “What If,” is a mix of silent flashes, swallowed fireballs, and a lot of ringing like a bell. The findings, published today alongside a sponsored video by Chat LLM, reveal that our entire arsenal of more than 12,000 nuclear warheads, while devastating to human civilization, is laughably insignificant against the scale of the solar system’s giants.
“Nuking Jupiter is like throwing a lit match into a volcano,” the video’s narrator explains. “It would take 100 quadrillion times our entire nuclear stockpile to blow that planet apart.” This breaking analysis forces a sobering reconsideration: humanity’s most powerful weapons are, in cosmic terms, little more than firecrackers.
The report begins with Mercury, the smallest planet and the first target in this hypothetical campaign. Mercury has no atmosphere, meaning a nuclear detonation would behave completely differently than on Earth. “A 50-megaton blast would cause the entire planet to seismically ring like a bell for hours after the explosion,” the transcript states.
Without air to carry a pressure wave, about 80 percent of the energy would be released as a silent flash of X-rays and gamma rays, vaporizing the top layer of rock. The resulting seismic waves would ripple around the planet, meeting at the exact opposite side, potentially triggering landslides and sending chunks of Mercury hurtling toward Venus. “It’s like hitting a gong,” the narrator adds.
“The whole thing vibrates.”
Moving to Venus, the analysis takes a sharp turn. Venus has an atmosphere 92 times thicker than Earth’s, behaving more like a liquid ocean. Detonating a nuclear bomb there would be similar to setting one off deep underwater, as demonstrated by the 1955 Operation Wigwam test, where a 30-kiloton fission bomb was detonated 2,000 feet beneath the Pacific.
On Venus, the extreme pressure would suppress the blast almost instantly. “The actual footprint of destruction would be tiny compared to on Earth,” the transcript says. The planet’s already scorching atmosphere would swallow the explosion like a lit match in a house fire.
Even the brightest flash would be hidden by thick clouds, making it nearly invisible from space.
The Moon, Earth’s nearest celestial neighbor, would offer a spectacular show. The United States once planned to detonate a hydrogen bomb on the lunar surface as a show of force during the Cold War, a project that briefly involved a young Carl Sagan. In practice, a nuclear explosion on the airless Moon would produce no mushroom cloud and no sound.
Instead, a brilliant burst of X-rays and gamma rays would vaporize regolith, sending dust clouds across the entire lunar surface. Seismic waves would make the Moon ring for hours. “For a brief second, that nuclear blast would look like a brilliant new star in the sky, brighter than Venus,” the narrator notes.
The Apollo missions already experimented with mortar shells on the Moon to study its geology, but a nuclear strike would be orders of magnitude more dramatic.
Earth, of course, has been nuked more than any other world. Over 2,000 nuclear weapons have been detonated during tests, from the ocean floor to the thermosphere. The 1961 Tsar Bomba, a 50-megaton behemoth, was 3,300 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.
The 1962 Starfish Prime test detonated a 1. 4-megaton warhead in space, generating a massive electromagnetic pulse that knocked out power across Hawaii. “If we set off modern nuclear weapons in that stretch today, we’d likely fry most of our electronics and make low Earth orbit a radioactive no-go zone for decades,” the analysis warns.
However, even using the entire global arsenal of 12,000 nukes in a single location would only carve a crater 10 kilometers wide and 2 kilometers deep. The planet itself would remain intact, though human civilization would collapse under nuclear winter and shock waves.
Mars presents a controversial scenario. Some futurists, including Elon Musk, have proposed nuking the Martian polar caps to release carbon dioxide and trigger global warming for terraforming. But the “What If” analysis dismisses this as counterproductive.
“A nuclear explosion would kick up so much dust into the thin atmosphere that it would block out the sun, creating a nuclear winter that would make Mars even colder,” the transcript explains. The resulting dust cloud would also destroy ancient climate records and the chemical building blocks for life preserved in the ice caps. “You’d also be killing the rovers.
We love the rovers. So, Elon, please don’t nuke Mars,” the narrator pleads.
Jupiter, the solar system’s giant, is the most resilient target. In 1993, the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 struck Jupiter with the force of 300 million atomic weapons, creating plumes 2,000 to 3,000 kilometers high and heating the local atmosphere to 40,000 degrees Celsius. The planet suffered only temporary scars.
“Jupiter shrugs,” the transcript says bluntly. To actually destroy Jupiter, the analysis calculates a required energy equivalent to 100 quadrillion times Earth’s entire nuclear arsenal. The pressure at Jupiter’s core is hundreds of millions of pounds per square inch, and the temperature is 43,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Any bomb would be crushed and melted before detonation. Even a coordinated simultaneous detonation inside the planet would produce only a temporary hot bubble that Jupiter’s storms would swallow in seconds.
Saturn offers a similar story. Nuking the gas giant itself would be disappointing, but targeting its legendary rings could be visually dramatic. Saturn’s rings are composed of trillions of chunks of ice.
A nuclear strike would vaporize some ice, creating an explosive cloud and a temporary hole. However, the magnetic field would redistribute the particles, and within days the rings would close up as if nothing happened. “The rings would seemingly heal themselves,” the narrator says.
“It’s a dynamic system.”
Uranus, the seventh planet, provides an unexpected spectacle. If a thermonuclear weapon were detonated deep in its methane-rich mantle, the shockwave would snap molecules apart. The intense pressure would turn carbon into solid diamonds, creating a localized radioactive diamond storm.
“You’d get a flickering light show in completely random places across the planet that could be bright enough to be seen across the entire solar system,” the analysis reveals. This diamond rain phenomenon, already theorized on Neptune and Uranus, would be intensified by nuclear detonations, possibly producing diamonds the size of icebergs.
Neptune, the farthest planet, would be visible only to high-end telescopes like Hubble or James Webb. Its thick atmosphere, thousands of kilometers thick, would compress any bomb near the surface, amplifying the diamond rain effect. But to a planet of Neptune’s scale, the explosion would hardly make a ripple.
“Ultimately, it would be like dropping a pebble into an ocean,” the narrator says.
Pluto, now a dwarf planet, would react much like Mercury but with a twist: its icy surface would produce a larger vapor cloud of incinerated ice. With no atmosphere, the detonation would create a blue burst of X-ray and gamma-ray energy, then quickly dissipate. “Sort of like a tiny supernova pulse,” the transcript describes.
Finally, the Sun. Any nuclear weapon aimed at our star would melt long before reaching the surface. But if it did detonate, it would be completely insignificant.
The Sun already performs a non-stop nuclear explosion, releasing the energy of 1 billion megaton bombs in a single X-class solar flare. “It’s like dropping a lit cigarette into an open volcano,” the narrator says. “Useless.”
The analysis concludes by noting that if humanity truly wants to nuke something satisfying, it should target a small asteroid or comet. Such objects are small enough to be disrupted, and nuclear deflection is one of NASA’s last-ditch strategies for planetary defense. “Now, that was satisfying,” the narrator says.
“I mean, explosions are really satisfying.”
This breaking report underscores a humbling cosmic reality: despite the awe-inspiring destructive power of nuclear weapons, they are nearly irrelevant on the scale of planets. The exercise, while purely hypothetical, serves as a vivid reminder of both human technological achievement and our puny place in the universe. The video, sponsored by Chat LLM, is available online, posing the question that started it all—why would anyone do this?
Because it’s there.