Who the hell is Jeff, and why do they have as many nukes as North Korea?
Since the creation of nuclear weapons, we have lived in a world where an all-out war could destroy humanity many times over. Studies have found that just 100 or so warheads could plunge the world into nuclear winter, which could claim up to 1 billion lives. As of 2023, we have an approximated 12,500 nuclear warheads.
Keeping track of them is, of course, pretty important. You don’t want to end up like the US, losing six nuclear weapons (that we know of).
At the moment, there are nine countries in possession of nuclear weapons: Russia, the USA, China, the UK, France, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea, and India. The tenth biggest possessor of nuclear weapons, according to an old graphic by CNN based on data from the Federation of American Scientists, is Jeff.
While this resurfaces every now and then, you have no need to fear nuclear Armageddon being instigated by some disgruntled guy called Jeff.
Jeff is not a person, but an acronym for Joint Evaluated Fission and Fusion Project, an international collaboration to create a library of nuclear data. It’s likely that a data mishap placed JEFF on the chart, making it, ever so briefly and only on a bar chart, the tenth biggest holder of nuclear weapons in the world.
Sorry, everybody, Jeff (be it Goldblum, Bezos, or Daniels) does not hold its own nuclear weapons. But let it be some comfort to you that Pepsi may have, briefly, owned a fleet of Soviet warships.
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