A terrifying Cold War-era map has emerged, painting a grim picture of the United States following nuclear warfare. The predictions suggest that up to 75% of the population could perish from radiation in the hardest-hit states.

The world's nuclear-armed nations include the US, UK, France, Russia, and China, as well as Pakistan, India, and North Korea.

A 1986 report by William Daugherty, Barbara Levi, and Frank Von Hippel from the Institute of Medicine examined the likely outcomes of a nuclear attack on the US.

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Their study focused on an assault targeting America's nuclear arsenal, including strikes on Minuteman missile silos - land-based nukes developed by the US in the 1950s - which would result in detonations at their locations, according to Express US.

Such coordinated attacks would lead to widespread radiation across the nation. The map shows how radioactive fallout, carried eastward by prevailing winds, would engulf the country.

The boffins have spoken, and it's a chilling forecast: "We have made the usual assumption that each of the 1,116 US missile silos and missile launch-control centers would be struck by two 0.5-megaton warheads."

Back in the day, the Soviet Union was packing some serious heat with around 3,000 warheads. The eggheads pinpointed the most lethal spots on the map, where radiation would skyrocket over 3,500 rads.

"Within this region... more than three-quarters of the population would die," the brainiacs grimly noted. These death zones are marked in black on their map.

Describing the nightmare scenario post-nuclear blast, the experts laid it out: "Nuclear explosions create a great deal of short-lived radioactivity - mostly associated with fission products. We have made the standard assumption in our calculations that one-half of the yield from the attacking weapons would be from fission."

"In the case of airbursts, the fireball would carry this radioactivity into the upper atmosphere, from which it would slowly filter down as a rather diffuse distribution called 'global fallout' over a period of months to years.

"In the case of an attack on so-called 'hard' targets such as missile silos, which can withstand high over-pressures, the nuclear weapons would have to be exploded so close to the ground that surface material would be sucked into the fireball, mixed with the vaporized bomb products, and carried by the buoyancy of the fireball into the upper atmosphere."

A sobering report from Princeton University researchers offers insights into the catastrophic effects of a hypothetical nuclear attack, revealing that: "There, much of the bomb material and surface material would condense into particles, a large fraction of which would descend to the surface again within 24 hours in an intense swath of 'local fallout' downwind from the target."

The research wraps up with a stark warning: "It is our hope that national decision-makers will develop a better understanding of the 'collateral' consequences of hypothetical first strikes and of the enormous destructive capacity of the weapons that would survive.

"That understanding should make them less likely to seek counterforce capabilities or to fear such attacks from the other side."