(NewsNation) — Ukraine is dark right now because it is the middle of the night, but also because 30% of the country’s power stations were destroyed by Russia. Why? Because this is how you make people break.

Thousands of towns and villages have no power in large numbers as winter approaches, and there is no telling when it will be restored. This is how Russia built the Soviet Union.

Putin declared martial law Wednesday in the four regions of Ukraine that Moscow annexed and gave all regional governors in Russia emergency powers.

According to the Russian legislation, martial law could mean banning public gatherings, introducing travel bans and curfews and conducting censorship, among other restrictions familiar to communism.

This will only get worse. How do we know? Witness Iran.

Iran is emboldened by the lack of pushback against its uranium enrichment and allowing the corrupt theocracy to oppress and brutalize women and their allies. Infections spread. But sanctions? Sanctions too often impact the wrong people – not the powerful, the poor. That’s why they are openly helping to kill Ukrainians with kamikaze drones.

Ukraine says more than 70 of its citizens have been killed in rocket and drone strikes in the past week and a half.

Iran has sent military trainers to Russian-occupied territory inside Crimea to train Russian military on the use of Iranian-built drones that Moscow has used in its war in Ukraine, according to two sources familiar with U.S. intelligence.

Russia has launched many of what is believed to be a store of hundreds of Iranian-made drones from Crimea in a fusillade that has targeted Ukrainian cities and energy infrastructure in increasing numbers in recent weeks. The drones have been seen as a signal of growing closeness between Tehran and Moscow.

If you needed another reason to pay more attention and demand more attention from our government, Putin is openly threatening us with nukes. Our government is working on scenarios of what nukes would do to us here.

Now, this is not something that we often talk to you about. We don’t want to fear monger. We don’t want to scare you. I’m not “we.” I think it’s important that you know because this is what our government is planning for. They’re talking about it. They’re planning to deal with it. Why shouldn’t you know?

Take the Daily Mail’s maps of what would happen if Russia launched a nuclear attack on New York for example.

Now, everyone who has looked at this says it’s an incredibly low possibility, but even though it is, we still need to consider the consequences of a possible nuclear strike from Russia.

President Joe Biden said we’re closer to Armageddon than we’ve been since the Cuban missile crisis. What happens if Putin gives the order to launch nuclear weapons at the West?

This map of the impact on New York City was based on a single 500 kiloton nuclear bomb. That’s 30 times the size of the “Little Boy” bomb America dropped on Hiroshima, but far from the largest in Russia’s arsenal.

The flight time from Russia to the U.S. for a nuclear weapon would be about half an hour. So in all likelihood, the first anyone in the street would know about an attack would be a blinding flash and a huge fireball vaporizing everything within a just over half mile radius from the center of the blast.

An attack focused on New York’s financial district would first flatten the entire lower end of Manhattan: Wall Street, the Manhattan Bridge, Chinatown, Little Italy. That’s everything in the yellow zone in the center of the map, just over half a mile from the center of blast would be vaporized.

In the red zone, just over a mile from blast, there would be heavy blast damage with fatalities near 100 percent. In the light blue zone, there would be radiation that would likely be fatal. The dark blue zone would result in medium blast damage with most buildings collapsing. The orange zone would be thermal radiation and third-degree burns. The outer medium blue zone would mean light blast damage and windows shattering.

This is scary. Everyone I love would be dead. Now, the reason to put this out there is to do the job of holding the powerful to account to make sure it doesn’t happen.

The idea that staying out of it keeps us safe — that less is more — is debatable.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author, and not of NewsNation.