What If?

I tend to be a generally positive person, but the way things are going lately, it's hard to keep looking on the bright side, especially when the bright side could be an atomic fireball generated by someone who doesn't know how to handle the power at his fingertips. After all, just claiming to have a bigger button than the other guy isn't a very mature way to approach something as ugly as nuclear war.

Here's something I found online a week or so ago: a generator that overlays the effects of a nuclear detonation over your choice of targeted area. You can choose among four different nuclear weapons of increasing power, the lowest being the 15 kiloton "Little Boy" dropped on Hiroshima during World War II, and the highest being the 50,000 kiloton* Russian "Tsar Bomba;" the default value is the W-87 warhead carried by the US Minuteman III ICBM, which has a yield of 300 kilotons. You can also choose between a surface explosion and an air explosion.

I ran the model with a surface burst of a W-87 warhead centered on the White House. The estimated results were 303,476 killed, 258,126 injured.

Just a little something for you to think about when you think about those who cavalierly talk about using the nuclear arsenal.

Sleep well.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow, when we return to happier topics with more Great Moments in Editing and Signage.

Bilbo

* That's 50 million tons of TNT.