The National Interest: Revealed: The Devastating Aftermath of a Nuclear Attack on Manhattan
My generation doesn't think much about nuclear weapons, disarmament and the consequences of nuclear-weapons use. Some certainly do, but generally, the cause of nuclear disarmament is being carried on by an older generation.
I think that's a problem. Nuclear weapons seems like an old issue, from a previous generation and time. Plus, we have our own causes and as the argument often goes, 'no one is ever going to use one anyways, right?' This never convinces me, for a variety of reasons, but I also think we just haven't lived in a time when geopolitical tensions were such that two nuclear armed powers were close to war (except perhaps India and Pakistan in 1999, and the growing nuclear dimension of the tensions between Russia and the West today).
WNU Editor: The Atomic Bulletin's account on what a nuclear attack on Manhattan would look like is the following .... What would happen if an 800-kiloton nuclear warhead detonated above midtown Manhattan? (The Bulletin). A second-by-second description of such an attack can be read here .... Horrific scenario: NYC hit by terrorist nuke (WND).
On a side note .... Nukemap is a fascinating website that measures the impact of a nuclear attack on any major city. For more information, go here.
4 comments:
Does it matter if It is the Romans with a gladius, Gheghis Khan's hordes with a compound bows or a nuke?
Either way it is thousands of people killing hundreds of thousands.
The tech does not count so much as the will to war and to plan for it and continue it.
There was a rail gun, Schwerer Gustav, used in the siege of Sevastopol. People have opined that it took a division of people to set it up and maintain it. They also said that maybe those people could have been better used as regular division.
You can kill 100 people with one shot that takes a 100 people to coordinate and supply or you can have each one of those 100 people take 1 person out. At the end of the day dead is dead. It really does not matter what you used, so much as should you have done it?
People are too hung up on objects (weapons) and not enough on reasons or motives.
A minor nuclear war with each country using 50 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs as airbursts on urban areas could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history. A nuclear war between the United States and Russia today could produce nuclear winter, with temperatures plunging below freezing in the summer in major agricultural regions, threatening the food supply for most of the planet. The climatic effects of the smoke from burning cities and industrial areas would last for several years, much longer than previously thought. New climate model simulations, which are said to have the capability of including the entire atmosphere and oceans, show that the smoke would be lofted by solar heating to the upper stratosphere, where it would remain for years.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
Even an India-Pakistan War would create Nuclear Winter.
Jay .... after finally finishing up on a rather large web project (a month of my life that will never get back), I have been spending the past half hour going through people's comments and emails. I just finished and I said to myself .... where is Jay? Surprise .... my email has just notified me that you left a comment. I guess I felt your energy.
Past volcanic eruptions are probably our best benchmarks in determining how severe a nuclear winter could be. History has many examples where one volcanic eruption severely impacted the world's climate for a few years .... but when we are looking at hundreds of nuclear firestorms .... I just shudder on what that impact will be.
WNU Editor,
It's funny, the Children of the Cold War, went two ways. There were the Ostriches, who hid their heads in the Sand, and those who read, investigated, read, understood,
And then, in the late 90's, the World started pretending that Nuclear weapons didn't exist any more.
In Gynne Dwyer's War, he notes that at the time, everybody who was anybody in NATO had a nuke on Moscow, over 2600 in total, amounting to 146,000 megatons, rediculous overkill.
The Chechen angle on the Nemtsov killing is interesting, as with Chechens, it quickly becomes a game of "which Chechens?".
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