Being insane myself, I used the NukeMap to see the impact of a one megaton bomb on my city. The city has a population of around 150,000. The city and surrounding county together have a population of around 250,000. It's a typical medium size city built around a large public university, surrounded by rural lands.

In the urban core most buildings would collapse, and fires would spread everywhere. In the wider urban area everyone would experience third degree burns. In the surrounding county windows would be broken in most buildings, allowing in rain, wildlife etc.

A single bomb, and the entire county would be toast from one end to the other.

The following is just a guess, totally open to challenge of course. The guess is that it would take around 50 nukes to kill America as that would destroy all the major cities, which would seem likely to collapse the food distribution system, leading to mass starvation, and social and political chaos.

The following fat little @#%#$ either has 50 nukes, or likely will before long.

Another story recently heard on NPR....

During the Cuban Missile Crisis the Kennedy administration had decided to invade Cuba on the following Monday unless a solution to the crisis was found first. On the Friday before that Monday Khrushchev suggested that they would remove their missiles from Cuba if Kennedy would remove our missiles from Turkey.

Everyone in the Kennedy administration was against that plan. All the generals, all the cabinet officers, even Bobby Kennedy, they all wanted to reject the Russian offer. Only JFK wanted to accept the offer, and he was President, so he over ruled everyone else.

What they didn't know at the time was that not only were some of the Cuban missiles armed, the Russians had also snuck 40,000 Russian soldiers in to Cuba too. If JFK, a single person, had not accepted the Russian compromise, if the group consensus had prevailed and the invasion gone ahead, it would have immediately led to a direct confrontation between American and Russian forces, mass deaths on all sides, and a global nuclear war destroying Western civilization at the least.

A single person, a single decision, saved the world.

So Kennedy's the hero of the story, right? Not quite. It was Kennedy's primary responsibility to persuade all enemies that America could not be bullied and bluffed, an all important job he totally failed at, or the Cuban Missile Crisis would have never happened in the first place.

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Also been watching a documentary on Amazon Prime about "Kennedy's Women". Wow, while Kennedy was typically an intelligent sober rational actor in his job, he was wildly reckless in his personal life. He continually rode the razor's edge of scandal exposure and collapse of his administration.

Please recall the Camelot image of the handsome young man, his beautiful glamorous wife and happy children with which Kennedy seduced the entire nation. Now imagine the headline that reveals Kennedy is routinely cheating on his wife, dating a mob gal one day, a likely East German spy on the next, and Marilyn Monroe too. According to the documentary, one theory at least, the only thing that saved Kennedy from career ending scandal was his assassination.

And yet, he's the guy who saved the world.

But at least the Russian leaders in charge of their nuclear weapons are serious responsible professionals, right? Um.....

The first time Yeltsin and Clinton met was when Yeltsin traveled to Washington and stayed in the White House for a few days. In the middle of the night they discovered Yeltsin out on Pennsylvania Avenue, drunk as a skunk, in his underwear, trying to hail a cab so he could go get some pizza.

But he wasn't dating Marilyn Monroe, so nothing to worry about really.

Tonite is the first presidential debate of this election cycle. It will be interesting to see if nuclear weapons are mentioned even once.

Thousands of weapons stand by to erase modern civilization within minutes and...

That typically doesn't qualify as an interesting enough topic to discuss in a presidential campaign.

Yup. No doubt about it.

Insanity squared.

So, as I guessed would be the case, not a single of mention of nuclear weapons in the recent presidential debate. Not such an amazing guess really, given that they've hardly been mentioned during the entire campaign. Here's a question that might be asked at the next debate, should there be one.

"Dear candidates, if you are elected you may be called upon to incinerate hundreds of millions of people based on limited information and almost no warning. Are you prepared to do that?"

If a candidate answers no, they simply can not be Commander In Chief.

If a candidate answers yes, they are insane. How else to describe any person who would spend years seeking a job where they may be forced by events to kill hundreds of millions of innocent people???

The perfect gotcha question. And yet, no one will ask it, and no one will answer it. Life in the fantasy bubble will remain undisturbed.

So what's the solution to the threat posed by nuclear weapons?

A nuclear weapons accident. Something like this:



In this case the rocket exploded (when a workman dropped a wrench) destroying the silo and ejecting the bomb from the silo, but the bomb didn't go off. If it had much of Arkansas would now be uninhabitable.

It seems focusing the attention of the public on nuclear weapons will require an accident where the bomb does go off. As harsh as that sounds, an accident would obviously be far preferable to snoozing along in denial until a nuclear war erupts, which given human history seems a sooner or later near certainty so long as these weapons exist.

Somebody will have to pay the price to awaken us from the denial dream. The world's largest nuclear submarine base is just a few hours from our house. Maybe we'll get the honor?

Someone bluffs you and tries to make your citizens scared you have little choice but to do the same. It's an unfortunate level we've reached in history (though I suppose it's really nothing new) but you know you work with what you're given.

If a threat of violence wasn't an effective means of deterrence it wouldn't be a legal form of assault. The crazy part is WWIII was almost started by accident. Some space junk or even a technical malfunction (which you have to understand is what an adversary would try to say in attempts to stall a response) occurs and people die.. things can get real all too quickly. It's actually all very horrifying come to think of it.

Denuclearize the world!

Edit: It reminds me of an old episode I once saw.. would really appreciate it if someone who knows what I'm talking about would call it out.. I don't think it's Twilight Zone it seems more "Outer Limits" but it easily could've been a movie.. long story short it's in space and leaders of Earth are in a space craft talking (they sometimes refuse to communicate) with a race of aliens and I forget what leads up to it (if the episode or show doesn't start post-conflict) but long story short the human force allegedly blew up an alien populace and their army threatens to blow up Earth and I *think* it was an accident or something other than an intentional act of bloodshed but long story short the aliens demand the leader of the force to be killed to avoid a war- and the human side knows it wasn't on purpose so doesn't want to go along with it.. there's a countdown or something.. forget what happens but it was very dramatic and frankly quite entertaining. Basically something like that could probably happen lol.

The crazy part is WWIII was almost started by accident. — Outlander

Yup, that's already happened more than once. Here's a quick 6 minute story of one such event. The Soviet early warning system mistook sunlight on the clouds for rocket boosters and signaled an incoming attack.

Here's a good description of the time somebody at NORAD mistakenly put a training tape in the computer, which convinced the national security apparatus that a Soviet first strike was incoming.

Here's the kind of event I'm arguing will be necessary to change the sleepy status quo group think on nuclear weapons. The following video briefly describes the time the Air Force accidentally dropped two nukes on North Carolina. One of the bombs came very close to going off, a single cheap switch preventing the detonation. Something like this is likely going to have to happen again, and the bomb will have to detonate, for us to focus on the danger we are in.

Let's return to the incident when a workman dropped a wrench inside a missile silo, leading to the missile exploding and ejecting the warhead from the silo. Here's the video again, from above in the thread.



My suggestion is that if we are ever to escape nuke madness, it may start like this. A nuclear weapons accident which causes major destruction, such as the contamination of the entire state of Arkansas. Such an event would focus the world on nuclear weapons, without leading to a war and even more destruction.

So you get up one day, check your news feed, and discover that say, much or most of the state of Georgia is now uninhabitable because of an unintended detonation at the nuke sub base on the Atlantic coast of that state.

What happens next? Sure, the media goes ape shit crazy, a given. But then what? How would America respond to the loss of one of it's states?

Oh well, these things happen?

Mad panic?

Political chaos?

Forgotten in three weeks?

How would America sustain it's nuclear arsenal in such a political environment? Put all the nukes on subs and get them off American soil? Move them all to Saudi Arabia?

So it's not news that aiming nuclear weapons at each other is an act of insanity — Hippyhead

Perhaps the alternative would be more insane. Consider the scenario that there are two rivals, X and Y. If X develops nukes, it would give them an advantage that Y wouldn't be able to tolerate and so Y would develop nukes too. The same happens if Y develops nukes. Perhaps not seeing that nukes are disadvantageous to both is the insanity you refer to.

Perhaps not seeing that nukes are disadvantageous to both is the insane aspect to the issue. — TheMadFool

Imho, being bored by nukes is the pinnacle of the insanity.

Imho, being bored by nukes is the pinnacle of the insanity. — Hippyhead

Notice how the arms race is evolving. It seems that we've maxed out on destructive capability with nukes and now it's about the delivery system - how fast can we make the rockets so that the missile shield can be penetrated and the nuclear payload delivered to the intended target. If the human race had a mother she'd probably say, with resignation, "well, as long as they don't hurt themselves I guess it's alright to play like that".