Atomic Weapons are Insane

This Is Bad.

(First published at freality.org, Dec 01, 2003)

The first nuclear explosion was done by the U.S. Government at Alamogordo, New Mexico in 1945. That explosion had the explosive force of detonating 19,000 tons of TNT, also notated as 19 kilotons or 19KT. At that time, the lead scientists of the project weren't sure what the effect of the explosion would be, and there was a serious concern that it would lead to a chain reaction in the atmosphere and possibly burn off the entire atmosphere of our Earth. Thankfully, that was not the case. However, the beginning of the so-called "nuclear age" was no cause for celebration. On seeing the explosion, John Oppenheimer, the chief scientist, quoted the following passage from the religious text, the Bhagavad Gita:

"I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."

The U.S. Government decided to use this new technology on large Japanese cities during WWII, by detonating 15KT and 22KT devices over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, respectively, later that year. In Hiroshima, 70,000 people died instantly, 200,000 died in total. In Nagasaki, 3 days later, 40,000 people died instantly, 140,000 died in total. After hearing news of the explosion in Hiroshima, President Harry Truman remarked that it was "the greatest day in history."

Amazingly, larger nuclear devices continued to be developed. These devices dwarfed their predecessors, with explosions thousands of times larger. Many explosions were done in the Pacific. The largest explosion in the U.S. program, that we know of, occured in 1954, in the Marshall Islands, in a project code named "Bravo". Bravo exploded with the energy of 15,000,000 tons, or 15MT, of TNT. The explosion was over twice what had been thought possible. The plume was 62 miles wide, 40 miles high. The exclusion zone after the test was 850 miles wide, or about 1% of the Earth's surface. The fallout cloud reached a distance that would, in comparison, cover the entire U.S. North-Eastern Seaboard.

Not content with just destroying Pacific islands, testing was expanded to blowing holes in the high levels of Earth's atmosphere. In projects Argus (1958) and Starfish (1962), megaton-scale devices were exploded in the ionosphere. They variously disrupted, destroyed and created new layers in the Van Allen Belts, the natural magnetic layers that shield the Earth from solar and cosmic radiation. Those belts have been changed ever since.

The U.S. nuclear power monopoly of ended when the Soviet Union exploded a series of kiloton devices in the mid to late 1950s. In fact, the Soviet Union went on to explode the largest known nuclear device, at 50,000KT in 1961. This explosion generated a huge shockwave that rounded the Earth three times. That weapon was designed in a project with design goals up to 100,000 - 150,000KT.

The bellicose strategy of the U.S. combined with the capable response of the Soviet Union led to a situation of "Mutually Assured Destruction", a realization that a nuclear war between these two nations would be the end of them both, along with the possibility of destroying much of the life on Earth. As this situation guaranteed vast military budgets for both nations, they worked the job with earnest, developing nuclear arsenals with a force of ~3GT accross ~10k warheads each. At a total of about 6 GigaTons of explosive force, we're starting to approach the 75-100GT energy of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Slowly, the world public began to realize what was happening, and began to protest. Rather than turning back though, nuclear arms development went underground, both politically and literally. The main U.S. nuclear development program was moved to Nevada, where nearly 1000 nuclear explosions, that we know of, have happened since. From orbit, that area now looks like the surface of the Moon.

Even these relatively contained tests brought severe diplomatic and domestic protest. In response, a series of international treaties were signed during the end of the 1900s to reduce nuclear testing, nuclear stockpiles, and the possibility of nuclear weapons spreading to new countries. Unfortunately, these treaties appear to have only stemmed the tide for a moment. The prognosis for our species is again declining.

At last count, there are 12 countries who are known to have, or reasonably suspected of having had, active nuclear weapons programs: the U.S. (which has recently renewed manufacture [as of 2004]), Russia, U.K., France, China, India, Pakistan, North Korea, South Africa, Israel, Iraq and Iran. The first 7 of these have a currently available capability.

Additionally, bans on physical testing have become fairly useless, as our military has turned to simulating nuclear explosions on the most powerful computers we have. Simply stated, the U.S. is the main developer and user of weapons of mass destruction.

Ironically (or perhaps obviously), Japan, the only victim of atomic warfare, is using what is now the most powerful supercomputer in the world for a completely different purpose: to simulate the natural processes of the Earth. It seems they have learned this lesson.

> A  film short film of largest nuclear tests in history, and Internet Archive's larger set of images and movies.