Updated 2022-03-10 at 11:00 a.m.
Nuclear War is Mutual Self Destruction
The Brian Toon video included is a must listen regarding nuclear war.
Whenever anyone speaks about the use of nuclear weapons on another country we should all be very worried. I made a post about the FEMA Nuclear War Instructions the other day with tongue in cheek. FEMA Nuclear Explosion Instructions – Lisa Parent Covid-19 Home Page
I included in that blog post a video by Brain Toon who is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences with the University of Colorado-Boulder. His studies include the environmental impacts of nuclear war.
As part of this blog please take the time to listen to his 15 minute talk on the subject as it will enlighten everyone to the real outcome of a nuclear war. The first 2:27 minutes of his talk is about the extinction of the dinosaurs to create a picture for us of what we would face.
Brian Toon Video
Summary of His Talk
There are 15,000 nuclear weapons in the world today.
- One modern jet carries 5 nuclear bombs. Each nuclear bomb has the equivalent power of 500 Hiroshima, Japan bombs…a bomb in WWII that killed 100,000 Japanese.
- A Trident submarine can carry 100 nuclear bombs with the explosive power of 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. One of those bombs alone can kill 500,000 people.
- Nuclear weapons kill in 4 ways up to a 6 mile diameter…Shock Waves, Radiation Poisoning, Buildings Collapse, and deadly 3rd Degree Burns.
- The USA and Russia each have 4,000 nuclear weapons. Enough fire power to hit each city with more than 100,000 people in the others country with 10 nuclear bombs.
- The initial destruction of such a war would be 400 million dead. This is only the result of the immediate effects of the bombs.
- The collateral damage would be like his description of the dinosaurs.
- He used an example of a war between India and Pakistan with very small nuclear weapons. The smoke from such a war would cover the Earth in about two weeks. The smoke would be so high it would not be brought back to Earth by the rains. It would be there for years severely damaging farming worldwide. There would be severe food shortages for years. A small war like this would cause the death of 1 to 2 billion people worldwide.
- With a full scale nuclear war the temperatures would drop to Ice Age conditions. Nothing would grow. Up to 90% of the population of the planet would starve to death resulting in the end of civilization. As a result even countries that were not subjected to the direct involvement in the original nuclear war would be safe from this destruction.
- In the words of President Ronald Reagan after Brian Toon and others explained this to him “A great many reputable scientists are telling us that such a war could just end up in no victory for anyone because we would wipe out the earth as we know it”.
- After a similar presentation Mikhail Gorbachev said, “Models made by Russian and American Scientists showed that a nuclear war would result in a nuclear winter that would be extremely destructive to all life on earth; the knowledge of that was a great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality to act in that situation”.
Conclusion
Can we depend on our leaders to not make a mistake and inadvertently or worse intentionally get us into a nuclear war? In public documents has the military or government given us all the facts about the effects of such a nuclear war?
No on both questions. We cannot depend on those in power to make the rights decisions and to inform us the way Brian Toon has in his talk and how he and other scientists informed Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev some 30 years ago.
We all have a responsibility to our fellow creatures on earth to be properly informed about the impact of a nuclear war and fully informed about what it would mean to us all and our future on Earth. Nuclear weapons need to be eradicated from the planet. Our future is in our hands.