The Looming Prospect of Nuclear War – Winnipeg Free Press

Opinion

Maybe I spend too much time thinking about nuclear war. It’s true that I generally carry a level of anxiety that some would call pathological. I often imagine scenarios in which we hear of an impending strike, and so I pack up my family with a car full of supplies and flee to a forest refuge where we could survive the fallout. It’s almost therapeutic to imagine such contingency plans.

I try not to think about the fact that these plans are completely delusional.

One person who probably thinks about nuclear war more often and certainly more rationally than I do is Annie Jacobsen. She is the author of Nuclear War: A Scenario a book that is the result of years of interviews with scientists, military officials and other experts. Jacobsen paints a picture that suggests that the lack of fear of nuclear weapons is truly pathological.

Let’s start with the numbers.

Most of us have figured out that global nuclear weapons stockpiles of about 12,000 are enough to destroy the world many times over, as if that were some fun little thing. We are less aware of how close we are to such destruction because of the number of warheads “ready to launch.” Of these, America accounts for 1,770 and Russia 1,674, meaning they can be launched at any time on their irreversible path to destinations that they can reach in less than an hour. And lest anyone think that nuclear war will be any less worrisome now that U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has come to terms with Vladimir Putin, remember that China, Trump’s preferred adversary, also has over 500 nuclear weapons and the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal in the world world has.

This is where we should address the elephant in the room. No, I’m not writing this solely because of Trump’s impending presidency. However, this is a concern because his response to a possible nuclear war with North Korea was, “I have a bigger button.” And that was Trump at his more coherent and less combative.

But beyond Trump, the entire world stage is increasingly one of risk-taking as Biden decides that all he can do on the way out is authorize the use of long-range missiles in Ukraine. It seems quite possible that this thirst for war will not be quenched until the unthinkable occurs.

But let’s think about it, shall we? Modern thermonuclear weapons have a much greater penetrating power than the 15 kilotons that were dropped on Hiroshima. Approximately 1,000 times stronger. In fact, they only use a nuclear bomb as a detonator.

So what does a thermonuclear explosion mean? First, everything within a mile of the explosion site is almost instantly melted, if not completely vaporized, in a flash of pure, white fire. Then comes the shock wave that flattens every structure within a five-kilometer radius in all directions as if they were dominoes. And there’s the iconic mushroom cloud, but what you may not know is that mushroom clouds act like a vacuum, sucking both human and non-human debris miles into the sky.

Maybe it seems cold to call people debris, but that’s what a nuclear explosion makes of us – a smoldering pile of carbon, indistinguishable from the melted raw materials of buildings, cars and trees that sucked into the sky with us become. In a busy metropolitan area, up to a million people could suffer this fate.

They could be the lucky ones because then come the megafires that could cover up to 400 square miles (642 square kilometers). Fighting a fire is unthinkable in such a situation.

Although the effects deserve many more words to describe than I have to spare here, there is also a nuclear winter in which the atmosphere is filled with so much soot that it blocks the sun. This is leading to such drastic drops in temperatures that Canada will likely not see temperatures above freezing again for another six years. Not to mention the pervasive radioactivity that would last much longer.

As Nikita Kruschev once said, the survivors would envy the dead.