Read other letters about this article

• Thursday, September 11, 2008 10:15 AM

  Nuclear Weapons

  The US has over 10,000 nukes, and hundreds of those are of the enormous variety, each enough to take out whole states. Together, enough to exterminate life on Earth, cockroaches included. But that's nothing.

  Nothing in that paragraph is true, except the part about the US has over 10,000 nuclear weapons. It has over 30,000. None that are operational would be considered huge, much less enormous, because anything over a megaton is inefficient. No nuclear weapon ever devised could take out even the smallest state. The largest weapons ever made would have couldn't even take out a medium sized city.

  You vastly overrate the effectiveness of nuclear weapons.

  The Russians went apeshit making plutonium in the 1960's, so much it would take centuries to put it all into bombs, so they just stockpiled it, very, very cautiously. Enough to take the Earth's crust down to the mantle. The production waste alone was enough to create an accidental nuclear detonation in the Urals years ago, and they were being careful. Very messy. Tschernobyl was nothing in comparison.

  No, in fact, both US and Russian space agencies are currently suffering from an acute shortage of plutonium. Russia has almost all the remaining stockpile, measured in a few kilograms, and that stock pile will be depleted in a few years.

  There was no accidental nuclear detonation, which is quite frankly something that can't happen by accident. Creating a sustained critical chain reaction is an exceedingly complicated process.

  You can have a run away chain reaction that creates a large amount of heat and may even release radiation, but to call that a nuclear detonation is like calling a drop of water the Pacific Ocean.

  Since there is no way at all to get rid even a small amount of it, it is only a matter of time. I've been hoping for those colonies on Mars they've been promising so I can get off this rock.

  Only a matter of time till what?

  —Xanthro Read Xanthro's other letters
  Permalink
  Flag
  Click "Submit Flag" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

  Cancel