NUCLEAR WAR
WILL KILL US ALL
AND
YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED
By
Søren Nielsen
2019
66 million years ago, a mountain-sized asteroid traveling 10 faster than a bullet from an assault rifle, slammed into the shallow seas, covering what is now "The Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico".
The immense energy of that impact, hurled rocks as far north as Canada, and it vaporized the asteroid, part of Mexico and part of the shallow sea.
This fireball of vaporized rock and water, rose far above the Earth`s atmosphere and spread over the planet.
As it cooled, molten drops of rock about the size of a grain of sand solidified, into an immense swarm of shooting stars.
The shooting stars re-entered the Earth`s atmosphere and heated the upper atmosphere to a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.
Standing at the ground, the dinosaurs saw the blue sky become a sheet of red-hot lava.
The scientific artist "David Hardy", imagines the fate of the dinosaurs in the this painting.
They broiled to death under the glowing skies. The energy in the sky is like that in the glow bar in an electric oven.
If you`re dying to experience what the dinosaurs did when they died, turn your oven on broil and hop in.
The glowing skies started everything on fire. Great clouds of smoke rose into the upper atmosphere and blocked the Sun, so no sunlight reached the ground.
It became cold and dark. Photosynthesis stopped, and plants and animals in the ocean or on the land, either starved or froze to death.
The dinosaurs didn`t do anything wrong, that caused their death. It was just fate that an asteroid hit the Earth and killed 70 % of the species that we know of on the planet.
Unfortunately, in our lifetimes, we may experience the same fate as the dinosaurs. But I`m not talking about asteroid collision, I`m talking about a nuclear war.
A nuclear war would have many the same phenomena, that the dinosaurs experienced. But this time it absolutely would be our fault.
Fortunately, there are things that we can do prevent this from happening. If you live ina city, that has a military base, there`s a missile that`s aimed at you right now.
If you live in a city, that has important industry, a major university, a large airport, an oil refinery or oil storage faclities, there`s a hydrogen bomb, that`s aimed at you right now.
We live in a perilous era. There are 15.000 nuclear weapons on the planet. and the 9 nuclear weapon states, are in conflict with each other.
"The United states" and "North Korea", "NATO" and "Russia", "India" and "Pakistan". We`re just one misunderstanding, one mistake, orone fanatic politician away from a nuclear conflict.
In World War II, fleets of hundreds or even a thousand airplanes were used to bomb a single city.
But with the invention of the atomic bomb, only one airplane and one bomb was needed.
The "Enola Gay" carried one atomic bomb, with the power of 15.000 tons of TNT. And when it dropped that bomb on "Hiroshima, Japan", a hundred thousand people died.
Over time, even more powerful bombs were built. "Hydrogen bombs".
This 1960s airplane carried five hydrogen bombs, the red and white things there, and had "The power of 500 Hiroshima bombs".
And of course "The United States" and "Russia", don`t just use airplanes. They have "Intercontinental ballistic missiles" with hydrogen bombs on them, and they have nuclear submarines with missiles.
A single "Trident missile submarine", can carry a hundred hydrogen bombs, with "the expolsive power of a 1.000 Hiroshima bombs".
Knowing the power of the bombs and their targets, we can understand the destructiveness and loss of life might occur, if these were ever used.
Let us imagine, for example, that "The United States" attacks "Pyongyang, North Korea", the capital, with the smallest bomb carried on a "Trident missile submarine".
500.000 people - about the population of "Sacramento" or "Batimore" - would die.
Nuclear weapons kill people in four different ways. In this orange circle, there`s a shock-wave so powerful, that it knocks down concrete buildings and kills everyone within that zone.
In the red circle, there`s radiation, that`sb released from the atomic bomb as it fissions. The radiation would kill 50 to 90 % of the "North Koreans", over the next few weeks.
In this green circle, the shock-wave continues out, with enough power to knock down residential buildings.
And in this yellow circle, six miles in diameter, there`s a blast of light, so bright, that if your skin was exposed, you`d get third-degree burns, which can be fatal, and flammable things like leaves, newspapers and your clothes, would burst into flames.
And of course, if we attack "North Korea", they`re likely to attack us back. If they use the same size weapon that we used, and they`ve already tested one like this, they could kill 150.000 people in this 6-mile diameter circle in "Denver".
And these terrifying scenarios I`m talking about are just, if each side uses one nuclear weapon.
But "Russia" and "The United States", each have 4.000 strategic nuclear weapons.
That`s enough to attack each city with than 100.000 people, in each country, with 10 atomic bombs.
In a war like that, 400 million people would probably die on the planet, in "China", in "Russia", in "Eruope" and in "the United States".
But wait, that`s not all.
I`ve just been talking about the damage near ground zero. That all the military considers in their war plans. But there will be collateral effects.
Remember the dinosaurs: It was the burning forests, that killed three quarters of the species we know about on the planet.
And the same would happen after a nuclear war; Cities would catch on fire and burn. It`s this damage, the damage the military doesn`t even consider, the damage that`s just thought of as an accident, that might destroy human civilization.
Even a war between "India" and "Pakistan", two of the smallest nuclear powers, with only a few hundred weapons of about size of the "Hiroshima" bomb. We might die as unintended consequences, that the "India" and "Pakistani" generals never even gave a thought about.
"Luke Oman" and "Alan Robock" calculated the spread of smoke, after a war between "India" and "Pakistan". It only takes about two weeks for the smoke to cover the entire Earth.
And it would rise to altitudes between 20 and 50 miles above the surface. At those altitudes, it never rains. The smoke would stay there for years.
This farmer, maybe in "Europe" or in "the United States", but many thousands of miles from "Pakistan" and "India", is looking at the smoky sky above him and down at the crops, that have died in his field from the lack of light and clod temperatures.
It`s estimated that in a war between "India" and "Pakistan", we would lose 10 to 40 % of the yields of "corn", "wheat" and "rice", for years afterward, because of the bad weather.
The entire world only has enough food to feed the population for 60 days, unless agriculture produces more food.
"Ira Helfand", a member of "the Nobel Peace Prize" winning "International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War", has estimated that one to two billion people would die after a war between "India" and "Pakistan", of starvation.
And after a full-scale nuclear war, temperatures would plunge below ice age conditions. We would be in a nuclear winter. No crops would grow.
It is estimated that 90 % of the population of the planet would strave to death, and civilization would be destroyed.
And no one would be safe.
Not those in countries with no nuclear weapons, not those in countries that didn`t participate in war, and not those on the other side of the planet, from where the explosions occurred.
No one would be safe.
But we don`t have to just keep plodding on like we have been, walking toward disaster. We can do things to stop a nuclear war and prevent global starvation and the end of human civilization.
In the 1980s, politicians recognized the dangers of a nuclear conflict and did things about it. Nowadays, politicians don`t seem to understand the dangers of these wars.
And the younger generations hardly give nuclear confilct a thought. We baby-boomers had this drummed into to us. In grade school, we were taught "duck and cover" drills and how to get under our desk in a hopeless attempt to avoid a nuclear explosion.
In middle school, our mothers told us, "You can`t drink your milk anymore", because the 500 atmospheric nuclear weapons test, had poisoned the Earth with radiation.
And the popular culture was dominated by radioactive mutants, such as "Godzilla", which is a "Japanese" nightmare from "Nagasaki" and "Hiroshima".
In the 1980s, "Richard Turco", "Carl Sagan", "Russian" scientist and others to tell "Mikhail Gorbachev" and "Ronald Reagan" about the dangers of a nuclear war. They told him a nuclear war would cause a nuclear winter that could end civilization as we know it.
And they listened.
"Ronald Reagan" said,
"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".
And "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 great stimulus to us, to people of honor and morality, to act in that situation".
In September of 2017, the United Nations passed a resolution, banning nuclear weapons like landmines, chemical and biological weapons have been banned.
Unfortunately, the nuclear weapons states want to ignore that ban and just plod on, like they have been. It`s up to us wake them up, before they sleepwalk into a nuclear disaster.
What can you do about this?
Talk to your political representatives. Tell them you`d like "the Department of Defense" to report to us on what would happen after a nuclear war. They did this in the 1980s.
How many people would die in "Korea", if we attack them with nuclear weapons?
How many people would die in "Russia", "China", "South Korea" and "Japan", the countries that surround "North Korea?"
What will happen if like every other war we have ever fought, it does not go as planned and expands beyond "North Korea?"
And you should ask your politicians to stop "launch on warning." In launch on warning, "the American President" can launch nuclear-armed missiles within minutes, without consulting antone, using the nuclear football, which is carried everywhere "The President" goes by a military officer.
In 1968, "The United States" and 190 other countries signed the treaty to prevent a proliferation of nuclear weapons. In that treaty, we promised to build our nuclear arsenals down to zero as soon as we could.
We need to keep that promise. All of our lives may depend on it.
