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On Nuclear Weapons as Units of Measurement

Friday, February 22, 2013 20:53
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(Before It's News)

Perhaps you saw the reports last week, as the world tried to wrap its collective mind around the piece of outer space that had arrived at our small piece of inner space, that the Russian meteor exploded “with the force of 30 Hiroshima bombs.”

And, wow, that sure seems big. And it’s true: The Russian meteor was a monster — the biggest in a century, rocking the city of Chelyabinsk and injuring more than a thousand of its residents.

But even so, even considering the destructive potential of meteors and the punch they can deliver, comparing a meteor’s force to a nuclear bomb is a pretty sloppy equation, argues atomic historian Alex Wellerstein, and in its sloppiness, the comparison runs into all sorts of troubles.

“Every time we have a natural disaster, somebody translates the energy output into kilotons and then tells you, using a simple division equation, how many times more that is than Hiroshima,” Wellerstein told me. “This is something I find really problematic.”

“In general,” he added, “What I don’t like is … the idea that kiloton or a megaton is just an energy unit, that it’s equivalent to so many joules or something. Because you could do that. You could claim that your house runs so many tons of TNT worth of electricity per year, but it sort of trivializes the notion.”

He breaks his concern down into two separate but related points: First off, he writes on his blog, the character of a nuclear blast is not really comparable to a non-nuclear explosion, even when the amounts of force delivered are similar. “It’s just sort of a raw energy output with no attention to exactly how that energy is being delivered. And without attention to that, it doesn’t really tell you what would happen other than that, yes, if a meteor hit your town directly it would flatten most of your town, and, yes, a nuclear weapon would also flatten most of your town.”

But nuclear weapons deliver more than just sheer force; there’s also incredible heat, orders of magnitude hotter than a meteor’s explosion, (most of the people who died at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Wellerstein says, died of fire), and, of course, the radiation. The radiation brings sickness, makes land uninhabitable in the long term, and can have residual genetic effects that long outlast the bomb’s immediate destruction. “It’s sort of the sum of these effects that we think of when we think of what’s the problem with nuclear weapons,” he says. To only think of an atomic weapon in terms of the kilotons of energy released glosses over the totality of the terror these bombs bring.

More: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/ar…nt/273425/



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