Nukes, They’re The Bomb

Have you ever wondered how the world would end? Well it wasn’t that long ago we knew. Nukes. First one side fires ‘em, then the other side fires back, and after that there’s pretty much just running and screaming. Run! Panic! What happened? Has the nuclear threat gone away? I mean, why aren’t we building bunkers? Terrorists could import them into the US, and don’t forget about China and North Korea. Or Pakistan! And there’s India, and Iran, and all of the lost Russian nukes after they destabilized. [Laughs] We are so dead.

We should probably put a disclaimer on this video, or you’ll think that we’re pro-nukes, but most of what you think you know about nuclear bombs just isn’t true. Hollywood wants you to think if one goes off, the entire United States is gonna be swimming in fallout. The total number of nukes we’ve dropped on other people: two. The total number we’ve dropped on ourselves: over a thousand. Yeah, I’m not kidding – over a thousand. I love fallout! I’ve got this funny rash. Hm, glows in the dark, too. Now a lot of those bombs were below ground, but at least 331 weren’t.

The first bomb we ever dropped on ourselves was on July 16th of 1945 at the Trinity site in New Mexico. And after it came a long line of nuclear testing on US soil. Mostly in Nevada. I mean, what else is there to do? So we blew ‘em up, and I’m sure there’s radiation all over the test sites, but life as we know it is still here. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying nukes are harmless, and I don’t want one going off in my backyard. But, it kind of already did. Some of our nuclear testing happened out in the Pacific at Bikini Atoll, but a lot of it took place in Nevada, about a hundred miles northeast of Las Vegas. Search for “nuclear test site” on Google Earth; you can see some of the craters and mounds created by the explosions.

The explosive yield of a nuclear warhead is measured in megatons, but megatons of what? Fallout? No. Plutonium? No. At Trinity, they blew up a hundred tons, or .1 kilotons of TNT. They measured the output of that explosion, and all the bombs we’ve invented since then have been rated accordingly. So megatons is like thousands of tons of TNT equivalent. That’s a lot of TNT… and T, and T, and T, and T, and T, and T, and T. One of the best documentariy movies on nuclear testing is called Trinity and Beyond. If you’re interested in seeing what really happened with the US in nuclear testing, you should check it out. Not so you can laugh off the idea of nuclear weapons, but so you can educate yourself. We have some more links on our site.

But is there an upside to nuclear weapons? Yes, the beautifully-eerie glow. And the cute little mushroom cloud it makes. But seriously, the case can be made that they’ve saved way more lives than they’ve ever taken. Estimated casualties for invading Japan were enormous on both sides, and when you see footage of what the Japanese had in store for the invasion of their homeland, it’s not really hard to believe. They had manned, rideable torpedoes, kinda like an underwater kamikaze, and they were gonna train the citizen population to attack them with sharpened bamboo poles. Not pretty. And if it hadn’t been for nukes and the policy of mutually assured destruction, there almost certainly would have been a superpowers war between the United States and Russia, and maybe even a third World War.

The bottom line is this: nuclear weapons are big, and nasty, and devastating. But one of them can’t blow up the Earth, or the United States, or even the entirety of a major US city. One alone, no. Like a lot of them together, like a MIRV? Yeah, probably, but one – no, couldn’t blow up a whole city. But it could take out a big piece of it. News flash: we’ve dropped hundreds of nukes on ourselves! Just thought you ought to know.

Transcribed by: Justin G.

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