Nuclear Expert Predicts How Launching a Single Nuke Could Wipe Out All of Humanity
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Thank you, Professor, for doing this. Let me start with the most simple of all questions. How are nuclear weapons different from conventional weapons?
Nuclear weapons are different from conventional weapons in many ways. One of the things that I like to say is that they really defy the kind of concept of both space and time. And let me explain what I mean by that. If you have a conventional weapon and you explode it over a city or wherever, that explosion is going to have an impact in that local place. And it's going to have that impact in time. And then you could come back and clean up the area and rebuild and so on. Nuclear weapons are not like that. A nuclear explosion in one place, in one location, and in one split moment of time can have both global effects and it can have impacts over actually even thousands of years through the effects of radiation and the kind of radioactive isotopes that get deposited in the environment.
But there are sort of a number of ways in which even a single nuclear weapon explosion can be incredibly dangerous and devastating. And then there are a number of impacts in which a nuclear war, in which many nuclear weapons are used, can be... obviously quite clearly much more devastating. So the thing that people know about nuclear weapons is that one nuclear weapon can be much more powerful than any kind of chemical explosion. So for example, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 80 years ago. 80 years ago, almost exactly, had what's called energy yields of 15 and 21 kilotons of TNT. Now, these bombs were made out of uranium and plutonium, uranium for the Hiroshima bomb. and plutonium for the Nagasaki bomb.
But when we describe their energy yield, we describe it in terms of the equivalent amount of chemical explosive that you would need. So that's where the 15 kilotons, 15,000 tons of TNTs, how much you would have needed of chemical explosive to produce the energy equivalent to that explosion. And that in and of itself is huge. And just to give you one kind of point of comparison, the Oklahoma City bombing, which I'm sure you remember, it was actually the first year that I was living in the United States. It was in April of 1995. And it was a devastating event. It was the equivalent of two and a half tons of TNT. So Timothy McVeigh had filled the Ryder truck with chemical explosives, lit it up outside of a federal building, killed people.
168 people, including 19 children in the daycare center. And there was damage in a radius of up to, I think, 16 blocks, something of that order. So absolutely an incredible and devastating event. At the same time, that explosion was 6,000 times more less energetic than the bombing of Hiroshima. So 15,000 tons of TNT versus two and a half tons of TNT. So that just begins to give you a scale for just how powerful a single nuclear weapon can be. And then on top of it is that we now have weapons that are far more powerful than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs. In fact, in 1945, the U.S. had three nuclear weapons. One was used as a quote-unquote test, the Trinity test in the desert of New Mexico. And then two were used on attacks on Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, we actually have 12, on the order of 12,500 nuclear warheads, many of which are far more powerful.
How much more powerful?
So we know that both U.S. and Russia have nuclear bombs currently that are on the order of one megaton. That's about 70 times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb. At the height of the Cold War, when we were first testing nuclear weapons and actually first testing hydrogen bombs, which are different from the atomic bombs that were used in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I can explain that as well, we were even testing the largest test that the U.S. had ever conducted, took place in the Marshall Islands. It's called the Bravo test, Castle Bravo test, And there was a thousand Hiroshima bomb equivalents. And yet the Soviets actually tested something even more powerful. They did so up in the North Sea, a region called Novaya Zemlya.
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