HOW I LEARNT TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (KINDA)
I felt alienated from The Guardian’s graphic about stockpiles of nuclear weapons.
I felt the use of abstract figures made most of the data meaningless. Russia has 5192 warheads. America 4102. France 300. What does that mean? Is that a lot? I can’t relate to that.
There’s a single way I relate to nuclear weapons. By their destructive capability. I grew up watching Threads and The Day After. We were even made to watch those nuclear horror films at school. Those films branded our minds with the idea that nuclear weapons could destroy the world. They are Doomsday devices. They kill everybody. Nuclear War = End Of The World.
So, I thought of a better way to understand the data. Dump the raw totals. Instead visualize the stockpiles by how many times over they could destroy the world. Yeah cool! And that would actually expose the ludicrous stupidly of nuclear weapons at the same time. *So clever*.
However, the idea rapidly unravelled. Here’s why…
I wasn’t expecting that. We only actually have 0.83% of what’s required to completely wipe out civilisation. We couldn’t do it if we wanted to.
10 years ago we had 32,512 nuclear weapons. That’s a much better 2.6%. God damn you Non Nuclear Proliferation Pact!
Ah but we all live in cities now
I tried to recover a eye-popping stat with another quick calc. 50% of us live in densely populated cities now. Maybe we could wipe out all city-dwelling humanity. YES!
Nope. Still no good.
Unexpectedly, in making this image, the data forced me to change my mind.
In this case, it exposed the myth in my head, scorched long ago into my childhood imagination. The scene of many nightmares. That nuclear weapons could kill everything. Could wipe out civilisation.
No doubt, nuclear weapons are crazy devices. In the hands of mad people and mad regimes, they have a nightmarish potential for devastation. But they are not the end of humanity.
As the data reveals, we simply don’t have enough of them.
RELATED POSTSGET THE
POST A COMMENT OR LEAVE A TRACKBACK.
19 Comments
You failed to account for the nuclear fallout from these bombs; that would kill many more people than the actual blast could.
Also, considering the circumstances in which nuclear weapons are used, there would be many more things besides nukes to worry about. Perhaps we’ll have massive famines and genocides all over the place.
Hitler didn’t need a single nuke to kill those 6 million+ Jews.
True, but physical destruction is only a part of the fun of nuclear weapons. You need to calculate average fallout, mortality rates, and radiation half-life to get the full picture.
How about fallout?
The problem here is that you’re looking at the blast/explosive equivalent without looking at the long term effects. If you set off 88 conventional bombs you get a huge explosion and a lot of death and destruction in the blast area, but anyone outside that zone will be fine. However, nuclear radiation is messy. It can travel in the air, gets into water supplies, doses people who were never in the blast zone. Think Chernobyl: no explosion, but people hundreds of miles away (far outside the blast zone of a nuclear weapon with larger energy release) still got cancer and gave birth to deformed babies. If you explode every bomb we have today, civilization will be over within a couple of generations, guaranteed.
So of course, why do we have so many nuclear weapons? Ability to respond and precision in targeting. We’ve got small bombs and large bombs, bombs designed to go by themselves and those designed to sit 8 to a rocket. And rockets fail too. If 20% of your nukes are ready for launch at any time (integrated on a vehicle), 50% of your launch sites are taken out, only 10% are in range of the target, and you have a 10% failure rate with your launch vehicle, then you’ve got 4 nukes at your disposal to launch. Out of 4000.
Hold on. What about the economic and political fallout of 10% of our cities being destroyed and huge swathes of land made uninhabitable or unfarmable by fallout. I’m not so sure we could recover from that so easily regardless of how many of us survive…
10000 nuclear explosions would totally wang up our climate for several years and kill all our crops, and the fallout would kill everything else.
Only a few hundred are needed.
Wouldn’t be possible to get all Nukes started: The first step in a nuclear war would be to destroy the nukes of the enemy, many are mounted on submarines oder planes and there is a (small) chance that these get shoot down or blown up before they can unleash hell
so much for the positivie effects 
….but nice visualisation 
As some of the posters before me mentioned, you didn’t take nucelar fallout into account. Have a look here:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtfall.html
“900 Rem
Distance: 90 miles
A lethal dose of radiation. Death occurs from two to fourteen days.”
A radius of 90 miles means about 65,879 km². According to my calculation only some hundred megaton bombs are needed to kill all people on earth.
I really hope you update this blog post.
@Andy Yeah I guess it’ll all go a bit like The Road
Yup. Thanks for all the feedback. I’m going to redraft the image with radiation, fallout, nuclear winter, failure rates, poisoned water supplies, crop deaths, deformed babies, and cancer all factored in. After I’ve had this stiff drink…
Also, does your figure include fire damage? That’s a huge factor often ignored in nuclear weapons damage estimation. Here’s a source:
http://www.amazon.com/Whole-World-Fire-Organizations-Devastation/dp/0801435781
Without fire damage, the figure would be extremely misleading.
If you DO want to be thorough..
You would need to include (with all the previous mentioned DOOM scenarios) the fact that all this assumes free propagation of whatever is thrown up by any particular blast (surface, air, ..).
Eg if you are outside the range at which the blast and secundary effects are powerful enough to topple buildings, then you are in a relative ’shadow’ from the direct effects of the bomb.
If you stay sheltered AND get a hold of uncontaminated foodstuff (with cities there may be ample supply, given the number of deaths and ‘normal’ stocks), …. this will have a positive effect.
Many more factors need (?) to be taken into account. Not everyone seems to suffer the same from radiation effects. Not every pregnant woman ‘exposed’ to the Tsjernobyl fall-out gave birth to a deformed child. And so on.
Mother Earth seems to be able to recover from almost anything, and (sadly?) so does man. The latter never learning from the experience.
I really like the positive attitude of the original here. STOP worrying and hiding in holes. IF you want to do something, then TELL those YOU put in charge to STOP the idiocy and START improving life for everyone.
And most important:
keep smiling while you do whatever you do
this post made me re-watch Threads, the 1984 BBC docudrama.
One more link to add to the list of resources and people mentioning the long-term effects of nuclear explosions, especially multiple detonations on a global scale:
The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW has put together a clear and concise analysis of the global long-term impact of just 100 Hiroshima-sized nuclear bombs being exploded in a hypothetical war between India and Pakistan. Learn more here:
http://www.ippnw.org/Programs/ICAN/Famine.htm
It would be nice to know how many people in fact believe this bullshit because it’s made as serious looking graphics. I’d like to know how close to idiocracy the world is ;0)
Knowledge is power! Go to school! Think!
What about destroying the harvest?
And if a bomb is detonated in the atmosphere, a few km above the ground, its effect on the life and the telecommunications infrastructure may be greater than you expected from a bomb detoned on the surface.
Interesting post!
Is absolutely true, try whit the Death Star…
The world is very crazy.
.hc.
http://www.diagramar.com/
Another perspective on this… In John Allen Paulos’ book, Innumeracy, he uses nuclear weaponry proliferation as an example of very large numbers that are difficult to conceptualise. Whan the book was written, the global nuclear weaponry total was 25,000 megatons, or 50 trillion pounds or 10,000 pounds equivalent of TNT for every man, woman and child on the planet. Just think of what one pound of TNT would do in a car bomb…The nuclear weapons on board a single Trident submarine contains eight times the fire-power expended in all of world war two.
14 Trackbacks
[...] This post was Twitted by groques [...]
[...] Notable Posts: Google is not a search engine, If Twitter was 100 people, Not enough nukes [...]
[...] [Source] Publié dans Futilités | Tags : bombe nucléaire, schéma [...]
[...] 这些图表转载自informationisbeautiful.net。这是一个专门研究可视化的网站，上面还有很多有趣的内容，推荐访问。 [...]
[...] How Many Nukes Will Destroy de World? | Information Is Beautiful [...]
[...] How Many Nukes Will Destroy de World? | Information Is Beautiful [...]
[...] [...]
[...] How Many Nukes Will Destroy de World? | Information Is Beautiful [...]
[...] gráfico completo How Many Nukes Will Destroy de World? –con el cálculo que arroja esa cifra– puede verse en el precioso blog Information Is [...]
[...] gráfico completo How Many Nukes Will Destroy de World? –con el cálculo que arroja esa cifra– puede verse en el precioso blog Information Is [...]
[...] Via Information is beautiful. [...]
[...] matematicas por fin han tenido su fruto, Un Grafico Encontrado en el Blog de Informationisbeautiful nos muestra que No hay suficientes Bombas Nucleares para poder destruir nuestra [...]
[...] 这些图表转载自informationisbeautiful.net。这是一个专门研究可视化的网站，上面还有很多有趣的内容，推荐访问。 [...]
[...] 这些图表转载自informationisbeautiful.net。这是一个专门研究可视化的网站，上面还有很多有趣的内容，推荐访问。 [...]