Yesterday in
my car I was listening to Maine Public Radio’s discussion on Russia’s threat to
use a nuclear weapon in the Ukraine war. The consensus was that we are closer than we
have ever been since Nagasaki to another nuclear weapon being used against a
civilian population.
The question
was posed, what would happen if Putin dropped a nuclear bomb in Ukraine in
order to bring about immediate surrender and an end to Russia’s war?
The answer
was unanimous: Nothing.
The United
States and other Nuclear nations would be afraid of escalating into an all-out
nuclear holocaust. There would be talks
and sanctions and condemnation, but there would be no military response.
Russia has
the largest nuclear stockpile in the world, and the largest yield nuclear
weapon: the Tsar thermonuclear bomb. The
United States has the second largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, but enough
to bring about a mass extinction.
When I read American
Prometheus, the story of Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the first
atomic bomb, a small paragraph stood out to me.
The mathematicians had decided that there was a small chance that the
nuclear explosion could cause a chain reaction that would ignite the atmosphere
rendering earth a dead planet. When
pressed for a statistic the answer was “not zero.” Yet Oppenheimer and the scientist pressed
ahead. Just before the bomb was exploded
the scientist were taking bets as to the yield, but Enrico Fermi, in a little
graveyard humor, was taking bets the atmosphere would ignite.
Where am I
going with this? Fucked if I know.
But a
Casandra warning: There are enough nuclear weapons stockpiled on this earth to
bring about a mass extinction – many times over. What could possibly go wrong?
The Ol’Buzzard
