Just because few want to think about nuclear war doesn’t mean the issues shouldn’t be thought about. From Donald W. Miller, Jr., MD at lewrockwell.com:
P. Dutton has just published a startling book by Annie Jacobsen titled Nuclear War: A Scenario.
The “scenario,” as she describes it in an Author’s Note, begins with a nuclear strike on the Pentagon, a “Bolt out of the Blue” that the U.S. Nuclear Command and Control System (NCCS) calls an “unwarned large [nuclear] attack.”
Annie Jacobsen next identifies 47 people she interviewed for the book—nuclear scientists, people who formerly held NCCS positions, and different U.S. policymakers. They include Dr. Richard L. Garwin (now age 95), the nuclear weapons designer of the first thermonuclear bomb (Ivy Mike) to undergo a full scale test, in 1952 (in the in Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands); Dr. Charles F. McMillan, Director Los Alamos National Laboratory (2011-2017); Dr. Charles H. Townes, inventor of the Laser, Nobel Prize in Physics; Leon Panetta U.S. Secretary of Defense, Director of the CIA, White House Chief of Staff (now 85 years old); Dr. William Perry, U.S. Secretary of Defense (90 years old); Lewis C. Merletti, Director of the U.S. Secret Service; plus other people who formerly held positions in NCCS.
In a Prologue to the book titled “Hell on Earth,” she writes:
“A 1-megaton [of TNT] thermonuclear weapon detonation begins with a flash of light and heat so tremendous it is impossible for the human mind to comprehend. Its one hundred and eighty million degrees Fahrenheit is four or five times hotter than the temperature at the center of the Earth’s sun…
The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fireball that expands at millions of miles per hour. Within a few seconds, this fireball increases to a diameter of little more than a mile (5,700 feet across), its light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stones shatter, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon.”
Sounds as brutal as the Dresden firestorm where a literal tornado of fire was created with high incendiary bombs, it also sucked all the oxygen out.
There is a War Games video style view of what it would be like online, not for the squeamish.
One of the best scenes in The Siege of Firebase Gloria is where they enter the village and there are heads on stakes, some troops are puking and saying this is barbaric while R. Lee Ermey as Sgt. Hafner says…this is effective.
Time for an Enemy At the Gates encore to get in the right mindframe.
Dayam you can’t even get a break on Sunday.
Russia major invasion threat to Europe, NATO will defend itself, Ukraine seeks F-16 jets to use in WAR, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea strengthen ties.
Careful what you wish for and governments will just love the expansion of power and suspending of elections.
You can make tremendous Fundamental Transformations during wartime as you never let a crisis go to waste.
No one could foresee the world downfall that came so fast.
Enjoy vintage movies, art, music, poetry, tomes, loved ones, while you still can.