The Search for Security in the Age of the Bomb
ON THE night of July 27, 1943, thousands of firebombs pummeled Hamburg, Germany. The result was something new to warfare: a vast, consuming inferno, a fire storm. Rising currents of air caused hurricane-force winds to feed the fire from all sides, sucking people into the flames. The heat was intense. Air-raid shelters became ovens, baking and shriveling those huddled within. Other people were bogged down in molten asphalt. Over 40,000 perished, more than 20 times the number killed in an ordinary bombing raid.
Two years later, on the other side of the globe, another fire storm consumed Hiroshima, Japan. This time the conflagration was lit by a single plane that dropped only one bomb.
The bomb, an atom bomb, was dubbed Little Boy. But its effect was anything but little. It was horrendous. It blinded with brilliant light. It killed and maimed by fire and heat and blast wave. It poisoned by deadly radiation.
Three days later, another bomb, named Fat Man, obliterated half of Nagasaki. A ridge that runs through the center of this hilly city protected the other half.
The Nuclear Arsenal Today
Today, there are about 50,000 of these weapons of mass destruction in existence. Consider:
◻ If the two superpowers used a mere 5 percent of their strategic nuclear weapons against each other’s cities, within minutes 200 million people would die, four times the number slain in World War II. The huge number of wounded survivors could expect little or no care from overburdened medical centers.
◻ Just one U.S. Trident submarine is equipped with enough nuclear missiles to blast 192 separate targets. Each of those explosions would be eight times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb.*
◻ The world’s stockpile of nuclear weapons has 2,600 times more explosive power than the combined munitions used in World War II.
Such statistics are mind-boggling, and they underscore the magnitude of the problem.
A West African proverb says: “When elephants fight, the grass too will suffer.” Likewise, the consequences of a nuclear war would not affect merely the combatants. In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs magazine, scientist Carl Sagan said that a nuclear war “would imperil every survivor on the planet. There is a real danger of the extinction of humanity.”
[Footnotes]
At the time of writing, there are 36 strategic missile submarines in the U.S. fleet, carrying 616 missiles bearing more than 4,928 warheads. The Soviet Union has a comparable fleet.
[Diagram on page 3]
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Today’s nuclear stockpile has 2,600 times the explosive power used in World War II
16,000 million tons
6 million tons