There is something painfully absurd about the idea of blind mute spheres of death wandering round the oceans hoping not to bang into each other.
We like to think nuclear war was only a problem around the time of Bob Dylan's first album and was shot in kodachrome photos but the fact is it could still kick off today.
"I did a preliminary risk analysis which indicates that relying on nuclear weapons for our security is thousands of times more dangerous than having a nuclear power plant built next to your home."
Diffie
So for fun why not compute like it was 1962 and see what would happen if various nukes went off in your vicinity. There is a fun print and make Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer here and some more here. They are basically versions of slide rules people used to calculate how big fire balls and such would be.
Hey get the kids involved, its crafty and its edumacational. Why not teach them about how close to a bomb they would need to be so that all that would be left is the enamel of their teeth?
4 comments:
Enamel? I'd love to live in your pre-SunnyD world, where children still have tooth enamel and the attention span to use a slide rule. Is it is kodachrome too?
Fair point. There is an iphone application that will do the sums for you. I imagine that's what the young whipper snappers would be using.
Are you sure you're not mixing up the battery life of an iphone with the time left on the Doomsday Clock?
For my atomic and nuclear physics class we once did a calculation of how much of Dublin would be left if a 2 mega tonne thermonuclear went off in the city centre. If I remember the first 2km radius from the blast would be completely vaporized.
I blame Edward Teller.
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