Eric Schlosser is an award-winning journalist, and a correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly. His work has also appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, the Nation, and The New Yorker, among others. Eric Schlosser is the author of three previous best-selling books, Fast Food Nation, Reefer Madness and Chew on This, and his latest is Command and Control. Also this week, Naomi Alderman tells us why we should be watching Parks and Recreation.
Posted in: Little Atoms
Owen Boyd
December 30, 2013
Now, with a bit of distance from the Cold War, it seems to me that nuclear weapons were perhaps over hyped by both sides of the argument. I wouldn’t deny that in Schlosser’s words “they are the most dangerous machines ever built”, but I don’t think they would have destroyed the planet, life on earth, humans, or perhaps even ‘civilisation’. Like Schlosser, in the early 80s when I was a CND activist, I was always stressing how humungously more powerful the larger H-Bombs were compared to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Atom Bombs. I now think there was a bit of bad science going on there, which served the interests of both the sabre rattling military AND the banner waving disarmers. Very crudely, the destructive effect of a bomb varies by the cube of the ‘megatonnage’. In other words to make a bomb 10x more destructive needs 1000x the megatons. So those 10 Megaton Cold War H-Bombs were about 10 x the Hiroshima bomb, not the 1,000 times usually quoted. As so often lazy journalism. I believe an all out nuclear war would probably have killed tens of millions of people in the Soviet Union, Western Europe and the USA. The rest of the world would have been relatively unaffected, apart from raised levels of cancer because of the increased worldwide background radiation level and of course economic meltdown. Awful x 10 to the power infinity of course, but NOT the end of the world. I still think nuclear weapons are disgusting and that Britain has no reason to possess them however!