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Interactive Edition of the Nuclear Notebook
Lasrick writes The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just launched a very cool interactive graphic to go with their famed Nuclear Notebook, the feature that tracks the world's nuclear arsenals. Now you can see at a glance who has nuclear weapons, when they got them, and how those numbers compare to each other. A short introductory video gives some background on the success of the Notebook, which has been tracking nukes since 1987.
The tiny fraction can still wipe out the human race many many many times.
We still need to ban nuclear weapons.
aaaaaaa
You're assuming people ever knew how to read data. Every day I'm reminded that they don't.
The tiny fraction can still wipe out the human race
They could certainly wipe out many urban population centers, and kill billions of people. They would also cause major economic disruption, and a collapse in trade that may kill billions more. But wipe out? No way. There are plenty of people living self sufficient lives in remote areas. There are many more people that have food reserves that they can live on until agriculture is revived. Many areas of the world, including most of the Southern Hemisphere, would not even be targeted in any reasonable scenario. Nuclear arsenals are much smaller than they were decades ago. There are far fewer warheads, and they are smaller and cleaner. A nuclear war with today's arsenals is not going to wipe out the human race.
The map had Israel colored orange but did not have their map at that bottom.
I've always said English was my second language. Had Romeo and Juliet been written in C, I might have understood it.
Did you move the slider at all? It is in fact noteworthy that the page shows Israel has nearly doubled the size of its nuclear arsenal since worldwide arsenals peaked in '86.
Given the neighborhood and Iran's intent to make their own nukes, can you blame them?
Likewise, it's worth noting that Israel is *not* a member of the NPT.
...so who would they sell the tech to? Sometimes it makes no sense to bother with something when you're not liable to violate its precepts.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Ban nuclear weapons, and you bring back the World Wars. WWI left some 38 million dead, WWII killed around 70 million. As grim and pointless as the proxy wars of the Cold War were, they pale in comparison to those numbers. The Korean War left maybe 3.5 million dead, Vietnam maybe 4 million. I won't pretend to offer statistics for the various other third world conflicts between 1945 and the 1990s, but at least those two wars should show that they're on a completely different scale, even with the technological advancements over WWII. There was a lot of dumb, unneccessary fighting going on during that time period, but that's pretty much true of any time period.
I like nukes. They end and prevent world wars. We currently live in the most peaceful time in human history, despite having a larger population than any other time. That's got to tell you that we're getting better. Ban nukes, and we lose all that progress.
Unless the number of each of those "billions" is only 2, then that's just about the entire human species.
Except that it wouldn't be. The people in remote rural areas would be the most likely to survive the initial blasts. They would also be the most likely to survive the ensuing economic disruption. If all the nukes in the world were detonated in maximum casualty producing air bursts, they would destroy about 0.2% of the Earth's land area. Air bursts produce minimal amounts of fallout. If they were detonated in sub-surface bursts (to destroy underground silos) the fallout would be worse, but would still mostly be contained in the ground locally, and almost no one would die in the initial bursts. Today's nukes are more efficient and cleaner than the WWII era bombs. They produce far less fallout for a given yield.
Even within target urban areas, there would be survivors. Some people in downtown Hiroshima, and many more in Nagasaki, survived the blast, and the radiation, and went on to have children and grandchildren. Most people in Hiroshima didn't die from the blast or the radiation. They died in the firestorm. But Nagasaki was mostly made from stone, instead of wood like Hiroshima, so there was no firestorm, and many more people survived there despite the bomb being nearly twice as powerful.
If people 200 meters from ground zero can survive, I am sure someone on New Zealand's South Island, 5000 km from the closest impact, will be okay.
We still need to ban nuclear weapons.
And alcohol. And drugs. And cigarettes. And... well, you get my point. Banning something doesn't make that thing unavailable. This is doubly true in reference to sovereign nations dealing in a world lacking a unified system of enforceable international laws.
The genie doesn't go back in the bottle. We are either going to have to figure out how to get along in a world in which each of us has the capability to destroy all of us, or resign ourselves to the extinction of our species.
Your post is total hogwash. Just about everything you have said is completely 100% factually false. By "scientists" I assume you are referring to an actor portraying a scientist in an anti-nuclear power propaganda piece.
a) there is no large pool of water directly below the reactor
b) even if the fuel melted into a large reservoir of water, it could not become critical. It is not physically possible without the precise fuel and moderator arrangement present in an in-tact reactor configuration.
c) even if you somehow made the fuel become critical, it could not explode like a bomb. If a fuel mass became critical, it would simply heat up and disperse. Worse case is the heat would cause additional steam/fire to disperse more fission products. Let me reiterate: it is physically impossible for reactor fuel of any kind to produce a nuclear bomb type explosion. Nuclear bombs require extremely precise arrangement with unimaginably creative engineering to function.
d) if the fuel mass reached the water table, all that would occur would be another path for contamination in the local area which was already heavily contaminated. Fission products would not be magically transported throughout the whole continent, nor could an entire continent be made uninhabitable.
e) a power plant contains a couple orders of magnitude more fuel than a bomb. The contamination from a worse-case-scenario power plant accident is much higher than nuclear bombs would be, unless they were some sort of salted enhanced radiation bomb. For comparison, a typical nuclear power reactor creates as many fissions as a nuclear bomb about every 6 hours.
f) radiation does not spread like a contagion. This is just plain FUD.
The only part of your post which was even remotely accurate was about doomsday enhanced radiation bombs or salted bombs. No one has ever designed, built, or tested such a device and they are only theoretical. But theoretically, with enough salted bombs (meaning about 1000 times more than the entire world's nuclear stockpile at the height of the cold war) you could theoretically make most of the surface uninhabitable.