According to the Federation of Nuclear Scientists, Russia possesses some 5,580 nuclear warheads, most of which are aimed at us.
I believe we have forgotten the terror that these end-of-the-world weapons should inspire. No nuclear war has ever happened, so no need to worry. Except that we’ve come very, very close, and more than once.
Imagine: it’s a sunny day. You look up and see a streak of light heading down. Then: a blinding flash.
If you’re close to the blast, you are instantly vaporized, with no warning. One moment you’re there, the next moment every single bit of you is gone, vanished from the face of the earth; no physical trace of you exists, will ever exist again.
If you’re a little further away a horrifying phenomenon occurs: the heat of the blast carbonizes your body. When Japanese and American investigators came to Hiroshima shortly after the war’s end, they found thousands of blackened human forms. You’re turned, in effect, to charcoal.
Fire storms ignite everywhere. Touch your face and your skin peels off. The burns are unimaginable. After the Hiroshima blast, thousands jumped into the river in the center of the city to get relief from the pain. Thousands of others lost their sight and wander, aimlessly, in agony through the streets.
They have become ghosts.
Tens of thousands more will contract radiation sickness and cancer of all forms over the coming months and years.
At least three times in the nuclear age we have come close to Armageddon. Once, in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis, a brave Soviet officer named Vasilii Arkhipov disobeyed orders and prevented the firing of nuclear torpedoes near Florida. In 1983, Stanislav Petrov, a colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces, overrode a computer warning of an American attack (the malfunction was later traced to sunlight reflecting off clouds). Arkhipov and Petrov quite literally saved the world.
Later that same year, after hardline comments by President Ronald Reagan, NATO forces conducted military exercises, codenamed Able Archer, which were so realistic that the Soviets believed a pre-emptive attack was imminent. Only at the last minute when it became apparent that the Soviets were mobilizing (including loading their bombers with nuclear weapons) the exercise was called off.
That’s how close we’ve come. And who knows if there have been other such incidents?
The comparatively tiny Hiroshima blast killed 70,000 people.
Imagine if it were New York.
(some of this paraphrased from Stuxnet: A Worm’s Tale, a Microsoft Think Week paper, by Barry Briggs.)