Top 3 Explosive Facts About Nuclear Weapons.

 

1. Nuclear War may be Inevitable safezones-nukes

So far we have been fortunate. Despite numerous close calls and some reckless missteps, only two of the thousands of nuclear bombs which have been built have actually been deployed in anger. However, we shouldn’t deceive ourselves that the end of the Cold War has rendered the prospect of nuclear war an irrelevance. In many respects, things are more perilous than ever. There are two nuclear powers in India and Pakistan that refuse to play along with one other, a freshly armed and unpredictable North Korean dictatorship, and a militant Russia determined to restore its position.

According to some commentators, a nuclear war be unavoidable. Even if the danger is just 0.5% each year it would represent a 5% likelihood of a nuclear war per decade. Given enough time even a little chance becomes a certainty. The only way to avert it would be international disarmament, something which is extremely hard to envisage occurring any time soon.

One Stanford University Professor, Martin Hellman, says that each kid born today faces a 10 percent risk of being murdered in a nuclear war. We can only hope we continue to be fortunate.

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2. The Bombs of Today are Way More Powerful than those used in World War II presentday-nukes

The bombs which were unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrible weapons which caused tremendous harm to the people of Japan. However, they were nothing more than ambitious fireworks compared to the weapons which are accessible to the nuclear powers of the world today.

The yield of a nuclear bomb is measured in kilotons or megatons. Little Boy, the bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima, was a 16 kiloton weapon, which means it detonated with the power of 16 thousand tonnes of high explosives. Nowadays weapons like that are regarded to be tactical nuclear weapons meant for use against armies on the battlefield. Strategic nuclear weapons, which are the sort which will start striking us in the face if a full-scale nuclear war ever breaks out, are measured in millions of tonnes of high explosive. In other words, they have an explosive output of a thousand or more times larger than the bombs used against Japan in World War II.

3. One Man Prevented a Nuclear War – and Gained a Vacuum Cleaner vacuum-nukes

Not many people remember the name Stanislov Petrov, but on 26th September, 1983, he had the destiny of the world in his hands. A lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Union’s Strategic Rocket Forces, Petrov wasn’t even meant to be at work that night, but he was standing in for a colleague who had phoned in sick.

Cold War tensions were running high. President Ronald Reagan had just labelled the Soviet Union as a “evil empire,” NATO was conducting military rehearsals in Europe, and three weeks before the USSR had shot down a South Korean aircraft which they said had violated their airspace on an espionage mission. Petrov would have known all of this when the information on his screen informed him that five US intercontinental ballistic missiles, each more than 100 times as destructive as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, were heading towards the Soviet Union.

Petrov took up the phone to the Kremlin knowing that his recommendation would influence whether the Soviet Union launched a counterstrike. He assured them it was a mistake. The technology, known as Oko, had just come on stream the previous year and Petrov trusted his instincts rather than the computers. Fortunately for the world, his instincts were correct.

In 2004, Petrov was granted a World Citizen Award and a check for $1,000. He handed most of the money to his grandkids. With the remainder he purchased himself what he had always desired — a vacuum cleaner.