Take all of the avowed nuclear nations. Choose a medium-sized city at random. Evacuate the city.
And then hit it with a 300-kiloton nuke.
Film the living shit out of it. Instrument the hell out of it.
Then show the world. Bring the leaders of every nuclear and wannabe nuclear nation to the ruins of the city to let them see just one one of those weapons can do. And leave the ruins untouched.
We have thousands of those weapons. So do the Russians. The Chinese, French and British have hundreds of them. The Indians and Pakistanis have roughly a hundred each. The Israelis may have a couple hundred (or far fewer). North Korea may have a dozen or so.
It would take an utter fool to contemplate using such weapons. Unfortunately, humanity has never had much of a shortage of fools, especially in high governmental positions.
Purple Rain
1 hour ago
11 comments:
That is not a new idea. I remember reading an opinion piece in my local newspaper with the concept back in the early 1980s. Except in that one the idea would be the US would abandon San Francisco and Russia would abandon Kiev. Then each city would get nuked live on TV.
A better suggestion : don't evacuate the city, just put all the politicians on there ;-)
Unknown, about now, the Russians might wish that they had gone along with that idea.
Look at the pictures of the hole that was once the Bikini Atoll. Damned impressive what some good old fission can do.
My thought was to just let the world leaders pick a champion and let them fight it out for world dominion. Thailand(with muay thai) would still be a world power.
Why kill all the young? Just let some pros battle it out.
w3ski
Didn't we essentially do that demonstration – complete with vaporized people – in Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
If those didn't work, why would any other demo? In my opinion, this proposal would result in the waste of a perfectly good city. And of a perfectly good bomb.
Very crankily yours,
The New York Crannk
NYC, our particular species of hamburger-eating monkeys seem to have a need to have hard lessons repeated every several decades.
Hell, it took about sixty years to strip away all of the Depression-era financial laws and then it took the banksters less than ten years to crash the system again. (Not that we've learned a lesson there, thanks to Barry & Eric)
You need to put the leaders up close and personal like the troops were in early US bomb testing.
Just FYI, Israel is now rated as the 4th nuke power, ranking by numbers of warheads. That includes ICBM's with an 8500 mile range, and nuke capable subs (cruise missiles, IIRC).
They are in the big boy's "bounce the rubble" club.
They would have been only in 5th, but Ukraine gave up all their nukes (around a 1000) for worthless guarantees by us and the Euros to protect them. Good lesson for the rest of the world, no?
I believe a demonstration of the bomb was proposed to Harry Truman -- not on an evacuated city, just in the water off Tokyo Bay -- but he turned it down.
Deadstick, wisely, too. If I remember rightly, there were only three such weapons available at the time.
I fear that many in power would not be deterred by such a demonstration, but encouraged. There was a comic called "The Pain, When Will It End?" that imagined William T. Sherman with The Bomb: "Boys, I was wrong when I said war is Hell. We just wasn't doin' it right. This is fuckin, beautiful!"
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