Stockpiling Bombs vs. Stockpiling Ventilators
(April 10, 2020) — Why didn’t we stockpile ventilators and PPE? Because our government spent our money stockpiling bombs instead.
How many bombs? Enough to destroy every city on Earth and still have 1,500 bombs left over. Literally. Researchers at Popular Mechanics did the math. No exaggeration. [See story below.]
And just this year, they decided to spend another $50 billion on building a whole new generation of nuclear weapons.
That’s despite the fact that the US could cut its defense budget in half and still spend more money on war-making than Russia and China combined.
And that’s despite the fact that the “Global War on Terror” is creating terrorists faster than we can kill them.
As Michael Franti wrote: “You can bomb the world to pieces but you can’t bomb it into peace.”
The fact is that for 3% of this year’s Pentagon budget we could have had all the 880,000 ventilators and PPE we needed at the ready. And they’re not cheap machines.
And for 4% of the annual Pentagon budget, we could replace every lead water-delivery pipe in America — solving a lead contamination problem that currently afflicts 22 million people — many of them children who will be impacted for the rest of their lives.
ACTION: Enough is enough. Do your bit to put an end to it. Join me in Drop the MIC, a new social media campaign to expose the corruption of the Military-Industrial Complex, and the financial, human, and environmental costs of spending over half of the entire US discretionary budget on preparing for war.
It’s time to make it clear that we’re not willing to put up with endless wars and war machines. Not in our name, not with our money.
Please like our new page on Facebook and follow us on Twitter and Instagram and invite your friends.
Ben Cohen is a co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream.
What If We Blew Up All The World’s Nukes at Once?
For starters, it would be a very, very bad day for mankind.
Kyle Mizokami / Popular Mechanics
(April 1, 2019) — Sometimes it’s best not to think about just how many nukes are out there.
Nuclear weapons are enormously destructive devices capable of level entire cities, and arguably ending human civilization in the case of an all-out nuclear exchange. But what if humankind, for some bizarre reason, decided to set all of them off at once? The YouTube channel Kurzgesagt followed this thought experiment to its apocalyptic conclusion, and it’s not pretty.
The explosive yield of nuclear weapon is typically measured in kilotons, or thousand tons of TNT. The bomb dropped on Hiroshima is typically calculated at 16 kilotons, or 16,000 tons of TNT. The W-87 warheadcarried by the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile has a yield of 300 kilotons. The B83 nuclear freefall bomb, carried by the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber, has a yield of up to 1.2 megatons, or 1,200 kilotons.
Besides the huge Cold War arsenals in United States and Russia, nukes are owned by China, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, Pakistan, India, and North Korea. Altogether, there are an estimated 15,000 nuclear weapons worldwide.
Individually, each of these weapons could do incredible damage. Kurzgesagt estimates that if the world’s supply of nukes were used evenly on its large cities, the global arsenal would be enough to kill three billion people, with 1,500 nukes left over. Packed inside a single, sprawling warehouse in the South American jungle, as Kurzgesagt imagines, they collectively have the power of up to 15 Krakatoa-style volcanic eruptions.
The detonation of this super warehouse would create a fireball 31 miles across, flattening 1,864 square miles surround it. A mushroom cloud 30 miles high would follow. The nuclear firestorm would expand in all directions across South America (ironic and a bit unfair, considering South America is one of the few continents without nuclear weapons).
It would also be followed by a nuclear winter scenario, in which particles of dust and ash sent skyward would enter the upper atmosphere, blocking sunlight and lowering temperatures globally for several years.
Kurzgesagt doesn’t stop there. What if humanity mined every bit of uranium from the Earth — approximately 35 million tons? Well, that’s enough to build ten billion Hiroshima bombs. As the ensuing animation demonstrates, that would be an extinction-level event on par with the asteroid that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs. except this time it would be the end of the Age of the Humans. Not even the crew of the International Space Station would be safe from that explosion.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes
