Bombs Away!

"I feel safer already, don't you?"

The United States is now dismantling the last of the 9 megaton nuclear bombs that have been around since 1962. The B53's, roughly 600 times more powerful than the bomb that was dropped over Hiroshima, have been replaced with smaller, gentler nuclear devices that are merely 75 times stronger than the Hiroshima version. Supposedly the newer models, the B83's, are much more accurate, enabling them to hit targets more precisely while doing less collateral damage.

It's not even pretty.

But for those of you who believe that an overwhelming military is the only way our nation can continue to dominate and intimidate the rest of the world, no worries. We can still destroy the whole world some multiple number of times should the geo-political landscape call for such action. What would be the catalyst for such a thing again?

Personally, the whole nuclear arms race seems like an incredible overreaction to me. Should the world be destroyed only once, it would be sufficient, wouldn't it? Did we ever need to be able to end all life on earth 389 times, just because the old U.S.S.R. could do it 362 times?

Well at least these damn things are gone. I wonder if we've paid for them yet, or if we're still paying interest on the money we borrowed to build them in the first place?

One interesting detail. Evidently the engineers and scientists that originally built these things have long since died or retired, so they really didn't know how to safely dismantle them. They had to do a lot of work on that before they could take the silly things apart. Would it be too much to ask that we not build any more weapons of mass destruction without knowing how to unbuild them at some point in the future when we have more sense?

Hmmm. Now what do we do if we need to destroy an asteroid?