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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024

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The fate of Hiroshima and Nagasaki arguably forms a part of why nuclear mythos is so exaggerated, though. Even if we don't consider the whole symbolic implication of two little bombs forcing mighty Japan to surrender, the dawn of atomic age etc., Hiroshima and Nagasaki aren't all that representative of what would happen now; the Japanese tradition of paper-based construction meant the houses went up in flames even more easily than comparative European homes of the period, and the further development of nuclear weapons has been accompanied with developments in population protection (sturdier housing, still-extant shelters etc).

Also, while there's obviously bigger nukes and stockpiles than in 1945, people probably also have a wrong image of these in the other direction; once I started looking into this, I (used to nuke strength being measured in megatons) was surprised, for instance, to learn that according to most recent American estimates Russia does not have any nukes of 1 Mt or higher in power and that the Russian nuclear stockpile is a bit over 10 % of the height of Cold War (I had of course known it had gone down, but still, while it probably still packs a punch, it's not of destroy-the-world capability, even if one would expect all of them to work, not be intercepted, not fall to a first strike or a second strike etc.)

ICBMs, MIRVs and more accurate missiles basically made multi-megaton nukes obsolete. You get much better destructive power over an area if you spread a bunch of 100 kton nukes over it instead of concentrating all that power at a single point because of the three dimensional nature of the explosion.

Certainly, the point just being that people have a completely facile image of the raw power of current nukes. In "nuclear demonstration" maps like this, the nuke used to "demonstrate" a potential nuclear war is literally the 100 Mt Tsar Bomba - a device that literally only existed in the planning stages and was not even tested, and would not have remotely resembled your average Soviet nuclear warhead even in the height of the Cold War.