Nuclear Arms

http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2010/04/03/18643724.php


Nuclear Arms
by Ted Rudow III,MA
Saturday Apr 3rd, 2010

Since World War II, “the war to end all wars,” the explosive power of the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and Russia has grown to the equivalent of 300,000 Hiroshima’s. The 8,500 warheads and bombs in the US arsenal alone have a combined explosive power of more than 3 billion tons of TNT – about 1,500 pounds of explosive for every man, woman and child on this planet.

Dr. James Muller, a Harvard heart specialist and secretary of the Physicians for Prevention of Nuclear War, Inc., brought this out when he said: “At some point deep down inside, people know the world could explode tomorrow.”
Yet some people are just talking about it calmly as though it is the natural thing to expect – that we are going to destroy each other and the world! In an article entitled “The End of the World, US Senator George McGovrn wrote: “Even the smallest of today’s strategic nuclear weapons has several times the yield of the Hiroshima bomb. If one were to explode at midday in Manhattan, the shock wave would kill 5,000,000 unprotected people within 4 or 5 miles and would demolish buildings almost as far away as the Connecticut border. And that would be just the beginning of the end: only 20 percent of the fatalities at Hiroshima were caused by the blast.
“A nuclear explosion over Manhattan would generate temperatures of tens of millions of degrees centigrade, radiating out like the sun’s rays. The heat and the fire storm would be deadlier than the shock. So would the short and long-term radiation effects. The familiar mushroom cloud would draw up and contaminate tons of earth and debris, to settle back and kill millions of people hundreds of miles away.”

Ted Rudow III, MA