The ticking hands of the death clock care nothing for any plans we have. The hands remain indifferent to those things that we might yet achieve. They have not one shred of sympathy for the grieving loved ones we will leave behind.
They just are.
Sort of.
Because the death clock isn’t real, it’s just an image. Something we conjured up in our collective imaginations to help us make sense of the world. Something to help us shine a light into the blackness of the absolute where we never see what we want to see.
Because there are layers of reality. The number four is real but is it as real as let’s say the Brooklyn bridge? Probably not.
Abstract concepts are as vulnerable to real world events as is tangible matter and if President-elect Trump’s cavalier talk of nuclear weapons is anything to go by, the hands of everyone’s clock just skipped a few rungs.
For Trump, talk of bombing the hell out of countries is an extension of his own fantasist existence. His love of vagaries plays well into his confused view of a world in which saying something is the same thing as doing it.
He’s an idiot.
An idiot who is about to be put in charge of the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world. A man who might well be planning coordinated use of them with his ally Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Come In From the Cold War
Those of us who lived through the cold war remember the visceral fear of nuclear holocaust. The early warning systems encased in spheres of glass and steel once littered the countryside of Europe as constant reminders of the dangers we faced.
They looked quite comical, almost like giant golf balls abandoned in some forgotten field.
Nobody laughed as they drove past.
They bought us exactly three minutes of warning.
There are two dimensions to the use of nuclear weapons. There is the moral dimension; such weapons are horrendously indiscriminate. Drop one on a city and you consign men, women, and, children to a torturous death.
The second is more pragmatic. Use such weapons on your enemies and they might well wind up using them on you.
Atrocities Of Scale
The Atom bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were terrible, but the reality is that more damage and greater casualties had been inflicted on Tokyo simply by dropping many smaller bombs. The psychological impact of using a single bomb to do so much damage was immense but at the end of the day the power to flatten a city was nothing new.
The H-bomb was something else. Successfully tested in 1952, it represented a paradigm shift in power, one that beguiles the imagination. Apologies, you’re going to have to scroll down this graphic.
A lot.
Blame J. Robert Oppenheimer I guess.
If the pain in your hand from rapid scrolling isn’t enough of an indicator of how much more powerful these bombs are then perhaps this will help.
Nuke Map was set up so that people could see for themselves what a simulated strike would look like.
New York seems like a reasonable case study here for two reasons. Firstly because its topography is well-known and secondly because there is absolutely no question that it would be hit with multiple missiles in the event that Trump’s posturing starts a war we cannot win.
What follows could be considered graphic and disturbing.
The Living Will Envy the Dead
The first circle is the fireball itself. Hard though it might be to envision, it would be around 6 km across. Everything from The Village in the west to Greenpoint in the east, Red Hook in the south and Central Park Zoo in the north, would be exposed to temperatures reaching 150 million degrees Fahrenheit; that’s way hotter than the sun in case you’re wondering.
Those in the second innermost circle, with a radius of 36 kilometers, would be subjected to massive overpressure; most residential buildings would collapse, injuries would be universal, fatalities widespread. People’s limbs could literally be blown off by the force of the pressure wave and organs such as hearts and lungs, would be liquefied.
Those in the third circle of some 73 kilometers’ radius would be the lucky ones! From Woodbury in the north to Toms River in the south, all they’d have to worry about would be third-degree burns extending throughout the layers of skin. These burns would in many cases be painless because the pain nerves would be gone.
I know, awful right?
The Causality list would be horrific: In the first 24 hours fatalities would sit at 8,012,450 and injuries at 6,682,480.
That’s before the radiation starts killing off survivors by the way.
Casual Genocide
This is what Trump claims he would like to do to cities all around the world. He has even refused to rule out their use in Europe.
And it’s for this reason that Donald Trump’s election is a nonpartisan issue. It’s for this reason that his impeachment should begin on day one. We need to come together to remove this scurrilous despot.
In the face of rising tensions with China, we risk war with another global superpower. In the face of rising economic tensions, we risk Donald Trump spending us to the poor house in a zero sum pissing contest of monstrous proportions. Experts are predicting war. Experts are predicting the end of America.
These conflicts are not ones that America can win.
Because when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks back. Sometimes it bites back. Sure maybe America need never fear an attack of this magnitude. Perhaps New York will be all right.
Maybe Trump will only use his WMD on some small helpless country that nobody seems to give a fuck about. Even so.
America would still lose.
Lose its reputation, lose its sense of purpose.
Lose its soul.
Watch footage of the largest bomb ever exploded. Trump has access to many times this firepower.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNYe_UaWZ3U
Featured image from Ring of Fire video.
