Russia sent a couple of nuclear-capable bombers to circle around Guam, forcing us to scramble intercepters. This makes me a little nervous on a day that a meteorite blew up in the Russian sky with more power than the bombs we dropped on Japan. Carl Sagan once did an episode of Cosmos dedicated to discussing The Tunguska Event. The Tunguska Event was a still not perfectly understood catastrophe that happened in Siberia in 1908. It was probably a comet, a fragment of a comet, or an asteroid that exploded in the air and caused non-radioactive damage equivalent to our first test with a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. Dr. Sagan pointed out that a similar explosion in the nuclear age might have been interpreted as an attack which required full scale retaliation, thereby ending all intelligent life on Earth.
Watch it if you are interested.
We’re lucky that people have cameras and that Russia has sophisticated radar and the ability to quickly test radiation levels. Because fifty years ago, a meteorite like the one that hit in the Ural Mountains today might have caused World War Three and ended all our lives. Forever.
I remember when nuclear disarmament was a priority not only for progressives, but for Ronald Reagan. I am still astonished by how little progressives talk about it today, and how little the blogosphere seemed to care about the New START Treaty. We need to get rid of these weapons as quickly as we can. And we need to prevent large objects from striking our planet. We know how to do that, you know. We just have to care.
