Long Story/Post(No really, long story!) Short: Carl Sagan among others lied his ass off to keep us from blowing ourselves up with “The Bomb” and I’m really thankful for that.
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And Now, the Rest of the Post |
So given the “Don’t poke The Bear, You’ll start WW3 and kill us all, just let them do what ever the fuck they want.” vibe running around on the Tribune lately, felt like sharing this when I was reading around on various tech and science sites.
It’s an answer by an Engineer who actually builds the subsystems and components of various Nuke related stuff and is well cited, in fairly readable language (i.e. not so technical in language that the average person shouldn’t be able to understand the information conveyed. Big emphasis on shouldn’t.), and really informative about ‘How Things Actually Are’, versus ‘How We Think Things Actually Are’ with regards to Nuclear Weapons.
My first key take away from the whole thing is that quite a few people, including and especially the Late-Great Carl Sagan, knowingly lied their asses off about the dangers of using Nukes, and because they did we all probably survived long enough to know it without having to have a live demonstration of why Nuclear Winter probably wasn’t a real thing at the time and definitely isn’t a thing now.
The second key take away from that post is that we may or may not actually be in a worse position now that we know Nuclear Winter as sold to us is a lie. Both because we now know Nuclear War is still scary a hell, but not world ending even if the number of nukes doubled or tippled world wide, and because this leads us to an extremely more likely scenario where Nukes are actually used.
As much as I spend my time in a quest for ‘Truth’ and Knowledge, I can’t help feeling I want that Terrible Lie back…
