W.J. Astore

Except a Nuclear Apocalypse Would Be Unimaginably Worse

The wildfires in LA are horrific. People are losing everything. Thousands of structures have been consumed by flames. Ash, soot, smoke, poison the air. It’s devastating. Just look at this photo taken from space.

It looks like a nuclear apocalypse. Yet as devastating as the LA fires have been, a nuclear apocalypse would be unimaginably worse. A thousand times worse. A million times worse.

We see something like the wildfires in LA—as bad as they are, they remain on a scale that is comprehensible. We can fathom them. They will eventually be contained.

One atomic bomb like the one used at Hiroshima would be a thousand times worse (and don’t forget the blast wave and radiation as well as the fires). A thermonuclear weapon, a hydrogen bomb or warhead, would be one hundred thousand times worse. Unimaginable. Unfathomable. Unsurvivable.

There’s much to be learned from these wildfires in LA. Much more action needs to be taken to prepare for similar events in the future. Perhaps they might serve as a reminder as well of how much worse the fires could and would be from a man-made inferno in a nuclear war.

America, it’s high time we stopped building more nuclear weapons and started investing in improvements to our infrastructure, to disaster preparedness, to meet the climate-driven catastrophes that we know are coming.

America needs more fire trucks, more fire crews, even something seemingly as simple as more water. We don’t need more infernal (and inferno-producing) nuclear weapons.