Christian Democrats in the United States
Global Issues - Non-nuclear StrategyWe support a strong defensive strategy, but also a total elimination of all nuclear weapons in the world. A nuclear-armed terrorist cannot be deterred by a nuclear response. If the United States can get along with the overwhelming majority of nations, and deal with others through conventional force, aiming all this doomsday at the world's citizens only serves to make people feel threatened before they have ever offended or even cared about our society. The risk of accidental or terrorist use of nuclear arms increases every day. We must direct all efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons, but the United States must live up to its own standards and goals. We submit that if the United States takes the lead in nuclear disarmament, all civil nations of the world will follow voluntarily.
For power generation, nuclear fission (splitting uranium) is and always will be unsafe, because the waste products remain radioactive for so many centuries, potentially causing birth defects and diseases for hundreds of years. Nuclear fusion (how our sun works) is worth researching, because the potential higher power yield would leave much less radioactive waste.
Subscribe to Posts [Atom]how many nukes would it take?
My junior high civics teacher once asked us if we knew how many nukes it would take to destroy the entire San Francisco bay area. (For those of you who don't live here, the SF Bay is a large inland bay about 70 miles long, connected to the ocean at the Golden Gate bridge: map)The answer: 2.
The fission bombs dropped on Japan were firecrackers compared to the hydrogen fusion bombs we have now. Just two bombs — one in the north bay and one in the south — would wipe out everyone, because the bay would be vaporized into superheated steam that the shock wave would push out into all the surrounding cities. If we weren't caught in the blast, we'd be poached like fish.
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