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It's a hard comparison to make. Nuclear weapons have caused, and care capable of causing, more damage. But they also have a better safety record, insofar as acc

It's a hard comparison to make. Nuclear weapons have caused, and care capable of causing, more damage. But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. IOW, one could argue that the metaphor is making nuclear power plants out to be safer than they are. It's true that coal is awful, too. But I think that it would be callous to simply dismiss the rather arresting psychological impact of entire communities being rendered uninhabitable at a single stroke. Why what happened to Pripyat or Fukushima is known to basically everyone, while what happened at places like Aberfan and Centralia seem to have become subject matter for Atlas Obscura, I couldn't quite say. Perhaps it's the greater scale of the individual events.

m4rtink 6y ago
I recomend looking up "Broken arrow" - many nuclear weapons have been destroyed or lost, often with signifficant local loss of life (generally the bomber crew & often crew of the aicraft the bombrr colided with) as well as local contamination. Also some of the soviet bomb development efforts caused wide scale contamination, sometime even in inhabitted areas.
AnthonyMouse 6y ago
> But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. Compared to the sites in the US related to nuclear weapons, like Hanford, and the (literal) fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing? It's also quite likely that accidents related to nuclear weapons are under-reported, especially outside of the US, for all the obvious reasons.
catalogia 6y ago
I think it's probably safe to say that more Americans have been killed by nuclear bomb tests than by nuclear powerplant accidents. It's hard to say for sure, but John Wayne may have been one of those killed by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders

m4rtink 6y ago

I recomend looking up "Broken arrow" - many nuclear weapons have been destroyed or lost, often with signifficant local loss of life (generally the bomber crew & often crew of the aicraft the bombrr colided with) as well as local contamination. Also some of the soviet bomb development efforts caused wide scale contamination, sometime even in inhabitted areas.

AnthonyMouse 6y ago

> But they also have a better safety record, insofar as accidents at nuclear power plants have done more damage to surrounding communities than accidents at places where nuclear weapons are stored. Compared to the sites in the US related to nuclear weapons, like Hanford, and the (literal) fallout from above-ground nuclear weapons testing? It's also quite likely that accidents related to nuclear weapons are under-reported, especially outside of the US, for all the obvious reasons.

catalogia 6y ago

I think it's probably safe to say that more Americans have been killed by nuclear bomb tests than by nuclear powerplant accidents. It's hard to say for sure, but John Wayne may have been one of those killed by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders