5 ms·

We don't have enough nukes (Data visualization)

43 points by dirtyaura 17y ago

cwan 17y ago
The data visualization is pretty well done and convincing. That said, I think the concern about nukes that most people have is less about the possibility that it will wipe out civilization but instead, a bit more selfish - themselves/ourselves.
- kschults 17y ago
  It's convincing, until you realize that the author is treating nukes as just really big bombs. If he's only looking at the area of total destruction, then he should be counting all explosives, since that's ignoring where the real deadliness of nuclear weapons lies. First off, the heat wave let off will be lethal at a much larger radius than where it will cause total destruction. Total destruction means that everything is gone: buildings, cars, people, anything that was there will be unrecognizable/gone. For a nuke, this is a very small part of the destruction caused. The fallout and radiation will carry much much farther than that. If you tried, you could probably cover the entire earth with fallout with fewer than 100 strategically placed nukes. It's not beyond belief that ten thousand would both cover the earth with concentrated radiation, and cause enough fallout to create nuclear winter. Volcanic explosions are often enough to affect sunsets on the other side of the world. If we exploded nuclear weapons all over the world, there'd be enough debris in the air to block out the sun, causing a significant temperature drop, and killing plants around the world. Scratch the global food supply, and we're all toast.
vijayr 17y ago
OK, are we supposed to feel happy that we can only kill less than 1% of the world's population with the available nukes or feel sad that we have spent so much time, energy and money developing weapons, just one of which can completely wipe out everything in a full 15 sq km area?
physcab 17y ago
Well, ok. I don't think nukes were developed to wipe out humanity. They were developed to cause the utmost amount of destruction to a single point of interest. I don't think Iran wants 1000 nukes. I think they want one, so they can aim it at the Saudia Arabia oilfields.
- JimmyL 17y ago
  They don't want to aim it at the Saudi oilfields, they want to aim it at Mecca.
  - jackdawjack 17y ago
    Really? I'd have thought jerusalem would have been a more likely target
    - JimmyL 17y ago
      When thinking about nukes, remember that the whole point is to not fire them - their value lies in deterrence, and in everyone knowing the horrible things that would happen if they were fired (this is less the case with tactical nuclear weapons, but Iran doesn't have those). So if you're using them for deterrence - especially in the case when you're up against a much stronger enemy - you target them (and announce this) in such a way as to cause the greatest damage for the greatest number of parties. Let's say Iran had a nuke, and was feeling so threatened that it had to launch its nuke. If it takes out Jerusalem, it destroys a significant pilgrimage location for Islam, as well as the capital of the (local) great enemy. The US then comes and levels most of the country, and the Israelis likely drop a nuke on Tehran. There's also the pretty good possibility that the Israelis would be successful in shooting down the missile, but would still launch an overwhelming military response. Israel is now in bad shape, Iran is gone, and the rest of the local Arab countries are pretty unhappy, but still alive and kicking. If they launch on Mecca, there's a much greater change of the thing detonating where it's supposed to. They also destroy a very significant Islamic pilgrimage site. The rest of the Arab world then converges on attacking Iran (with American blessing), as well as Israel (the Sunni states would use the logic that those evil Shiites must have conspired with the Israelis to do this). This results in the US now getting involved militarily to protect Israel, and now you've got a pretty serious war going on in the Middle East, disturbingly close to both India and Russia. Of those two, the second causes much more hell - which is what they're going for. The second also has the benefit of making the Islamic states much more interested in dealing with their threats, and possibly getting the US to (covertly) be more accommodating.
dtap 17y ago
I think he doesn't have a full understanding of nuclear fallout. Yes, a nuke will vaporize 14.9 km^2, but it will render a much larger area unlivable. Also, many people will die in the following months from radiation poisoning. There is also the possibility of nuclear winter.
- nudded 17y ago
  +1 Am I the only one who heard the rumor that we have enough nukes to destroy humanity 8 times?
  - lyellr 17y ago
    yeah i've heard that, and after reading this i still wouldn't be surprised if we do. the effect of radiation clouds, nuclear winter, etc. is far far far more devastating than the blasts themselves, which even according to this guy could still kill hundreds of millions.
  - caffeine 17y ago
    After the water supplies are contaminated, the soil is rendered infertile, most ecosystems implode, and the climate changes ... sure, some humans might survive. But I wouldn't envy their lives of eating cockroaches and moss and delivering misshapen children.
- MikeCapone 17y ago
  Civilization is more fragile than most people think. Destroy enough of the infrastructure, and it won't be easy to get back. There might still be people left, but it doesn't mean they'll have a good time. For more about existential risks (and how to mitigate them), check out the work of the Lifeboat Foundation (http://www.lifeboat.com http://www.lifeboat.com)
- marvin 17y ago
  That is an unfounded claim. According to Nuclear War Survival Skills (a downloadable book on the construction of improvised fallout shelters), nuclear fallout remains directly lethal only for two weeks. This is the kind of fallout produced from a detonation where the fireball touches the earth. After this period, radiation from the fallout is weak enough that it is safe to move about for a limited time each day. A nuclear detonation in the air produces much less fallout, and it will be diluted over a much larger area unless there is precipation. Any discussion beyond this is guesswork..as far as I know we have never really studied this stuff. It would be interesting if someone could point out that I'm wrong. The following article claims that the number of birth defects and cancer-related deaths from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings are too small to be seen in the (admittedly sparse) data collected. I think it's a good idea to study the traditional notion that nuclear war is so extremely destructive. The subject seems to be a voluntary intellectual wasteland - no one ever wants to find out how things really would work, only quote the canonical belief that any nuclear war would cause huge amounts of deaths from cancer, birth abnormalities, barren fields, genetic mutations and nuclear winter. What such a war would do to society is an entirely different matter, but this is almost never discussed.
rriepe 17y ago
How does this article get so in-depth without mentioning a nuclear winter? The real fear of nuclear war is societal collapse, radiation being everywhere, and the ensuing nuclear winter, which (according to some) could wipe out humanity. Not the direct blasts.
ams6110 17y ago
The doctrine of the cold war was MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. But the point wasn't that we had enough weapons to totally eliminate each other's populations, it was that we could totally destroy each other's economic and governmental infrastructure.
mmphosis 17y ago
"Yup. Thanks for all the feedback. I’m going to redraft the image with radiation, fallout, nuclear winter, failure rates, poisoned water supplies, crop deaths, deformed babies, and cancer all factored in. After I’ve had this stiff drink…"
- yannis 17y ago
  How about looking it also from another angle. How many missiles do you need to wipe out all the big Cities and capitals of the world. Probably only one missile per City. Given +- 200 countries and that is the end of civilization as we know it. From there onwards whoever survive will have to compete like cockroaches to continue living.
  - three14 17y ago
    That was discussed in the linked post.
  - lhorie 17y ago
    If you read the whole thing, you'll see he calculates that too: "99293 heavy duty nukes required to wipe out world's city dwellers, we have 10227".
    - yannis 17y ago
      I have read the article and my point was different. I said .. and civilization as we know it will end. I used my elementary school maths. The current number of countries in the world are 192, since some of them have two capitals I rounded the number to 200. His statistics for London showed that 1 warhead was enough to wipe it out and London is spread out unlike Singapore or Hong Kong. As per my calculation 200 missiles are more than enough to destroy our current civilization.
      - lhorie 17y ago
        I'd imagine nuking Washington wouldn't change the US as a whole (perhaps you'd get another post-9/11 terror obsession, but I'd think the economic infrastructure would still remain rather intact). I think number of capitals isn't a very good measure of economic infrastructure: Monaco has some 30k people, but a non-capital city like Sao Paulo has 11 million. One could say "ok, let's drop Monaco and nuke Sao Paulo then", and then maybe nuke Boston and Sydney too while we're at it. But you're going to run out of bombs way before you run out of large cities.
pixcavator 17y ago
Just one correction: Non Nuclear Proliferation Pact has nothing to do with reduced stockpiles.
yread 17y ago
The thing is that even though we have like 10k warheads we have a much more limited amount of missiles, so we wouldn't be able to deliver them. On the other hand if we wanted to wipe out only cities bigger than 2 000 000 it would be ok: theres only 200 of them
tezza 17y ago
Everything is even better. There is no way that the numbers will be as high as the (excellent) analysis suggests: --- * This presumes all parties collaborate to destroy mutually exclusive regions (unlikely) * Multiple nukes will be launched at particular sites to avoid countermeasures * Some of those countermeasures will be effective * The main targets of nukes will be nuke launching sites, which will cut down the retaliatory nuking * Nuke launching sites are not in populated cities (generally)
- pbhj 17y ago
  "The main targets of nukes will be nuke launching sites [...]" Probably not. If USA takes one in the eye (Washington DC) from Russia then they want to hit Moscow immediately after to show that a) we're fighting back, stop now if you don't want to end the world, b) everyone will notice and possibly you might cut off the head before further damage is done. Yes silos will be a priority target, but not necessarily above major cities.
tetha 17y ago
Mh, just wondering: What about 'creative' nuke usage? Basically, I am thinking about not dropping a nuclear bomb on, say, Berlin, but rather using bombs to create major disasters, like tsunamis (either by setting off the bomb in an ocean, or by destroying almost collapsed landmasses, which would then drop into the water and cause monster-waves), or by abusing tectonic knowledge and nukes to create major earth-quakes? Is such thing efficient enough to be reasoned about when trying to calculate the overall killing power of all nuclear weapons?
- njharman 17y ago
  You sir, should study to become a super-villian.
- mr_luc 17y ago
  The Russians planned that, at one point! I remember reading, back when I was in junior high school, that the Russians had some plan involving multi-hundred-megaton nukes on or near the ocean floor off the pacific coast. Supposedly it would have created a massively radioactive tidal wave that wouldn't have stopped until it hit the Rockies. This is something I vaguely remember reading in the school library, thinking was cool, and using in a report. So it may be my imagination, or it may have been sensationalist writing, or it may have been a real plan, because the Soviets and the US had no shortage of real, ridiculous plans.
- eru 17y ago
  Interesting idea. Earth-quakes release much more energy than most nukes. I do not believe it's possible to ignite a quake this way. Tsunamis may be possible with some help from thawing methane ice.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
raquo 17y ago
I wonder how much time is needed to launch all these missiles. They aren't all in ready state in a silo, are they?
- moe 17y ago
  I'd think that those which are not in immediate ready-state are probably stored very near a silo or hangar. Simply because it doesn't make much sense to store a nuke very far from a location where it could be used (except when that nuke is heading for disassembly). Consequently I wouldn't be surprised if it was merely a matter of hours (minus the odd dud)...
andreyf 17y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter Also, I think three well placed nukes in the US could guarantee the collapse of American civilization. Always remember - if the trucks stop driving, it ain't long 'till everybody starves.
justin_vanw 17y ago
Radation, disruption of food production, nuclear weather effects (nuclear winter or whatever), disruption of medicine production, disruption of police protection. These will kill far more than the actual explosions.
windsurfer 17y ago
One Trident submarine can stay at sea for up to two years without refueling. It can produce it's own recycled water, and produces little to no waste. It is only limited by food, since it is powered by a nuclear reactor. Each submarine is armed with 24 (nuclear) Trident II long-range ballistic missiles, each one able to hit almost anywhere in the world. Each one of these missiles can be launched from underwater at a moments notice. In mid-flight, each missile can split up into 12 individual bomblets, each of which is capable of wiping out a city. One submarine, which is manned by less than 200 men, could destroy 288 major cities in half an hour from anywhere in the world. That's a frightening thought.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  It is a frightening thought. We have technology that can keep 200 men alive for over two years, including all of their needs for food, air, water, electricity and such, and yet we're still getting around by burning old plants from millions of years ago.
  - georgekv 17y ago
    That would be because nuclear power generation is still a bogeyman in some people's minds. Just imagine the true "green revolution" that could be brought about with a few hundred more nuclear plants in the US alone.
    - jhancock 17y ago
      To make it cost effective, the U.S. has to stop making enemies. Do you know how much it will cost to secure a few hundred nuclear power plants from people willing to blow themselves up?
      - elai 17y ago
        As much as 200 more low security prisons? 20'000 federal employees (to be generous) is peanuts to a project of that scale. How many attacks have there been on power plants anyway? You cant make modern designs go boom, just melt.
ivankirigin 17y ago
First two comments here and first one there are right: fallout. I don't have a source, but I've been told that we at one point had enough nukes to kill everybody a few thousand times over.
tel 17y ago
I love how this post incidentally highlights the differences between science/statistics and information-centric graphic design and then shows how easily they become unified when you just touch the "scientific method" even tangentially. We can all argue about his model now and think critically about the threat of nuclear suicide due to a simple hypothesis, curious data, and some nice visualization to communicate it quickly.
sgoranson 17y ago
Clearly this guy has never played CivIII.
- duncanj 17y ago
  Civ III taught me that cruise missles are worth more than nukes, are cheaper to build, and don't set the world against you for using them.
xtho 17y ago
Obviously the author wasn't born yet when the cold war was still going on.
rbanffy 17y ago
While we don't have enough nukes to quickly and painlessly incinerate all humans. But we do have quite enough to bomb ourselves back into stone-age. It's not a comforting thought.

43 points by dirtyaura 17y ago

cwan 17y ago

The data visualization is pretty well done and convincing. That said, I think the concern about nukes that most people have is less about the possibility that it will wipe out civilization but instead, a bit more selfish - themselves/ourselves.

kschults 17y ago
It's convincing, until you realize that the author is treating nukes as just really big bombs. If he's only looking at the area of total destruction, then he should be counting all explosives, since that's ignoring where the real deadliness of nuclear weapons lies. First off, the heat wave let off will be lethal at a much larger radius than where it will cause total destruction. Total destruction means that everything is gone: buildings, cars, people, anything that was there will be unrecognizable/gone. For a nuke, this is a very small part of the destruction caused. The fallout and radiation will carry much much farther than that. If you tried, you could probably cover the entire earth with fallout with fewer than 100 strategically placed nukes. It's not beyond belief that ten thousand would both cover the earth with concentrated radiation, and cause enough fallout to create nuclear winter. Volcanic explosions are often enough to affect sunsets on the other side of the world. If we exploded nuclear weapons all over the world, there'd be enough debris in the air to block out the sun, causing a significant temperature drop, and killing plants around the world. Scratch the global food supply, and we're all toast.

vijayr 17y ago

OK, are we supposed to feel happy that we can only kill less than 1% of the world's population with the available nukes or feel sad that we have spent so much time, energy and money developing weapons, just one of which can completely wipe out everything in a full 15 sq km area?

physcab 17y ago

Well, ok. I don't think nukes were developed to wipe out humanity. They were developed to cause the utmost amount of destruction to a single point of interest. I don't think Iran wants 1000 nukes. I think they want one, so they can aim it at the Saudia Arabia oilfields.

JimmyL 17y ago
They don't want to aim it at the Saudi oilfields, they want to aim it at Mecca.
- jackdawjack 17y ago
  Really? I'd have thought jerusalem would have been a more likely target
  - JimmyL 17y ago
    When thinking about nukes, remember that the whole point is to not fire them - their value lies in deterrence, and in everyone knowing the horrible things that would happen if they were fired (this is less the case with tactical nuclear weapons, but Iran doesn't have those). So if you're using them for deterrence - especially in the case when you're up against a much stronger enemy - you target them (and announce this) in such a way as to cause the greatest damage for the greatest number of parties. Let's say Iran had a nuke, and was feeling so threatened that it had to launch its nuke. If it takes out Jerusalem, it destroys a significant pilgrimage location for Islam, as well as the capital of the (local) great enemy. The US then comes and levels most of the country, and the Israelis likely drop a nuke on Tehran. There's also the pretty good possibility that the Israelis would be successful in shooting down the missile, but would still launch an overwhelming military response. Israel is now in bad shape, Iran is gone, and the rest of the local Arab countries are pretty unhappy, but still alive and kicking. If they launch on Mecca, there's a much greater change of the thing detonating where it's supposed to. They also destroy a very significant Islamic pilgrimage site. The rest of the Arab world then converges on attacking Iran (with American blessing), as well as Israel (the Sunni states would use the logic that those evil Shiites must have conspired with the Israelis to do this). This results in the US now getting involved militarily to protect Israel, and now you've got a pretty serious war going on in the Middle East, disturbingly close to both India and Russia. Of those two, the second causes much more hell - which is what they're going for. The second also has the benefit of making the Islamic states much more interested in dealing with their threats, and possibly getting the US to (covertly) be more accommodating.

dtap 17y ago

I think he doesn't have a full understanding of nuclear fallout. Yes, a nuke will vaporize 14.9 km^2, but it will render a much larger area unlivable. Also, many people will die in the following months from radiation poisoning. There is also the possibility of nuclear winter.

nudded 17y ago
+1 Am I the only one who heard the rumor that we have enough nukes to destroy humanity 8 times?
- lyellr 17y ago
  yeah i've heard that, and after reading this i still wouldn't be surprised if we do. the effect of radiation clouds, nuclear winter, etc. is far far far more devastating than the blasts themselves, which even according to this guy could still kill hundreds of millions.
- caffeine 17y ago
  After the water supplies are contaminated, the soil is rendered infertile, most ecosystems implode, and the climate changes ... sure, some humans might survive. But I wouldn't envy their lives of eating cockroaches and moss and delivering misshapen children.
MikeCapone 17y ago
Civilization is more fragile than most people think. Destroy enough of the infrastructure, and it won't be easy to get back. There might still be people left, but it doesn't mean they'll have a good time. For more about existential risks (and how to mitigate them), check out the work of the Lifeboat Foundation (http://www.lifeboat.com http://www.lifeboat.com)
marvin 17y ago
That is an unfounded claim. According to Nuclear War Survival Skills (a downloadable book on the construction of improvised fallout shelters), nuclear fallout remains directly lethal only for two weeks. This is the kind of fallout produced from a detonation where the fireball touches the earth. After this period, radiation from the fallout is weak enough that it is safe to move about for a limited time each day. A nuclear detonation in the air produces much less fallout, and it will be diluted over a much larger area unless there is precipation. Any discussion beyond this is guesswork..as far as I know we have never really studied this stuff. It would be interesting if someone could point out that I'm wrong. The following article claims that the number of birth defects and cancer-related deaths from the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings are too small to be seen in the (admittedly sparse) data collected. I think it's a good idea to study the traditional notion that nuclear war is so extremely destructive. The subject seems to be a voluntary intellectual wasteland - no one ever wants to find out how things really would work, only quote the canonical belief that any nuclear war would cause huge amounts of deaths from cancer, birth abnormalities, barren fields, genetic mutations and nuclear winter. What such a war would do to society is an entirely different matter, but this is almost never discussed.

rriepe 17y ago

How does this article get so in-depth without mentioning a nuclear winter? The real fear of nuclear war is societal collapse, radiation being everywhere, and the ensuing nuclear winter, which (according to some) could wipe out humanity. Not the direct blasts.

ams6110 17y ago

The doctrine of the cold war was MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction. But the point wasn't that we had enough weapons to totally eliminate each other's populations, it was that we could totally destroy each other's economic and governmental infrastructure.

mmphosis 17y ago

"Yup. Thanks for all the feedback. I’m going to redraft the image with radiation, fallout, nuclear winter, failure rates, poisoned water supplies, crop deaths, deformed babies, and cancer all factored in. After I’ve had this stiff drink…"

yannis 17y ago
How about looking it also from another angle. How many missiles do you need to wipe out all the big Cities and capitals of the world. Probably only one missile per City. Given +- 200 countries and that is the end of civilization as we know it. From there onwards whoever survive will have to compete like cockroaches to continue living.
- three14 17y ago
  That was discussed in the linked post.
- lhorie 17y ago
  If you read the whole thing, you'll see he calculates that too: "99293 heavy duty nukes required to wipe out world's city dwellers, we have 10227".
  - yannis 17y ago
    I have read the article and my point was different. I said .. and civilization as we know it will end. I used my elementary school maths. The current number of countries in the world are 192, since some of them have two capitals I rounded the number to 200. His statistics for London showed that 1 warhead was enough to wipe it out and London is spread out unlike Singapore or Hong Kong. As per my calculation 200 missiles are more than enough to destroy our current civilization.
    - lhorie 17y ago
      I'd imagine nuking Washington wouldn't change the US as a whole (perhaps you'd get another post-9/11 terror obsession, but I'd think the economic infrastructure would still remain rather intact). I think number of capitals isn't a very good measure of economic infrastructure: Monaco has some 30k people, but a non-capital city like Sao Paulo has 11 million. One could say "ok, let's drop Monaco and nuke Sao Paulo then", and then maybe nuke Boston and Sydney too while we're at it. But you're going to run out of bombs way before you run out of large cities.

pixcavator 17y ago

Just one correction: Non Nuclear Proliferation Pact has nothing to do with reduced stockpiles.

yread 17y ago

The thing is that even though we have like 10k warheads we have a much more limited amount of missiles, so we wouldn't be able to deliver them. On the other hand if we wanted to wipe out only cities bigger than 2 000 000 it would be ok: theres only 200 of them

tezza 17y ago

Everything is even better. There is no way that the numbers will be as high as the (excellent) analysis suggests: --- * This presumes all parties collaborate to destroy mutually exclusive regions (unlikely) * Multiple nukes will be launched at particular sites to avoid countermeasures * Some of those countermeasures will be effective * The main targets of nukes will be nuke launching sites, which will cut down the retaliatory nuking * Nuke launching sites are not in populated cities (generally)

pbhj 17y ago
"The main targets of nukes will be nuke launching sites [...]" Probably not. If USA takes one in the eye (Washington DC) from Russia then they want to hit Moscow immediately after to show that a) we're fighting back, stop now if you don't want to end the world, b) everyone will notice and possibly you might cut off the head before further damage is done. Yes silos will be a priority target, but not necessarily above major cities.

tetha 17y ago

Mh, just wondering: What about 'creative' nuke usage? Basically, I am thinking about not dropping a nuclear bomb on, say, Berlin, but rather using bombs to create major disasters, like tsunamis (either by setting off the bomb in an ocean, or by destroying almost collapsed landmasses, which would then drop into the water and cause monster-waves), or by abusing tectonic knowledge and nukes to create major earth-quakes? Is such thing efficient enough to be reasoned about when trying to calculate the overall killing power of all nuclear weapons?

njharman 17y ago
You sir, should study to become a super-villian.
mr_luc 17y ago
The Russians planned that, at one point! I remember reading, back when I was in junior high school, that the Russians had some plan involving multi-hundred-megaton nukes on or near the ocean floor off the pacific coast. Supposedly it would have created a massively radioactive tidal wave that wouldn't have stopped until it hit the Rockies. This is something I vaguely remember reading in the school library, thinking was cool, and using in a report. So it may be my imagination, or it may have been sensationalist writing, or it may have been a real plan, because the Soviets and the US had no shortage of real, ridiculous plans.
eru 17y ago
Interesting idea. Earth-quakes release much more energy than most nukes. I do not believe it's possible to ignite a quake this way. Tsunamis may be possible with some help from thawing methane ice.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

raquo 17y ago

I wonder how much time is needed to launch all these missiles. They aren't all in ready state in a silo, are they?

moe 17y ago
I'd think that those which are not in immediate ready-state are probably stored very near a silo or hangar. Simply because it doesn't make much sense to store a nuke very far from a location where it could be used (except when that nuke is heading for disassembly). Consequently I wouldn't be surprised if it was merely a matter of hours (minus the odd dud)...

andreyf 17y ago

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter Also, I think three well placed nukes in the US could guarantee the collapse of American civilization. Always remember - if the trucks stop driving, it ain't long 'till everybody starves.

justin_vanw 17y ago

Radation, disruption of food production, nuclear weather effects (nuclear winter or whatever), disruption of medicine production, disruption of police protection. These will kill far more than the actual explosions.

windsurfer 17y ago

One Trident submarine can stay at sea for up to two years without refueling. It can produce it's own recycled water, and produces little to no waste. It is only limited by food, since it is powered by a nuclear reactor. Each submarine is armed with 24 (nuclear) Trident II long-range ballistic missiles, each one able to hit almost anywhere in the world. Each one of these missiles can be launched from underwater at a moments notice. In mid-flight, each missile can split up into 12 individual bomblets, each of which is capable of wiping out a city. One submarine, which is manned by less than 200 men, could destroy 288 major cities in half an hour from anywhere in the world. That's a frightening thought.

DanielBMarkham 17y ago
It is a frightening thought. We have technology that can keep 200 men alive for over two years, including all of their needs for food, air, water, electricity and such, and yet we're still getting around by burning old plants from millions of years ago.
- georgekv 17y ago
  That would be because nuclear power generation is still a bogeyman in some people's minds. Just imagine the true "green revolution" that could be brought about with a few hundred more nuclear plants in the US alone.
  - jhancock 17y ago
    To make it cost effective, the U.S. has to stop making enemies. Do you know how much it will cost to secure a few hundred nuclear power plants from people willing to blow themselves up?
    - elai 17y ago
      As much as 200 more low security prisons? 20'000 federal employees (to be generous) is peanuts to a project of that scale. How many attacks have there been on power plants anyway? You cant make modern designs go boom, just melt.

ivankirigin 17y ago

First two comments here and first one there are right: fallout. I don't have a source, but I've been told that we at one point had enough nukes to kill everybody a few thousand times over.

tel 17y ago

I love how this post incidentally highlights the differences between science/statistics and information-centric graphic design and then shows how easily they become unified when you just touch the "scientific method" even tangentially. We can all argue about his model now and think critically about the threat of nuclear suicide due to a simple hypothesis, curious data, and some nice visualization to communicate it quickly.

sgoranson 17y ago

Clearly this guy has never played CivIII.

duncanj 17y ago
Civ III taught me that cruise missles are worth more than nukes, are cheaper to build, and don't set the world against you for using them.

xtho 17y ago

Obviously the author wasn't born yet when the cold war was still going on.

rbanffy 17y ago

While we don't have enough nukes to quickly and painlessly incinerate all humans. But we do have quite enough to bomb ourselves back into stone-age. It's not a comforting thought.