While there is much excitement about asteroids and large meteors, people have forgotten that we have thousands of nuclear weapons with the same explosive power. We don’t have to wait centuries for big meteors and worry about deflecting them, when we have our own home-grown nuclear blasts ready to launch in a minute and just as unstoppable once launched. One big difference is that 80% of meteors will land harmlessly in the ocean, which is not so with nuclear weapons. Another is that the Chelyabinsk meteor exploded at 12-15 miles in altitude, and only smaller fragments hit the ground, not so with nuclear weapons that will explode at an altitude to cause maximum damage. Another is that even over land, there are vast tracts that are sparsely inhabited that may be hit like Tunguska in Siberia in 1908, not so with nuclear weapons that can be precisely targeted. Meteors don’t leave deadly radiation, not so with nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons will cause forest fires that will send ash to the stratosphere where they will cut sunlight and lower the earth’s temperature for years to a decade in a nuclear winter, even from limited 50 warhead local wars, not so with meteors. Nuclear weapons will kill and injure millions or billions of people and destroy our entire civilization or major countries involved in such a war, not so unless with 100 million year rare asteroid hits. Nuclear weapons are a lose, lose, lose, lose, lose and lose situation compared to meteors.
The asteroid that just passed us was 50 yards across and rated at 2.4 megatons of TNT should it have struck the earth. The Chelyabinsk Russian meteor was 55 feet across and rated at an amazing 500 kilotons of TNT. Its volume was then 1/27 th of the asteroid. It weighed 10,000 pounds, was going at 40,000 miles per hour, and exploded at 12-15 miles high. Fortunately, nobody was killed by that meteor, but a thousand were injured, mostly by flying glass. The warhead that was dropped on Hiroshima was 13-18 kiloton by comparison. Wikipedia has several informative articles on nuclear weapons. The largest US nuclear test was 15 megatons in 1954, beating the asteroid by a long shot. The US has 5,000 weapons now. Russia has 10,000 nuclear weapons, the largest test being 24 megatons. China has around 500. The United Kingdom has 225, France has 300. India and Pakistan are each supposed to have around 100 weapons. The US nuclear weapons have a range of yields from 100 kiloton to a megaton of TNT, according to Wikipedia.
President Obama has stated that he wants to reduce our ready to fire nuclear weapons of about 1,500 by a few hundred, by further negotiations with Russia. I strongly support that.
Don’t get me wrong about space objects. I strongly support the astronomical program to rapidly identify all near earth orbital objects, that has been cut back by Congress. I just think that if meteors now scare us, we should channel that into reducing the nuclear threat which is much more deadly, and directly under our control. We should also prepare for other disasters of nature that we know will happen in the near future, such as earthquakes, floods, droughts, pollution, hurricanes, and sea level rise.
