eaz135 said:
Death Biscuit the statement i used about them being able to vapporize the planet 7 times was taken straight from a news report on tv a while ago. i dont think u understand how many nuclear weapons the usa has. they have nuclear silos scattered all over the continent. they have nuclear armed deep-sea submarines in every ocean in the world waiting to retailiate if some1 attacked the usa. should i go on ? and if u are bassing the power of a nuclear weapon on the blast of hiroshima dont.. compared to the nuclear weapons of today the atomic bomb droped on hiroshima is nothing more than a toy now.
Then the news report was poorly researched, and most likely bought into the often-sensationalised myth that nuclear weapons are capable of destroying the planet many times over. This false assumption is probably a legacy of the cold war era, where fears of nuclear armageddon were hyped up by protestors and cynics of nuclear weaponry: a scary thought to frighten the "duck and cover" generation. I am fully aware of America's nuclear might; about 40 000 nuclear warheads exist in the world of which America controls maybe a third. But the Earth is huge and the crust is thick, about 30 miles at most. The mantle is over a thousand miles thick.
You shouldn't overestimate the power of nuclear weapons, even the big 1 MT+ warheads that make up a large portion of America and Russia's arsenal. Awesome though these weapons are, in the greater scheme of things they don't actually do that much physical damage, especially when you take into account how massive the Earth truly is, and how much energy is required to seriously affect it. The actual impacts would be like thousands of pinpricks to the crust, creating a lot of little pockmarks, but little more than superficial wounds at the end of the day.
The real danger of nuclear weapons is what we associate with the after affects, such as the radioactive fallout, changes to the ecosystem and so on: the so-called "nuclear winter." Indeed, some scientists even speculate that the idea of nuclear winter itself is overly hyped, although I'm not sure I'm fully convinced by their arguments.
Remember as well that asteroids have struck our planet in the past with far more power than all our nuclear weapons combined; the infamous asteroid impact that supposedly wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago had a yield of more than 100 million megatons (some sources claim as high as 1 billion megatons or 1 petaton). The total yield of all our nuclear weapons amounts to about 30 000 megatons. So, that asteroid impact
alone had the equivalent power of more than 3300 full-scale nuclear wars with our weapons. It devastated the surface, blanketed the atmosphere and caused the extinction of more than 80 percent of all life, and yet the crater it left is only 200 kilometres wide. . . .
It's also possible that you misinterpreted the report, or have included the word vaporised because you forgot what term was originally used. You also have to remember that when somebody says "destroy the world" they might not necessarily mean to annihilate the planet completely; what they're probably implying is the devastation of the planet's surface.
