Nagasaki Japan August 6, 1945 - 21 Kilotons
Mount St. Helens Washington, May 18, 1980 - 24 Megatons
Disclaimer: This post is not intended to defend the design, manufacture, or use of Nuclear Weapons, especially against civilian populations. It is intended to try to offer some humbling perspective on the works of man.
This post is in response to Ms. Shigeko Sasamori's visit to Los Alamos this weekend. Unfortunately, we did not attend her public speaking engagement.
About 6 years ago, former Beat Poet and contemporary Buddhist, Gary Snyder came to Santa Fe to read from his latest book of poetry. While on stage, he told a very interesting pair of anecdotes:
It seems that in August of 1945, Snyder was hiking on Mount St. Helens and upon returning to the Forest camp at the base, read the newspapers announcing the devastating bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He reported thinking how those cities would not see life again for tens of thousands of years.
In May of 1980, Snyder was visiting Nagasaki where he marveled at how little evidence of the destruction of 1945 remained noticeable. He was in Nagasaki when he heard the news of the Mount St. Helens eruption and was immediately taken back to the days he hiked it's slopes while Nagasaki and Hiroshima were bombed. 20 or so years after the eruption, Snyder returned to Mt. St. Helens and saw the marvelous rebirth of an ecosystem yet-more fully destroyed than even that of an atomic blast.
Snyder did not make the comparison but with a little research we discovered that the estimated amount of energy released in the Mt. St. Helens eruption was about 24 Megatons, or about 3 orders of magnitude more energy than in the Nagasaki-21 Kiloton (or Hiroshima-16 Kiloton) bombs. Krakatoa was apparently good for about 200 Megatons.
A good hurricane is apparently worth 8 Gigatons or (yet another) 3 orders of magnitude. The combined nuclear stockpile around the world is estimated at around 13,000 weapons with a combined energy of about 5 Gigatons or one modest hurricane! Killer asteroids such as the one which may have wiped out the dinosaurs clock in at a mere 100 Gigatons.
56 people were known to be killed in the Mt. St. Helen's eruption while an estimated 200,000 were killed in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, also about 3 orders of magnitude difference. WWII included 40-70 Million deaths or 2 more orders of magnitude. The recent tsunami in southeast asia (2005) took a little over 200,000 lives.
Man is clearly pretty good at using his contained and directed energies at killing people while mother Nature wields quite a bit more on a regular basis but is a bit less bent on such directed violence. Until humans escalate to anti-matter weapons (1 lb => 20 Megatons), we will be quite second-rate to mother nature. The amount of solar radiation, for example, impinging on the earth every second is about 10^18 joules or a Gigaton per second. Imagine what the sun is generating!
Enough of the goofy anecdotes and numbers... but let's back down on our human arrogance a couple of notches and think about what we are doing.
and the 
I guess.
