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.
4 comments:
What a stupid blog. Don't forget to turn out the lights when you leave Doc!
Ah Toodles (and Good Lord?)... do I recognize your voice here again?
Speak up... say something more coherent than "what a stupid blog".
Make your own statement, defend your own opinions, don't just be a jerk...
Thanks for writing this.
Now you're making numbers up.
The collapse and eruption of mount st. helens moved some 4 cubic kilometers of Earth (2.8 in the landslide, the rest in the form of lateral blast and other effects) or about one cubic mile. That is a fair amount of energy that was involved, on the order of 10 megatons. But think now: The mk41 thermonuclear weapon yields 25 megatons, while the device itself weighs at a mere 4.5 tonnes.
What you don't seem to comprehend is that in an air burst of a nuclear device, the main source of destruction comes from the air concussion and thermals.
An erupting volcano on the other hand destroys through the massive amounts of earth moved, in the form of pyroclastic surges which deposit thick layers of dust on the landscape. Now the concept of an underground nuclear detonation comes to mind, which produces exactly the same effect. Why can't plants grow on this? Very simple, the dust doesn't contain the minerals required for plants to grow, thus it can take 20 years or more to repopulate the land.
Krakatoa was about 150 megatons, and it moved about 20 cubic kilometer of land. The yield seems to be proportional to the mass moved in the eruption. Nothing strange here.
At the height of the cold war, the nuclear stockpile was 50000-100000 weapons, with a combined yield of about 30 gigatons. A hurricane is a very large weather system, and lots of air masses moved, 8 gigatons is not surprising.
Also, the dino-killer meteor was equivalent to 100 teratons of TNT, a 3 order of a magnitude difference to what you suggested.
The amount of solar radiation smashing the Earth every second is about 32 megatons, you've not done your math or you would also think the sun outputs many times more energy than it does.
And, to say the least, I'm extremely tired of people saying "man, we are so weak and nature is so powerful!", or people trying to downplay nuclear weapons. Could you just stop doing that for once?
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