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“If the United States and Russia go to war today, it’s not going to be one relatively small bomb used on one or two cities, as was the case in 1945; it’s going to be many bombs used against many cities, and these bombs will be 10 to 50 times more powerful than the one that destroyed Hiroshima,” he said. “If that were happen, within a thousandth of a second, a fireball would form reaching out two miles in every direction, four miles across. Within this entire area, everything would be vaporized — buildings, trees, people ... the upper le“vel of the Earth itself would disappear.
Back in the ’80s, everyone understood that nuclear war was a real threat; people were concerned about it, and they took political action to try to end the Cold War, work that was ultimately successful. But when the Cold War ended, everyone assumed that the danger had passed, and they stopped paying attention to the issue.”
“To a distance of four miles in every direction, the explosion would gener- ate winds of 600 miles per hour,” he went on. “Mechanical forces of that nature destroy anything that human beings can build. To a distance of six miles in every direction, the heat would be so great that automobiles would melt, and to a distance of 16 miles in every direction, the heat would still
be so intense that everything flammable would burn — paper, cloth, wood, gasoline, heating oil, plastic ... it would all ignite. There would be hundreds of thousands of fires, which over the next half hour, would coalesce into a giant firestorm 32 miles across, covering more than 800 square miles. Within this entire area, the temperature would rise to 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, all the oxygen would be consumed, and every living thing would die.
“In the case of Boston, we’re talking about 3 million to 5 million people, depending on the time of day,” he continued. “In the case of New York, 12 million to 15 million people, and if we have a major war with Russia, that’s
Please see Weapons, page 7
Dr. Ira Helfand says the war in Ukraine presents an opportunity to gain real progress
in ongoing efforts to ban the use of nuclear weapons.
So, he isn’t at all shy about painting what he said is a much more accurate picture, and he did so for HCN.