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mousey musings
Wednesday, August 31, 2005
As I sift through the reports coming out of New Orleans, I am struck by how much the chaos resembles the hypothetical aftermath of a nuclear strike on a major urban center. The casualties aren't comparable, of course, but the total collapse of local health services, the creation of hundreds of thousands of homeless people, and the breakdown of law and order all remind me of the single-city scenarios described in nuclear war literature. How well equipped are we to deal with a major metropolitan area becoming uninhabitable for weeks or months?
Imagine that the same situation in New Orleans was compounded by radioactivity, hundreds of thousands of seriously wounded people, fallout downwind, and the complete destruction of the inner core of the city. How would our social system, already taxed from responding to a "mere" hurricane, be able to cope? This little thought experiment ought to make us think twice about allowing arms control talks with the Russians to stall indefinitely. There are still tens of thousands of nuclear weapons in the world; perhaps it's time to think about what effect even one of them might have on our modern society.
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