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Posted by David Sherman on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 20:17:48 :
In Reply to: Re: why ? posted by Super Bob on Thursday, February 26, 2009 at 18:05:02 :
If a nuclear bomb explodes 10 miles away, it's not going to do any blast damage to my neighborhood, and if it's 100 miles away, or overhead in space, I might not even notice it, but the EMP would still fry any modern un-hardened electronics. And yes, in the event of a nuclear blast, being able to go somewhere might actually be quite important to me.
Your notion is like saying "Why design your house to withstand a 100 mph wind, since if a tornado hits it, it'll still get blown away?" Sure you can't survive a direct hit from either a tornado or an atomic bomb, but you can definitely survive a close miss, and having done so, in both cases it might be convenient to have a vehicle that runs.
Maybe I think about such things because I grew up in Seattle, not far from several Boeing plants, and quite a few neighbors had bomb shelters. There were three old Nike missile sites in the area, two of which we used as playgrounds. My father worked on the B-52 and on the whole series of Minuteman missiles, so the probability of nuclear war was just part of life and something one took reasonable precautions about.
Nowadays the common opinion seems to be that if somebody lights a nuke, we're all gonna die, but I don't accept that. The biggest nukes are still small compared to the Earth. Blast and radiation decrease with the square of the distance. Nuclear weapons and guided missiles are both incredibly complicated machines that have never been tested together. Many of them won't work right when fired. Both major nuclear powers have probably overstated their numbers of warheads for negotiating purposes. No weapon has ever been invented that hasn't been used eventually, except for the hydrogen bomb. I don't expect it to be the exception, but on the other hand, I don't think a nuclear war would be anywhere near the total destruction that people imagine it to be. Lastly, listen to Vladimir Putin speak some time, and think, "Does this seem like the kind of man who would go down without a fight?"
I'm not paranoid, and I don't lie awake at night worrying about it, but I do like to be somewhat prepared, just as I am for forest fires and blizzards.