This is a rare wedge issue among boomers. The much derided duck-and-cover drills, which really would have protected kids from the blast effects of a nearby atomic bomb, became nonsensical after the advent of far more powerful thermonuclear weapons that would just vaporize them.https://twitter.com/ktumulty/status/1228668771759542272 …
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So older people remember them, while younger boomers never had them. It is insufficiently appreciated that nuclear weapons arrived in two generations 7 years apart, the second generation a thousand times more powerful than the first, and with no theoretical limit on that power.
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A fun thought experiment is to imagine if natural uranium had a different isotope ratio, so that atomic weapons did not require enrichment, and whichever Hapsburg prince controlled the Bohemian mines that were its only known source for centuries had been able to nuke his rivals.
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Replying to @Pinboard
There's an interesting digression in
@HardcoreHistory about what leaders of various other ages would probably do with nukes. Worth listening to if you've got some hours handy.1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
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There was a natural one of these a billion years ago or so, and it functioned as a kind of hot spring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor …
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