Between the chance that a candidate better known for his onscreen appearances in the entertainment industry and an increasingly volatile Russia, 2016 can often feel like it’s really buying into 1980s nostalgia a bit too much. Which means the time is ripe to buy into the nuclear weapons panic that swept across the world at the time as well, leading to terrifying dramas like The Day After and Threads – only now the bombs are much bigger and even more devastating.
According to the embedded video below, which aims to explain the advancement in nuclear missile technology in the seven decades since America dropped the bombs that ended World War II, the size of the mushroom clouds have ballooned so dramatically that Hiroshima has become a unit of measurement. To wit, the largest nuclear warhead ever detonated on the planet was carried out by the USSR, which in 1961 detonated a 50-megaton thermonuclear weapon on the remote Severny Island – a bomb with the destructive force of 3,333 Hiroshimas.
But that device, the so-called Tsar Bomba, pales in comparison to another one planned by the Soviet Union, double the size and easily capable of destroying New York City and its suburbs. As explained by the YouTube channel RealLifeLore, given the current state of the world and its military love of nuclear deterrents, it might be time to give peace a chance...
[H/T: Gizmodo]
