New Clear We Action Program
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The conventional bombs of World War II were called
blockbusters. Filled with twenty tons of TNT,
they could destroy a city block. All the bombs
dropped on all the cities in World War II amounted
to some two million tons, two megatons, of TNT---
Coventry and Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo, all
the death that rained from the skies between 1939
and 1945: a hundred thousand blockbusters, two
megatons. By the late twentieth century, two megatons
was the energy released in the explosion of a
single more or less humdrum thermonuclear bomb:
one bomb with the destructive force of the Second
World War. But there are tens of thousands of
nuclear weapons. By the ninth decade of the twentieth
century the strategic missile and bomber forces
of the Soviet Union and the United States were
aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets.
No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained
in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting
the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000
megatons---but with the destruction concentrated
efficiently, not over six years but over a few
hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet,
a World War II every second for the length of
a lazy afternoon.
-Carl Sagan
Cosmos, 1980
Chapter XIII, "Who Speaks For Earth?"
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