Just round numbers here – in 2009 there were like 6,400 megatons yield in the world-wide nuclear arsenal. Keep in mind this doesn’t include conventional bombs/missiles/rockets, which are also quite adept at wide-spread death and destruction. Or bullets, for that matter.

Quick math: 6,400 megatons * 1000000 to get us into tons and then * 2000 because I assume they don’t mean metric tons gives us the equivalent yield of 1,280,000,000,000 pounds of TNT. World population in 2009 was, what, 7 billion? That’s around 180 pounds of TNT per person *JUST* in nuclear weaponry. More people today, and a lower total yield. Doubt 2017’s yield is half 2009’s though. And at half (3,200 megatons), we would still have 84 tons TNT equivalent for each of the 7.5 billion people on the planet. How will 300 or 400 pounds per person make our country stronger?

I saw a chart in the early 80’s that represented the world nuclear firepower (18,000 megatons) in terms of WWII (estimated at 3 megatons). The dots were overlaid with a grid – 11 x 11. 120 squares full of little dots (one square in the center was *just* a single dot representing WW2). Two squares on the grid was sufficient to destroy all of the large and medium size cities in the entire world. We had 118 more squares. Each representing another 150 megatons of firepower. And I doubt that was 10x what we have today (sorry, not *nearly* 10x what we have today).

Now I’ll grant you all seven point five billion people won’t just clump themselves into nicely bomb-able circles (why the nuclear arsenal is measured in warheads, making a pounds-TNT-equiv / person calculation for 2017 rather difficult). But ‘fucking moron’ is an understatement for someone demanding any sort of increase in the nuclear arsenal!

If we “need” more warheads, and I don’t think we do … but let’s pretend there’s a point to all this senseless murder, the problem isn’t a lack of nuclear firepower. It is that highly concentrated firepower is terribly inefficient. Estimate the number of people we plan to off in the next world-annihilating war (round numbers, let’s say all of em). Scale up by 20% or so, then make conventional micro-bomb drones with, say, the equiv of 2.5 pounds of TNT each. That’s not even 2% of the 2009 nuclear arsenal’s firepower. And you could literally eliminate every person on the planet. With a 20% margin of error (more people,drones that fail, whatever).