The Atom: Making a Comeback?

Matthew Hague
Sep 5, 2018 · 3 min read

Nuclear warfare is a truly modern method of war. Great nations used to be protected by harsh borders that were enforced by masses of military personnel. Now, however, even superpowers can be completely toppled in approximately fifteen minutes. Ballistic vector mapping mathematics, thermonuclear warheads, and multi-stage rockets are the ideas and inventions that make this form of warfare highly effective. After all, who needs to settle arguments via diplomacy, when entire nations can simply be erased from the map?

I think all of our wars should be fought with nuclear weapons. It really is a simple method of warfare. First step: fire a missile. Second step: wait about fifteen to twenty minutes. Third step: the war is won. If the United States utilized its nuclear arsenal more often, the taxpayer would spend much less on military defense, and more money would be diverted to programs that benefit the general population of the United States. Nuclear war really is the way of the future.

One major concern with nuclear and thermonuclear weapons is that once many nations figure out how to construct them, absolute chaos will break out. The simple solution to this, however, is to just drop a few bombs on whatever country decides to start building bombs, before they strike back. A country struggling to prove it’s own legitimacy would have no chance against a world superpower. Think of it as deleting a video game save, except what was just erased from the face of the Earth was a civilization, not some simple ones and zeroes stored on a memory card.

Currently, the United States’ nuclear stockpile sits dormant. Underneath the New Mexico desert at Sandia National Lab, the Seattle Greater Metropolitan Area at Pacific Northwest National Lab, and in Denver Colorado at the “Rocky Flats Point”, a dragon lies sleeping. This dragon has the fire and fury to eradicate all of humanity and destroy the entire surface of our dear planet, not once, not twice, but more than seven times. When the United States dropped its bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the end of the second world war, it was to, “save American lives”. I propose that in order to save the most life possible, that the United States government utilizes its nuclear might so that more lives are not lost fighting petty wars.

When the United States bombed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it did so with relatively weak weaponry. The predicted yield of the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs were sixteen kilotons and thirteen kilotons respectively. Since then, the two keystone tests were the Ivy-Mike device, and the Castle Bravo test. Ivy-Mike was a thirteen megaton bomb, and its shock wave was measured all around the world using seismographs. Castle Bravo was larger, at a whopping thirty-six megatons, this is the largest device that the United States has ever detonated and its detonation was more than four thousand times larger than the nuclear devices dropped on Japan during the second world war. Both devices were two and three stage thermonuclear bombs, but plans for eight stage bombs have been designed, and these bombs produce virtually no fallout due to the high efficiency of their fission-fusion stages. The United States has the capability to literally erase entire continents in minutes, so why not use this power in order to save lives?

Matthew Hague

Written by

BYU Mathematics Student