When I was in high school, the cold war had been raging for decades already. I lived in a region that included probably 5 of the top tier Soviet nuclear missile targets on the west coast. If someone ever pushed the big red button, we would be among the first to know.
I thought about it a lot.
And I was often frustrated with my peers, when they joked about ‘being vaporized’. I knew that the ones that got obliterated instantly would be the lucky ones. But the majority of the victims of a nuke strike would be blind and/or blistered, radiation-poisoned, hungry and thirsty, and there would be no help coming any time soon.
At one point I wrote an article for the school literary magazine on what a nuclear detonation in the Puget Sound area would really be like, drawing on source material like John Hersey’s Hiroshima for realistic details. It was not a tremendously popular article.
Well, the cold war is over. The Iron Curtain has been drawn back. My children don’t fear the Bomb the way I did when I was growing up. My rather unhealthy fascination with wholescale carnage has had to find another outlet.
Like GLOBAL catastrophe. Just watch this Japanese video depicting the impact of a good-sized asteroid with the Earth. Even though I can’t understand the narration, it gives me chills. And there ain’t no fallout shelter in the world that would do you any good in this particular worst-case-scenario.
holy carp! i kaint reed good, so i’ll just assume this is what would happen if the deathstar bumped into earth.
Unrealistic, but still kinda freaky.
As the SouthPark boys would say, “That’s pretty fsked up right there!”