Ever present dangers: Nuclear war and climate change

Wednesday, October 30, 2019

By Native Sun News Today Editorial Board

An argument rages that climate change is a hoax, or that it is blown way out of proportion, but let us just say that climate change is as bad as activists claim, in fact, let’s not hold back, and say it is twice as bad.

Twice as bad climate change means some awful things. The last time the climate went that comprehensively bad, was 252 million years ago. In the relatively short course of about a 100,000 years, three factors converged that created conditions that killed over ninety percent of all living things.

Climate change is nothing to sneeze at. But as bad as it is, as bad as that XL pipeline appears to be, and let’s just say it is far worse than people think it is, nothing holds a candle to the destructive power of nuclear war.

The bomb that leveled Hiroshima is a firecracker compared to the Russian Tsar Bomba, developed in 1956, which has a total destruction radius of 22 miles. If it went off over Ellsworth, all the people living in Summerset, over 20 miles away, would eventually die. If you were shopping at Target in Rapid City, you’d just be vaporized. Top that threat, XL pipeline.

The mutually assured destruction of thermonuclear warfare has magically become a non-threat. People are more worried about mountain lions in the Black Hills.

Popular culture has found a way to render such a war out of sight, out of mind. There are no more fallout shelters, no more drills in elementary school. So we fixate on all these other threats, while a threat beyond the worst horrors imaginable is left in the attic, collecting cobwebs, and we act as if it is a silly overreaction that died with the 20th Century. In the past seventy years, actual exchange of these weapons has come dangerously close to happening several times.

This dire threat has not been addressed, and we are far from safe. Yet any attempt to activate against this threat would be ignored by the news outlets and scoffed at by social media.