John Berry <[email protected]> wrote:
> There isn't enough money in all the insurance companies in the world to >> cover the damages or pay off the policies. There are many wealthy people in >> Washington, DC. The population density is high. >> > > That is a good point, but the some of the same could have been argued > about the disruption of taking the WTC down and flying something into the > Pentagon. > No. I am sorry, but you fail to understand the concept of "orders of magnitude." You need a sense of perspective. You need some grasp of large versus small events. This is kind like saying that having your furnace burn down your house is "sort of the same" as the destruction of the Fukushima reactor complex. Yes, they are both a failure of a modern energy delivery system. But one is much, much *MUCH* bigger and more consequential than the other. Fukushima was hundreds of millions of times more expensive than the loss of your house would be. It led to destruction of the nuclear power industry in Japan. 50 working nuclear reactors thrown away! That alone has got to be worth about $800 billion in capital costs alone, never mind all the electricity that must be generated with coal and natural gas to replace them. Yes, the WTC attack was disruptive, but it was nothing remotely like a nuclear attack. > Also what if the nuke's yield was reduced to appear more like whatever > North Korea managed to detonate underground a few years ago? > There is some control over yield, but you cannot dial down a nuclear bomb to that extent. You would just use a conventional explosive in that case. > Also I do not know much about the size of Washington DC, but if it was > detonated in a remote area? Possibly to be argued that it was detonated > early because the good guys were on to them... > The U.S., Russia and other countries detonated hundreds of bombs above ground in tests in the 1950s and 60s without killing many people. I think people would assume it was an accident. - Jed
