World War II for Every Family

World War II Every Second for Every Family

The conventional bombs of World War II were called blockbusters. Filled with only twenty tons of TNT, one bomb could destroy only a city block. All the bombs dropped on all the cities in World War II amounted to some two million tons, two megatons of TNT – Coventry and Rotterdam, Dresden and Tokyo, Koenigsberg and Helsinki, all the death that rained from the skies between 1939 and 1945: a hundred thousand blockbusters, two megatons.

By the late twentieth century, two megatons was the energy released in the explosion of a single more or less humdrum thermonuclear bomb: one bomb with the destructive force of the Second World War.

But there are tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missiles and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet Earth was safe. The energy contained in those weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was more than ten thousand megatons… with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years, as in the World War II, but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.

A blockbuster for every family, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon (Quotations from Megan Jorgensen). Image: © Megan Jorgensen (Elena)