WiFi Damages Trees

[Arwin]

Well, ostensibly this is true, as it is entirely possible for an asteroid impact to wipe out all life on Earth, and we couldn't do that even if we detonated every single nuclear weapon on the planet (though we could well make the planet uninhabitable for us).

Just strikes me that an as yet unexplored scenario is when an asteriod hits a field full of nuclear weapon silos.

As it stands, however, we are in the middle of one of the largest extinction events in Earth's history (on par with the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs), and this is due to human activity.

Indeed.

 

[KimB]

Just strikes me that an as yet unexplored scenario is when an asteriod hits a field full of nuclear weapon silos.

Haha

Actually, it wouldn't make much difference. One interesting thing about nuclear weapons is that in order to go off, the nuclear fuel needs to end up in an extremely specific geometric configuration, and it has to be placed in that configuration very, very fast. Nuclear weapons make use of sophisticated, precisely-timed explosives to get different bits of fuel into the right location at the right time. So physical damage to the nuclear weapon itself is unlikely to cause a nuclear explosion. Of course, the nuclear fuel is itself radioactive and constitutes an environmental hazard, and would be spread around if the nuclear weapon were physically destroyed.

Of course, this is ignoring that if the asteroid was big enough to do serious damage (that is, dinosaur-killing or larger), even if every nuclear weapon it struck went off at the same time, nobody would notice the additional added blast. Basically, the Chicxulub impact event that killed the dinosaurs was in the range of 100,000 times more powerful than all nuclear weapons combined.