OK prepare to be depressed. I'm not sure I sould even be writing about this but here goes. I was at an open house type event for a major defense contractor. No classified information was on display, just your run of the mill carnival type kiosks except for one booth. I was leaving and noticed out of the corner of my eye what looked like a bomb going off in a city on their big LCD display. I stopped, turned around and went back to ask the guy what this was all about. He said that it was a demonstration of explosions, stuff they couldn't do in real life any more since nuclear weapons testing was banned. He had a very high resolution 3D map of what looked like a major city. on one of the streets, a virtual bomb went off. I've seen a bunch of documentaries on this stuff, Blinding Horizon, Trinity and Beyond, etc. and what I saw in this booth was scarier than anything in those documentaries. I know a lot about this stuff, it always interested me so I was able to hold a fairly intelligent conversation with the guy. He said they run the simulations at Sandia National Labs which didn't surprise me, they have some of the biggest super computers know to man. Looking at the explosion on the screen just tearing apart buildings in a huge radius, I knew it wasn't a truck bomb I was looking at so I asked the guy if I was looking at a nuclear bomb. A one kiloton a-bomb is the equivalent one thousand tons of TNT. He said that it was a ten kiloton bomb that I was looking at in the simulation.

Now here's where it gets weird. George Will is probably my favorite writer, he's the only reason I read newsweeek. I was reading one of his articles and it struck me...
"In December 1994, Czech police seized more than eight pounds of HEU in a parked car on a side street. A senior al Qaeda aide's proclaimed goal of killing 4 million Americans would require 1,400 9/11s, or one 10-kiloton nuclear explosion — from a softball-sized lump of fissionable material — in four large American cities...In 1993, U.S. officials used ordinary bolt cutters to snip off the padlock that was the only security at an abandoned Soviet-era facility containing enough HEU for 20 nuclear weapons."

HEU is highly enriched Uranium. The guts of one of these bombs. So what I was looking at was a 3D, birds eye view of the most likely scenario of what's likely going to happen over here in the next few years. Reading Foreign Affairs isn't helping my nerves either because most of the people that write about this stuff are convinced that this is inevitable. Even the articles that claim to explain how to prevent it debate how we should respond and what the world will look like afterward.

I wish I knew what city I was looking at in the simulation. It didn't look like San Diego which is kind of nice I guess. There is an equation used to predict the existance of life on other planets. One of the major factors that decreases the odds is a variable for the likelyhood of a civilization blowing itself to pieces with nuclear bombs.

It makes me wish I hadn't seen that simulation. Ignorace is bliss right? Sorry for ruining your day.

UPDATE: Lockheed Martin just visited my blog. Now it's sorta scary because they've never visited and now I post about defense contractors and here they are. The weird bit is that my post was today and Google hasn't updated yet so how the hell would they know to come check it out?