Maggie's Farm

Haidt and Lukianoff’s explanation for our era of campus craziness is primarily psychological. In sum, a well-intentioned safety culture which has led to ‘paranoid parenting,’ and screen time replacing unstructured and unsupervised play time, has created a fragile generation. Haidt and Lukianoff focus on people born after 1995, iGen or Generation Z, who began attending college in the last five years – just when things started to escalate.

Anti-nuclear activists, if they want to be taken seriously, have an obligation to educate themselves on the facts, and to stop exaggerating and stop lying. Examples of five whoppers, and not necessarily the worst ones, that often appear in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists:

Allegedly, U.S. arms racing is making Russia and China build-up their nuclear arsenals. In fact, U.S. arms control initiatives have reduced the number of U.S. nuclear weapons by 90%, leaving the U.S. with nuclear weapons and delivery systems over 30 years old, while Russia, China, and North Korea are building mostly modern nuclear weapons and delivery systems—often in violation of arms control treaties.

Allegedly, the U.S. has 6,000 nuclear weapons ready for war. This misrepresents the total U.S. nuclear stockpile as the number of weapons that would be employed in a nuclear war. In fact, most of these are in storage, mostly cannibalized for spare parts, and would take months to mobilize, if they could be used at all. Under New START the U.S. is allowed only 1,550 operational strategic nuclear weapons (counting rules allow more than one weapon on strategic bombers, so the actual number of U.S. operational strategic nuclear weapons is about 2,000). Of these, because mobilization of bombers takes three days and SSBNs on patrol would probably require hours to respond, only U.S. ICBMs with their 400 warheads are constantly ready, 24/7, for a nuclear exchange, not 6,000 warheads.

Allegedly, radioactive fallout from a nuclear war would be a death sentence for the whole world. In fact, as long as the warhead is fused to burst at altitude, so the fireball does not touch the ground, which is likely for optimum burst height, there would be little or no nuclear fallout.

Allegedly, thermal effects and fires from a nuclear war would cause a "nuclear winter" dooming the whole world. The "nuclear winter" myth is based on erroneous computer models rigged to produce a "nuclear winter" outcome, that goes away by tweaking a few variables, and is contradicted by hundreds of atmospheric nuclear tests and historical (and recent) volcanic eruptions that have never produced a "nuclear winter."

Allegedly, nuclear war is unrecoverable. Nagasaki and Hiroshima are larger and more populous today than they were before the atomic bombings of 1945.

Anti-nuclear activists will not stop exaggerating and lying because they are not open to facts and reason, are like a religious cult willing to say anything to advance their ideological agenda, like the "priesthood" that declares "climate change" is the greatest existential threat.