[Olaf Simons, Gotha, Germany] This strange website reminds me of the late 1970s and early 1980s. I was a pupil back then and could spend afternoons at a local lake near Munich, close my eyes and almost sense the imminent blast. What would happen? How many would die in an instant? One had seen images of nuclear tests on TV, and this was scary enough.
I went to school, had handed in my Kriegsdienstverweigerung — my objection to military service. Back then, in West Germany, this was almost a trial in which you had to plead that your conscience would not allow you to become a soldier. Those who went through these trials — indeed, I am speaking of West Germany, the democratic free nation back then — informed their potential followers of strategies one needed in order to answer these questions. “Imagine you and your girlfriend were attacked and you had a weapon… would you use it?” (Secretly: yes, but I do not know whether this would have been my official answer.) I felt that our entire system of politics was rotten. Built on the option that either of the two blocks could destroy life on Earth if the other attacked.
What did we know about the future? The entire Eastern Bloc could fall into pieces in the events of a revolution in 1995… Just wait. And if they attacked us? Let them come in and wait. There could not be a thing worth the destruction of human life.
Today I am sitting at the computer, in East Germany, Gotha, doing my work on 18th-century Illuminati, follow the facebook stream in the background, get this link and test a detonation for Gotha. Should I use a US-Bomb? I get a menu to chose. Maybe. After all Gotha is in former East Germany. I have invaded the Eastern Bloc three years ago.
The image of devastations comes quickly and in clean graphics. The computation takes a bit longer.
Estimated fatalities: 77,620
Estimated injuries: 144,370
In any given 24-hour period, there are approximately 547,869 people in the 1 psi range of the most recent detonation.
Modeling casualties from a nuclear attack is difficult. These numbers should be seen as evocative, not definitive. Fallout effects are ignored. For more information about the model, click here.
The strange thing is that the options do not affect me that much any longer. My perception of reality is a construct I do not have in my hands. Why did I feel this danger as imminent threat in 1981? How did they remove that threat — not by removing the bombs but by removing the public conscience of the threat? They did this somehow in the 1990s. “They” is not precise. There is no institution generating this public consciousness.
The entire history of the threat has almost meditative aspects: