"Finish this sentence" re: nukes, exams, and Cabell's post

[perldiver]

So, I was reading Cabell's post about exam dreams and nuclear bomb warnings and it made me think of the following game.

Complete this sentence in a way that is true for you:

 

I am a school principal, final exams are happening now, and I receive a call saying that there might be a nuclear bomb in the city.  I would....

Here's my completion:

....kick back and surf the net.  If the bomb is real and goes off, none of us will ever know.  In any other case, why panic?  Besides, I had to sit through sixteen friggin' years of exams.  This crop of school kids should share my pain.

Comments

[docorion.livejournal.com]

See, that would have been my answer. Sit down and finish your exams; either it's nonsense, or ohgodohgodwe'reallgonnadie, and there's nothing you can do about it. This works almost everywhere except NYC or Los Angeles, which of course are also the cities you're gonna bomb. Let's face it, if a terrorist blows up my town, here's him reporting to Osama:

Clueless Terrorist: "Oh, great Leader! My cell has blown up Boston!"

Osama bin Laden: "Boston? Where the hell is that? I specifically told you to blow up one of the homes of the Great Satan."

CT: "But revered one, Boston is one of the greatest educational centers of the Satanic Empire! Seventeen colleges and universities are now monatomic dust, including Harvard and MIT! Have we not struck a great blow for our cause?"

OBL: "Everyone knows the Great Satan lives in NYC, vacations in LA, and works in Washington DC. Did you blow up one of those places? No! And Harvard?! My great-nephew goes to Harvard! If you have harmed him, I swear, you won't have to wait for hell to suffer endless torments. I'm sure I can come up with some..."

So yeah, I feel pretty safe up here.

[perldiver.livejournal.com]

Heh. Glad we're on the same page, there.

Even though I realize (as I know you do) that a nuke, even a big one, wouldn't REALLY reduce a school campus to "monatomic" dust, there were sure times back in grade school when I wished that someone would try that on MY school. Even fairly large-particulate rubble would have been fine, honest. :>

[avram]

Hiroshima had a population of over 380,000, but that was down to about 250,000 because of wartime evacuation. Only about a third of them died instantly in the attack, and another third or so were injured. One survivor was only a hundred meters from ground zero.

[docorion.livejournal.com]

True, but compared to currently available yields, that was an itty-bitty bomb, at 'only' 15 kilotons. I'm assuming yields in the hundreds of kiloton range, at least.

Also-as perldiver notes, I am actually clueful enough to realize that almost nothing except some minor bomb components will actually be 'monatomic dust'; it's just that 'monatomic dust' is so fun to *say*.

[avram]

What sort of nuke do you think would get detonated in an American city nowadays? I'm not nuclear engineer, but from what I can tell reading online, yields in the 100kt area and higher are only possible with fusion bombs, not fission bombs. Is anybody with fusion bomb technology mad at us?

[perldiver.livejournal.com]

Dude, let it go. Both DocOrion and I were treating this as a throwaway joke, not a debate about the politics and science of nuclear terrorism.