4d ago

At some point in history, there must have been more nuclear warheads than there were people living in Greenland

What's that I hear you say? I'm a hack fraud whose shower thoughts are stupid and have no evidence? I agree, so I did some digging in the literature and found the following:

A graph of the nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR from 1945–2019.

A graph of the population of Greenland from 1780–2000.

4 comments

Which would make that moment around the 80s, when the Groenland population reach a relatively stable 50k and the US + CCCP warheads make a peak from 50k to 65k (excluding other nuclear arsenals)
But why would you have thought that? There have always (for recorded history values of "always") been people in Greenland; there have only relatively recently been nuclear warheads. So - regardless of truth - why would you have assumed that there must have at some point been more warheads in the world than people in Greenland? That doesn't seem like an obvious assumption, to me. What made that occur to you?
- A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined how disproportionate a retaliatory strike could be, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I'm almost certain I've seen figures of more than 60,000 nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.
  The research was done make sure I wasn't misremembering, that Greenland didn't at any point exceed 60,000 (thus necessitating a closer comparison), and that I'm not Senator Armstrong-ing this.
  
  Thank you. I don't know that I ever knew that statistic about Greenland's population. The nuke statistic tossed around - that I always heard - was something like "there are enough nukes to blow up the world a million times," with is a silly, sloppy metric that doesn't day anything about the actual warhead count. Are those Tsar Bombas, or Fat Man? How many megatons are required to "blow up the world" once? But that graph is interesting; it's even more interesting that there population of Greenland and the number of (viable) warheads on the planet have been so relatively close.