All At Once

Every few months North Korea detonates a nuclear weapon and the earth shakes and everyone refreshes the news for a few minutes before moving on. The thought sits there anyway. What would happen if every warhead on the planet went off at the same moment instead of one at a time over decades of hypothetical conflict. The mathematics don’t mean anything at that scale. Dust in the atmosphere. Years without sun. The slow suffocation of everything.

I’ve rehearsed this scenario a dozen times already, mostly in video games. Fallout. Metro 2033. The Division. All of them built on the corpse of nuclear war, letting you pick through the ruins and fight things that shouldn’t exist. There’s something restful about those games. The worst already happened. You’re not waiting for it anymore.

The actual bombs fell in 1945. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The initial blasts killed around 135,000 people. Then the burns, the radiation, the long slow dying that went on for years after. Two warheads. Two cities. The weapons now are exponentially more powerful and there are thousands of them.

The idea’s gotten almost casual. Every science channel has made the video, every corner of the internet has imagined what it would look like. Maybe thinking about it thoroughly enough makes it stop being terrifying and become just another historical scenario waiting to happen. Or maybe I’m just fascinated by thinking about the end because it’s easier than thinking about now.

And you keep thinking about it, even though thinking about it doesn’t change anything.