Stephen King on the Apocalypse
GQ had the pretty brilliant idea to interview Stephen King — author of The Stand, a book in which a virus wipes out most of humanity — about swine flu and all things apocalypse. It’s a good read, but I wonder if King knows what he’s talking about when he predicts that a nuclear weapon will explode in a city sometime relatively soon:
It’s been almost 65 years since anybody’s blown up a nuclear weapon in a city in the world. Everybody knows that’s going to happen. You’re going to wake up one morning to find out somebody exploded a dirty nuke in Baghdad or Islamabad. Or the North Koreans actually did launch some kind of a shit-kicking little missile and managed to blow up part of Tokyo. In terms of death toll, it probably won’t be any worse than what happened at Chernobyl. But the trauma. I mean, look at the situation we’re in — people fly a jet plane low over New York City, and the city goes all Martian Chronicles.
According to the IAEA, the WHO, and the UN, the meltdown at Chernobyl has so far resulted in fewer than 50 deaths — with perhaps 4,000 more to die from radiation-caused cancer at some point in the future (though that’s far from certain). That’s a tragedy, and it’s not a number to be minimized, but I suspect it’s a far cry short of the death toll we’d see if a nuclear weapon was used against a densely populated urban area.
I’ve seen a pretty rigorous study of this exact thing, and it suggests that the best way to save lives in a dirty bomb attack is good crowd control. The panic would be more lethal than the radiological weapon. So King might be right.
— Matt Frost · May 9, 08:36 PM · #
There are a couple of separate issues here: a dirty bomb wouldn’t kill nearly as many as, say, a suitcase nuke. So if King is thinking solely about a dirty bomb, Chernobyl probably isn’t far off.
Then again, he may think that Chernobyl was far, far deadlier than it actually was. I find when talking to people who are casually anti-nuclear power they think that Chernobyl was a massive, massive tragedy (in the tens of thousands of lives lost range). They throw Chernobyl out there whenever they want to make the case that nuclear power is unsafe. My point being that King might be one of those people who thinks that Chernobyl killed many more people than it actually did and that a nuke in, say, Baghdad would do similar damage.
(Nothing like guessing about somebody else’s mindset in a blog comment for instructive commentary.)
— Sonny Bunch · May 9, 09:45 PM · #
My sense was that King was under the impression that the meltdown killed far more people than it did. But, as you say, we don’t really know.
— Peter Suderman · May 9, 10:10 PM · #
Looking back at King’s comments, it’s a muddle. A “dirty nuke?” Does that mean a “dirty bomb,” or a low-yield nuclear detonation with lots of fallout? I dunno. Does he?
— Matt Frost · May 10, 01:06 AM · #
I was never so scared as the spring quarter in college when my roommate was living with her boyfriend and I was reading “It” all by myself at night. Still, I don’t look to Stephen King for influential commentary on public safety threats. If want to hear disaster scenarios I go to my grandma.
— Joules · May 11, 02:03 AM · #