Tsunami Like a 'Nuclear Strike'? Not Exactly

By: Greg Mitchell "NUKED" screamed the front page of the New York Post Thursday, over a photograph of a nearly barren landscape in Indonesia devastated by the recent tsunami. In fact, nuclear imagery has been common in press postmortems on the disaster. ?It?s like a nuclear bomb hit? is a common assessment by journalists.

Well, not exactly. While aerial or wide angle photos, along with the death toll, may bring to mind Hiroshima or Nagasaki, there are two rather important aspects left out of the ?nuked? concept.

First, in the current disaster, there are no radiation dangers, either short-term (illness and death) or long-term (death, tumors, genetic mutations, earth and water contaminated for years or centuries). And the damage is confined to the areas along the coast line, not spread many miles away via deadly airborne radiation.

Second, the leveled "post-nuclear" landscape is really only evocative of a Hiroshima-sized atomic bomb. If a hydrogen bomb, even of 1950s vintage, had been dropped over Bonda Aceh, half the city would not have survived intact, as it did with the tsunami; in fact, it would not have survived at all, and neither would any of the surrounding area, for miles around.

And a modern hydrogen device would have likely devastated, by force or fallout, nearly all of Sumatra.

This is not to minimize the frightful human cost of the tsunami, but merely to suggest that those throwing the ?N? (nuclear) word around ought to be more precise, and know better -- especially since the threat of a nuclear attack, for most people, far exceeds the chance of another tsunami, yet few today fully grasp its true dimension.