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Newspaper asks what would happen if nuclear bomb strikes DC and oh boy, does social media answer

March 24, 2024 | | Print Article

An author has written a book theorizing about what would happen if Washington, D.C. were hit by a nuclear bomb, and it’s drumming up quite the reaction.

Called “Nuclear War: A Scenario,” the book by Pulitzer Prize-finalist Annie Jacobsen offers an evidence-backed but theoretical view into what might happen were D.C. and the Pentagon hit by a nuclear bomb.

The immediate result would, of course, be pure destruction.

“In the first fraction of a millisecond after the bomb strikes the Pentagon, there is light,” an excerpt from the book published to the New York Post reads. “Soft X-ray light with a very short wavelength. The light superheats the surrounding air to millions of degrees, creating a massive fire-ball that expands at millions of miles per hour.”

“Within seconds, this fireball increases to a diameter of a little more than a mile, it’s light and heat so intense that concrete surfaces explode, metal objects melt or evaporate, stone shatters, humans instantaneously convert into combusting carbon,” the excerpt continues.

“The five-story, five-sided structure and everything inside its 6.5 million square feet of office space explode into superheated dust; all 27,000 Pentagon employees perishing instantly. Not a single thing in the fireball remains. Nothing. Ground zero is zeroed,” the excerpt concludes.

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Horrific, right? Not necessarily.

To promote the excerpt, the Post asked its subscribers on the social media platform X, “What would happen to Washington, DC if attacked by a nuclear bomb?”

And well, responding to the question, many critics seemed actually quite enamored by the idea of the Pentagon and all its employees going up into flames.

Look:

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But the truth of the matter is that a nuclear bomb hitting D.C. would annihilate more than just hated members of the government. According to Jacobsen, it’d also destroy Arlington National Cemetery.

“Northwest of the Pentagon, all 639 acres of Arlington National Cemetery — including the visitors paying respects on this early spring afternoon, the groundskeepers mowing the lawn and the white-gloved members of the Old Guard keeping watch over the Tomb of the Unknowns — are instantly transformed into combusting and charred human figurines,” the excerpt reads.

These folks, including those in the Pentagon, would be the lucky ones because they’d die instantly. As for those who survived the initial blast, they’d be in for a world of hurt.

“There’s a baseball game going on at Nationals Park,” the excerpt continues. “The clothes on a majority of the 35,000 visitors catch on fire. Those who don’t quickly burn to death suffer intense third-degree burns, their bodies stripped of the outer layer of skin.”

“Third-degree burns require immediate specialized care to prevent death. Here inside the park there might be a few thousand people who somehow survive initially, people now desperately in need of a bed at a burn treatment center. But all of them are almost certainly now destroyed,” the excerpt adds.

Read the rest of it at the Post.

Vivek Saxena
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