Elon and Trump make the worst possible argument for nuclear power I have ever heard:
“Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed but now they are full cities again,” the multibillionaire owner of Tesla, SpaceX and X said.
“That’s great, that’s great,” Mr Trump responded.
“It is not as scary as people think, basically,” Mr Musk added.
They joked about nuclear power facing a “branding problem”.
“We will have to rebrand it,” the former president told Mr Musk. “We will name it after you or something.”
Not scary: some people were vaporized leaving only a shadow, others badly burned as the painting shows, people were maimed and amputated by the blast, and a big part of the city was blown and burned down. Plus the poor souls who would die horribly from acute radiation poisoning over the following days.
And let’s not forget those nuclear weapons were some of the very first ever made. Modern atomic weapons can range from Hiroshima-size to turning a mountain into a radioactive lake range. Thankfully no hydrogen bomb has even been used in anger because that would be a completely different level of horror (and likely the trigger to the end of human civilization).
Many nuclear powers have policies to fire nukes on warning. That means they would shoot back even before the enemy nuke hits them. Shoot when the nukes are confirmed to be incoming.
Republicans love to regularly talk down the World-ending horror that would be using atomic weapons in war. During Bush Jr.'s “war on terror” they were already talking about using bunker-buster nukes and tried to diminish the well-deserved stigma of nuclear weapons.
Renaming them atomic weapons “Musk bombs” sounds hilariously misguided.