boom

It is August 6th 2024.
Exactly 79 years ago Hiroshima was bombed by the first nuclear weapon to be used on a target and I watched this video about the only nuclear weapons used in war.

And as irony has it my friends and I started playing the game ICBM recently...
You control continent sized nations and slowly build up your arsenal on nuclear weapons as you also research more and more means to help you "win" the oncomming conflict.
We played a few rounds before and when you don't make the connection to the real world one might believe that nuclear weapons aren't that bad as "only" 10s of millions die on each continent directly after the bombs hit.

But yesterday was different, we played the same round for around 2 real hours before we decided to all launch our arsenals to bring it to an end.
An hour before that happened I said something along the lines of "Guys, I don't want to start it. Our militaries might be fighting but I don't want to doom all those people."

Nuclear submarines with missiles where stationed around my enemies, hundreds of planes where ready to deliver everything from small tactical and 50 megaton bombs to every single military unit and civilian population centre on the map.
And it only got worse by the minute.

Finally, around the two hour mark we fired our weapons of mass genocide.
Planes and missiles where everywhere and I think that no city was unscaved.
A city in china was hit just once and suffered "only" around 300.000 dead.
Other cities, in Indonesia for example, where hit for a grand total of 113 times and less than 1000 people came out alive from a city that once inhabited millions.

The game wasn't designed to be played as long as me and my friends did but we maybe only reached together a tenth of the amount of nuclear weapons that the United States currently has.

As I began thinking about what has happened in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, our game and how many nuclear weapons there are in real life I was in a temporary state of shock and bitter sadness.

Nuclear weapons are probably humanities most horrible invention, and if the brute of nuclear war somehow breaks loose then I have no doubt in that only a very small amount of people will survive and that there will be billions of people who will suffer an unnecessary terrific death.

You blow up people, 7.8/10