At some point in history, there must have been more nuclear warheads than there were people living in Greenland

Submitted ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨TheTechnician27@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

What’s that I hear you say? I’m a hack fraud whose shower thoughts are stupid and have no evidence? I agree, so I did some digging in peer-reviewed academic journals and found the following:

A graph of the nuclear arsenals of the USA and USSR from 1945–2019.

A graph showing the number of nuclear warheads held by the United States and the Soviet Union from 1945 to 2019. Sources listed are Kristensen and Norris (2015) and the FAS Nuclear Notebook (2014–2019). The sum at one point is over 60,000.

A graph of the population of Greenland from 1780–2000.

A graph showing the population of Greenland from 1780 to 2000. At no point does the population ever rise above 60,000.

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Takapapatapaka@tarte.nuage-libre.fr ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Which would make that moment around the 80s, when the Groenland population reach a relatively stable 50k and the US + CCCP warheads make a peak from 50k to 65k (excluding other nuclear arsenals)

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sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
But why would you have thought that? There have always (for recorded history values of “always”) been people in Greenland; there have only relatively recently been nuclear warheads. So - regardless of truth - why would you have assumed that there must have at some point been more warheads in the world than people in Greenland? That doesn’t seem like an obvious assumption, to me. What made that occur to you?

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- TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  A friend brought up Greenland nuking somebody as a joke. And I imagined a retaliatory strike, quickly remembering though that the current population is less than 60,000 and that I’m almost certain I’ve seen figures of more than 60,000 for nukes during the Cold War, so I imagined a retaliatory strike where literally every person in Greenland had a personalized nuke.
  
  The research was done make sure I wasn’t misremembering, that Greenland didn’t at any point exceed 60,000, and that I’m not Senator Armstrong-ing this.
  
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  - sxan@midwest.social ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    Thank you. I don’t know that I ever knew that statistic about Greenland’s population. The nuke statistic tossed around - that I always heard - was something like “there are enough nukes to blow up the world a million times,” with is a silly, sloppy metric that doesn’t day anything about the actual warhead count. Are those Tsar Bombas, or Fat Man? How many megatons are required to “blow up the world” once? But that graph is interesting; it’s even more interesting that there population of Greenland and the number of (viable) warheads on the planet have been so relatively close.
    
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