The Tom Lehrer Wisdom Channel
1 HN recommender · recommended in 5 months, 2016–2024
2:37 · 1.4M views · Aug 27, 2008
Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song Who's Next, about the spread of nuclear weapons, with a spoken introduction. It is a short musical comedy piece from the Cold War era.
HN mentions it mostly in nuclear-weapons threads as a witty or darkly funny aside, rather than as a recommendation.
5 comments from Hacker News
I love his song "Who's Next?", about nuclear war: especially how it starts and ends, haha > First we got the bomb and that was good > Cause we love peace and motherhood > Then Russia got the bomb, but that's O.K > Cause the balance of power's maintained that way! ... > ... We'll try to stay serene and calm > When Alabama gets the bomb! this video
I have to imagine the only way to really get nukes dropped on you, is to have nukes aimed at someone else... or have a large standing army. Or basically be a threat in some way. It's not like someone says, "I want to kill all the humans..." they presumably just want to destroy their enemies and threats to their safety. With that in mind, these nations are probably fucked... but that's only a fraction of nations. * List of states with nuclear weapons - Wikipedia || [LINK] Russia has, generously, an 8k nuclear arsenal (but only about 2k of those are considered active). If they sent everything they had ever built at Texas, they'd still barely be able to drop one bomb per every 30 square miles... Assuming they were all Tsar Bombs... that might take out one state. * NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein || [LINK] I think there are a lot of rural places in the US that would be mostly safe from being directly targeted and potentially far enough away to also avoid fallout. And also... like all of Canada. Who's going to waste nukes on Canada? * US States: Area and Ranking - EnchantedLearning.com || [LINK] And let's not forget these are all government contracts to build the nukes were awarded to constituents as kickbacks or were built by the lower bidder -- and many are very old at this point. I have to think the failure rate is more than 0; so unless they're doubling up likely there will still be places targeted and still left unscathed due to delivery or ordinance malfunction... or just human
I must've been a bit older when the Cold War ended, because I still keep an eye on where permanent security council members* have their sub pens. On USENET, people used to give their "icbmto:" coordinates in signatures. Ha ha. As far as "Who's Next" goes this video reality imitates art: Alabama (SSBN-731) does indeed have the bomb. * might we explain much US right-wing two-minute hate against France by the simple existence of Brest?
That might have been a better argument if the USSR[0] had had the bomb in 1945[1]? Lagniappe: this video [0] first test: 29.08.1949 [1] a year in which the US and USSR were, however tenuously, still allied
It's easy to remember the early players in the nuclear power/weapons game, with a simple mnemonic song: this video