Donald Trump's Nuclear War Remarks Raise Eyebrows

Former President Donald Trump is pictured during his town hall event with Fox News host Laura Ingraham in Greenville, South Carolina on February 20, 2024. Trump mistakenly promised to bring “very powerful crime” to Washington, D.C. during the event.

Donald Trump’s comments over the danger of a nuclear war in which a single bomb could destroy both New York and South Carolina raised eyebrows on social media, with many casting doubts on the accuracy of his words.

During an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday, Trump said he was worried about the safety of his supporters.

“I worry about their safety too,” he said during the town hall event, which reached more than 3.2 million viewers on average, according to Fox News. “These people, everybody in this room is in great danger right now. We have a nuclear weapon that if you hit New York, South Carolina is going to be gone too.”

The largest and most powerful nuclear bomb ever built and tested was the Tsar Bomba, according to The National WWII Museum in New Orleans. The museum writes that the bomb, detonated in a Soviet Union test in October 1961, vaporized everything within three dozen miles of its impact, while damage extended to a 150-mile radius. That means that even the Tsar Bomba, if dropped in New York, would likely not reach South Carolina.

Nukemap, a website which allows to simulate nuclear detonations, shows that dropping a 100-megaton Tsar Bomba of New York would be devastating, killing over 8 million people and injuring over 6 million. The bomb’s fireball radius—the one with the worst damage—would reach 4.17 miles; the moderate blast damage radius would reach 20.3 miles; the thermal radiation radius would reach 45.8 miles; and the light blast damage radius would reach 57 miles from the detonation site.

The most powerful nuclear weapon currently in the U.S. inventory is the B83, with a maximum yield of around 1.2 megatons.

The threat of a nuclear weapon has been rising following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, with Russian state-television personalities often talking of punishing Moscow’s Western enemies with the country’s nuclear might.

But this threat might concretize in something other than the dropping of a nuclear bomb on U.S. territory. American intelligence agencies recently said that Russia might launch a nuclear weapon into orbit this year, targeting satellite communications rather than cities and towns—which are likely to lead to immediate retaliation.

Many on social media said that Trump’s remarks about the single nuclear weapon were exaggerated.

“The distance between NYC and Columbia, South Carolina is 705 miles. That’s a heck of a blast radius!” Daily Beast journalist Justin Baragona wrote on X, formerly Twitter.

“Totally normal presidential thing to say,” wrote author and journalist Molly Jong-Fast.

“That’s one hell of a blast—does he know this from the classified docs he stole..,” wrote another user, sharing the distance the blast should cover between New York and South Carolina.

Trump, who’s currently facing a total of 91 felony counts in four different criminal trials, has been charged with the mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House. Following an FBI raid to his Florida resort, Mar-a-Lago, in August 2022, agents retrieved thousands of government documents, among which over 100 classified ones.

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