Sad Benefit

Burnt-out cars in Tianjin (PopularMechanics.com)

Early reports of today's warehouse explosion in Tianjin (about 75 miles southeast of Beijing) said that there were at least 44 people dead, hundreds injured, and thousands displaced. [Update - 8/14/15: the Chinese authorities still have not released information about the cause of the explosion, the latest count of the dead and injured, the ownership of the warehouse, and, perhaps most importantly, specifics about the chemicals released into the atmosphere.]

The scale of destruction is terrible to behold, but one sad benefit is that it allows us to put into perspective the horror of nuclear war, which most of us know only through grainy black-and-white photos and newsreels. The nuclear bomb that detonated over Nagasaki 70 years ago (August 9, 1945) was 22 kilotons, nearly 1,000 times as powerful as the Tianjin explosion. The most powerful hydrogen bombs were an unimaginable two million times more destructive than Tianjin.

Oh, that's why there's all this fuss about Iran.