Jay Manifold (who really needs to put in a title for the HTML of his index page) says that the "meteor shower" (which was really a single object that exploded high in the atmosphere) over Chicago last week could have been a lot worse. It wasn't another Tonguska, but it could have killed a lot of people, and done a lot of damage.

Scary, isn't it?

And what's even scarier is that, had it been a disaster that destroyed a portion of Chicago and killed God alone knows how many people, the first thing we would have heard out of the whackos is that it was "God's Retribution" against the US for our perceived sins.

Makes you wonder if a portion of Chicago went up in smoke, at our threat level, would a large portion of Iraq have gone up in a mushroom cloud? I wonder how much of a knee-jerk reflex we have right now.

I good point, but I don't worry about it _too_ much. I think we would at least take the time to try and figure out where the attack came from before we retaliated and that investigation would give time to figure out what really happened.

I hope.

The Cold War hair-trigger business was based on the idea that our strikeback capability might not survive a Soviet first strike.

I'm fairly confident that if a city got smoked before anyone knew what was happening -- and nothing else was seen incoming immediately afterward -- there wouldn't be much in the way of urgency to strike back right away.

JMTC.

I'm not too worried about an American overreaction, but if a similar event were to occur almost anywhere on the Indian subcontinent, it could start a nuclear war. I've blogged about this several times, but it's not a new idea -- I found a mention of this very possibility in TIME magazine clear back in '86.

(Sorry about the HTML tag thing, Rand. On Blogspot, it creates a huge headline that I don't know how to get rid of* and would mess up my look, such as it is.)

* Yeah, I know: leave Blogspot and use MT or some such. Eventually ...

You can find a similar idea in science fiction as far back as 1959. "The Answer", by H. Beam Piper.
Possibly earlier, but that's the one I know about.

A meter detonating over Auburn New York triggers a nuclear exchange between the Soviet Union and the US.

Hopefully we're past that sort of reflex retaliation now if for no other reason then we don't have a single opposing entity to automatically blame it on anymore.

I've always been partial to the semi-crackpot claim that the Great Chicago Fire and the Peshtigo, Wisc. fire, as well as a number of other large fires that night, were caused by the breakup of a small comet causing a smaller versions of Tunguska--a heat flash igniting buildings and trees in an area along the western shore of Lake Michigan already parched by a drought.

(Almost 2000 people died in Peshtigo, many more than in Chicago. Combined, that October night possibly had the single worst civil death toll in the US until 11 Sept 2001.)

Not to worry, our early warning system would have tagged it as a meteor. It's the other countries that don't have an extensive system as we do, that you have to worry about.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,64791,00.html