Where the nuclear weapon blast-Russian meteorite comparison falls short

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last four days, you’ve seen the comparison: last week’s Russian meteorite “exploded with a force of nearly 500 kilotons of TNT – some 30 times the energy released by the Hiroshima atomic bomb”.

Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at the American Institute of Physics, wrote an interesting post today arguing that the nuke comparison is unhelpful:

Using nukes as a genericized way to talk about energy output is highly misleading both from the point of view of the expert, but even more so from the point of view of the layman. I really don’t see the advantage to it either way. I fear in talking about asteroids as nuke equivalents people may be trying to emphasize their threat — which is totally legitimate — but at the same time may end up inadvertently down-playing nukes.

The entire post is worth a read.