< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
Typically, wars do not get named until they're over, and when you think about it, it's sensible. For instance, it was easy to name the War of 1812, since that's when the shooting started, but during the conflicts, who could have known the duration of the Seven Years War (the French and Indian War on this continent) or the Thirty Years War?
Even after the treaties are signed, the name can change,
World War I was the Great War for a while, as well as the
War to End All Wars
and the War to Make the World
Safe for Democracy.
None of those names was fitting 25
years later when a greater war was underway, with mostly
the same powers involved.
At that time, President Franklin D. Roosevelt preferred
War for National Survival,
and the Soviets called it
the Great Patriotic War
-- but World War II is the
name that stuck.
Another complication is that different parties use
different names. I have no idea what name Mexican history
books use for our Mexican War, but I do know that whenever
I refer to the American Civil War in a column, I can count
on getting email from a Son of the Confederacy who insists
that it was really the War Between the States.
Neither name is really accurate. Civil wars are usually
fought between factions for the control of the entire
country; here, the South wanted independence, not control
of New England and the Midwest. Nor was it a War Between
the States,
either. Michigan did not fight Arkansas,
nor did South Carolina battle Massachusetts. By and large,
the battles were between national armies.
Thus, something like the War of Attempted Southern Independence would be a more accurate name.
That said, we should note that current conflict in Iraq
has no popular name. The Pentagon has christened it
Operation Iraqi Freedom,
but I suspect that's too
much of a mouthful to catch on for everyday use. One TV
network employs War With Iraq,
and another shifts
prepositions to War In Iraq.
Other possibilities I've heard around town include
Return of the Republican Guard,
Son of
Saddam,
Gulf War: The Sequel,
and my favorite,
Bush War II.
Bush War I was called Desert Storm
by its
planners. Now observe that most of Colorado is a desert
(any place with an average annual precipitation of less
than 20 inches qualifies as some form of desert, and our
statewide average is about 17 inches). And we just had a
big storm, which may explain why I have received some
inquiries as to how our desert storm
might be
quantified in military terms.
Although I have read that tropical hurricanes unleash the power of thousands of hydrogen bombs, I've never encountered the formulas for comparing natural storms to man-made destruction.
Thus what follows is my original reckoning. I was a pretty good math student, until I encountered calculus anyway, and I haven't been in a math class for 35 years.
To pick up where I left off, I used the same tools as I did then: a Pickett Model N-1010-ES slide rule with a 1959 copyright, and the CRC Standard Mathematical Tables, Student Edition of 1965. (I checked the work with a calculator and a computer spreadsheet, though, and got the same results).
Let's start by assuming that our desert storm dumped, on average, snow with a moisture equivalent of four inches. We'll also assume that it affected a quarter of the state, approximately 25,000 square miles or 16 million acres, and that the snow fell from clouds about 5,000 feet above the ground.
That means a water volume of 5.3 million acre-feet, or 230 billion cubic feet. A cubic foot of water weighs 62.3 pounds, so that works out to 14.4 trillion pounds. Multiply by the 5,000 feet that it fell from the clouds, and energy released by the storm is 72 quadrillion foot-pounds.
Since we're studying war now, what does that mean in military terms? The starting unit is the energy released by the explosion of one ton of trinotrotoluene, and setting off a ton of TNT releases 4.2 billion joules. Convert that metric measure to something comprehensible, and it's 3 billion foot-pounds.
Divide that into our desert storm's energy, and we get 24 million tons of TNT, or 24,000 kilotons, or 24 megatons.
Hydrogen bombs run in the megaton range. The Hiroshima atomic bomb released about 18 kilotons in 1945, and thus our storm released the same energy as 1,300 of those devastating bombs, When you reckon it that way, it's easy to understand why there was so much damage -- even though our desert storm was just an act of nature, not a deliberate effort to produce damage.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2003 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >