[colechristensen]

I’m really not.

The contemporary quote was either misattributed, missing context, or a straight up lie.

It’s not hard for an ordinary person to imagine what 4 million tons of explosive equivalent might be, or a hundred thousand, both are ridiculous. The actual risk was an explosion on the scale of a few buildings or a minor criticality incident which splattered melted nuclear material in a very small local area.

You’re not going to find a nuclear physicist who could back anything else up with calculations, the author tried and couldn’t.

The problem with your “viewers are ignorant so it doesn’t matter point” is that viewers aren’t totally ignorant and are then fed with very false information which makes any understanding that they did have considerably worse.