Poplawski+Weapons+of+mass+destruction


 * Research Paper Quick Check **

** Startling and informative opening **   ** A closing surprise...intriguing fact, quotation, or discovery from my own research **
 * Less than 20% of the countries in the world possess nuclear weapons of mass destruction, but combined they have 2 times the power needed to destroy the entire planet. No more than 200 countries have signed the Geneva contract limiting use of chemical and biological weapons but over 350 countries have reported testing and stockpiling of these items.
 * Quick summary of main question that I mean to answer or reason I think this topic is important **
 * The main controversy is whether we should continue to manufacture and stockpile weapons of mass destruction or that we cannot afford this kind of potential destructive power.
 * Two or three most interesting things I learned from research **
 * Two or three of the most interesting things I learned from my research are that America has, in fact, used involuntary, under qualified test subjects for their chemical and biological weapons research and that Russia is the leading producer of nuclear weapons to be launched by missile.
 * Confirmation or rejecting of one or two commonly held beliefs about this topic **
 * It is believed that nuclear power is forceful enough to destroy an entire planet. Unfortunately this popular conception of nuclear destruction is correct to some degree. With the amount of nuclear weapons stockpiled so much radiation would be created the continents would become inhospitable to human inhabitants and we would be forced to leave the planet, find a hospitable area, or die.
 * Something to connect the topic to the reader's life so that he/she will care **
 * If you have trouble thinking of the scale of these problems consider this, the amount of nuclear weapons America has stockpiled would be enough to completely obliterate the continent of South America, if you take that destructive force multiply it by about two and a half and you would get the amount of destruction all the nuclear powers combined could cause. With biological weapons in a quantity as large as Russia’s stockpile a disease could be set loose in a city and within a few months a population center such as Chicago or New York would be nothing more than a desolate shell devoid of healthy life.
 * When the Manhattan project tested the very first atomic bomb, the scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer witnessed the very first atomic explosion and is shocked into remarking “Now I am death-the shatterer of worlds.”
 * 65,000 people instantly vaporized when little boy exploded over Hiroshima