It turns out that I found an estimate that an acre of solar cells produces about 440,000 watts. Which is to say, 440k watt-hours in an hour. Since we all know that there are 3597 joules in a watt-hour, the comparison is pretty easy. Of course, solar cells are only about 30% efficient, so the total solar energy is about 3 times what they collect.

I’m sure all you LA natives learned in school that LA County has 4752 square miles, which is obviously ~3M acres. A little multiplication shows that about 1.4 x 10^16 joules of solar energy hits LA County in an hour.

Mentioned in the article is the simple conversion of a megaton of TNT to 4,184,000,000,000,000 joules. Of course, a Station Fire sized H-Bomb is 3 times that size, or 1.3 x 10^16 joules.

So given the very fuzzy estimates of a number of the multipliers here, I think it about right to say that one H-Bomb shines down on LA per hour of daylight.

force = mass x acceleration
energy = force x distance

Notably also:

power = energy / time

There’s no time component in energy (well, there is buried in acceleration; but it’s not the “main” thing like in power). If you compare power, on the other hand, the H-Bomb releasing all that energy in microseconds is vastly more than the fire doing it over weeks. I.e. dividing by 1ms makes a much bigger number than dividing by billions of ms’s.

Clearly, the destruction from the different events is not the same. Giving the energy time to diffuse makes a difference. And it is easier to evacuate with a day’s notice than with a millisecond notice. And lots of other differences.

Moreover, lots of things add up to the same power given the right time. The energy of solar radiation hitting Los Angeles exceeds that of an H-Bomb if you give it the right amount of time. I haven’t done the back of envelope, but I bet that time frame is less than most people might guess (maybe a reader will calculate this). And y’know sun=good; while fire/bomb=bad.

As for imagining LA’s destruction and delighting in it, in the California studies classes I taught, I liked to bring up the point that when New York City is destroyed in films, it’s always tragedy, but when LA is destroyed, it’s anything but. Think back to Independence Day, when the destruction of LA is represented by a bunch of ditzy people on top of the Library Tower welcoming the aliens. So not only are we all killed, we deserved to be killed because we’re stupid, and it’s played for laughs.