For some reason, Texas always seems to spring to mind when people are thinking of destruction on a huge scale.
Take the 1998 movie Armageddon, for example, in which Planet Earth is threatened by an asteroid “the size of Texas.”
The fact is, sometimes it’s not great to be intimately linked with bigness. Last week, Russia unveiled a brand new ballistic missile. The country proudly announced that the warhead is big enough “to wipe out Texas.”
This prompted Texas Monthly to ask, “Why is our state always used to measure destructive scale?” The editorial went on to ask why the Russians can’t threaten to destroy “similarly large land masses, like California, Montana, the country of Mauritania, or 29 New Hampshires?” In this case, Russia may still be smarting after being rebuffed last month when it asked to send its diplomats to US polling stations.
