More Words, Deeper Hole

Bradbury was inconsistent within the set of stories: in "The Off Season", it seems to blow up:

Earth changed in the black sky.
It caught fire.
Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a
gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping
glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled:


While in "The Watchers", written specifically for the book a few years later, it doesn't seem _quite_ so bad, although it might just be a more low-key description of the same thing...

At nine o' clock Earth seemed to explode, catch fire, and burn.
The people on the porches put their hands up as if to beat the fire out.
They waited.
By midnight the fire was extinguished. The Earth was still there.

And then comes a morse light-flash message (visible naked eye across 70 million miles of space? Bradbury, you science fail again)

AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT VAPORIZED IN PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF ATOMIC STOCKPILE. LOS ANGELES, LONDON BOMBED. WAR. COME HOME. COME HOME.

So I guess the scale of the war can be interpreted various ways, but almost certainly worse than an OTL 1950s war would be. I'd go with the "not sustainable", but I wouldn't bet on Bradbury working that out for himself. But the whole million-year picnic thing seems to argue that Earth isn't going to send anyone into space for a looong time.

Where did those spaceships full of black people go? Or was it a US government eugenics dodge?