Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

291–300 of 381 posts

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#291

Post by Retric »

ianburrell wrote: post #179
Retric wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes far less to be an effective fallout shelter than you might think. If you look at lethal ranges on H-Bombs you see incredible destruction, but if you're protected for the first 1hour after a blast you can be surprisingly close to the blast and live.

Fallout shelters aren't about protecting from the nuclear blast but from the fallout that comes afterwards. The secret to surviving fallout is to put as much distance and stuff as possible to places where fallout collects like the ground. And then stay there for 24-48 hours. Looking for buildings with basements, or the center of multi-story buildings. The advice I have heard is if not in proper shelter, like house wi…

I mean blast in terms of timing. You can get a leathal radiation doses in the first seconds well outside the fireball.

Moving from shelter A to B is very high risk. It might work, but you are unlikely to get far and would want someway to avoid breathing dust on the trip. If your in the center of a large office building for example you probably want to stay there for the next hour unless a great shelter is less than five minutes away or the building is on fire etc. http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-explosion-fallout-rad...

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#292

Post by greggman »

amazingman wrote: post #276
joshuakcockrell wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mormons stopped practicing polygamy in 1890.

How was that decided?

the law banned it.

note though all Christian religions claim to believe in a book, the Bible, that has people who practiced polygamy blessed by God. It's pretty hypocritical for any one who believes in the Bible to be against polygamy when the God that book is about blessed the practice.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#293

Post by greggman »

sjg007 wrote: post #258
torstenvl wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the thought. Water is the #1 survival necessity but an enormously fragile resource. Electricity can go out, pipes can burst, water supplies can be tainted. Some people keep years worth of canned food around but almost nobody has a year's supply of water.

Don't forget that the water heater has 50 gallons in it.

not in Japan. Japanese water heaters are on demand heaters. I love them becahse unlike US style tank based heaters Japanese on demand heaters never run out of hot water.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#294

Post by lz400 »

tomalpha wrote: post #51
IIAOPSW wrote: post #17

I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war. First, I'm going to press send on the doomsday draft which is sitting in my e-mail. Second, I'm going to go to youtube and play "We all go together" by Tom Leher. Third, I got a bottle sitting in my desk that I'm going to pop open. Presumably I'll be in the office at the time so one final round with the coworkers. The people in this article se…

> I'm currently living in Japan. So obviously I have a plan for nuclear war. I can't tell whether this is meant seriously or not, but assuming it's serious, I'm genuinely curious as to why this is "obvious"? Is this historical (Hiroshima/Nagasaki) or due to current political tensions?

Not sure but in Japan there are a lot of preparedness measures for earthquakes. Everyone goes through disaster training, people have survivals kits at home, are aware of evacuation centers, etc. There is some overlap between these measures and nuclear war but I'm not aware of a lot of planning for nuclear war itself.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#295

Post by wolfgang42 »

gdubs wrote: post #60
ashleyn wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing up I got the impression that a fallout shelter was a purpose-specific room deep underground. So every time I saw the "Fallout Shelter" sign on a building, I figured it was built with one of these "secret underground rooms". Think dedicated, locked stairwell that goes a thousand feet underground; after all, that's how it was pictured in my "Way Things Work" book. When we went to the bank, it was something of a…

Off-topic, but if the book you’re referring to was the How It Works encyclopedia set, that was how I also learned about everything. My grandpa gave the set to me, and it included an incredible amount of material - illustrated and fascinating for a wide range of ages (this was long before we had internet). It is how I also learned about nuclear weapons, though I don’t specifically recall fallout shelters.

ashleyn says[0] that it was The Way Things Work[1] by David Macaulay (©1988), which indeed has (on page 177) a drawing of a fallout shelter depicted as a small concrete bunker at the end of a deep stairwell far underground (containing, of all things, a party singing Happy Birthday), along with the following description:

> A future nuclear war would not only reduce cities and towns to ruins. Fallout from the nuclear explosions would spread through the atmosphere, bombarding the land with lethal amounts of radiation. The only means of escape would be to live in deep underground shelters away from the fallout. This imprisonment would have to last until the radiation decreased to an acceptable level, which could take many years. Even then, climatic changes, shortage of food and the threat of disease would make life above ground a grim business.

Incidentally, the book is most memorable for lucid and well-explained diagrams involving woolly mammoths, and I highly recommend it for explanations of anything mechanical. The section on nuclear physics is a bit lackluster, however.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16145514

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Way_Things_Work

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#296

Post by [deleted] »

jjeaff wrote: post #158
nkurz wrote: post #90

I saw a high-effort self-post on Reddit that gave a good framework for evaluating what might have happened. I thought it was good enough that I've recopied it here in full hoping that author appreciates reaching a larger audience and that discussion here might be better than that on Reddit. Repeating, I'm not the author of what's written below. --- A couple of possibilities for what REALLY went down in Hawaii yesterd…

Regardless of the credentials of the poster, the fact that it was posted in r/conspiracy makes me think it's not that useful of a comment. r/conspiracy attracts a certain type of poster, one who finds possible consiparcy in everything.

[deleted]

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#297

Post by throwaway1X2 »

ScottBurson wrote: post #251
henrikschroder wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps because they understand the reality of the situation better? Look, almost everyone gets the situation with North Korea wrong. NK has exactly one deterrent from being invaded, and that is a ton of very boring, very conventional artillery that is within firing distance of Seoul. In the case of NK being invaded, they would immediately start shelling Seoul and trying to reduce it to rubble. If you start evacuatin…

I think this is mostly right, but there is still some room for concern. First off, those anti-missile defenses have never been tested in anger and we can't be 100% sure they will work. (I'd love to think we have an effective boost-phase defense in place, but I gather that's not going to be a reality for a few years yet, at best.) Second, what I think Kim really wants to use those nukes for, besides leverage in the sa…

Wow... Apart from the NPT (which is just a piece of scrap paper anyway, see Israel, India, Pakistan), last time someone thought putting nukes near adversaries on the other side of the world was a great idea, the world almost ended.

The entire incident is now known as "Cuban Missile Crisis", although it started with the great idea of placing Jupiter missiles in Italy and Turkey against USSR, continued with USSR placing missiles against USA in Cuba and ended with a single officer on a Soviet submarine, out of three required, objecting to launching a nuclear torpedo while being attacked from a USA ship above. Seeing how easy it is to spark a full war (e.g. Gleiwitz, Gulf of Tonkin), the Doomsday clock had its leap second that day.

Stationing nukes in the SK, close to both China and Russia would be such a major shift in power balance, that I would really like to see the crazyman who would go to China/Russia to even mention that.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#298

Post by booleandilemma »

pkaye wrote: post #280
booleandilemma wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For most developers there is no overlap with what they know about software and the things listed above.

Hence the stew pot ;)

He edited that in later :)

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#299

Post by Udik »

ScottBurson wrote: post #256
UweSchmidt wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think the US would actually retaliate against a limited nuclear attack in an isolated place with a massive nuclear counterattack? (I can see it in a cold war scenario against the USSR, with tanks moving into Europe and the world order at stake) I think the US woudln't and, of course, shouldn't. The usual game-theoretical reasonings in this regard are misguided and shortsighted.

I'd be interested for you to expand on your last sentence, because it seems to me that we would have no choice but to respond massively. Once Kim demonstrated a willingness to launch an offensive attack killing or endangering civilians, we'd have to assume he would do it again, and would therefore have to do our best at destroying all his launchers, and make every effort to kill him. He knows that, of course, which i…

I think the most extreme and remotely plausible thing NK could want to do (but that would already mean taking an incredible risk) is to direct a nuclear missile to explode somewhere on the ocean, far from any populated place but close enough to the west cost of the US to send a clear warning about their capabilities to reach a major US city if provoked. NK is never going to actually attack the US first, it would simply mean squandering all the effort made so far in building a credible deterrence. Deterrence is not deterrent anymore when you force the enemy to respond.

Re: What It Felt Like in Hawaii When Warning of an In-Bound Missile Arrived

#300

Post by Udik »

gdubs wrote: post #64

It’s interesting how people (anecdotally) don’t seem to have any plan for a nuclear attack, as opposed to, say, an earthquake or a fire. I think there’s a stigma around even considering the possibility. However, it makes sense to at least talk with your family about what you would all do. According to what I’ve read on the gov sites, it’s very survivable for a lot of people if you take key steps: surround yourself wi…

Fires and earthquakes are orders of magnitude more probable than nuclear attacks.
Post reply on HN