Think about how all our nuclear tests actually raised carbon 14 levels to such a high point it can actually be used as a marker to determine the age of an object anywhere in the world. Then think about our crazy high cancer rates.
C14 exists naturally as well. The reason you can date C14 containing objects has NOTHING to do with nuclear bombs.
Yes but the point is nuclear tests doubled the amount of atmospheric carbon 14.
So [all of history: rising C14 level] ... [-nuclear tests-] = now double of all of history rate to that date.
I've heard from anti-vaccine advocates that a number of diseases were on the decline, and that vaccine use was insignifcant in that decline. But the vaccines were introduced anyway so you could say it was the vaccines that did it but other factors were at hand. Sometimes I think correlation not only doesn't equal causation, but counters causation, like a son doing well not because of his overbearing mother, but in sp…
Just because on popular pseudo-scientific theory was successfully debunked doesn't imply that all theories can be debunked. Arguing with the vaccination case here boggles my mind, it's so misguided.
OK let your mind boggle. Mine's fine. Some guys stand 10,000 or 18,500 feet away (depending on whether taken from text or video) from a nuke explosion then drive off. How much ionizing radiation were they exposed to? Probably very little. I'm not sure. Over the years in their job.. who knows. From my understanding, it's the fallout and contaminated food that is dangerous. As to vaccinations, I think it's an apt analogy. You get 1 jab and never get an illness. It must have been the jab, right?
Holy Hell. That second video really drives home the devastation caused in the blast wave. Paint on vehicles turned instantly to ash and blew away. Wooden structures instantly caught fire. What was unexpected to me (I saw this in the first video which made me aware of it) was the 'backwash' after the initial shock wave. Terrifying.
The prompt X-rays from the physics package heat up a lot of air very quickly. This expands, producing the supersonic shockwave front. Then the fireball, being very hot and much less dense than the air around it, rises. Air is sucked towards ground zero, producing the backwash, and the characteristic mushroom cloud of any very large explosion.
And the fireball created by the X-rays is, for a moment, hidden behind the shock wave. This makes a "double flash" which can be detected from orbit without even the need for a camera, just point a photodetector at the Earth's surface.
18,500 feet is 3.5 miles. So is there a different between being 3.5 miles under a bomb vs being 3.5 miles away from a bomb?
Yes. Studies of nuclear explosion impact effects distinguish between "ground burst" and "air burst" detonations. Ground bursts typically have a smaller overall radius of damage, but do more intense damage at or near ground zero. Air bursts spread their effects across a wider radius, but damage is relatively more evenly distributed. Ground bursts also produce more fallout, since they dig up and irradiate earth and sca…
Reply to 'gcb' who's account is hellbanned, so I can't reply to him directly.
No: Ground bursts cause way more fallout. Air pretty much can not become radioactive no matter how powerful the bomb. But soil can, so it becomes radioactive, then is scattered by the wind.
The fallout from the bomb itself is different and is the same for both - but it's a smaller component, since there isn't that much of it.
Think about how all our nuclear tests actually raised carbon 14 levels to such a high point it can actually be used as a marker to determine the age of an object anywhere in the world. Then think about our crazy high cancer rates.
And then think about our historically crazy high life expectancies.
As the saying goes (roughly): "correlation doesn't equal causation, but it's a good place to start looking". Are cancer incidence rates higher among those around nuclear explosions? Yes. http://www.nrc.gov/about-nrc/radiation/health-effects/rad-ex... Is there a plausible mechanism by which radiation exposure leads to cancer? yes. http://hss.energy.gov/healthsafety/ohre/roadmap/achre/intro_... These two facts greatly…
I've heard from anti-vaccine advocates that a number of diseases were on the decline, and that vaccine use was insignifcant in that decline. But the vaccines were introduced anyway so you could say it was the vaccines that did it but other factors were at hand. Sometimes I think correlation not only doesn't equal causation, but counters causation, like a son doing well not because of his overbearing mother, but in sp…
The case for the major vaccines is open and shut. In the past fifteen years the roster has been populated with some stuff that's less clear, but targetting diseases that are much less dangerous. If you are going to make arguments against vaccines like measles, polio, diphtheria, tetanus you _really_ must do more homework. These are very serious diseases and we really don't want casual free-riders avoiding vaccination.
Operation Plumbbob, troops in front of an exploding nuclear bomb (@2:50): http://youtu.be/7mV0Lt2PUjI?t=2m50s Tactical nuclear artillery being fired (@0:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GBjlUOROY&feature=relat...
In the 2nd vid, there are vertical smoke lines next to the mushroom cloud, are those from the bomb itself or something else?
Operation Plumbbob, troops in front of an exploding nuclear bomb (@2:50): http://youtu.be/7mV0Lt2PUjI?t=2m50s Tactical nuclear artillery being fired (@0:50): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46GBjlUOROY&feature=relat...
In the 2nd vid, there are vertical smoke lines next to the mushroom cloud, are those from the bomb itself or something else?
those are rockets launched to create smoke trails. The smoke trails were used to study the velocity of the shock-wave emanating from the explosion.
If you read up on the history of the era and combine that with a study of the real effects of nuclear bombs, it becomes evident that there was an uncoordinated, but nevertheless systematic, effort to grossly overstate the dangers of nuclear war. A game of "Telephone" [1] was played, where at each step the nukes got more dangerous. If nukes were as dangerous to the world as popular culture today imagines, there would…
Note that a great deal of those tests were underground - the Limited Test Ban Treaty banned all atmospheric tests and was signed in 1963. This was primarily because of the risk posed by fallout. Needless to say, wartime use of nuclear weapons would not be underground.
Fallout is of course dangerous. It just isn't as dangerous as it is commonly thought. We actually had a recent demonstration of this fact courtesy of Fukushima, and people in California being worried about the fallout. These worries were many, many orders of magnitude away from being well-founded.
What I'd like to know is why the recording equipment kept functioning -- isn't an EMP supposed to wipe out sensitive electronics? At least that's what the movies tell me...
A few things.
ICs are a lot more sensitive to EMP than vacuum-tube devices.
The amount of EMP experienced is a function both of the size of the size of the nuke, and of the receiving antenna. One reason the Starfish and Hardtack bursts affected street lighting systems is that these were attached directly to the electrical grid: power lines == large antennas.
Blast yields were also in the megaton range, 1000x greater than the one here.