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

Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 118 posts

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#81

Post by Dove »

delinka wrote: post #46
kitsune_ wrote: post #19

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...

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.

If you haven't seen a lot of atomic blasts, look up Trinity and Beyond. It's a documentary about nuclear warhead development and testing, with a lot of historical footage of the blasts themselves. In fact, I think the clip you reacted to is from that documentary.

Anyway, the damage you're seeing isn't actually typical for a nuclear blast. It's an effect called the precursor wind, and is in fact one of the distinctive things tested by shot Grable.

    A precursor is a very strong dynamic wind caused by the
    shell’s oblique angle of approach, and its high   
    horizontal speed. The nuclear explosion essentially 
    inherits the shell’s forward momentum, which sweeps 
    across the landscape causing extensive drag damage in 
    addition to the typical destruction. For instance, a jeep 
    which had been left virtually untouched by the much more 
    powerful Encore device was completely torn apart by the 
    artillery blast, and thrown a distance of about 500 feet.
http://www.damninteresting.com/atomic-annie-and-her-nuclear-...

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#82

Post by mynameishere »

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #63
mynameishere wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually that second video looked mostly fake. Some of the footage was in "The Day After".

Its real. Many movies have reused stock nuclear footage. I recognize that video. Also, the effects in it are typical of nuclear blasts.

Sorry if I wasn't clear. The video was a clear hack job, interspersing many different pieces of footage from different tests. It was designed to fool a 1950s crowd. Let's be better than that.

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#83

Post by adrianwaj »

chernevik wrote: post #76
adrianwaj wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

See chart 1. http://www.ispub.com/journal/the-internet-journal-of-infecti... 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 seri…

Thanks, I am aware of Measles being useful. How about Hep A/B/C, Meningitis and others? More importantly, illnesses and syndromes correlating with increased vaccine usage? That's 1 illness and 1 paper.

I don't think vaccine usage is an open and shut case at all and there are many sub-issues and I'm not getting into a micro-discussion now on this thread.

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#84

Post by mturmon »

Symmetry wrote: post #50
mturmon wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, it's deterministic, until you get surprised: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Flat#Baneberry and then perhaps you wish you had not shelved your "irrational" fear.

There's a lot less that can go wrong when you're trying to contain an explosion by distance, then when you're trying to contain it with dirt in the way.

Here was another oops moment, from an airborne test:

"Shot Harry was detonated on a 300-foot tower. The 32-kiloton explosion heaved a vast amount of earth into the air, much of it vaporized, most of it as a fine powder, all of it radioactive..."

From http://www.kcsg.com/view/full_story/19217952/article-SOUTHER...

My point is simply that it's hard to stay safe when within a couple miles of an energy release of that size, no matter what your model tells you. Downvote if you like; this seems pretty non-controversial.

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#85

Post by backprojection »

dhughes wrote: post #39
bjornsing wrote: post #34

> Some of you may have noticed the nuclear missile video says the explosion took place 10,000 feet above our group of soldiers. Apparently, the video is wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council checked the numbers and says the explosion, part of Operation PLUMBBOB, was actually at 18,500 feet. Well, there's actually some pretty good proof here that the explosion was closer than that: I count the time between ligh…

Me too! distance = 1,116.44 feet/second * 12 seconds = 13,397.28 feet

Significant figures, you have too many of them.

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#86

Post by hollerith »

bjornsing wrote: post #34

> Some of you may have noticed the nuclear missile video says the explosion took place 10,000 feet above our group of soldiers. Apparently, the video is wrong. The Natural Resources Defense Council checked the numbers and says the explosion, part of Operation PLUMBBOB, was actually at 18,500 feet. Well, there's actually some pretty good proof here that the explosion was closer than that: I count the time between ligh…

If the 18,500 figure refers to feet above sea level, then since most of Nevada is at about 4,500 feet above sea level, . . .

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#88

Post by opminion »

ck2 wrote: post #62

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.

Care to explain?

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#89

Post by goostavos »

delinka wrote: post #46
kitsune_ wrote: post #19

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...

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.

I highly recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb. It goes into incredible detail about the blasts. One of the later chapters, using the example of hiroshima, discusses the effect of the blasts on the human body -- often to excruciating detail.

Your comment about the paint instantly turning to ash and blowing away made me think of the book. At a certain distance from the bomb, the wave isn't strong enough to instantly kill you, but much like paint on a car, you're skin will instantly blister from the heat, and then be blown off by the shock wave.

Horrifying stuff, but a really, really interesting read.

Re: Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

#90

Post by justinatjustat »

pjscott wrote: post #38
justinatjustat wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and so, in fact, you see: this toxic sludge is actually quite good for you.

No. Stop it. There are degrees of badness, and degrees of risk; decapitation is worse than getting a scraped knee, and car accidents are more common than cases of people being devoured by sharks. If we want to do right by everyone, and prevent horrible things from happening, but we have limited resources, then we've got to focus on things that are bad, common, and at least partially preventable. If you understate som…

whatever: nukes /are/ bad, all too common, and entirely preventable. given "they still can kill millions directly and effectively destroy civilization as we know it by wiping out potentially every major city in the world" -- what more do we want before this unacceptable risk gets adequate focus? certainly, so far, there's little risk that any resources have been 'misallocated' I'm pretty sure no-one's gonna get hurt and die because we rid the world of these weapons of mass destruction.
Post reply on HN