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Five Men Agree To Stand Directly Under An Exploding Nuclear Bomb

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

#91

Post by caf »

jerf wrote: post #79
caf wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The Fukushima accident demonstrates nothing at all about the use of nuclear weapons. High yield thermonuclear weapons detonated above ground turn large quantities of soil and dust radioactive and throw it up into the atmosphere. Nothing in any way comparable to this happened at Fukushima.

It is instructive that the US, UK and USSR were able to agree, at the height of the Cold War (this was less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis), to ban atmospheric tests.

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

#92

Post by rapala »

justinatjustat wrote: post #90
pjscott wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Compared to, let's say illegal small arms, nukes are not that common. And the catastrophic destruction that they can cause is extremely uncommon. There are only a few nuclear incidents of any kind that have caused direct human casualties. From this perspective, dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA would be a huge allocation of resources to remove a small threat.

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

#93

Post by ekianjo »

ck2 wrote: post #71
ekianjo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sorry but it does not make any sense. When there's C14 inside an old artifact or a skeleton, the fact that the atmospheric C14 has doubled over the past 50 years does not change the result of your C14 extracted, for old items.

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

#94

Post by ekianjo »

kragniz wrote: post #70
ekianjo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

C14 exists naturally as well. The reason you can date C14 containing objects has NOTHING to do with nuclear bombs.

Nuclear testing did change the levels of C14 significantly [1]. Carbon dating is impossible for dates after the '50s, when large amounts of nuclear testing started. [1] http://www.sciencecourseware.org/VirtualDating/files/RC_3.ht...

OK, but in my understanding, C14 dating was not really used to date anything recent in the first place. Usually it's used to date old items, monuments, bones, etc...

So, what's your point exactly ?

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

#96

Post by pedalpete »

ams6110 wrote: post #65
BHSPitMonkey wrote: post #18

> "Quite a few have died from cancer," he told reporter Bill Broad. "No doubt it was related to the testing." Is there really no doubt? I didn't see any more details in the article pertaining to the deaths, but for the sake of not implying that correlation == causation, I would point out that most cancer patients were never involved in nuclear testing (and, conversely, the cameraman who said the above also shows cont…

And later, we find that one of them is still alive at age 84, others died at ages 86, 83, 71, 63, and one unknown. Those ages seem to me like pretty good, even mostly quite long lifespans for someone who was already an adult in 1950s.

I agree with your sentiments, but we shouldn't be looking at death, but incidents of cancer. Either way, the sampling is too small, and I suspect can only lead to misdirection.

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

#97

Post by justinatjustat »

rapala wrote: post #92
justinatjustat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Compared to, let's say illegal small arms, nukes are not that common. And the catastrophic destruction that they can cause is extremely uncommon. There are only a few nuclear incidents of any kind that have caused direct human casualties. From this perspective, dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA would be a huge allocation of resources to remove a small threat.

risk analysis: low likelihood x unacceptable impact is still an unacceptable risk. anyhoo, I won't be satisfied with "dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA" : I want total global elimination. perhaps we can begin by agreeing that ending the development of new nuclear weapons should not represent a huge allocation of resources. In fact, that kind of no-cost leadership by example could be the most important step towards convincing other actors to move beyond the nuclear error.

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

#98

Post by rapala »

justinatjustat wrote: post #97
rapala wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Compared to, let's say illegal small arms, nukes are not that common. And the catastrophic destruction that they can cause is extremely uncommon. There are only a few nuclear incidents of any kind that have caused direct human casualties. From this perspective, dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA would be a huge allocation of resources to remove a small threat.

risk analysis: low likelihood x unacceptable impact is still an unacceptable risk. anyhoo, I won't be satisfied with "dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA" : I want total global elimination. perhaps we can begin by agreeing that ending the development of new nuclear weapons should not represent a huge allocation of resources. In fact, that kind of no-cost leadership by example could be the most important…

You can't really use unacceptable impact in risk analysis, it is too subjective. In my opinion illegal fire arms have a (high likelihood * unacceptable impact) risk. Would this risk be greater than the (low likelihood * unacceptable impact)?

Yes, no-new-nukes would be a major step forward. Unfortunately it seems that the Cold War is still on, with the USA building missile defense systems in the eastern Europe and the Russia responding with more missiles near its western borders.

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

#99

Post by arethuza »

klodolph wrote: post #73
cubicle wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bhangmeters are one kind of specialised photo detector used to detect nuclear explosions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhangmeter

I'm pretty sure these were used in bunkers (at least in the UK) as well as satellites.

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

#100

Post by coldarchon »

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #33
yanowitz wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

On the same tack of radiation, but a different situation, Nick Davies' Flat Earth News describes the Chernobyl aftermath. I can't remember the complete substance of his argument, but it was generally that the effects of these things was vastly overstated in the media. Not that I'm trying to controvert your point. This is just an allusion to an enterprising journalist's research.

They are overstated. After Chernobyl people were relocated that would receive 200 mSievert in their whole life due to radiation.

If you smoke a pack a day for 13 years you get the same dose, but no one tells you ..

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