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Japan was killing about a Hiroshima+Nagasaki worth of Chinese and Southeast Asian civilians every month.
Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
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Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
#72Deliberately forging metals with nuclear blast is something we need to put in future sci-fi
In a short story titled 'Glory' Greg Egan described process where hydrogen and anti-hydrogen are forged together into a thin needle: > The end point of this process of nuclear sculpting was a sliver of compressed matter and antimatter, sandwiched together into a needle one micron wide. Which then explodes in a controlled way
Interesting but that doesn't scratch the itch. I imagine something more like crude metalurgist dwarves, assembling a neutrino detector sized ball shaped room, 1 kilometer underground, with demon core shaped device suspended on detonation wires. Aliens thought giving us nuclear fusion would annihilate us without them trying, but we started to using it to make shiny jewelery and fancy chopsticks.
Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
They did not get vaporized in the fireball. We have survivors at the hypocenter. Intense burns and radiation poisoning killed most plus conventional blast damage mechanisms. Half the acute deaths happened after the first day.
Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity. Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!" I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful witho…
>"were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!"
that's debatable. like, worst single instance atrocity? possibly is
Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, and I dunno, it probably does no one any good, I just find it mildly annoying when people treat the atomic bombs dropped in ww2 as some kind of completely incomparable atrocity. Like the beatles joke, "were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!" I mean, we don't really need to rank awful things, we can acknowledge anything beyond a certain level is awful witho…
>"were the atomic bombs the worst atrocity of all time? They weren't even the worst of that war!" that's debatable. like, worst single instance atrocity? possibly is
I mean, even only considering bombing raids, more people were killed during the various fire bombing campaigns against japanese cities and so on, granted those took 1000 planes instead of 1, but somehow I doubt the people burning to death considered that a meaningful distinction.
Re: Discovery of a multicomponent alloy forged by the Hiroshima atomic blast
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Both the US and the Soviet Union actually experimented with "nuclear fracking" in oil/gas fields. The Soviet Union also used atomic bombs to put out fires in gas fields as late as 1981.
See also: operation plowshare. The idea was you could use nuclear bombs to dig canals. Or make harbors. Or really any large scale earth moving project. The U.S. did one test shot, a shallow buried bomb intended as a cratering charge. https://www.google.com/maps/@37.176944,-116.046111,4654m This ended up contaminating more people than any other test which put the breaks on that. The soviets had an equivalent study but…
>The U.S. did one test shot
"Nine were for the purpose of developing an ultra-low fission thermonuclear explosive for use in nuclear excavation projects and one each was for the development of special emplacement techniques and for a small diameter, ultra-low tritium producing explosive for hydrocarbon applications such as Rio Blanco."
[0] Table 1 on page 7 (PDF page 11) https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/408695