Nukes of Hazard (2013)
newyorker.com
Nukes of Hazard (2013)
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Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#2I read "Command and Control" on vacation this summer and I highly recommend it. It interweaves jaw-dropping nuclear weapon disasters from the whole nuclear age with a detailed account of one particular incident. It's astonishing how close we've come to accidental nuclear detonation (and then what happens?). That's really the point of the book: it's a matter of when, not if.
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#3The article claims that a nine-megaton blast would wipe out "most of the state of Arkansas". Wikipedia claims the lethal radius on a bomb of that size is about 20 miles for thermal effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Effects ), which is around 2% of the area of Arkansas; other effects are described as having an even smaller radius.
I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct.
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#4From reading the article, I get the sense that the best thing working in our[1] favor was having a series of relatively steady, not crazy hands on the nuclear football, on both sides. It's still incredibly frightening that the annihilation of the human race was literally placed in the hands of two people at any given time, but a testament to the capability of the Soviet Politburo and the American political system to elect capable human beings.
[1] i.e. the human race
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#5>And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out.
That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#6>And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out. That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression t…
The largest nuclear detonation set off by the United States was Castle Bravo. It was fifteen megatons. It had serious fallout issues, but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon.
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#7> Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square
Are there people that know how big a Cub is, but don't know how big a Cessna is?
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#8nah... we'll collapse our civilization slowly by turning into one big always connected ant colony hidden in concrete from the overheated unfriendly environment
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#9Nuclear bomb security may have be less advanced than we were lead on to believe. For example British nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key: "British nukes were protected by bike locks" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm .
If one puted that in a movie plot I think few would believe it.
Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)
#10From reading the article, I get the sense that the best thing working in our[1] favor was having a series of relatively steady, not crazy hands on the nuclear football, on both sides. It's still incredibly frightening that the annihilation of the human race was literally placed in the hands of two people at any given time, but a testament to the capability of the Soviet Politburo and the American political system to…
That came up in a previous discussion of nuclear weapons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 ). To quote my wife (Dove), "There were several close calls during the Cold War, and while the powers involved always chose to respond (they had to, it was doctrine at the time), they always chose to respond cautiously. Both sides wanted to avoid a "hot" war at almost any cost." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 ).