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

Nukes of Hazard (2013)

newyorker.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 176 posts

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#141

Post by hollerith »

lotharbot wrote: post #3

The 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 t…

Another technical mistake in the New Yorker article: it implies that since the missle was armed, the fire could have produced a megaton-sized blast. Not true: the component that undergoes fission in all US nukes designed after 1945 is spherical, and for the component to release significant amounts of energy, the sphere has to be compressed by a very precisely-timed combination of about 20 explosions of conventional explosives (TNT or such). In fact, a new kind of electronic device needed to be invented by the Manhattan Project to meet the precise timing demands.

So, although it is possible for the fire to ignite the conventional explosives, it would almost certainly have not done so in precisely the way needed to activate the atomic components of the bomb -- at least that is what I have read somewhere. (Sorry, I do not remember where -- maybe Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ.)

The worst thing that could realistically have happened is that the fire and a conventional explosion would have spread the radioactive components of the bomb (particularly, plutonium) into the environment, in the manner of a dirty bomb.

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#142

Post by ceejayoz »

bkmartin wrote: post #139
ceejayoz wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks. This is very true. We've spent over a trillion dollars combatting terrorism with little progress (and more American lives lost than in 9/11, let alone Iraqi/Afghan lives). Spending that trillion on heart attack prevention and treatment would've been far more effec…

There are A LOT of assumptions in this argument. One assumption is that spending 1 trillion dollars over the last 13 years on heart attack prevention and treatment would have made a significant difference in the number of lives saved. How do we quantify this? A second assumption on the other side of the argument is that spending 0 to fight terrorism would have netted 0 new casualties, anywhere. If we did nothing we w…

What's with the conspiracy strawman?

I think it's hard to argue that a trillion dollars to the NIH, CDC, preventative medicine for the poor, etc. wouldn't result in at least 3k lives saved during the period.

I also think it's impossible to rationally argue that the Iraq war did anything to reduce terrorism, given that the pretext for invasion was WMD, not terrorism, and that extremists now control large swaths of the country where they had minimal power under Hussein.

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#143

Post by swah »

gdubs wrote: post #94
swah wrote: post #65

The movie plug is in the article but most of us are only skimming so let me plug it again: http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/dr_strangelove/ I didn't like 2001, maybe because in 2014 its harder to appreciate, and it has a very slow pace. Dr. Strangelove a much easier watch.

"Fail Safe" [1] is also an excellent movie. I believe it was based on the same book as Strangelove, but is a drama and not a dark comedy. Excellent movie and cast.

Which one ? http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/failsafe/ vs http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/1175374-fail_safe/

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#144

Post by PythonicAlpha »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #55
PythonicAlpha wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Humans" as such would have still survived, but I don't know, if that what would have been left of it would be realistically to be called "civilization". I am also not to sure, if they (the remnants) would survive for long with global climate change and radioactive fallout everywhere.

Almost certainly a Cold War maximum nuclear war would result in collapse of industrialized civilization as we know it, concomitant with an enormous reduction in worldwide population. Nevertheless, a lot of things would almost certainly remain: literacy, agriculture, metalworking, the ideas of science and industry, and so on. Human civilization would be in a very bad state for a good long time, but it would mostly be…

It is most likely, that the state systems as we know them today will break down in many areas of the world.

It all depends, how the survivors will behave. I think it is much likely, that living together will change its form very much -- up to the possibility that people will fight for the last resources or a return to Middle Ages state (but, when I see what is happening in our democracies, they might also do without nuclear destruction).

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#145

Post by jessaustin »

maxerickson wrote: post #85
Houshalter wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is far from certainty. Industrialization depended on having easy and abundant access to natural resources like coal, oil, and various metals. We've exhausted the easy deposits of these resources, the ones a preindustrial civilization could get to. If civilization were to collapse now, it may never rise again.

It would be problematic for the rebuilders if we managed to vaporize everything we've built, but at the moment, pure metals are far more available than they've been in history. We've also probably evened out the geographic availability (so for example you can scrape together a few hundred pounds of copper pretty much anywhere there is a little bit of settlement). I agree that coal/energy would likely be a problem.

I'm not sure what book it was (I'm thinking it was something by OSC), but I've read a scifi story in which some mad scientists were intentionally "resetting" civilization to no-tech chapter one. They had no problems slaughtering billions of people, burning their possessions, and brainwashing their descendants. The major issue was removing all those convenient alloys from the reach of future metallurgists. They eventually settled on some nano-tech devices that melted everything into giant blobs and then sank the blobs thousands of feet into the Earth. There was a quip at the end about geology in future being doomed to failure, based as it would be on some harebrained explanation for the natural formation of convenient blobs of alloy.

I wonder if the story itself is as fucked-up as my memory of it is.

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#146

Post by jessaustin »

aragot wrote: post #125
DennisP wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Put it that way and it sounds like 99.9999% is just an excessively precise version of 99%. Really it's the difference between .01 and .000001. It's just an expression of the order of magnitude: one in a hundred, a thousand, a million.

...and we did hit that one chance in a million that it was wrong.

What are the chances?!

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#147

Post by jessaustin »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #60
VMG wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you're much more likely to be born into a world where this event didn't happen. The history of nuclear accidents is not a good indicator for the risk of nuclear war due to survivorship bias. The fact that we haven't observed a nuclear war in history might have less to do with the likelihood of nuclear war and more with the fact that fewer people would be able to observe that history. See http://en.wikipedia.org/w…

Ah, interesting, a bit like a quantitative version of the anthropic principle. It presupposes that civilizations that have recovered from doomsday scenarios will never be as large as those that never had such an event occur. Perhaps on the timescale since the Cold War that holds.

This seems much sillier than the anthropic principle, however. (And I've had a professor thunder at me that the anthropic principle itself is silly, anyway.) It's not as though we know of any nuclear-capable civilizations besides our own.

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#149

Post by VMG »

jessaustin wrote: post #147
InclinedPlane wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, interesting, a bit like a quantitative version of the anthropic principle. It presupposes that civilizations that have recovered from doomsday scenarios will never be as large as those that never had such an event occur. Perhaps on the timescale since the Cold War that holds.

This seems much sillier than the anthropic principle, however. (And I've had a professor thunder at me that the anthropic principle itself is silly, anyway.) It's not as though we know of any nuclear-capable civilizations besides our own.

I'd love to hear an explanation why it seems silly.

Re: Nukes of Hazard (2013)

#150

Post by jessaustin »

Kiro wrote: post #126
ceejayoz wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it. We've lost more people in the Iraq/Afghan wars than were lost in 9/11, for little progress - Iraq's splitting into pieces and much occupied by folks hardcore enough that Al Qaeda goes "hang on, you're making us…

It's easy to be wise but I'm pretty sure no-one could have predicted the rise of ISIS. Saddam Hussein was a tyrannous dictator that ruled for too long.

You're right it seemed like most pundits predicted they'd call themselves SPECTRE or H.A.M.M.E.R. or something like that. You never can be too sure with these super-villains.
Post reply on HN