161–170 of 176 posts
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It's sad that semantics appear to be more worthy of discussion than the mere existence of such raw destructive power.
It's a sign that the journalist just didn't give a crap. What else did they not give a crap about?
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One explanation of the massive overkill that the US had for a lot of the Cold War came down, essentially, to badly stated requirements. Apparently, the US military were tasked with destroying 50% of the socialist world's industrial capacity - which you could do by destroying 50% of the factories completely or 100% of the factories by at least 50%. However, if you attack say a shoe factory (the example given) with an…
Maybe, but another important reason for overkill is that you couldn't be sure that all payloads would actually reach their destination. In the nuclear-bomber era this was especially the case - IIRC the last book I read on LeMay suggested that planners assumed around 90% of the planes would be shot down far away from their intended targets. The missile era obliterated that particular dynamic, but replaced it with a th…
Air defence systems back them were really pretty poor - e.g. the infamous case where the entire US air defence system couldn't stop UK strategic bombers taking out major us cities in an exercise (which was kept quiet for decades due to the embarrassment it caused).
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A point that bears repeating is that this level of overkill was actually counterproductive . One way of disabling a high efficiency nuclear device is to blast the thing with neutrons (causing a premature and incomplete fission reaction in the core of the weapon). This was actually how the Sprint ABM system was intended to destroy its targets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_%28missile%29 Now picture the skies ove…
Hey, there's a simulation I'd like to see. "It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least 10 s apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than 1 min or more than 1 h apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects." Anyone for Missile Defense with a 50-100Mt Tsar bomba?
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> "in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant" The specific point being discussed was a local disaster -- a 9 megaton bomb which was damaged by somebody dropping a tool on it -- not an all-out war scenario . Which is why I responded the way I did. In that scenario, I don't see any realistic case in which the entire state of Arkansas would be "wiped out". Possibly fallout would have rendered a fraction…
No, see the answer from aeturnum: use the online calculator, enable falout. You'll have to zoom out the map: the area of the effects is approximately as big as the state. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fallout from an airburst.
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No, see the answer from aeturnum: use the online calculator, enable falout. You'll have to zoom out the map: the area of the effects is approximately as big as the state. http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
I did in fact already run this scenario. The fallout area is large if you set the threshold low enough. But from what I understand, the largest rings do not render the area uninhabitable by any means. Perhaps the smallest inner ring does. Fallout is also generally a short-term effect -- weeks, not decades. Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fal…
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I did in fact already run this scenario. The fallout area is large if you set the threshold low enough. But from what I understand, the largest rings do not render the area uninhabitable by any means. Perhaps the smallest inner ring does. Fallout is also generally a short-term effect -- weeks, not decades. Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fal…
Contrary to what you assume, the fallout increases in the underground burst compared to the burst in the air as the surface is reached see: http://fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm
Thus, I am unconvinced by the argument that the longer-range fallout would "wipe out" something the size of Arkansas.
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I've seen that argument made many times, to be frank it's not actually as well founded as it seems. This is because it confuses two very different things: ease of production of natural resources and cost effectiveness of production of natural resources. In the early stages of industrialization ease of production is paramount, but in later stages quality, production volume, and per unit cost is paramount. Early resour…
Civilizations have collapsed before from far less serious disasters. From Mayans to Mediterranean civilizations (several of them actually) to the 5 centuries of decline and stagnation of China, and probably countless more I haven't read about. And the industrial world is far less resilient. We depend on huge amounts of infrastructure and massively complex systems of trade and production. Very likely we would return t…
Some aspects of modern, industrialized civilization are tenuous (like worldwide inter-continental freight shipping), others are simply insights or knowledge gained through hard work that doesn't need to be repeated. Such as even the general idea of the movable type printing press, or literacy, or the germ theory of disease, or food preservation via canning, and so on. A modern person with a little bit of knowledge transported back 2 or even 3 thousand years could change the way people live their lives at a fundamental level. Boiling water and pasteurizing milk before drinking it are things that have been possible since antiquity. As would be canning of various foods, enabling preservation of fruits, vegetables, and meats harvested in the summer through the winter or through several years. That sort of thing transforms the basic subsistence equation enormously and massively accelerates the amount of time it would take to return to some degree of modernity and industrialization. Not to mention the huge transformation due merely to the ideas of rewarding individuals for their labor and their inventions, the idea of the scientific method, and the process of advancing knowledge and technology in general. All of which were stunted historically because people didn't know any better, just as people didn't know to wash their hands or boil their water.
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A point that bears repeating is that this level of overkill was actually counterproductive . One way of disabling a high efficiency nuclear device is to blast the thing with neutrons (causing a premature and incomplete fission reaction in the core of the weapon). This was actually how the Sprint ABM system was intended to destroy its targets: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_%28missile%29 Now picture the skies ove…
Hey, there's a simulation I'd like to see. "It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least 10 s apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than 1 min or more than 1 h apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects." Anyone for Missile Defense with a 50-100Mt Tsar bomba?
If you can land a nuke, or even a conventional warhead, directly on whatever it is you're trying to make a was, your required explosive yield falls dramatically.
Blast radius and damage increases with the cube of yield, so if you're half as accurate, you need 8x the blast, generally, for effective damage.
Turns out that with extremely high precision warhead delivery, the US can dispense with nuclear weapons even for tasks such as destroying deeply buried and reinforced bunkers (command and control, or missile launch).
On the one hand this makes nuclear Armageddon that much less likely. On the other it makes use of highly advanced weaponry less objectionable.
Which way the risk needle ultimately swings given that calculus is an interesting question.
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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.
Nah. We've got information, which is more valuable than energy and not likely to be lost in a collapse. Civilization doesn't require pissing away prodigious amounts of energy on every little thing - that's just the way we do it when we have lots of energy. Also, there's plenty more available energy on this planet, many times the amount we've used so far in building this civilization. Methane Hydrate, Thorium to name…
Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, has noted that adding technology to his models does very little to shift the ultimate outcome.
And information absent energy isn't worth much at all. The world as a whole has effectively equal access to information. What's it's got unequal access to are raw material resources, most particularly energy.