Slashdot Mirror

Somebody needs to send Trump a copy of "On the Beach". Radiation sickness is not a pleasant way to go. You vomit and deficate like the flu. According to the book, you might get better, but it only lasts for two weeks before the symptoms recall and then you die. http://www.atomicarchive.com/E... I think people need to hear the graphic effects of what a nuclear war would be like.

>Does it follow that Europe's nasty record of being the number one killer in the world was a result of free speech?

Didn't the USA take the title when it dropped nukes on the Japanese?

What? You seem to forget the Europeans who killed over 6 million undesireables in Europe during the 30's and 40s. And Old Josef, who killed an unknown number. And those were non-combatants. Add the soldiers killed in WW2, and we actually made a momentary global reduction in population for s short period, almost alll courtesy of the enlighterned and sophisticated Europeans.

I realize that you have a deep and abiding hatred, of us Americans, but is your hatred so ingrained, your ability to think so propagandized that you ignore what Europeans did to each other?

The Americans you claim to have killed more people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki had a total casualty of 135,000 in Hiroshima, and 64,000 in Nagasaki. http://www.atomicarchive.com/D...

But if I recall correctly, some Europeans have a real knack for wht they proudly called "The Big Lie.

Overpressure Physical Effects 20 psi Heavily built concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished. 10 psi Reinforced concrete buildings are severely damaged or demolished. Most people are killed. 5 psi Most buildings collapse. Injuries are universal, fatalities are widespread. 3 psi Residential structures collapse. Serious injuries are common, fatalities may occur. 1 psi Window glass shatters Light injuries from fragments occur.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/E... It will utterly obliterate any and every pod in the tube. You'd be hard pressed to find a piece of human meat bigger than a baseball. And that is really just one concern of a dozen.

The main health hazard is attached to the gaseous waste products. They contain not only carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide (both highly toxic) but also a number of carcinogenic compounds such as phenanthrene and others. To discharge these into the air is impossible. It would cause the tolerance level to be exceeded for several miles around the reactor.

It is therefore necessary to collect the gaseous waste in suitable containers, pending chemical detoxification. Alternatively, the waste might be mixed with hydrogen and filled into large balloons which are subsequently released.

Really, why do we think that POTS would continue if we were partitioned or that data lines were taken down?

Because POTS will work in some of the worst environmental conditions possible. It survived the nuclear bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Did you just make that up? "The telephone system was approximately 80% damaged, and no service was restored until 15 August." http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp9.shtml

You can make the same points on resiliency for the Internet. The question is, is it worth continuing to maintain POTS, and if not, should we extend the resiliency of the Internet within smaller regions.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Deterrence/Deterrence.shtml

do you want me to get another speech from his soviet counterpart?

or do you just want to admit now that you're an idiot who doesn't understand a rather simple concept?

Of course that sort of glosses over the assistance the US provided the UK prior to entering the war as well.

You mean assistance like loaning money, loans that were only paid off a few years ago? Or perhaps assistance like allowing British nuclear physicists to work on the Manhattan Project, and then not allowing them to share any of the results with the UK after the war?

When I wrote "prior to entering the war" I meant "prior to entering the war', so the reference was to the US Lend-Lease act of 1940 and the provision of 50 destroyers to the UK and Canada. That was helpful in preventing the UK from being starved into submission by submarine warfare.

This followed the 1940 Destroyers for Bases Agreement, whereby 50 USN destroyers were transferred to the Royal Navy and the Royal Canadian Navy in exchange for basing rights in the Caribbean. Churchill also granted the US base rights in Bermuda and Newfoundland gratis, allowing British military assets to be redeployed.[13]

A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $647 billion today) worth of supplies were shipped: $31.4 billion to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, and $1.6 billion to China. Reverse Lend-Lease comprised services such as rent on air bases that went to the U.S., and totaled $7.8 billion; of this, $6.8 billion came from the British and the Commonwealth. The terms of the agreement provided that the materiel were to be used until time for their return or destruction. Supplies after the termination date were sold to Britain at a discount for £1.075 billion using long-term loans from the U.S. Canada operated a similar program that sent $4.7 billion in supplies to the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union.[2] The United States did not charge for aid supplied under this legislation.

You are quite wrong about the loans, the terms were quite generous: What's a little debt between friends?

The British Mission

With the resumption of cooperation, the first task was an updating one. The British handed over a pile of reports on the progress of their work, and General Groves supplied a copy of the progress report he had just submitted to the President. The British were amazed by the progress made in America and staggered by the scale of the American effort: the estimate of the total project cost was already in excess of one thousand million dollars compared with the British expenditure in 1943 of only about half a million pounds. Chadwick was in no doubt that the first duty of the British was to assist the Americans with their project and abandon all ideas of a wartime project in England. He concluded that this would best be achieved by sending British scientists to work in the United States. . . .

Whatever the variations in the opinions of the British contributions to the Manhattan Project, there is no dispute that their participation benefited the British considerably. The course of the British nuclear programme in the postwar period would have been very different had it not been for the wartime collaboration. While United States law prohibited international cooperation on nuclear weapon design, the British were able to undertake a successful independent nuclear weapons programme, which, despite its small scale relative to that of the American programme, succeeded in elucidating all the essential principles of both fission and thermonuclear warheads and in producing an operational nuclear weapons capability. When the two countries came together again in 1958, following a critical amendment to the 1954 United States Atomic Energy Act, the developments in nuclear weapons technology over the previous eleven years were found to be remarkably s

Little Boy on Hiroshima was a device dropped on a city of wood and paper, most of the damage in photos of Hiroshima are from the fire storm that broke out 20-30 minutes after the blast, a nuclear reactor won't do that.

If you look at Trinity (20 KT airburst at 100 feet AGL - fireball radius of 110-115 feet), we have pieces of steel left at the base of the tower.

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/Trinity/image18.shtml

Now at Fukushima, much stronger and exotic metals, plus uranium, there will be a lot more metal left intact. Fukushima's containment structure can survive 410-1400 kPa, you'd have to put a nuclear device right next to the containment structure and trigger it.

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

As for fallout, even if you use a device(s) large enough to engulf the facility in the fireball, all that vaporized metal is going to fall out of the sky somewhere downwind, you know like in the North Pacific fisheries.

There was probably some of that, but I know that they were specifically worried about flash blindness, which makes it impossible to function (except blindly) for a while. Retinal scaring (from the UV or the visible) I believe is only a problem if you are looking directly at the fireball, whereas I have heard that you can get flash blindness from a nuke even facing away with your eyes closed and your arm over your eyes. See, e.g., http://www.atomicarchive.com/Effects/effects13.shtml for a little more.

Before you embarrass yourself further, you might want to actually read up on the various definitions of cruise missile.

(Hint: Launching platform and intended target are irrelevant.)

http://www.fas.org/nuke/intro/cm/index.html
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Glossary/Glossary2.shtml
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cruise_missile

Just so you are clear...

Dropping two nuclear bombs on Japanese civilians saved the lives of an estimated 300,000 to 1,000,000 japanese soldiers and 250,000 to 750,000 japanese civilians.

(http://socyberty.com/history/did-we-have-to-nuke-japan/)
"In the South Pacific, our combatant kill rate, Japanese to Allies was about ten to one. We killed about ten of their soldiers for each one of ours. Had we lost 100,000 men in the landings, not an impossible number, and continued that kill ratio, we would have killed nearly one million Japanese soldiers. More realistic numbers based on Normandy would have been 30,000 American deaths mapping to over 300,000 Japanese Soldiers killed. Notice I am careful to use the word soldiers. I remind you we would have killed a significant number of Japanese civilians, easily more than one quarter of a million had they not resisted the Americans, based on the losses of French and Dutch civilians in the taking of Europe from the Nazis. Had they resisted, the toll would have easily tripled based on the civilian casualties at Stalingrad. The pre-invasion air assault and shore bombardment would also have taken its toll. Even if those numbers are halved, the losses at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still much lower!"

---

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.shtml
  Hiroshima Nagasaki
Total Casualties
  135,000 64,000

Hiroshima was chosen because of its large size, its being "an important army depot" and the potential that the bomb would cause greater destruction because the city was surrounded by hills which would have a "focusing effect". Nagasaki was the backup target when Kokura (and it's arsenal) was clouded in.

---

Dresden alone (by comparison) is currently estimated at about 25,000 casualties (so half of Nagasaki but still a lot of civilians).

---

Japan got off extremely light with regard to civilian deaths.
http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob62.html

Germany 2million (ten times the civilian casualties resulting from a clean, non nuclear defeat)
Japan 350,000 (--- when you consider 200,000 of those were the two nuclear bombs...)
Rumania 400,000 (1/3rd the population of Japan, higher civilian casualty rates)

---

We have done a lot of scummy crap. And you know what- most of it seems like it turned out badly. So it makes you wonder why they keep doing it?

My theory is that we want to keep a lot of the world balkanized to prevent more superpowers from arising.

Even you count in the scale, there's been a lot more total deaths due to car crashes or airliner crashes than with nuclear plants. France gets 78% of their power from nuclear, yet the only accident I could find was 3 workers getting confined due to not using proper safety equipment. Probably a lot less than the problems we get with coal based power.

I think that's the reactor building drawn to be rather cartoonish:

Real Three Mile Island Pic
http://www.atomicarchive.com/History/coldwar/images/tmi.jpg

Simpsons-esq Drawing with titties
http://www.inkycircus.com/jargon/images/nuclear_power_plant.gif

Most nuclear plants have been running in the U.S. and France for more than 30 years without issues.

Most, without issues?. Not all? What does most mean to us?

1. 1. -- There is NO safe dose of ionizing radiation, and also economic viability
2. 2. -- Nuclear power plant incidents at home and abroad
3. 3. -- Nuclear power plant incident preparedness documents
4. 4. -- A little alarmist media, because sometimes we should be alarmed

1. -- Some exerpts from "The Politics of Power: Risks and Costs of Nuclear Power Plants": http://www.garynull.com/The%20Politics%20of%20Power%20Final%20&%20Final%20Footnotes.pdf

The NAS (The National Academies of Science (NAS) report, Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation,) finding had long ago been discovered and presented by John Gofman, M.D., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Molecular and Cell Biology at the University of California and Chairman of the Committee for Nuclear Responsibility (CNR). Dr. Gofman said the following in 1994:

The lowest dose of ionizing radiation is one nuclear track through one cell...Either a track goes through the nucleus and affects it, or it doesn't...I came up with nine studies of cancer being produced where we're dealing with up to maybe eight or 10 tracks per cell. Four involved breast cancer ... it's not a question of 'We don't know.' The DOE has never refuted this evidence. They just ignore it, because it's inconvenient. We can now say, there cannot be a safe dose of radiation. There is no safe threshold. If this truth is known, then any permitted radiation is a permit to commit murder.

and

Critics complain that nuclear energy is expensive because of (1) the time and resources it takes to build and decommission nuclear power plants and other nuclear facilities; (2) the hidden costs of mining the uranium ores, reprocessing and storing the waste, and purging the environment of radioactive pollution; and (3) costly health problems from exposure to low level radiation. The Department of Energy (DOE) has admitted that, "economic viability for a nuclear plant is difficult to demonstrate."

Thomas Cochran, a nuclear physicist and Director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says that nuclear power is "uneconomical, it has a safety problem, it has a horrendous proliferation problem on the global level, and it has a long-term waste problem that hasn't been solved."iii He notes that "nuclear power would be a great solution to greenhouse gases" that cause global warming, were it not for those four problems!

2. -- http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Japan/Accidents.shtml This link is a list of "Major Nuclear Power Plant Incidents" from around the world, including the US.

Here's another one from last year in Michigan: http://blog.mlive.com/grpress/2008/02/palisades_nuclear_power_plant.html

3. -- http://www.redcross.org/images/pdfs/code/nuclear_power_plant.pdf and http://www.fema.gov/areyouready/nuclear_power_plants.shtm are links to the Red Cross and FEMA nuclear power plant incident preparedness documents.

4. -- http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7553564094124690254

There were those opposed, chum. They were overridden by concerns that the U.S. and Australian soldiers would retaliate for the vicious nature of the occupations by the Japanese in China, SE Asia, Phillipines, etc.

Let me educate you.
When the Japanese captured Nanjing, they put about 300K people on their knees and shot them in the head or cut them off. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4439923.st m
Consider the Bataan Death March. 10K prisoners died in inhumane treatment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bataan_Death_March

Now -- Nagasaki. 150K dead. http://www.csi.ad.jp/suzuhari-es/1000cranes/nagasa ki/index.html
Now -- Hiroshima. 66K dead. http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp10.sh tml

You should note that the Nanjing massacre outweighs both bombs combined. No nukes involved, only bullets and swords.

The Allied troops wanted blood and lots of it. Were we to have had to land on the Japanese coast, the Japanese had women, children and old people trained and armed (albeit poorly) to send against them. The estimates of casualties were in the many hundreds of thousands. Far less than those produced by the two bombs.

I have to say that while most special effects enhacements were good, the one thing I really didn't like was the ring explosions around both Death Stars.

Those explosions eventually gained the acronym BSR (Big Stupid Ring).

It's supposed to be modelled on the Mach Stem caused by an explosion. When an air explosion hits the ground, it creates a secondary shock wave which travels faster than the first, and the two eventually merge. From above it looks like a rapidly expanding ring.

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.

There are at present only two methods for sifting uranium atoms, or isotopes, to create the right mix.

Some guy already discovered a new set of Roman ruins in Italy with Google maps.

Get yourself Google Earth and look around. I'm sure a couple of google searches will tell you where most of the nuclear tests have taken place.

This map will even show you where they've taken place.

I wouldn't even be surprised if many of these things are already cataloged someplace for Google Earth.

Cheers

Accuracate (sic) placement is not a high priority with fission bombs.

Although this is widely believed, it is not true. Placement is absolutely crucial to nuclear weapon effectiveness.

Nuclear detonations are large but still finite. Tactical weapons are deployed using highly accurate warheads because they must have a small CEP (on the order of a few hundred meters) to assure destruction of hardened targets. So called strategic weapons must be detonated at altitude to maximize damage.

Obstructions such as hills can greatly reduce the effect of overpressure. This was observed in Nagasaki, which was spared a large amount of devastation due to terrain. Thermal radiation can be stopped by terrain and even reduced by heavy clouds.

A small, or at least inefficient, nuclear detonation at sea level in a port will produce far less devastation than an optimally placed weapon. An interesting study of what might occur if New York suffered a hypothetical 150 kiloton detonation a ground level is found here. The result is 1.7 million casualties (800,000 dead) in a very densely populated city of 8 million. A detonation some arbitrary distance off shore of a less densely populated area, possibly mitigated by terrain and/or weather (Seattle, for instance,) would be far less effective. You might end up with total casually figures of a few hundred thousand. About average for a large scale carpet bombing operation during WW2.

My point is that placement is paramount to nuclear weapon effectiveness. Damage from haphazard detonations in ports will be relatively limited. More important is what happens after such an attack.

Unfortunately, he cannot write anything new: http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/inmem oriam/KennethRossMacKenzie.htm but he is well published in scientific circles. Atmopsheric hydrogen ignition is a sustained chained reaction in theory. It does not work due to the lack of control over the initial energy release. Yeah - I guess no one *really* knew until they pushed the button but since then it has been discredited.http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/Smyt hReport/smyth_appendix_4.shtml

And "radioacive [sic] fallout" is another big myth about nuclear weapons. The amount of radioactive material left is comparatively small and on top of that, are alpha emitters anyway are only dangerous if ingested/inhaled and only then if in comparatively large doses.

And "radioacive [sic] fallout" is another big myth about nuclear weapons. The amount of radioactive material left is comparatively small and on top of that, are alpha emitters anyway are only dangerous if ingested/inhaled and only then if in comparatively large doses.

And "radioacive [sic] fallout" is another big myth about nuclear weapons. The amount of radioactive material left is comparatively small and on top of that, are alpha emitters anyway are only dangerous if ingested/inhaled and only then if in comparatively large doses.

That sounds pretty assured, and pretty destructive, to me...

Unless we are expecting an attack from Russia, Great Britain, France, or China, we are not talking about MAD.

Read http://www.atomicarchive.com/Docs/MED/med_chp3.sht ml/

Then read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_wit h_nuclear_weapons more carefully than some apparently have.

Apart from the above countries, it is unlikely that any of these so-called rogue states have anything much more powerful than Fat Man and Little Boy. The first site above lists the damage at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Note in particular:

  -- No casualties were suffered as a result of any persistent radioactivity of fission products of the bomb, or any induced radioactivity of objects near the explosion.
  -- The blast totally destroyed everything within a radius of 1 mile and caused significant damage out to about 3 miles.

Anyone who thinks that North Korea is going to figure out a way to send a missile across the Pacific, accurately, and manage to destroy all 465 square miles of Los Angeles, is not checking the facts.

China could destroy Los Angeles.
France could, probably.
Great Britain, most likely.

India, with 60-90 weapons, would have to place them carefully.

North Korea just can't do it

Which is not to say that hitting Los Angeles with even one nuclear warhead wouldn't hurt.

But consider the situation about a day after that, when the country that launched against Los Angeles isn't there anymore, and the US has used perhaps 5% of its arsenal.

MAD indeed.

"It will be able to move towards a specific target, such as a wrecked pipe laying on the ocean floor -- and maybe fix it."

I've said it before and I've said it again. It saved lives.

Educate me.

Fix Wikipedia.

I won't say you're wrong. I will say that I can't be as certain as you are without knowing a lot of facts modern historians don't know the answers to. The fact is, I don't know the truth and I believe nobody ever will. I don't think the Japanese, Americans or Soviets knew everything that was going on. Nuclear war certainly wasn't on the table when Japan decided to make its move. How do you evaluate a risk like that when scientists haven't even proven it works?

It saved the lives of approximately One Million US Service Personnel, and it saved the lives of Millions of Japanese Civilians and Soliders

The bombings claimed 70,000+ lives in Nagasaki (they recently released the list of names) about 130,000 in Hiroshima, an additional 65,000 are estimated to have died from fallout. How many US lives would not dropping the bombs cost? Japanese lives? How many Soviet lives would it have cost, if they had finished up getting over China to Kyushu where, by modern theory, the Soviets would have accepted a conditional surrender of the Japanese, ending the war only two weeks after the atomic bombs were dropped? (57M/8 years /52 weeks in a year = 137,000 per week, 270,000 in 2 weeks and that's a severe overestimate because the Mediterranian and European theaters were over by then). Please cite some sources for killing 3 million people inside of two weeks.

How many generations does a life cost? The murdered children? The pregnant women? The women still yet to get pregnant? (Men are easy to count.) The bad will the US earned from the rest of the world by being the only nation to use atomic weapons in war?

Maybe the atomic bombs saved lives in the short term. Heck, maybe Japan would have been communist otherwise and the cold war would have not been so cold because someone would need to use the weapons in wartime to prove their effectiveness.

We're just guessing here. There are no clear cut answers. The fact of the matter is, the US had two reasons, one was saving US servicemen lives (accomplished) and two was saving Japan (and the rest of the world) from them falling to the communists (accomplished). The rest of it is retrospective optimism.

Next time you state that the atomic bombs saved lives -- without any room for question or flexibility, I'll meet you at the Peace Park in Nagasaki. We'll walk across the street together to the Atomic Bomb Museum. You just hold your head high knowing the US made the right decision. Watch how the Japanese react to your confidence. Cast aside everything inside as propaganda, because that's what it'll take not to put your American / European education into perspective.

So the only way to force an unconditional surrender was a rather raw display of power. The Bombs were a way of saying, "We don't need to use people to decimate you -- we can do it in a manner that you cannot possibly defend against. Now, will you give up?"

I agree with everything you just said. Now how many lives did it cost by dragging the war out an extra month by demanding an unconditional surrender, as suggested by then-Secretary of War Henry Stimson? (By the way, if we're going to discuss "intent to save lives", let's discuss the plan to nuke all the defenses on Kyushu before sending servicemen in to prevent another Normandy, shall we? At least

Hehe, I always thought it was amusing that they needed copper for the cyclotrons, but couldn't get any due to wartime shortages, so they borrowed 15,000 tons of silver from the Treasury.

Here is a Shockwave-based solution (sorry Linux) If you have the latest version of Shockwave installed then go to http://www.atomicarchive.com/DVD/starwars.html. There is no error checking, so use at your own risk ;)

The real problem with Yucca Mountain is the water table issue and the fact that most of these waste materials are extremely toxic. Nuclear reactors do not produce large amounts of isotopes "hundreds of thousands of times more radioactive" than "natural" uranium. And if they did, the half-life for them would be extremely short. The reason it takes millions of years for these waste materials to become functionally inert is because they are alpha emitters with very long half-lives. In other words, they do not produce large amounts of dangerous radiation. As they decay they will hit stages of greater radiation, but remember, alpha particles cannot even penetrate the layer of dead skin cells covering our bodies. A sheet of paper is strong enough shielding. Beta emmiters are somewhat more dangerous, but not significantly so. Additionally, while alpha particle radiation can still cause mutagenic aberrations if it can get passed your clothes and skin; the real danger is application to an open wound, inhalation, or ingestion of the radioactive materials. Not only does this allow the alpha particles to damage sensitive internal organ tissue, but the materials themselves are highly toxic. This is one of the reasons that radon (the end product of the uranium in the earth naturally decaying) in our basements is such a concern. Radon being gaseous enters our lungs where the alpha particles can actually do damage.

Chernobyl's problem was not the release of radiation into the atmosphere. That is disapated very rapidly by prevailing winds and does not affect the surrounding area significantly (not from a single event such as that). The problem with Chernobyl was that when the top blew chunks of radioactive debris like pieces of the graphite cooling system rained down over the surrounding countryside and got into the ground and the water supply.

Most of the deaths in Nagasaki and Hiroshima were caused by the shockwave and the subsequent fires, not the radiation. This is not to say that there weren't many people killed by radiation, there were. But those individuals dying of cancer caused by those blasts are the individuals that were present at the time of the attacks. Both areas are still thickly settled and do not have higher than normal cancer rates outside of the population of the bomb drop survivors.

Additionally, far larger amounts of the same materials used and produced in nuclear power production (including uranium 235, uranium 238, and thorium among others) are pumped into our atmosphere every day by coal burning plants. In fact, if we took all the radioactive materials we send into the air every year and put them in nuclear reactors, we'd be able to make more energy that the coal plants that put them into the atmosphere did during the same timeframe.

On top of that, if breeder and pellet based plutonium reactors were actual in service we could use the waste from standard light water reactors to feed breeder reactors whose waste would feed the pellet based reactors. Drastically reducing the amount and lethality of the nuclear waste that we'd ultimately have to store.

Uranium-238 Decay Series

Nuclide Half-Life Radiation
U-238 4.468 109 years alpha
Th-234 24.1 days beta
Pa-234m 1.17 minutes beta
U-234 244,500 years alpha
Th-230 77,000 years alpha
Ra-226 1,600 years alpha
Rn-222 3.8235 days alpha
Po-218 3.05 minutes alpha
Pb-214 26.8 minutes beta
Bi-214 19.9 minutes beta
Po-214 63.7 microseconds alpha
Pb-210 22.26 years beta
Bi-210 5.013 days beta
Po-210 138.378 days alpha
Pb-206 stable

Are you sure that there isn't 15,000 tons of silver bullion on earth?

I live a very close to the Mountain, and I went out walking with my digital camera this afternoon. As it started to erupt, I caught this spectacular shot. You should have been there!

http://www.atomicarchive.com/Photos/LANL/images/mo hawk.jpg

Of course a Neutron Bomb would be a much cheaper and easier way to destroy a population and leave the infrastructure intact. This type of capability has been around for decades, and hasn't destroyed the world yet. While nano-tech may be dangerous, it is not for the reason you state.

The ABLE bomb was dropped off target, a tail fin on the bomb failed. That is why so few ships were sunk. Although the BAKER test did sink more ships, the water plume that was created was very radioactive and if the ships had been manned, there would have been serious radiation issues for the crew. For more information : Operation Crossroads or buy the Atomic Archive CD-ROM

The H-Bomb and SDI.

And getting Oppenheimer's clearance revoked by casting doubts on his patriotism.

If you want to read about a genuinely interesting and curious bomb-physicist, check this out.

Star Wars was the FIRST movie to do a Space based SCI-FI with lots of semi believeable special effects. The sci-fi movies before it sucked because the effects were lame..

• 2001:A Space Odyssey (1968), with Flash explanation.
• Silent Running (1972 had far more believable robots - and very realistic explosions in space (based on the Starfish 1.4 Megaton tests).

In addition to supposed lost Russian nuclear material, actual lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are equally worrisome and more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West.

Lost US nuclear weapons and accidents are a lot more common than anybody realizes, with over a dozen VERY major incidents detailed here. There's even a monument to the 1957 Broken Arrow incident in New Mexico. If you've got $20 to blow, you can even get a nostalgic guided tour of all these Broken Arrow events narrated by Batman himself, Adam West. Just for grins, the official US Government document for how a nuclear weapons loss is to be handled may be read here.