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U.S. Prepares to Get Nuked
There's an important story in the NYT about new efforts from the U.S. national laboratories to retain and improve their ability to identify nuclear fallout. In a nutshell, any fissionable materials turned into a nuclear weapon will be composed of a specific ratio of various radionuclides, which form a sort of signature, which can be used to identify the source of the fissionable material. The problem is, naturally, that you're probably doing this after the detonation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/19/national/19NUKE. html?ex=1080277200&en=e0e70d58d50239e4&ei=5062&par tner=GOOGLE
Here
This is what "The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists" has to say int the January issue:
"Putting aside the controversy surrounding security at U.S. nuclear power plants, a would-be dirty bomber faces a Herculean task. A spent fuel rod weighs about 28 kilograms, with 36 rods weighing more than a metric ton. Heavy shielding and remote controls are required in their handling, because each rod exposes anyone standing nearby (within a meter) to a lethal dose within seconds.
There you go:
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2004/jf04/jf04k
This is more related to the Padilla case but never mind, to achieve the same impact one would have to deal with similar issues I guess.
For those of you cracking jokes, I enclose just one of mnay testimonies after what happens when someone (read the good ol' US of A) drops a (*tiny* by today's standards), 12.5kT atom bomb on a city.
This is NYC or London or your hometown if things screw up. Whatever you need to do to get involved so this DOESN'T happen, I suggest you consider doing. When it's acceptable to laugh at 9/11 corpses (3% of death toll at hiroshima) in polite company, I'll laugh with you about nukes.
----
From a survivor of Hiroshima:
nday, August 6, 1945, in Hiroshima. A few seconds after 8:15 A.M., a flash of light, brighter than a thousand suns, shredded the space over the city's center. A gigantic sphere of fire, a prodigious blast, a formidable pillar of smoke and debris rose into the sky: an entire city annihilated as it was going to work, almost vaporized at the blast's point zero, irradiated to death, crushed and swept away. Its thousands of wooden houses were splintered and soon ablaze, its few stone and brick buildings smashed, its ancient temples destroyed, its schools and barracks incinerated just as classes and drills were beginning, its crowded streetcars upended, their passengers buried under the wreckage of streets and alleys crowded with people going about their daily business. A city of 300,000 inhabitants--more, if its large military population was counted, for Hiroshima was headquarters for the southern Japan command. In a flash, much of its population, especially in the center, was reduced to a mash of burned and bleeding bodies, crawling, writhing on the ground in their death agonies, expiring under the ruins of their houses or, soon, roasted in the fire that was spreading throughout the city--or fleeing, half-mad, with the sudden torrent of nightmare-haunted humanity staggering toward the hills, bodies naked and blackened, flayed alive, with charcoal faces and blind eyes.
Is there any way to describe the horror and the pity of that hell? Let a victim tell of it. Among the thousand accounts was this one by a Hiroshima housewife, Mrs. Futaba Kitayama, then aged thirty-three, who was struck down 1900 yards--just over a mile--from the point of impact. We should bear in mind that the horrors she described could be multiplied a hundredfold in the future.
t was in Hiroshima, that morning of August 6. I had joined a team of women who, like me, worked as volunteers in cutting firepaths against incendiary raids by demolishing whole rows of houses. My husband, because of a raid alert the previous night, had stayed at the Chunichi (Central Japan Journal), where he worked.
"Our group had passed the Tsurumi bridge, Indianfile, when there was an alert; an enemy plane appeared all alone, very high over our heads. Its silver wings shone brightly in the sun. A woman exclaimed, 'Oh, look--a parachute!' I turned toward where she was pointing, and just at that moment a shattering blast filled the whole sky.
"Was it the flash that came first, or the sound of the explosion, tearing up my insides? I don't remember. I was thrown to the ground, pinned to the earth, and immediately the world began to collapse around me, on my head, my shoulders. I couldn't see anything. It was completely dark. I thought my last hour had come. I thought of my three children, who had been evacuated to the country to be safe from the raids. I couldn't move; debris kept falling, beams and tiles piled up on top of me.
"Finally I did manage to crawl free. There was a terrible smell in the air. Thinking the bomb that hit us might have been a yellow phosphorus incendiary like those that had fallen on so many other cities, I rubbed my nose and mouth hard with a tenugui (a kind of towel) I had at my waist. To my horror, I found that the skin of my face had come off in the towel. Oh! The skin on my hands, on my arms, came off too. From elbow to fingertips, all the skin on my right arm had come loose and was hanging grotesquely. The skin of my
There is no shield against a nuclear missile except perhaps pushing it out into space or stopping it from blowing in the first place.
Once it blows you have a huge mess that will kill people not just at the target but anywhere the wind carries the radiation.
This stuff isn't like dynamite that blows up and becomes inert. Radioactive material can take thousands of years to decay.
You said: " I don't know if they can id specific weapons, but can't they already identify the reactor of origin for the nuclear materials used?"
The nuclides currently of interest in making a nuclear weapon are U-233, U-235 and Pu-239. U-233 can be made from neutron absorption of Th-232 (and subsequent double B- decay), U-235 occurs about 0.7% as natural U, and Pu-239 can be made by neutron absorption of 238 (and susequent double B- decay). The reason these nuclides are of interest is that if one of them absorbs a neutron, due to the quirks of physics, it now has enough energy for the nucleus to break apart without requiring any kinetic energy from the neutron. This is not true for most other common radionuclides.
So, if the bomb used U-233, it came from a thorium breeder reactor, U-235 came from some type of seperation plant (which requires advanced materials--tends to indicate a fully industrialized country), and Pu-239 would come from a uranium breeder reactor. Since U-233 and Pu-239 would be chemically seperated from the rest of their respective reactors' fuel, you aren't really going to get any good design information about their breeder reactors that created the U-233 or Pu-239. A U-235 bomb is the only one that you can really tell based on environmental impurities or irregularities in the U-234, U-235, and U-238 concentrations where the U was mined.
So how can you tell if the bomb was created with U-233, U-235, or Pu-239? Well, there is a statistical distribution of fission products created during fission of any fisionable nuclide. This distribution will vary from nuclide to nuclide. Each of these radionuclides will have a half-life (and branching ratios) as it decays to various radionuclides. If you know when the bomb detonated, you should be able to determine its type by the radionuclides left over at the point of detonation, right? Not exactly, for 2 reasons. First, some radionuclides are gaseous (once cooled to ambient temperature) prior to a decay and solid afterwards or vice versa, so environmental factors have to be taken into account (or just measuring radionuclides that will be solid at all points in their decay chains). Second, and most important, a nuclear bomb has lots of neutrons flying around. Depending upon the size of the bomb, the tamper, they type (atomic bomb, thermonuclear bomb, etc.), --basically the design--the concentration of neutrons in time for the bomb will vary. Whats important about this is not that all the fissionable material will be used up--thats the point of the bomb--but that the fission fragments will also be exposed to a neutron flux and transmuted.
What does this mean? Based on the fallout you can determine what the fissionable material is and the design of the bomb within your mathematical models.
Finally one point that I think needs pointing out: U-233, U-235, and Pu-239 are selected because they require no kinetic energy of a neutron hitting them to cause fission. Thats useful for a nuclear reactor where you want to control the fission rate, but in a nuclear bomb you have to use neutrons that are travelling very very fast; therefore, there will be a significant kinetic energy imparted upon an absorbing nucleus that one of these fast neutrons hits. Meaning: other nuclides (other than U-233, U-235, and Pu-239) could potentially be used in an advanced (but probably very large) nuclear bomb.
Suddenly, the hairy finger of a familiar monkey tapped me on the shoulder. It was time.--G. T.
By identifying the ratio of isotopes, they can determine the probable lab of origin (if it is one of the main labs and not someone's garage.)
The can also make some basic determinations as to the level of tech used to make the materials. They can also use it as evidence in any sort of tracking of the materials back to it's source.
It is a useful dataset, overall.
Warning, before someone moderates the parent as "informative", be aware that the above is a semi-clever troll.
For example, the last paragraph about the kinetic energy of neutrons and whether you want fast or slow neutrons for a bomb or reactor is complete bullshit. A given nucleus has an optimum range of energy for neutron absorption, whether that nucleus is in a bomb or a reactor.
Further, breeding and/or refining nuclear fuel is not an exact process -- you're going to get quanties of other elements and isotopes according to the amount of fission, neutron capture and impurities in the original material -- the analysis will look at things like strontium, gadolinium, other fission byproducts and their isotopic ratios.
And yes, they really can determine which reactor the material came from. (Although determining *what part* of the reactor it came from, as suggested in a Tom Clancy book, is a stretch).
Plutonium is a normal byproduct of uranium reactor operation, particularly of the unenriched uranium heavy water moderated reactors of the CANDU style, it doesn't have to particularly be from a special breeder reactor. The latter is simply more efficient. Analysis of the residue will clear distinguish them.
-- Alastair
My dad was a nuclear chemist back in the day, he talks about going outside the lab, scaping settled dust off the hoods of cars in the parking lot and doing analysis, with exotic isotopes showing up whenever the soviets were doing atmospheric bomb tests.
That was back then, doing casual analysis. A nice comprehensive database of worldwide nuclear fissile material and a network of sensors around the world would yield alot of information - not that we wouldn't know it if a bomb went off anywhere around the world.
Also theres that network of infrasound detectors, which also picks up earthquakes, meteors, and other large scale events. (link below)
Low sounds detect meteor blast (BBC)
Science: The original open source.
Yeah, cry me a fucking river. Somewhere around 5000 Chinese were dying PER DAY in 1945 - how long did you want us to fart around while the Japanese cabinet dicks around putting out "peace feelers" that were so inept that they never connected with anyone?
d f for how many MILLIONS of Japanese civillians starve if transportation bombing starts to prepare for invasion of Japan - scheduled to start within 2 weeks of the A-bombings.
And days after TWO bombs that levelled cities, same cabinet DEADLOCKED on surrender, and it took the emperor's personal intervention to move it along, at which point the army started a coup to stop it! How impressed do you think they'd be with "demonstrations" if levelling 2 cities only got them up to "undecided" ?
And check http://www.westminster-mo.edu/cm/scholar/252001.p
And focus *your* research on the arrogance of applying 20-20 hindsight and 21st century morality to push "revisionist history" on hard decisions taken after 6 years of total war. I have done a fair amount of reading and research, and I have yet to hear a credible alternative plan that would have even a moderate probability of causing less total deaths and suffering, without postulating unrealistically major changes in the actual situation at the time.
This article (South Asia Tribune) explains some of the motivation for 9/11, and possible future attacks. According to the article, the US has:
_ 02/opin ion_pervezhoodbhoy.htm
- Oppressed Palestinians by giving US$5bn per year to Sharon / Israel
- Failed to rebuild Afghanistan after helping to destroy it twice
- Spoken the language of Bin Laden (good vs evil, force as the method of choice)
- Supported dictatorial regimes in Phillipines, Indonesia and Algeria, all countries with significant Muslim populations, while singling out Iraq
- Acted with trumphalism
- Lacked respect for international law
- Bombed civilians such as the Afghanistan wedding party.
The writer of the article believes the above does NOT justify 9/11, although he says he knows some people that do. Here is the link:
Were We Too Hijacked On 9/11?
http://www.satribune.com/archives/sep09_15
I was under the assumption that "bunker busters" were bombs designed to penetrate a barrier (or multiple barriers) before detonating. This would mean a bunker buster would bust through the ceiling of a bunker (or shallow cave) and then explode, taking out the entire stronghold.
The damage done by an interior explosion would be SEVERELY more devastating to the stronghold than an explosion on or above the surface.
Actually, Russia abandoned its No First Use (NFU) doctrine after the end of the Cold War. It no longer renounces the first use of nuclear weapons. As you pointed out, the US has never renounced first use. I know Pakistan and Israel have not. Britain recently stated it might reply to a non-nuclear WMD attack with nuclear weapons, and NATO (including Britain and France) reserves the option as well. Only two states still have NFU. China has always had an unconditional NFU doctrine. India has been under internal pressure to abandon its own NFU pledge.
A comprehensive summary of existing policies is available at this site.
Make cheese not war 8:)
I think the reason why we make the jump from correlation to causation, in regards to nukes and increased cancer rates, is because of the cancer spike in Japan after WWII, and in Iraq after the depleted uranium used in Golf War I, and around Chernobl after the meltdown. These directly causative records have led to a global understanding that nuke testing in the past has caused increased cancer rates.
Since these facts are so well known, one would have hoped you would have known about them too, and not wasted our time talking about eBaying, AIDs, etc. Life expectancy increases are mostly due to nutrition and medicine advances, and in no way cloud the picture re the nukes and cancer.
As well, nuclear fallout has shown to be a global issue, much like acid rain, due to how winds carry particles, so I'm not surprised that people live without cancer within several hundred miles of a blast zone, but are dying a thousand miles away. It all depends on wind patterns, etc.
Scientific research has all pointed to this, so spare me the logic intro about correlation vs causation.