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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.
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.
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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
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.