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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.
I think the US is more preparing for radioactive fallouts from "dirty" bombs, i.e. sacks full of radioactive crap with a conventional explosive in then to spread the crap.
I don't think any terrorist group has the expertise, materials or facilities to build a nuclear device, much less deliver it, unless Pakistan helps.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Would being able to tell the country of origin for the fuel really mean anything? I mean, every nuclear power on the planet so far has let some bit of its nuclear program become 'lost'.
Seems to me this would just become a tool for blaming whomever our other intel is telling us is at fault - right or wrong, as we've seen recently.
:::The Spear in the heart of the Other is the Spear in the heart of You; You are He - Surak of Vulcan:::
A couple items caught my attention.
This is actually done with PREVENTION in mind. Given an existing legitamite threat, this is well-spent money. This isn't just anti-terror, as nations like North Korea are perfectly capable of this level of threat, and wouldn't be without an excuse to excercise it (Bush's infamous "axis of evil" comment?).
I've not been a fan of how much or even how we've been spending to fight terror (see http://www.costofwar.com for what else we could have bought), but I would consider with what information and resources American enemies have that I'm not opposed to spending my tax dollars on such a program.
Yes, obviously we'd have to be nuked for this to pay off directly for us. However, in the case of such an incident, it'd be tremendous if we didn't run around like chickens with their heads detached. There were some lessons learned in 9/11 that are worth recalling.
Of course the US has been preparing to get nuked since before nukes. And before "atomics" before that, like the WWII atomic bombs on Japan). As the first to test, then (the only) to strike with fission weapons, we've been practicing defense since the early 1940s. And we're in one of the handful of countries that has steadily practiced defense. We are, in fact, the most nuked people on Earth, by our own hand in tests and industrial pollution.
Thinking through the unthinkable has always been our primary defense: first by preventing it, then by readiness for the aftermath, which minimizes the aftermath, inhibiting the event by reducing its damage. While others might not learn anything of how they might best prepare merely by applying what they see us do, they might at least learn to help prevent getting nuked by planning for it, without accepting it.
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make install -not war
Maybe Hirohito should have thought about his people when we asked for their surrender several times before nuking them. Hell let's be more retroactive and say they should have thought about their people before launching a sneak attack on an American military base without a declaration of war.
Don't blame us for Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Blame the idiots that started the war to begin with so they could conquer Asia.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
because each rod exposes anyone standing nearby (within a meter) to a lethal dose within seconds
Dirty bombers don't need a real power plant rod, they just need something that registers on a geiger counter as dangerous, i.e. several time the "safe" exposure limits that are usually quite low. The idea for terrorists is to spread terror amongst the people, and get press time.
If Fox News starts spreading the word that something with the word "radioactive" in it just exploded in NYC or Washington, you may not see deaths by exposure, but I think you'll see a general panic and stampede big enough to kill, or at least severely disrupt the economy.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I suppose it must be considered a progress for you to laugh about it, but I lived though those times and I'm still scared.
I have a delivery system that can reach from almost anywhere in the world to almost anywhere else.
It's called a shipping container. After that, call your favorite UPS, FedX, hell even the USPS will deliver a decent sized package.
Duh.
Even if the lowly customs officer scans the box and detects radiation upon receipt what does he do? What kind of damage would a 10KT warhead do at the dockside in Los Angeles?
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
Like you haven't been paying any attention to this Dirty Bomb stuff.
Let me give you an example: What looks like a car bomb goes off on Wall Street. It turns out Al Qeada operatives have scraped together (from 10,000 smoke detectors or wherever) a bunch of radioactive material and included it in with their Tim McVeigh-style fertilizer and fuel oil bomb. Physical damage may be minor, but hundreds of people get exposed to the nuclear toxins and the grounds will take a major effort to clear.
Granted, one move like that and treaties with Pakistan or not, the US will be hell bent to exterminate Al Qeada.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Umm problem is that ICBMs aren't a big threat to the US. The problem is some guy packing a oversize suitcase bomb that some country supplied him with. ICMBs its easy to track who launched it, we have Norad. We could even possibly shoot them out of the sky.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Drop a nuke on Mecca first ... And make it clear their God is dead or never existed like everyone else's.
Bad idea. The destruction of Mecca by the Infidels is part of their armageddon scenario. Which continues, by the way, with the second coming of Jesus (whom they refer to as the prophet Issa, a particluarly holy man, whom they believe went bodily to heaven and will be back shortly before the end).
Playing into that scenario would essentially require the bulk of the Islamic world (most of which consider terrorism to be heresy) to go on a holy war against the bombers and their allies.
Given that (if I recall correctly) there's over a Billion of 'em last count, and they DO beileve that dying in a war to defend the faith is a ticket to paradise, this would be very very bad.
By the way, It's not "their" God. It's "our" God. Assuming you and I are both Christian and/or Jewish. (Of course that might be problematic, given your statment about the non-existence and/or death of God.)
"Allah" is just Arabic for "God" - specifically the Arabic pronounciation of the word that Hebrew pronounces "Yahweh", which became "Jehova" in English translations. It's the word that is used by Arabic-speaking Muslums, Jews, and Christians alike when referring to God.
You know, if you really believe there IS no God, or that God is dead, then you're playing into another part of the scenario. Their version of armageddon is the war between the UNfaithful and the "people of the book" - members of EVERY divinely-inspired religion, along with everybody who converts to any of 'em along the way (with Jesus back to give the last word on it all).
Drop that bomb and you're exactly what they've been waiting for.
Nip it in the bud.
You're about 1,500 years too late.
But maybe we can nip YOUR idea in the bud. Before you set off WW III in the form of the sixth Crusade.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You obviously grew up in the cold war. You know what it's like to have a vast array of global-killer weapons pointed in your general direction.
Today's youth takes this fore granted. I saw a comment on here a few days back along the lines of "Well, let's throw a few nukes at one spot on Mars and see what happens." Today's youth read about Fat Boy and think "Wow, that's a cool bomb." But they should really be thinking "Wow, we did that? Could that happen to us?"
I'm frightened to see what happens when my generation doubles in age, and qualifies for positions of power over these kinds of weapons. They do not know better and unless something horrific happens, I doubt they will within the next 25 years.
The same thing goes for those countries just now joining the nuclear family. Some of these countries are lead by people who do know better and think that's all the more reason to use them.
May you live in interesting times? We're well beyond that now.
You can be as technologically advanced as you like. But the key to not getting nuked is to be friends with others. Or at least leave them alone, so they'll leave you alone.
If North Korea wants to hit us, they can smuggle a suitcase bomb. The problem with terrorism is the lack of nuclear deterance, they aren't afraid that we'll hit them back.
The entire THEORY behind Bush's War on Terror is to hold governments accountable, and therefore not be willing to support terrorism.
North Korea is less likely to give Islamists nuclear material if we could track it to them and respond by nuking the shit out of them.
It gives deterance back, will therefore hopefully never be used.
We never launched our Cold War nukes, but if you think that they didn't make us safer... well then we disagree on 50 years of global history.
Alex
I love americans... "We would annihilate them" ....
Right... in global thermo nuclear war (like, HELLO, with China), you do not annihilate anything. In this scenario, you are in NORAD or you are dead.
So, perhaps you should say:
My president would annihilate them, or, the powers that be would destroy the world because of this or something that actually resembles reality, instead of the stuff you see in fox news.
NO SIG
Questions for you to research (you wouldn't believe my conclusions anyway, nor should you):
Was the attack really sneak, and intended to be so? Did the US also draw Japan into war using pressure around oil and rubber resources, as well as deception?
Did attacking a military base require revenge in the form of destroying cities? (Your suggestion is that it did.)
Given that Hirohito was actually offered a realistic opportunity to surrender, would it have been possible for him given internal politics? If not, did the US military know that?
Was it necessary to detonate over a city? Why not out past Tokyo harbour, in full view? Consider it a warning shot, factor in cultural elements.
Given that one is convinced that nuking a city was necessary, was it necessary to nuke a second city?
Was there intent and significant motivation to conduct these detonations as experiments?
I suggest that your research not focus on reportage coming out of the fog of war or patriotism, but on declassified documents and their analyses by scholars.
Good luck. (One might then apply the results of above questions to the people of Bikini, the Aleuts, the Navaho, etc., including those the French, English, and Russians experimented on, just for a bigger picture.)
Damn those pesky terrorists
Remember, no one thought that al Queda had cruise missile capability before 9/11.
Not strictly true. The basic idea of crashing airplaines into American skyscrapers had been around for at least twenty years -- Dean Ing used this premise in his 1979 novel Soft Targets.
-kgj
-kgj
Not only that, but if it happens between now and November 2, you can bet the Bush supporters will try to tell us that electing anyone else would be an appeasement to terrorism. They're already setting it up by accusing the Spanish voters of that--an accusation entirely inconsistent with the facts of that election, but they've never thought twice about lying in the past. You watch, that's what they'll try to say. (And if there's no attack, they'll say we should re-elect Bush because he's kept us safe.)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
Keep up your current foreign policy and you won't have long to wait.
Unfortunately, that statement, regardless of the flamebait moderations, has too much truth in it. It offends many people.
Our current foreign policy isn't working out very well. We need to do something about it no matter who's running the show next January. Bush, Kerry, whatever. Something's got to give.
Let's try something that more often embraces the world instead of making others wonder where our baseball bat will strike next.
This is not a dream, not a dream...we are transmitting from the year 1-9-9-9.
For such an "expert" in strategic geopolitics you as many Americans fail to grasp that terrorism is a tactic, not a constituency. The harder you fight it the stronger it becomes. Ask Israel.
Is just as horrific as what you described. War sucks, and it's been going on a lot longer than anyone has written down. The first books were about ways to effectively kill each other. Not much has changed since you gutted your enemy with a sword - a real innovation over the club and spear techniques. That is just as violent and gory - perhaps moreso. War is part of our very being. I find it interesting we debate so heavily what happened to the nethanderals.. heh. I can make an educated guess or two, and they all involve me making a better club and having a full tummy.
Nukes put it all out there - the only thing that has changed is there are more of us now, that we're all fooling ourselves about human nature - it's easy to be a pacifist when you have lots of food on the table without really knowing what makes our cities run (oil). So what if it was a war about oil.. oil runs the whole show my friend.
I caught the tail end of growing up in the cold war, and you mark my words: Nuclear weapons are going to be used again. They will be used to devastating effect, and the genie is indeed out of the bottle. If the western world does not demonstrate it has the willpower to use them, then someone else will - it is a dangerous game if nuclear weapons become a "paper tiger".
The sad fact is we are all headed to a very dramatic showdown over oil. People pretend there's an unlimited supply, but there's not. And we will do ANYTHING as a nation to insure the ready availablity of oil to fuel the economy.
Use nuclear power to find a way to get off the need for oil. If you care, don't rally government to stop wars and weapons development - I would perfer my side to be armed to the teeth with the beast weaponry known to man. "Green" technologies can NEVER come even close to replacing the energy quality of oil. Without that energy quality, "our" world just doesn't work.
Rally around a tax to fund nuclear physicists and other people who might figure a way to get energy out of the quantum vaccuum - but do something, and do it soon. Fooling ourselves helps nobody, and there's good reasons why the sun doesn't power your SUV - and none of them have to do with grand oil company conspiracies.
..don't panic
The game now is as it always was: deterrence. The point of being able to back-trace nuclear material, whether it be fallout from a nuclear weapon or residue from a radiological (or "dirty") bomb, is to be able to determine who was behind the attack. Yes, terrorism is hard to fight on a battlefield, but it's not exactly a radical thought that if we find a country to have been complicit in any way with such an attack, we'll force them to face us on our own terms. We've bulldozed through two countries so far because of 9/11, and whether you agree with the reasons for doing that or not, there's no way we'd hesitate to do it again if a nuclear weapon of any form was detonated here. Our best bet at preventing this kind of attack is demonstrating that we can figure out who to destroy after the fact.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
Officials also hope that if terrorists know a bomb can be traced, they will be less likely to try to use one
- How ya doing, Mohammed Al-Shafeer ? Ready to do the sacrifice in the name of Allah ?
- Nah, I don't think I'll carry that nuke with me. They'd be able to trace me after it exploded. I prefer to be just a plain old-fashioned bomb-man with vanilla explosives. This way they won't trace me.
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Roses are #FF0000, Violets are #0000FF, find / -name '*base*' |xargs chown -R us && mv zig greatjustice
What am I talking about? Ask a "suvivor" of a Vietnam-era napalming how their injuries feel. If they're still around - just because you survive the original splash doesn't mean you're going to live long, or well. Or, ask a survivor of stepping on a land mine how it feels to stump around on those splintered bones. Or, ask a vet with a good chunk of their brain blown away how they feel - if, of course, their hearing centers still function, and if they can communicate back.
Beginning to get my point? Being injured is horrible. Losing people is horrible. Neither is the exclusive domain of nukes.
There's more, though.
By now, some of you will be muttering darkly about the sheer numbers of deaths and injuries. That's not unique to nukes, either. Check your history. 1943 Hamburg firestorm: 40,000 killed. February 1945, Berlin: 25,000 killed. February 1945: Dresden: 30,000 killed. Total number killed by US bombings (in Germany) is generally accepted to be 800,000 to a million people, depending on your cites. I can absolutely promise you that not one of those people - or the people they left behind - give a rat's buttocks if fission was involved or not. Dead is dead. Burned is burned. Crippled is crippled.
Now we get to the fallout-fearing ranters. Well, this one's actually pretty simple to dispose of. So far (for the US testing only) we know of 911 nuclear weapons tests in Nevada, 106 in the Pacific, and 10 more in various other US locations (Alaska, New Mexico, Mississippi and Colorado.) These vary from airbursts to underground and varied in yield from fractions of a KT to 15 megatons. You'll notice that we're still here, Nevada in particular is doing pretty well, there are still edible fish and lots of other pretty healthy flora and fauna in the Pacific and generally speaking (considering 911 events) there is very little of interest going on related to all that activity. Of course, I've not mentioned the Soviet and Chinese and French and anyone else who has taken the liberty to pop off a nuclear device. Which I probably should do a little, because some of those were a lot larger than the US ones: The Soviets in particular hold the record as far as I know for the biggest bang, and they lit of about 715 weapons, not counting little guys, but counting "fizzles." And again, the world is still here, and people mostly think about Nagasaki and Hiroshima when they think about the effects of nuclear weapons.
Turns out, that's the right way to think, because nuclear weapons going off in populated centers are the really "annoying" thing. Lots and lots of dead and injured people at once, huge cleanup job, big risk of disease, injury to industrial and social infrastructure.
Think back. When those planes flew into the WTC, we lost 3,000 people, and a few buildings, and a few businesses got hammered. Now if you sit back and count people, and buildings, and businesses, you gain the perspective that this was in fact a tiny, tiny, tiny pinprick, albeit on a nerve - the NYC business district. But the social and business infrastructure damage was HUGE. President Bush mobilized, and used, the military, in several venues over a long period of time. The US economy took a shock which I maintain it has not recovered from to this day - though that's very much an IMHO - and the news, and the public, could talk of little else. Imagine the US public reaction to a firestorm (non-nuclear) that killed 25,000 people. It seems to me that we'd "melt down", socially and economically. A nuke would do the same.
That, /.'ers, is the real problem. America is one hell of a lot softer than its size, bellicose ranting, economic "might" and world police presence makes people think it is. I think if a nuke went off, the problem wouldn't be the direct effects. The problem would be the breakdown of everything else.
The thing that irritat
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I lived through the cold war. I was scared shitless as a kid by films like Threads. (A friend sent me an MPEG-4 of this film recently, and I still found it incredibly depressing, despite some of the obvious made-for-TV effects. The acting, storyline and directing makes up greatly for the low budget). When I first saw the film, aged about 13, I only saw half of it because it scared me so much I couldn't keep watching. I then couldn't sleep for weeks, and night lightning from summer thunderstorms woke me in cold sweats. Up until that point, "nuclear attack" had just been words, and I thought of it in a way like WWII - cities in rubble, but people cheerfully rebuilding it. Threads changed this - I suddenly realised with horror that not only was nuclear war possible (and with all the 'Protect and Survive' stuff - the early 80s was the height of nuclear paranoia in Britain), it seemed inevitable.
However, I got to a stage where I could stop worrying about it, and maybe laugh and make jokes about nuclear annihilation. This is because I finally realised there was absolutely NOTHING I can do about it, and therefore it's a bit pointless worrying about it - all I can do is hope it won't happen. In a bizarre Dr. Strangelove way, I learned to stop worrying "and love the bomb" (well, maybe not love the bomb, but I didn't spend half my day worrying about it).
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Some, but probably not as much as you might think, given the disparate penalties. In Victorian England, the worst that could happen to one for getting caught with porn would be a social stigma. In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, it could be fatal.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?