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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.
The internet will survive it... right?
Like the blinding flash, shockwave and mushroom cloud wouldn't give you a clue
Someone set us up the bomb!
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
I hope the fact that Clancy wrote a novel about airlines used as bombs before 9/11 doesn't mean that there is an entire US Gov division researching his books and making policy decisions based on things in them. Oh wait, I guess this could be better than SOME of the reality we live in.
as per ready.gov's instructions... i got my 25 miles of ductape... fuck those nukes!
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Ever read Tom Clancy's "The Sum of All Fears" (no seeing the movie does not count). They used a similar method (I admit the science of it was over my head) to figure out that the fissionable material in the bomb that was detonated in Denver actually came from the US. They were also able to learn other interesting stuff about the bomb -- granted this is a work of fiction but if the science is more or less accurate (any nuclear physicists here who care to comment?) then I don't see any reason to assume we can't do this in the real world. I do know for a fact that you can learn an amazing amount of information about the type of bomb, material used, etc etc when a conventional bomb goes off. No reason to assume nukes are any different.
With the nuclear threat that we are currently facing I don't see why this should surprise anyone. Let's all pray like hell we never need to use any of these procedures.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
You know you're living in a radioactive area if these are hopping around!
They have the Internet on computers now?
I suppose I'm the only one who read the title as "U.S. Prepares to Get Naked".
Which, of course, would have been a dupe of this article, right?
(And just when I'd gotten my karma back, too!)
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
That site says nothing about zombie infestations, the obvious choice of future attack.
Here are a few free pointers:
Seek out a mall. It will contain canned foods and hardware for fighting off the zombie horde.
Trust your fellow man to go insane under pressure. He/She will attempt to flee a safe location, endangering those that hide within.. or he or she may force you to stay in an a deathtrap.
- Mad, ingenous - they've both left you puzzled -
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
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
The word "get" is so over and badly used in American English. It grates after a while. "The US prepares to be nuked"
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.
Nuking someone makes 8 squares of pollution and makes everyone else in the world hate you. And we don't have enough settlers right now to clean up all that pollution.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
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
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.
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.