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Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast?
securitas writes "Both CNN and ABC News report that a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb lost off the Georgia coast in 1958 may have been found. The 'Mark 15, Mod 0' nuclear bomb was jettisoned into the Atlantic Ocean off Savannah after a B-47 bomber and an F-86 fighter collided in mid-air. 'The 7,600-pound, 12-foot-long thermonuclear bomb contained 400 pounds of high explosives as well as uranium' and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke,, who said that radiation levels were from seven to 10 times higher than normal. If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
Put it on ebay. ;)
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
Clearly someone tried to nuke the whales, and then covered it up!
Gotta nuke somethin'!
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Hope it don't go boom while they're recovering it....
"the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?" Is it just me or does anybody think the answer to this question would be better arrived at by the US government than the "Other" people that would be interested in the device?
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
I would recommend Derek Duke gets a plane as far away from it as possible.
--
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Voltaire
So THAT'S where I left it.
Please send it to the following address...
Err, maybe that's not such a good idea.
Who are you people? What? No, it's not mine.. It's engraved? I'm being framed. UNHAND ME YOU SCOUjsjcds,.......
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
Dig it up;
Deal with the *zilla fish around it;
Put it in a concrete case then;
Dump it with the rest of the nuclear stockpile.
Alternativly, do studies on it regarding how effective the case was at protecting it.
/b
|f(x)dx = F(b) - F(a)
Fishing is good around that thing...
Look it's a GIANT TUNA! And it glows in the dark. And has 3 eyes.
On the one hand, a recovery would be expensive, dangerous, and probably unnecessary. On the other hand, if we leave it there... the terrorists win.
Love the Third Amendment?
Those that decided to build this bomb should be forced to dive down to it themselves in a diving suit of choice and pick it up with their bare hands and bring it to the surface. Those who make a mess should be responsible for cleaning up after themselves. They're probably dead though.
I think we should deny we have it, and then detonate something like it near south america. We should then have an impromptu parade in our honor.
Then after we make everyone think we blew it up, we claim that it is a smear campaign by south america.
(In case you missed it mods, that was making fun of North Korea)
Chris
one down, ten more to go!
and put it in a museum.
The United States lost 11 nuclear bombs in accidents during the Cold War that were never recovered, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.
An estimated 50 nuclear warheads, most of them from the former Soviet Union, still lie on the bottom of the world's oceans, according to the environmental group Greenpeace.
This really doesn't fill me with happy thoughts... Bottom of the ocean is far too lax a description, you can practically paddle in the North Sea between the UK and the rest of Europe! The Marianas trench would be (just about) deep enough for me not to care...
Simon
Physicists get Hadrons!
it would be rather scary if there were more 'lost' nukes floating around the country, and some group aquired it somehow. then we got a civil nuclear war @_@
This is a much bigger thing to be concerned about.
What confidance: the B-47 crew did not see an explosion when the bomb hit the ocean. Could you imagine looking down and seeing that thing blow? Savanah never would have become popular after "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil". Savanah would not be there any more.
This reminds me of the TV series "Sledge Hammer". Trust me... I know what I'm doing
Come and say hi. http://forum.penpals.com/index.php
SCO Headquarters.
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
.... you don't want this baby try to prove it's own existance.
Put an inflatable air bag underneath, and inflate it s-l-ow-l-y
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Ebay? I'm sure it has a sentimental value to some people.
I have a few ideas on what they could do with it. They could bring it up, take it apart and see how everything held up after being submerged for so long or perhaps take at the nuclear material and put it on display in one of the smithsonians.
The report also estimated it would take as long as five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.
Can anyone explain why the retrieval process would take so long if the bomb is supposedly "likely harmless"? I'm honestly baffled at this, and if we do not expend the money to retrieve it, are there any international accords in place to make sure our enemies do not retrieve/ reverse engineer it?
It is probably not as dangerous as some people are making it out to be. Remeber the air force had arming procedures in place with those things, the bomb is most likely not armed properly.
Although it could be argued that the explosive used, whatever they are, might be unstable after such a long period of time.
For one thing it's a danger to the local marine environment. There's no telling how long radiation levels in the area have been higher than normal, but leaving a nuke with decaying seals on it will do nothing for the area.
And, for another thing, you want to go retrieve it before someone else does. Nuclear - or should that be "nu-cu-lar"? - material lying there just waiting to be had is a potential goldmine for a terrorist organisation, etc. The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Bottom line: it's there, you know where it is, so go get it so it's out of play.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Why not dig a hole and bury it? Granted, I'm not an engineer and I have little understanding of how radioactivity affects the environment, but it seems like it would be safer to dig a hole in the ocean and bury it.
We have drilling equipment capable of drilling deep in to the ocean floor to tap oil reserves. Couldn't something like this be used to bury it?
It would seem to me to be too risky to try raising it, given it's proximity to population centers.
Check my journal for gmail invites!
Obviously, we need to get it back and get rid of it. If an arab group or someone else with a chip on their shoulder got their filthy hands on it, there's no telling what could happen.
Ummm, the mosque in my community is an arab group.
Let's keep the racial bigotry, subconcious or not, to a minimum.
They made a huge fuss about this in the virginia pilot almost 2 years ago. definitely old news.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
How much is the shipping and handling?
Sincerely yours,
Osama bin Laden
Sorry, Alvin is manned and is about to be retired. The new version is even better. The original Alvin also participated in the retrieval of the lost bomb off of Spain in the late 60's.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
AHA! THAT'S where Saddam hid it.
I'd start with three independant environmental impact statements, and follow up with fining the responsible parties $US 1 billion each ( all individuals and organisations involved ) plus making them cover the full costs of repairing the damage done ( taken from the environmental impact statements ).
Even ignoring the environmental damage done, right-wing appologists can't ignore the fact that this thing was sitting in the ocean, waiting for the next would-be terrorist to come and collect it in their row-boat and use it in their next attack on Uncle Sam ( God forbid ).
'Gross professional negligence' doesn't do this justice.
Duke...found a Nuke... oh my god..it's finally released.. although not like we expected.. Duke Nukem Forever!
What does it take to make one of these go off underwater?
I wonder.
Anyone know the details on why it is safer under several hundred tons of water? I'm not arguing the fact, but I am curious as to whether or not these can ever be a threat while being underwater.
BTW: IANAT.
I live in GA, you insensitive clod!
torn from the pages of Futurama
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Oh yes, an arab group.
Why not a neo nazi group, a christian group or a mormon group with a submarine horse drawn cart? Singling out any of the above shows equal understanding of how many groups have a chip against the US Government.
Since the radiation levels are so high - why not use it as a test field on the surrounding fish. Oh yeah - that's already been done. Hasn't it?
Realistically though, how many people's lives are going to be lost because of the government leaving it there all of this time? Radioactive fish, shellfish, and others do not really glow in the dark just because they are radioactive. (ie:You could have eaten radioactive fish and not known it.) So what this means is that a lot of the people who may have died of cancer over the years in that area have just cause to file suit with the US Government over this. And just as surely, with tides, currents, and the like the radioactive material has spread over at least a portion of the coast line. I'd hate to be someone living in that area right now and know that your property just became a wasteland.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Yeah, well Sum Of All Fears sprung to my mind too, just as Debt Of Honor sprung to my mind on September 11th.
Pity that nobody in the US intelligence agencieswho had the information that Al Qaeda was planning strikes on the US and that some of its operatives were going through flight school managed to join the dots. If they had then perhaps 19 people wouldn't have been able to change the world.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I live in a country with a 300 billion dollar annual PEACETIME military budget, and they can't locate an accidentally dropped nuclear bomb in 12 feet of water to recover it?
Instead, a hobbiest treasure hunter with a civilian boat and a WalMart geiger counter has to do the job for them and send the US military a GPS point.
That makes me sick to my stomach, no wonder we can't find Osama or WMD's.
Tell me again who's the real winner when it takes a 5 billion dollar nuclear aircraft carrier to deploy a 20 million dollar plane flown by a pilot with a million dollar education, dropping a ten thousand dollar bomb just to kill some Iraqi kid hiding in a hole with a $20 russian surplus rifle?
This to me is symbolic of everything that's wrong with our bloated defense budget.
Vote libertarian!!
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
The Air Force insists the bomb was being used for practice and did not contain the plutonium trigger needed for a nuclear explosion.
So according to the article there is no dnager of a nuclear explosion. At worst a smallish convetional bomb.
The article states that recovering the bomb would have cost between $5,000,000 and $11,000,000. This is money they could easily have made back by selling it to Saddam Hussein, with the added bonus that it would have given Bush a weapon of mass destruction to actually _find_ in Iraq.
But there is still the problem that most likely this thing would be difficult to recover. Its not like jumping into the deep end of the pool and retrieving a plastic toy that sunk down there.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Before you mention McVeigh and Nichols keep in mind they were two loners without 10's if not hundreds of millions of supporters. Radical Muslim Arabs are a blight upon humanity and are determined to kill as many innocent people as possible. Look at what the Arabs did in Russia, shooting kids in the back and blowing them up.
When was the last time you saw mormons doing that?
and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke...
... who forever shall be known as 'Duke Nukem'
Curiousity, how feasible is it to remove the nuclear substances from the bomb and use them as reactor core fuel in a nuclear power plant?
This sig no verb.
If you found a nuclear bomb that had been lost for a long time would you: 1. give it back 2. keep it 3. "borrow" some parts but then give it back 4. I don't know where to look for a nuclear bomb, you insensitive clod!
OF COURSE! It all makes sense! THIS is how Duke Nukem came to be - what with the radiation and all... explains how these planes crashed, anyway. Now we just have to wait for the aliens to come and steal our women, and the FUN will begin! Dibs on the laser trip mines!
Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
You mean plans like these?
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
Reading the article headline I assumed they were referring to the country, not the state. Anyone else make that assumption?
As an open-minded American, I lately find myself struggling with a wave of anti-islamic sentiment.
Please, folks, let's not judge or label a group by the loonies who attach themselves to it. That's the same sort of stupid reasoning Rob Enderle has against Linux, isn't it?
The grandparent should have used "terrorist," a behavioral label, rather than implying some ethnic group = terrorist.
Like America? :-)
The symbolism of using an American nuke to make the material for its own nuclear device, dirty bomb, or whatever against the very people that built it would be just the kind of thing that Al Qaeda would love.
Yes, I'm a fan of irony as well. We build bombs to protect us from the people who use our bombs to kill us! Brilliant!
(a+b)*c = ac+bc
thus the I believe the poster's intent was: if an arab group with a chip on their shoulder or someone else with a chip on their shoulder got their filthy hands on it...
I want a new world. I think this one is broken.
I'd start with three independant environmental impact statements, and follow up with fining the responsible parties $US 1 billion each
Why not 30 impact statements and 1 million billion in fines?
What are you trying to accomplish? What good are a bunch of silly environmental impact studies going to do?
Now I wish I would have got the metal detector from the Shopping Network. Doh! I could have found my own nuclear bomb.
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Those who built it created it with the intent of protecting the free world. Go read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" and see if you feel the same about these people you'd put at risk.
Good lord. What a dick.
I wouldn't know in detail how a hydrogen bomb is constructed, but roughly the process goes like:
Igniting conventional high-explosives (400 pounds here) compresses uranium enough to trigger a (relatively small, but what's small in this context) thermonuclear explosion. That thermonuclear explosion in turn causes 'heavy water' to go into a far more powerful (secondary) nuclear explosion.
It's not easy to cause this whole sequence. So don't worry, any such event won't happen by accident. Being underwater for a couple of decades, only helps to make it less likely.
I found this fascinating account of a hydrogen bomb accidently dropped in 1961 and still buried on a North Carolina farm. Although major portions were recovered, the uranium never was.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
I live in Atlanta and saw an article in the AJC over a year ago about this. It was found a few years ago and they said they Air Force did two studies that concluded it posed no threat. Something about certain detonation equipment that was not included on that specific bomb that would make it impossible to set it off.
As for radiation leakage, that might be a legitimate separate concern.
I had hoped it was that crummy little country, since all the crap seems to happen to them. Unfortunately it looks like there's a thermonuclear bomb about 120 miles away from me. What pisses me off even more is that the story suggests that the government hasn't sent anyone out to guard it; so it's probably just sitting there in 12 feet of water waiting for any idiot with a geiger meter to find it. Hope to see you next week.
Why is the parent modded flamebait? It's a perfectly valid concern.
All your lost bomb are belong to Captain Nemo.
"I tried to sleep my way to the top, but my alarm clock always wakes me right up" - TMBG
It's "Somebody set up us the bomb." Get it right!
you don't want this baby try to prove it's own existance.
;-)
Yeah, nukes are scary enough without being self-aware...
You can't take the sky from me...
Besides, according to my sources, this bomb lacked the fissionable trigger. It may still make a moderate conventional boom if disturbed.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
The latter two do not exist. You meant hobbyist.
Right on. Let's keep pretending that radical christians or jews are just as likely to carry out a suicide bombing as radical islamic fundamentalists.
Dang, I used to have a DSL link.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
And how vocal have they been in protesting what happend in Russia, Spain and the USA?
That anyone could have just drove their boat around and picked up a free nuke. If the US military lost a nuke, they should have searched and searched not stopping until it was found. Though I don't know the whole story, it sounds very dumb/careless/incompetent on their part to just let it sit there.
Neo Nazi groups don't do much, they are mostly talk.
'Christian' groups almost always just kill themselvers, they don't take others with them.
Mormons don't use explosives like that as they are too high tech.
Being pissed at a country is one thing, abusing kids like what happened in Russia, is another.
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
It should be retrieved. If this were a modern fission-fusion-fission bomb, it wouldn't be a concern. The Air Force says it doesn't have the fission trigger installed, so with a modern device that means you don't have a bomb. You need a fission bomb to ignite the lithium deuteride in the fusion stage, and you need the neutrons from the fusion stage to fission the U-238 jacket. So, again, no primary, no bomb. Leave it there, rivers already feed natural uranium into the oceans at a rate of 3.2x10^4 tons every year.
But this isn't a modern bomb, it was a transitional device between the earliest, liquid-dueterium monsters and modern three-stage designs. They weren't yet sure how to achieve efficient compression of the fusion stage, so they wrapped the bomb in highly-enriched uranium to be sure the fusion stage would light off. The bomb had a design yield of 1.7 megatons, and something like 1.3 megatons of that would be due to the fission of the U-235 jacket.
That means that this bomb contains a lot of almost-weapons-grade uranium. Again, 1.3 megatons of yield from the fission of uranium. The largest pure-fission bomb we ever detonated was the 500-kiloton Mark 18 prototype, and that used about 60 kilograms of HEU. Assuming linear scaling, that means we're looking at upwards of 156 kilograms of HEU in this bomb. Critical mass of uranium's about 16 kilograms. Double that to overengineer a bomb, and that means whoever gets their mitts on this thing could build 4 or 5 crude Hiroshima-type bombs, each with a yield of several kilotons.
That's bad. They need to retrive this thing, even if there's a risk they blow it up in situ. I'd rather have some of this stuff scattered in an unusable form offshore than have Mohammed and his band of Merry Pranksters get their hands on 4 or 5 cities' worth of U-235.
why use a bomb when we have missiles?
the Political Inquirer
You know, there's racism and then there's statistics. Frankly, I don't want your muslim arab community neighbors anywhere near the nuke, so lets let our government dig it up before they send down muslim arab divers to set it off and contaminate savannah's water.
Just push the button!.... nuclear fishing, we'll have 3 eyed fish called blinky in no time!
does this mean that Georgia has to go on high orange or teal alert?
when they ban enctryption only criminals wi$21*J *#JF$%!@#$':
Move it please.
Thank you,
A Concerned North Carolina Resident
Jay | http://oldos.org
oooh boy. another chance to hear bush say "newculur" on the news again!
$> man woman
$> Segmentation fault (core dumped)
This should've been a slashdot poll.. would've been better than most lately.
I'm not anti-social, I'm anti-idiot.
So that's where Sadam's been hiding them!
What are the salvage rights on a nuke ?
:-)
If Joe Bloggs had found it and hauled it back up into his boat, could he keep it ?
wait... Where does it say this thing is broken open? TFA at ABC says "radiation levels here were from seven to 10 times higher than normal". That does not seem to be very dangerous when you look into it a little. Natural background radiation is about 1.5 mSev a year, 10 times which would be 15 mSev/yr. Radiation sickness and long term cancer risks begin around 50 mSev in a shorter period of time. You may be thinking radioactive contamination.
From Wikipedia: Radioactive contamination means the distribution in an environment of radioactive material. This differs from direct radiation because the radioactive material may be moved around by wind or water, or it may be taken up by organisms.
BTW, IAAIP (I Am An Ignorant Person)
-
Put it up George W. Bush's ass and detonate the fucker.
WEAPONS LOST/MISSING
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean - somewhere between Dover Air Force Base (Delaware) and Atlantic City, New Jersey
February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia (this story)
September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island, Washington. Since this is slashdot, I feel obligated to point out that this is about 30 miles from Redmond.
January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina
December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean (only miles from the Japanese island chain of Ryukyu)
Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean - 400-500 miles southwest of the Azores.
Any slashdotters have a geiger counter, a boat, and some free time?
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
As a soon to be physicist, you restored my hope that there may be a FEW people on slashdot who know what they are talking about...
Do you know some more detailed blueprints for this kind of bomb? Im interested how they managed to encase the core with >1000kg of U235 without creating local critical masses in the outer layer... (or was it one of those old big boys which were physically so large that that amount of U235 translates to only 1 or 2 cm of layer thickness?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
The material used in this particular weapon is Pu-239. Pu-239 has a half-life of 24,100 years. That means that this device is and will be a hot-potato for much longer than you or I will be debating this subject.
Finally Bush found atleast some WMD....so what if its not from Iraq!!!
I appreciate the information you have brought into the discussion. Your post not only blows away the disinformation of the grandparent post, but adds new and relevent information, as well.
What I'd like to mention, however, is that there is another concern: The bomb is sitting above a fresh-water aquifer used by the nearby town. As, according to another source I read, the barrier between this device and the aquifer is only a (thick) layer of clay, I would imagine that there has already been some level of contamination to the drinking water. As the bomb settles and slowly sinks, likely being more dense than the surrounding clay, the contamination levels will rise.
The hard part, and the most expensive aspect to the retreival situation, is that a crew would have to retrieve the bomb without collapsing the aquifer roof and using equipment that would prevent radiation poisoning of the retrieval crew. Add to that the fact that the bomb is under twenty feet of silt, and you have a very tricky situation. You can't just build a four-sided dam to keep the water out--like those used to construct bridge pylons--and it would take some very specialized and delicate equipment to remove enough silt to retrieve the bomb without spreading contaminated silt everywhere.
It's a difficult situation, to say the least. The good news is that there few sea-floor excavation vehicles capable of retrieving the bomb, even without the contamination issue, and that an excavation going on in that area, now that the (supposed) find has been publicized, will draw a huge amount of suspicion. Due to the weight of the bomb itself and the sheer volume of silt required to be removed before the bomb could even be reached, it wouldn't exactly be an overnight job. The threat of terrorists digging up a piece of the bomb is, therefore, less than the threat of terrorists getting their hands on a seperate source of radioactive materials and building an atomic bomb.
[Hopefully, I'm not spreading bad information, myself, now.]
~UP
Eat the Path.
Anymore lost nuclear bombs that I should be worrying about? I had no inkling of any any missing nukes before this.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Nuclear bomb in 12ft of water and the gov. concludes in 2001 that it's better to just leave it there. But somehow I can't bring my nail clippers on the airplane.
I'm pretty surprised that no one has mentioned that this bomb lacked the plutonium trigger needed for a thermonuclear explosion. The plutonium trigger is the primary means of "arming" the weapon.
"There's more than plutonium in a nuke. I'm sure the other components in the warhead are unusuable."
you are right, sir. still, I wouldn't want to be standing next to it.
but you are right, the triggers are probably far more likely to degrade than the actual material.
Locally -Halifax, NS, Canada-, Dr Badawi (Imam, professor of business and religious studies at St Mary's University, Halifax) has been extremely vocal, even tireless in his advocacy. You'll see him occasionally on CBC or Vision, but I haven't seen many of his ilk on CNN or other American media.
There are a lot of Imams that are doing a lot to denounce terrorism on all sides. If they don't seem vocal enough, it's almost certainly not their fault.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Well, for now there are no more hurricanes, but maybe we can save this bomb up for the next big one and see if it's really true that a nuclear bomb won't affect a hurricane.
Mormons don't use explosives like that as they are too high tech.
You must be thinking of OMISH.
Mormons are the latter-day-saints crowd from Salt Lake City by way of Upstate NY.
Unfortunately, this weapon might not prove terribly effective against the kind folks at SCO.
It's funny. People have the follwing logic:
1. Radical Islam is our enemy.
2. Harass Arabs.
3. Racial profiling?
I'm sorry, but "Radical Islam" is a religion, not a skin condition. Once we racially profile, we'll see some white dude called "John Walker", let's say, attack America.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
And how vocal have they been in protesting what happend in Russia, Spain and the USA?
Exactly why do you expect them to be more vocal than, say, Buddhists? How vocal have you been in protesting what happened in Chechenya, when Christian Russians killed Chechen children?
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
In response to your sig, TANSTAAFL!
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
anti-islamic sentiment?
Its like telling jews to stop harping about their problems.
Im from Greece and Islam has been hell in the region for over a thousand years, it spreads like a virus.
U dont like that? Tough.
Its easy to be PC when your people havent had to live with Islam. In mu life Ive witnessed the Cyprus affair, my lebanese wifes parents fleeing a country where christians have been dwindled down to few. Bosnia with its heavy US/Al Alquaeda influence, Kosovo; american sponsored ethnic cleansing of 1 million christians, 100,000 jews, 250,000 gypsies in less than 3 decades, and now the macedonia crisis (again us sponsered). YOU might not have a problem with islam but thats because the numbers are very low.
Come back to me in 50 years and tell me how France and Britain will fare when the demography catches up with them (I lived in England and I know how the Hindu and Sikh and even black communities outdistance the islamic groups).
Within 20 years, both countries will have serious problems and when the muslims become 40% of the population, you will start seeing open violence.
If you think Im exxagerating, tell me the real name of Constatinople, which was the seat of christianity for one and a half millenia?
The US southwest will have serious demographic problems within 20 years but nothing in mexican history can lead anyone to think that there could be even anything remotely resembling islamic expansionism.
theo
Thanks. You and the wacko that's currently the Libertarian candidate for President are the 2 reasons I no longer call myself a Libertarian.
Sure, I'm still a fervent believer in the US Constitution, property rights, civil liberties, capitalism, and relative isolationism.
I also believe in killing the fsck out of crazy ratbastards that have killed or are planning to kill me and my neighbors. Better that the money earned by the sweat of my brow, then taken by the government, goes to killing bad guys than to feeding lazy ones.
If I'm not alive, my Libertarian tendencies don't mean jack squat.
He is talking about the tritiated lithium hydride, not the Pu-239 used in the surrounding triggers (which is quite salvageable from both an engineering and a financial standpoint).
A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs. (The "neutron bomb" was a planned attempt to replace the fission warheads with chemical explosives, creating a thermonuclear explosion with no radioactive fallout- a truly impressive feat if it were possible.)
Since the bomb was lost 46 years ago, which is about 4 tritium half lives, the maximum possible yield has in theory been reduced to 1/16 of what it was in 1958, and the actual yield is probably zero, as you would expect of a fusion device that has spent many tritium half lives on the seafloor. The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
It will be advertised as free after rebates. There will be three rebate coupons, all of which want the original UPC code. One of the coupons will ask for a form Fry's doesn't have. But you can call back on Monday and talk to a manager.
But, don't worry, the reason the price is so good is that they have determined that it doesn't work. Another customer already discovered that, that's why the box has a sticker.
True Fry's story: I did considerable research about which low-cost router to buy to protect a computer at a branch office. Then one Friday I saw in the Fry's ad the router I had chosen was free after rebate. That called into question my research. If they were good, why were they being dumped? On the other hand, how can you say no to free? So I bought three for the cost of jumping through the rebate hoops.
--
24 wars since WW2: Creating fear so rich people can profit.
Obviously, we need to get it back and get rid of it. If an arab group or someone else with a chip on their shoulder got their filthy hands on it, there's no telling what could happen.
Ummm, the mosque in my community is an arab group.
Let's keep the racial bigotry, subconcious or not, to a minimum.
Republican Translation:
Clearly, there are a number of active terrorist groups operating in the world today comprised primarily, and in most cases entirely, of people of Arabic descent. We should be taking any means necessary to deny these groups access to nuclear devices.
Yes, Yes I was.
;->
Bangs head into wall
Watches wall break.
Damn, I have a hard head.
Thanks!
LICK IT! LICK IT!
Show me on the doll where his noodly appendage touched you.
Since Slashdot's about as reliable as the Weekly World News, I can't trust a word you're saying. :)
For fuck's sake, Welcome To Last Week's News.
For the people who don't even read the damn news, much less the headlines posted a week or more late on Slashdot, is that there is no Plutonium in the bomb. This was a training bomb without a trigger.
And if it isn't the bomb, the question now is "WTF?!"
Then again, some people believe in the Tooth Fairy, so what are you going to do?
Yeah, right.
A receant one is GPS. The whole reason it was developed was for the military. They wanted to be able to easily and accuratly know the location of all their assets, be that soldiers, vehicles, or bombs. Well out of that has come the biggest advance in navigation in a long time. Commercial traffic, air, sea, and land is virtually dependant on it now.
Now it's not like this had to start as a military project, this could be done purely as a civilian endevor, but the point is that it's not like money that goes to the military just disappears. We do get returns on it outside of just the defense the military provides.
Yes, I have and I have seen Christian and Jews leaders condem what Russia has done. I haven't seen high level Islamic leaders do the same, as a matter of fact I have seen the high level Islamic leaders say that actions, like what happened in Russica, are fully justified.
I also do not see Christians or Jews killing 16 year olds who have premarital sex like they do in Iran nor do I see Christians or Jews locking the gates to keep female kids in why a school burns.
See if it still works.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
You don't think my friend, you just feel. Probably rage and hate mostly.
Try not to get any of that shit on the furniture, eh?
not "Project". One preview wasn't enough, aparently. Data on "Nectar" is close to the end the page.
668.5
I could do without Georgia anyway.
The "Neutron Bomb" was primarily designed to limit the blast and heat effect radius to a small area, whilst creating a massive pulse of neutrons.
Thus killing everyone, but leaving buildings standing and infrastructure intact and able to be used.
The reduction in fission products (fallout) was a secondary requirement.
The tank is probably full of lithium oxide and all sorts of crap, although it may still contain enough H isotopes to make it worth recovering. But the Pu is undoubtedly going to be salvaged. In dollar terms, Pu makes Au look like Si.
- Millionth Monkey
Well said -- both informative and entertaining.
-kgj
-kgj
... to Iraq
meh
The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities (due to the reduced fallout and blast - the radiation blast as noted above falls off quickly away from ground zero).
Chechen leader Maschadov condemned the terrorists, but probably Fox TV didn't show it.
Christianity is an older religion than Islam, we had our share of religious fanatism during the Middle Ages (the crusades!). Yet there are still Christians who think they have the only truth on Earth, and everybody else are filthy pagans.
Don't think Christians are innocents. Christan Americans slaughtered Indians and enslaved Africans in the XIXth century --- not so long ago, in historical perspective. The gas chambers were built by Europeans, not Arabs.
Islam is where Christianity has been in the Middle Ages: an aggressive religion, gathering momentum and unable to control its energy. Singling out Arab communities and treating them with unjustified suspicion will only make matters worse.
"Long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead." (John Maynard Keynes)
Just a brief excerpt from John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy, FSG, 1974. He spends a lot of time with the most prolific fission bomb designer, Ted Taylor. The following occurs in lower Manhattan.
"...We had been heading for midtown but impulsively kept going, drawn irresistibly toward the tallest buildings in the world. We went down the Chambers Street ramp and parked, in a devastation of rubble, beside the Hudson River. Across the water, in New Jersey, the Colgate sign, a huge neon clock as red as the sky, said 6:15. We looked up the west wall of the nearer tower. From so close, so narrow an angle, there was nothing at the top to arrest the eye, and the building seemed to be some sort of probe touching the earth from the darkness of space. "What an artifact that is!" Taylor said, and he walked to the base and paced it off. We went inside, into a wide, uncolumned lobby. The building was standing on its glass-and-steel walls and on its elevator core. Neither of us had been there before. We got into an elevator. He pressed, at random, 40. We rode upward in a silence broken only by the muffled whoosh of air and machinery and by Taylor's describing where the most effective place for a nuclear bomb would be. The car stopped, the door sprang back, and we stepped off into the reception lounge of Toyomenka America, Inc., a Japanese conglomerate of industries. No one was behind the reception desk. The area was furnished with inviting white couches and glass coffee tables. On the walls hung Japanese watercolors. We sat down on one of the couches. "The rule of thumb for a nuclear explosion is that it can vaporize its yield in mass," he said. "This building is about thirteen hundred feet high by two hundred by two hundred. That's about fifty million cubic feet. Its average density is probably two pounds per cubic foot. That's a hundred million pounds, or fifty kilotons-give or take a factor of two. Any explosion inside with a yield of, let's say, a kiloton would vaporize everything for a few tens of feet. Everything would be destroyed out to and including the wall. If the building were solid rock and the bomb were buried in it, the crater radius would be a hundred and fifty feet. The building's radius is a hundred feet, and it is only a core and a shell. It would fall, I guess, in the direction in which the bomb was off-centered. It's a little bit like cutting a big tree." "Thermal radiation tends to flow in directions where it is unimpeded," Taylor was saying. "It actually flows. It goes around corners. It could go the length of the building before being converted in shock. It doesn't get converted into shock before it picks up mass."
We went down a stirway a flight or two and out onto an unfinished floor. Piles of construction material were here and there, but otherwise the space was empty, from the elevator core to the glass facade. "I can't think in detail about this subject, considering what would happen to people, without getting very upset and not wanting to consider it at all," Taylor said. "And there is a level of simplicity that we have not talked about, because it goes over my threshold to do so. A way to make a bomb. It is so simple that I just don't want to describe it. I will tell you this: Just to make a crude bomb with an unpredictable yield-but with a better than even chance of knocking this building down-all that is needed is abuot a dozen kilos of plutonium-oxide powder, high explosives (I don't want to say how much), and a few things that anyone could buy at a hardware store. An explosion in this building would not be completely effective unless it were placed in the core. Something exploded out here in the office area would be just like a giant shrapnel bomb. You'd get a real sheet of radiation puring out of the windows. You'd have half a fireball, and it would crater down. What would remain would probably be a stump." "Walking to a window of the eastern wall, he looked across a space of about six hundred feet at 1 Liberty Plaza. "Through free air,
I mean: guys, do you lose nuclear bombs very often?
The NR1 is the only thing the Navy owns that has a manitulated aem. Alvin and the others are mostly owned by Woods Hole. All of those would be better at rigging something to be lifted.
The fact that it's in 12 feet of water does make one wonder why it wasn't recovered 40 or so years ago.
Professional Politicians are not the solution, they ARE the problem.
Courtesy everyones favorite free encyclopedia:
List here
I especially like the one they dropped in a farmers field but they couldn't dig it up so they bought the field.
Also kinda scary that Rocky Flats which has had it's share of disasters is pretty much in my backyard.
-Mikey P
What, like... "-1, Ignorant Wanker"?
~
~
~
-- INSERT --
Why do they transport atomic bombs around the world? what for?
Ever hear of the cold war? When someone has that many nukes pointed at you, you need to have just as many or more pointed back at them and ready to go, or you're a sitting duck.
I suppose you think that Russia, France, China, UK, Israel, India and Pakistan are all "co[w]ard[s] and assholes."?
What?
Obviously it should be put in a museum so that we and our decendents can go look at it. And touch it. And press small, blinking, shiny, red buttons....... And never plan on having kids...
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Where the radiation comes from then?
I find myself both frightened and disturbed by the incredible amounts of knowledge both had and openly displayed by numerous individuals posting to this story regarding the components and inner workings of nuclear weapons.
Perhaps more disturbing is that whenever someone gets the description of the anatomy and physiology almost right - but not quite right - (as if they're still working on it), someone else comes along to merrily correct them. I'm curious now - given the materials necessary, how many slashdotters could construct a working nuclear weapon?
-- "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
Im from Greece and Islam has been hell in the region for over a thousand years, it spreads like a virus.
And this distinguishes it from Christianity... how?
Europe, the Americas, Australia, and huge chunks of Asia and Africa didn't become Christian because they really liked the missionary tracts.
I am Sartre of the Borg. Existence is futile.
Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast Lost...
or
Sales of Metal Detectors to (insert generic terrorist/oppressive regime here) Skyrockets...
Give it to Saddam, to justify the war in Iraq.
Logic, macros, and more
"A thermonuclear bomb (at least as made in the fifties) is essentially a tank of deuterated and tritiated lithium hydride (LiH) that will explode with great fury if quickly raised to a temperature of millions of degrees within a span of milliseconds. It's very difficult to create the required temperatures quickly with chemical explosives- the easiest way to do it is to surround the tank with numerous small fission devices, which heat the tank to millions of degrees quickly and easily and are responsible for the radioactive fallout still associated with fusion bombs." All of this technology, knowledge, money and research for what: to kill as many people as possible at the same time! Humans are a very strange species indeed.
[the story's a repeat, btw.]
The military has said over and over again, the weapon was not "hot". It was in a training configuration.
At any rate, people shouldn't be worried about the nuke. They should be very worried about the 400 pounds of, now, 50 year-old conventional explosives sitting there. That shit will be very unstable today (possible salt-water denaturing aside.)
from the uranium used in it's construction. Back then, they really didn't know better than to use uranium (which is pretty tough stuff -- that's why we use it in artillery shells today) as a building material. Just think what future generations will think of us and all our plastics trashing the world. (granted, plastic is not usually radioactive :-))
Declare war on Mars! Er.. launch it towards the sun.
When is the last time a born again Christian performed a significant terrorist act upon abother country? A Jew? An Atheist? It's been a while. And the intervals are long, even when you have legitimate examples. Now, when was the last time a Muslim did? A few days, perhaps a week? Two at the most? How about the time before that? Another week, or only a couple of days? And before that? Etc. Not to mention they're blowing up ther own infrastructure and citizens in Iraq right and left, because they're stupid, aside from being ultra violent and manifestly misled by superstitious nonsense.
Now, let's take a moment to look at something else. When was the last time you saw your local community of Muslims out in the town square, holding up posters declaring the perpetrators as criminals and declaring themselves separate and different? I have seen (since 2001) just a few Muslims on the tube stating that they didn't support this (instead of making excuses) and very recently, FINALLY, three years later, we did get this apology
I was glad to see it, but if you look into it, you'll see it's a pretty narrow set of the Muslim community, and there has been deafening silence since then.
Why don't you find in the Christian bible where Christians are supposed to declare/commit holy war on some other group the way the Koran does, specifically, infidels, AKA you. If you can find something that can be twisted that way, can you find me a recent example where western civilization bought into such claptrap? The last example I can think of was Hitler, and we - not the Muslims, but the rest of the western world - tore him a brand new asshole and then stuffed his head deep into it for his presumption and his acts. Along with the priests/promoters of his "faith", IE, the top levels of the officer core of the 3rd Reich.
You do understand, don't you, that to a strict reader of the Koran, a peace-loving Muslim is a "bad" Muslim because the Koran promotes Jihad against the Infidel (again, you)? You've read the Koran, right? That's why you can speak so authoritatively?
You also understand that these morons think that by the very act of blowing themselves up on your innocent daughter's doorstep, they ensure for themselves a place in heaven where your very same daughter will wait upon them hand and foot, right? You have reseached the faith, right? Every little verse, jot and tittle?
People have every reason to look suspiciously upon practicioners of the Muslim faith as a group. The only way you can miss seeing that is by ignoring the evidence, which is unambiguous, copious and easily recognized if you simply think.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
I actually like the idea of having a few "missing bombs" and whatnot out there, though. They are not all that difficult to watch, and if terrorists first expend a lot of effort on plans to retrieve them and then get caught in the implementation we keep them away from things that can do real damage.
Time is Nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once... the bitch.
[Lost Nuclear Bomb Found Off Georgia Coast?]
Are you asking us? If so, I certainly don't have the time or inclination to do the research. Maybe do it yourself before submitting the story.
If it is true then I will be concerned about the bomb (and the fish with 3 eyes). Otherwise I won't be concerned.
Thanks.
Are you going to actually refute my earlier post or just spew drivel? It may not be the most sensitive comment to make, but I dare you to prove me wrong. All the politically correct bullshit in the world will not make all religiously motivated people equally dangerous.
now, forget about the one they have located (if it is the ONE)... What about other 10? WTF, we are not aloud to spit in sink a lab because of environment, but 10 nukes are out there just rotting away? Are some damn ruskies who care less for sh*t ...?
Damn, this place is a mess!
I guess this gives merit to the term "there's something in the water."
So, we had massive incendary raids that were necessary to have any real impact on production capacity. And, unlike many places even in Germany that regarded the end of the war as a good thing, Japanese were conditioned to believe that suicide was far, far preferrable to the Emperor losing the war. When conventional forces landed on Saipan and Okinawa they were met with senseless attacks by civilians and mass suicides. Think of 10 villagers attacking a patrol with pitchforks. Women holding babies jumping off cliffs to avoid being captured and (as they were told) raped and tortured.
Because of this, it is not difficult to believe there were actually fewer civilian casualties from the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than there would have been if we had invaded the "home islands". If the military wasn't finally convinced that we would burn the island down to bare rock they might never have surrendered and fought to the last civilian, all while the Emperor and military leaders quietly evacuated.
Invade and occupy the country closest to it.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The bomb is in fact not a nuclear bomb. It is capable of carrying a nuclear armament, however when it was "lost" it was rigged in "training configuration." It has no nuclear component, but rather a large amount of conventional explosives.
I think what's really fascinating is that its not really a "beast" at all. Its barely bigger than a large refridgerator and the energy able to be released from such a small amount of matter is just mindbending, enough to easily completely obliterate an entire city in an instant. With such a fantastically huge amount of power at the immediate command of us foolish humans, it's amazing we've made it this long....
- "Hear that?! The percolations are imminent! Cease your ingress!"
No no no!!
Play Cricket with it, but, bowl very badly.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
'Best before November 1959.' Damn it, Bob. There were plenty of brand new bombs, but you had to go for that retro 50's charm!
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
Hmm, it must be "Jam Echelon Day" again? How many times does this Slashdot article have the word Bomb or Thermonuclear in it?
/^([Ss]ame [Bb]at (time, |channel.)){2}$/
I can see a couple of "good ol' boys" from Tybee Island ridin' around in their fishin' boat wondering what in the hell those A-rabs from the 7-11 are so interested in out near the river.
"Frank -- you see them A-rabs at the pier the other day?"
"Yep, Earl -- sure did. Don't know why they wouldn't just tell Jonsey why they needed that fishing boat."
"Oh, well -- I ain't gonna complain about 'em. Last time I started bitchin' 'bout them A-rabs in I-rack at the VFW, some youngin' protesters found out and picketed our next meeting. Damned sherriff said they had a right to do it."
"You're right, Earl. Probably just them thar fellas from the 7-11 wantin' to catch bait for their bait'n'tackle side of the business. They got the best minnows this side of Tybee, ya know?"
"Yep."
"Yep."
IronChefMorimoto
(Honeymooned near Tybee -- it ain't no resort island, I'll tell ya that!)
In response to the grandparent post, the above post is probably more like what I should have said than the smart arse response devised in a spare lunch break minute.
Although I primarily agree with this post, I strongly believe that, while pain and hatred can and does exist without religion (just look at China's human rights record), organised religion is like fuel to the fire. The grandparent was right though - the Koran (which I have read, although not comprehensively, I'll admit - it's even slower than the Satanic Verses...) does perpetuate violence and hatred if taken to the nth degree, as it is by extremists. However the same can be said over the ages, if not more so, by Christians applying their interpretation to the bible. Sure, it's a little more obtuse than fundamentalist Islam, but it's widespread and just as deadly; only the ways and the means are a little different. Self preservation seems to be a much more prominent tenet in this instance - maybe this is a sign of a wavering belief in the heaven construct...
And I wouldn't be surprised to learn that atrocities had been committed in the past attributed to interpretations of the Bhagavad Gita...
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-- INSERT --
You said it yourself in your quote: "[T]he risk that the conventional explosives could be detonated" - nuclear weapons are designed very precisely, so much so that a random detonation of the explosive charges won't create the symmetrical compression wave needed to ignite the fission reaction, instead, the bomb will just explode and blow itself to pieces.
It's called a "one-point-safe" design, a single point of detonation won't set off the weapon. Some bombs are even designed to be set off in this random fashion as a self-destruct mechanism if you don't want it to fall into enemy hands, but don't want to vaporize a few square miles.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind, as Martin Luther King said
It was Gandhi who said it, really.
The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. -- G.B. Shaw
Looks like I picked a bad time to go on a business trip in Savannah, GA.
Eric B
ebresie@gmail.com
Don't know how accurate they are, but according to that show: the CIA already had pictures and knew where the sub was from 10 years earlier. It sank in the 1950's in the same month as an American sub the Scorpion (the accidents were unrelated). It had one missle on it (I may have missed what happened to the others, the graphic indicated it could hold 3). In the late 1950's an American sub was sent out there to locate it and photograph it and succeeded.
When Nixon was elected he was told about the sub and authorized raising it. The Glomar Explorer lifted the entire sub, but then the lifting contraption broke and 2/3 of the sub fell back to the floor. They got the front third and recovered six bodies (which they buried at sea in a russian-style ceremony), and they recoverd some code information (though I doubt codes from 1950's were much use in 1974!).
The Russians completely covered up the fact that they lost the sub, and the Americans did not say they had found it, so when the story about the Glomar Explorer leaked out, it was also the first anybody had heard about the sub sinking!
tell me the real name of Constatinople,
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
Are you saying it wasn't the Turks?
Let's play Pass the H Bomb! Yeah! That's a great idea! Catch!
This past summer, the G8 Summit meeting was at Sea Island, not 75 miles from Tybee Island. I had business in the area, and went through the security checkpoints each time. I had thought they would be looking for something like that to be a threat to the meeting.
Now we find out that there was possibly a nuclear weapon there, and the security details failed to notice the radiation. I would not be surprised to hear about some Congressional sub committee spending our tax dollars to do an investigation of the security failure.
Pete Carr Owner Chatmag.com
Most nuclear weapons in that era were transported with there core's removed. If the weapon was to be used, it would be armed by the physical insertion of the fissile core into the high explosive trigger system.
Essentially, a plutonium based fission device operates through a Highly complicated system of focused explosions crafted to compress the plutonium core evenly from all angles to create a supercritical mass. This is a very complicated and technical explosive. Accidental detination by overheating will generally not result in a uniform explosion, so the core will not begin to fiz.
A uranium weapon works by the rapid combination of 2 sub critical masses to form a supercritical mass. If these aren't brought together rapidly enough the ensuing reaction will blow itself apart before the mass has a chance to really get going (about 70 generations of fission reactions).
So, a nuclear weapon needs a lot of high powered explosives to get going. To be extra safe, the fissile material and the explosives are kept seperate to prevent a nuclear disaster in the event of an accidental explosion. Without those high explosives AND the fissile core, there is No Way to detonate a nuclear device. Any radiation that is still present is no doubt from the radioactivity imparted to the casing when it was exposed to the nuclear core.
Just don't try to use it to abolish television like Sideshow Bob did:
From episode [3F08] Sideshow Bob's Last Gleaming:
The scenes flash through people throughout Springfield and then the mushroom cloud appears, very small, and sets off the smoke detector in
the blimp. The bomb casing breaks apart and rats scatter.
Bob: [reading from the bomb casing] "Best before November 1959." Dammit, Bob. There were plenty of brand new bombs, but you had to go for that retro 50s charm.
[to kids] Well, if it isn't my arch nemesis, Bart Simpson. And his sister Lisa to whom I'm fairly indifferent.
The only people who could afford to get it safely, craft other bombs, and move them would be terrorist from the mid-east, or Russian mob.
I owuld like you to take a lok at all violent terrorist actions. After that, I think the mid-east thing is a safe comment.
are they the only ones? No, but they are by far the largest group. Probably 90%+
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In any case, the "Spark-plug" is definitely of weapons grade material and should be removed.
Is the laws of physics. According to the article, the bomb is 7,000 feet under the water. That is a very difficult depth to reach, much less grab and pick something up from. You can't send a diver down that deep, you have to send a ship that can grab it. Well finding a ship that can do that is not trivial. None of the US submarines can. A LA attack boat will implode at about 1500 feet, the deap sea research boats are good only to 3000 feet or so. The deepest boats in the US fleet, the DSRV (rescue boats) are good only to about 5000 feet, and couldn't lift the bomb anyhow.
So what you'd have to do, basically, is design a special craft, probably unmanned, that could go down, grab the bomb and bring it back up. This is feasable, though expensive, for someone like the US that has deep sea boats, and experts and companies in those fields. It's pretty much impossible for an illegal orginazation.
Remember they would need to:
1) Obtain people with the knowledge necessary to carry out such a design and operation.
2) Design and test a DSV that could reach these depths and a surface control ship.
3) Take the ship and DSV off the US coast and retrive the bomb.
And all this while not being detected. Someone finds your facility for making the DSV, you're done. If the US notices you (highly likely) as you are after the bomb, done.
Basically it would be expensive and difficult for the US to do, it would be near impossible for a group of terrorists to do. They can spend their money on other things that will give them more bang for their buck (literally).
That's the real defense. The bomb is really deep in the ocean, not many nations have DSV capabilities and those that do aren't interested, and it's near the US coast and thus not easy to get at without being spotted.
Getting it without being spotted would probabl be the hardest part because you can't seriously think that the US wouldn't send every ship and sub on the eastern seaboard after you.
"On the other hand, they don't know how to set things right."
you might want to ad to the sentance:
"Without pissing off the rest of the world."
really, we should ahve taken that refund Bush gave everybody in 2001, and put it into training people to infiltrate Mid-East terrorists.
We have a CIA, let them do their job.
I would be surprised if we were asked to leave. If the wrong person gets elected, then we won't leave. The wrong person being somebody the Saudis don't like.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Where do you get that from? According to the article it's in *7,000* feet of water. That's a shitload, and not at all easy to reach. You are talking remote vehicles only for that. The US's deepest manned boat, the DSRV, is only good to about 5,000 feet and doesn't have the capability to lift the bomb anyhow.
The ocean is really, really big and really, really deep (in a lot of places). IF you think it's easy to find something in it, try it yourself. There's a reason why shipwrecks are often undiscovered for hundreds of years.
There were also cites bombed to the ground more or less just because in WWII. Dresden is probably the most famous examples. The Allies, literally, firebombed it to rubble. More people lost their lives there than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Also, it's questionable as to what was gained militarly from the bombing of Dresden. At that point in the war, it certianly wasn't a military necessity and may not really have even saved that many allied lives.
Regardless it was done and certianly had an impact on German morale, as you noted.
but someone found us up the bomb!!
Knew there was some explanation for Zell Miller.
Time for some enterprising, patriot Americans to
go fetch it before the bad guys (the terrorists
who killed 50,000 people in Iraq to take their oil,
and killed 3,000 people in New York to take their
civil liberties) get it.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
That explains Zell Miller!
"There is no time, sir, at which ties do not matter," Jeeves, (Jeeves and the Impending Doom)
"If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?"
I say you wire it to a life monitor and mount it on your motorcycle, thereby becoming your own sovereign superpower. Well, sovereign until some katana wielding hacker comes after you... But until then, let the good times roll!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Just use conventional explosives to blow it up in situ. Result: one dirty bomb attack on Savannah.
You're right, the statement about the aircraft carrier was uncalled for in terms of a tactical discussion of military deployment. That was me waxing dramatic to make a point.
I feel it's important to adequately compensate our troops. We spend 20 million per airplane, but an entry-level enlisted guy with two kids is eligible for welfare unless his wife works. My issue is not with defense spending in general, but with the disproportionate allocation of funds.
I'm not sure of the physics involved in detecting radiation, but I still think that a jettisoned nuclear bomb right off our coast should be more of a priority for the government. I'm not a mariner or a physicist, but I'm sure there's a way to detect a huge scrap of metal in a relatively localized area with favorable weather conditions.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
A knight of the crusdades isn't going to come to your door and firebomb your family. A Muslim just might. That's the difference. It seems simple to me, I don't know why it isn't simple to you. It's not about history. It's about current events.
My argument is not now, nor has it ever been, that "only Muslims can commit atriocities." My argument is that it is the Muslims that are committing atrocities. Get them to stop, or actually stop them, and we can move on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
In Feb 2000, Bill Richardson, energy secretary under Clinton, went on a tour of all of the OPEC member states except Iraq, Iran, and Libya. He found that they are all at maximum production -- ie, while they have more oil in the ground, they can't pump it up any faster. The US will need 7.5 more million barrels of oil per day by 2020. The only excess oil we can find lies in these "unstable states" (ie, states that don't kowtow to the US). That is why we had to invade Iraq -- they have the worlds 2nd largest proven oil reserve, after Saudi Arabia (our other toady). Remember, the CIA hired and trained Saddam Hussein to assasinate the then democratically elected president of Iraq. He failed, but when the CIA did succeed, we helped put him in power. One of the many reasons why Iraqi's don't trust the US.
"You have the option of insanity. I do not. And that makes me crazy!" - Brian to Angela, My So-Called Life
the philippine verison of the cia nailed and shut down an international muslim extremist plot to blow up a number of jumbo jets at the same time flying to/ from the usa in the mid-1990s
and during their investigation, they uncovered the whole flying airplanes-into-buildings conspiracy as well, including a number of the prime movers and players of the whole 9/11 terrorist crew, and promptly notified their american counterparts about the whole thing
in other words, the intelligence service of a smaller, poorer country, with funding perhaps 1/1000th that of the cia, was doing a better job of protecting us citizens than its own government
thank you philippines
fu cia
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Drop it on SCO ....
Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease ....... :-)
The man that has been spearheading the search has been posting to our geiger counter/radiation forum in yahoo groups for some time asking for advice during construction of the detection apparatus. Here's his response to the article.
From: "Richard Gurske" Date: Tue Sep 14, 2004 5:48 pm Subject: Re: [CDV700CLUB] Re: Search for a Broken Arrow Hi To All: This message will answer allot of questions as to the latest developments dealing with the broken arrow. It is best to get it straight from the horses mouth. On July 20, 2004 I joined a team of searchers with my magnetometer, DGPS, CDV700(LENI), computer and 2-inch airlift dredge. My job (volunteer) was to conduct a magnetometer sweep of an area off the coast of Tybee Island, GA. First off, there were no GPS locations available for the search area. So random bottom radiological measurements were obtained using a Ludlum GC with a homemade weighted water/pressure proof probe. Bottom readings ranged from 500 to 3000CPM. DGPS locations of readings at and above 2000CPM were recorded. Estimated Position Errors indicated on the DGPS were 3.8 feet (very good). About 15 locations were recorded. The search area chosen was previously known to contain radiation readings above ground counts. A DGPS location which produced a reading of 3000CPM was later supplied to the US Air Force. There was never an attempt made to determine the entire area associated with these elevated readings. I did suggest that we at least determine the edges where the readings returned to ground levels. My suggestion was ignored. Next, a magnetometer sweep of the same area was started. The magnetometer sensor was suspended 12 feet below the water surface and was towed 90 feet behind the fiberglass search boat. The magnetometer used is of the proton precession type with a sensitivity of 1 nanotesla. There were 2700 readings taken with DGPS locations. Magnetic levels of up to 150 nanotesla were obtained. I must add here that magnetometers only detect ferrous metals and I am unsure if the lost item has any ferrous metal inside. If this is the case than all 2700 readings are invalid. However, the area searched was a mine field during WWII to prohibit boats from entering the rivers. There is still a WWII bunker visible on shore. Maybe there are other items worth looking for in the same spot. Some of the magnetometer readings were later turned over to the US Air Force. The last task was to obtain bottom samples of the spots with the highest radiation reading. The 2-inch airlift was hooked up and put into service. The water at this time (high tide) was about 22 feet deep. The airlift just made it. Bottom samples indicated mud not sand as I had thought. The mud was captured in containers but showed NO RADIATION when brought to the surface. Could someone explain why the bottom reading was high yet the sample showed nothing. Where did the radiation go? I don't know anything about the whereabouts of the samples taken, or the results of the testing done on them. This was the only attempt that I know of using the type of equipment I supplied. However I was told that a person was contacted that uses electronic equipment and dosing detectors to find lost items of all types. His results indicated the broken arrow to be in the area we were in. He states that he can detect objects up to 20 MILES away. I wonder if he is rich. I should also add that a National Geographic video was being made from another boat during the beginning of the sea search. FWIW, The captain of the National Geographic crew boat had to take a s##t and took the boat to shore where it sank, with waves taking the camera and recording equipment to the bottom. Everyone was wet but safe. The boat was bailed out but the electronic equipment was ruined by the sea water. I don't know any more about this video. Much to my surprise few days later I was notified that WE (I) had found the broken arrow. It was on the NBC news. What trash. I informed Mr. D (the search team leader) that I didn't appreciate my DGPS and magnetometer readings being used to fraud the government. WE HAD LOCATED NOTHING. I withdrew my voluntary services for all future searches. On August 23rd an email was sent to Mr. D from an Air Force Major General, who's office is in the pentagon, requesting a clarification
Hooray!
Money for nothing, pix for free
Let me see, it's been in the sea a long time.
...
/.ers people. Technology *burns* out of our arses (or is that the chili I ate laste night.)
It won't go critical but it's radioactive up the
wazoo. It's also potentially an explosive risk.
You leave it in peace. and get on with your life.
If you really care about other people you put up a
big sign saying "danger: don't fuck with this" so
everyone else leaves it in peace.
Any terrorist stupid enough to want to play with it
is *welcome*. We'd like some idiot to try to play
with it because that would be one less idiot we
have to deal with
Perhaps on another monday morning I'll get to chuckle about how Abdul Mohammed (blessings and peace) Smith managed to kill himself in a very
creative way trying to recover it...
I for one don't care that's an H-bomb. Not like I don't understand this shit. Hey, we are
Also check out the links to the other sources provided on that page.
Somewhat related - and very interesting - is this narrative of the B-52 accident at the Thule airbase in Greenland in 1968.
I do think, and I didn't feel rage and hate. You put too much into a few lines. Who would you think should go and pick up that thing then? Would you do it yourself, or send you kids?
the question now is: "what, if anything, should be done with it?"
Well, when the explosives squad finds a WW2 bomb out here, they tag on some extra explosives and just make it go boom.
That's one I'd like to watch..... From a different planet.
"The later planned usage in Europe was *not* to kill people without destroying property (that was propaganda from those opposed to NATO, but not Soviet, nuclear weapons). Instead, the intention was to use them against invading Warsaw Pact troop concentrations while reducing damage to nearby West German towns and cities."
Excuse me, but there's some redundancy here:
Warsaw pact troop concentration = people;
West German towns and cities = property.
And having lived in Germany at the time, I'd say most of the demonstrators - apart from the communist minority - were very much opposed to nuclear weapons use by both sides, particularly since most Germans had relatives on the other side.
I can see how an American might view nuking places on the other side of the globe with equanimity (not that I think most do!), but Germany was the central battlefield of most WWIII projections, and having had most of its big cities flattened by conventional means in WWII, was somewhat averse to having some Pentagon asshole play with thoughts of turning any part of it into nuclear wasteland.
Germans knew that they would be instant toast one way or the other in WWIII, and either side raising the tension by stationing nukes was not welcomed. Remember the Cuban missile crisis? This was the same thing.
Not it is not as scary as you might think.
First notice that they don't agree.
Second taak a look at hwo things work
Thirth the problem is in the details. "simple" things like extracting the plutonuim from the bomb is not as easy as a hollywood movie explains. Or making a big bang to explode a nucliear warhead.
There are other things that are much scarier and simpler to do. Like dropping planes on all kinds of objects that do NOT have a symbolic value, but are toxic (like your next door industries).
Congratulations!
Frank Horrigan and Lilly Raines and their friends will be around to ask you a few questions shortly, please stand by....
Better save blair1q's post for posterity now before these guys force Slashdot to delete it like the 'assassin' post I can't find and link to at the moment....
No, I'd rather see it used on India to combat the offshoring problem.
And I thought republimods were in the minority here, something must have slipped through the cracks for that one. Sure, it wont be the best answer to the problem, but it's an option that does hit two birds with one stone. One, it does the obvious, next, it gets OBL or gets him to a point where he has to move(and make himself more readily to be caught). Unless you like the effects of atomic energy, one would want to move far enough out of the way, even if you're the symbolic leader of a large terrorist group.
Also, the insurgents seem to agree with the USA: they think 50 muslim civilian lives is worth injuring 1 US soldier; if they thought otherwise, they would not keep making that tradeoff. :-(
It produces mostly lead, ultimately.
The daughter element of Pu239 is U235.
The decay tree for a fission reaction is really complicated, though: there's a multitude of ways each atom in the sample can decay, and it may stop for a very long time as some long-lived low-level isotope before heading on down the chain.
The decay of the results of a fission reaction is complex because the fission process produces multiple isotopes of multiple elements. At the same time throwing neutrons around which can be captured changing the isotope mix. The fission products are very unlikely to decay to any form of lead, given that they tend to be in row 5 of the periodic table. Hence Sr90 and I131 being present. N.B. many of the isotopes produced by fission have such short half lives that they are difficult to detect.
"The Emperor had been told that war could not be won as early as February 1942. In 1943, the [Japanese] navy had reached the conclusion that defeat was inevitable. In 1944 Tojo had been thrown out by a navy putsch. None of this made any difference. The fear of assassination was too great. In May 1945 Russia was asked to mediate. But Stalin sat on the offer, since in January at Yalta he had been promised substantial territorial rewards to enter the Japanese war in August.
... prosecute the war to the bitter end'. The final plan for the defense of Japan itself, 'Operation Decision', provided for 10,000 suicide planes (most converted trainers), fifty-three infantry divisions and twenty-five brigades: 2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 million army and navy civil employees and a civilian militia of 28 million .
On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, 'Fundamental Policy to be Followed hensceforth in the Conduct of the War,' which asserted 'we shall
They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, bamboo spears and bows and arrows. The Allied commanders assumed that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese would lives would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already experienced, it would be in the range of 10-20 million.
The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion became unavoidable. On 1 August, 820 B29's unloaded 6,600 tons of explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America's one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan's eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the city would be 'obliterated' had been dropped two days before . No notice was taken..."
-- Johnson, Paul: Modern Times
Read your history.
seems to me America (and probably Russia) had invasion plans all drawn up during the Cold War. I can see how such a belief was perpetuated, though:
a) the point of air burst nuclear weapons was to reduce fallout and therefore enables invasion/capture shortly after the explosion, and
b) only the fission source causes long term radiation contamination, so an invading force can move in quickly after air bursting a fusion device (at least to the outskirts of the blast radius). Fission devices are used to initiate a fusion explosion, so there is still some long term radioactive damage and possible fallout.
However, air bursting weapons maximizes kill radius while minimizing damage on the ground... makes sense from a military perspective, since they generally don't intend long term damage.
And actually, the military wanted both types of weapon - one tactical nuclear weapon with a short blast and minimal damage that could be used on the battlefield in front of an assault (preferably a 2-10mile maximum damage radius with a core blast/kill zone of 1-2 miles from what I remember of it) and one long distance high yield threat that could be used from afar. I don't think the tac-nuke was ever fully realized, because the goal of it was to be able to move into the region within a few hours of the blast, but the dependence on a fission source to at least initiate the explosion and the typical larger burst radii of fusion blasts didn't make that possible.
They say that it was only used for a simulated run... but if it's just for practice, why the heck is there uranium in it???
...yea...
I never believe what they say. The first nuclear detonation was explained to the public as a munitions explosion... (hint hint... the recent 2 mile wide mushroom cloud in NK that they say could be from a "forest fire")
i think that the intent was to defend Germany, not play some kind of game.
while i understand what you are saying (i still have family in Germany), to not consider the possibility of nuclear war entering the equation would have been foolish.
it is those same "pentagon assholes" who protected Germany when the rest of the world wanted Germany's blood after wwii? Who setup bases there to protect Germany from soviet invasion, which most Germans did NOT want?
maybe you are being a little harsh...
What is scary is that they actually lost the bomb. I mean really .. how do you loose a hydrogen thermonuclear bomb ... and have it lost for over 4 decades. I wonder how many more bombs they have "lost". You would think that finding them would sort of be on the high importantance list ...
I always thought there was only one fission nuke in most thermonuclear bombs - in the center.
I also thought, and I'm pretty positive about this one, that the neutron bomb is just a small fission bomb. Fission devices with low TNT equivalent still have a large neutron radiation output. In the 50s and the 60s thy made bombs with as little as 10 ton TNT eq., where all the effect of the explosion would be from the penetrating radiation. Just take a look at this beauty: Davy Crockett.
I remember from nuclear science class that they usually made bombs out of materials with intermediate half lives... like 50-100 years, because materials with longer half-lives were too weak, and shorter meant they wouldn't be bombs for long. Now, if this has been buried for almost 50 years, is it still a bomb? If some baddie went and got it, could they actually make a nuclear blast, or would it just be a dirty bomb?
The report also estimated it would take as long as five years and cost $5 million to $11 million to recover the bomb.
I'll bet it costs a few terrorists alot less than that to retrieve the weapon.
-ted
Yes, the conventional forces were welcome there, but any addition of any nukes only served to heighten tension. Saying that a neutron bomb is a tactical weapon and therefore will not lead to nuclear escalation from the other side is simply wishful thinking.
The Soviet block did not have neutron bombs and they had a stated policy not to use nukes *first*. Any use of a neutron bomb would have led to instant nuclear retaliation.
And yes, we can say that you can't trust a commie, but in the game of diplomacy, what you say and do counts in raising or lowering tension.
And a heightened threat of nuclear war did lower my enjoyment of life there in the middle of ground zero with nowhere to run. In a conventional war, you can at least imagine you have a chance of survival.
So, the US generals and politicians who brought democracy and protection to Germany deserve kudos. They were wonderful. They were not the same generals who played nuclear chess on the European battlefield while ensconced in the best bunkers on the other side of the planet. Okay?
The radiation is from the Uranium in the bomb casing. See the very good explanation already posted by Phanatic1a at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=122409&cid=102 93251
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
Yeah, I would go get it if asked, and I'd take along all the expertise on the subject available. An H-bomb is not the kind of thing one wants to leave lying around, even a mud encrusted antique. If nothing else some Islamonazi could dig it up and make a dirty bomb out of the leftovers.
Who -should- get it is a military recovery team with some experience in the job. They have the best chance of getting the thing out in one piece without making a mess of it. Build a caisson around it, dig it out, cast it in concrete, bury the SOB in the Nevada test range where nobody can mess with it.
Somewhat more practical than your suggestion, eh? Maybe a bit less vindictive peacenik bile too.
Better Red than Dead, eh?
You can tell a great deal about the character of a man by observing those who hate him.
Until someone pointed out that in a concentration of say 100,000 troops, you kill 10% on the spot, and 100% in 14 days - and no one wanted to stand in front of 90,000 troops who know that they're already dead - and are still capable of getting revenge. Think about it. The tactics that you use in shoot-em-up video games would have happened in the real world!
How tender hearted you are. Did you forget the Rape of Nanking by any chance? Japanese prison camps? Pearl Harbor?
How about the fact that those two nukes ended the war in a couple of days, vs. the several years and millions of lives it would have cost otherwise?
How about the incendiary attack on Tokyo? That was a beauty, made Hiroshima look like a weenie roast.
I've gotta add you're pretty cavalier with those soldiers too.
HOLY CRAP! Georgia has WMD! Quick, we better invade them!
You write a great number of errors about neutron bomb. First of all, neutron bomb wasn't designed as an anti-balistic weapon. This is interdit by internatinal treaty like ABM traty or Non nuclearisation of space traty. Clearly it was make as an anti-tank weapon. Because of big concentration of tanks in western europe during the Cold War, it was interesting for Us army to have a theater weapon with low fallout. Neutron bomb is a three-stage device : it used neutron made by a thermonuclear explosion to active creation of fusion's neutron in a third stage . In general, it use plastic whose hydrogene's atoms are changed by isotopes like tritium or deterium. Fusion neutron from thermonuclear explosion can create fusion reaction with that isotopes. This is not the only kind of three-stage weapon: Andrei Sakharov show (and permit the experimentation...) the design of a mega nuke with use fusion neutron to active fission reaction in a uranium 235 coverture: this kind of nuke experimented by sovietic has a puissance of 70 Megatons... by from Sakharov that 's not an upper limit... Second, you write:"Since the neutron blast falls off rapidly with distance (the old inverse square law in action)". There is no rapport from inverse square law and the fall off of neutrons. Neutrons are neutre... Third as an theater weapon, neutron bomb was an very perturbative weapon during the Cold War. It was an element of instability because this doctrine of usage was very differents of that of Sovietic or French. For them nukes was doomsday machine, not super bombes!! Nukes have only utilities as life-assurance to empeach direct invasion of national territories. But Neutron bomb is thinking as a super bomb to destroy tildes of soviet tanks...
The FA says that they lost the bomb during a training exercise.
What kind of idiot takes to carry a real nuke in a training exercise????
PENAROL: Seras eterno como el tiempo y floreceras en cada primavera.
As additional information, consider what Truman et al knew and not what we believe in hind sight:
* The U.S. had an invasion plan for Japan with the hope that it would lead to the Japanesse surender. The first stage was the invasion of Kyushu (operation Olympic) followed by an invasion to occupy Tokyo. Note that neither invasion included taking entire islands so theoretically fighting could continue. The hope was that the occupation of Tokyo would lead to a Japaneese surrender.
* The invasion of Kyushu was expected to lead to ~105k U.S. casualties. Based on previous invasions, one would have expected 200-500k Japanesse casualties from this operation.
* The taking of Tokyo was expected to take ~300k more U.S. casualties with a corresponding loss of 600k-2M Japanesse.
* While the invasions were expected to cost 400-500k Americans and 800k-2.5M Japanesse, the combined bombings cost 110k Japanesse (Hiroshima - 45k 1st day and 19k subsequently; Nagasaki - 22k 1st day, 17k susequently, combined 1000-2000 over later years). That's not a good thing if you're one of the ~105k killed by the bomb. However, in the grand scheme of things would you choose 105k dead or something greater than 1,000,000?
* The U.S., in preparation for the invasions, minted just under 500k purple hearts. Those were used for all U.S. casualties in Korea, Vietnam, and the current gulf debacle. There are still ~120k purple hearts left in warehouses. In other words, we have more purple hearts left over after 60 years of on and off fighting than the total casualties from the bombings.
* For completeness, the Nagasaki bomb "should" have killed more. The bomb missed it's target by several miles and exploded over an industriallized valley where the hills sheilded much of the city from the worst of the explosion. If the bomb had been on target, the Nagasaki casualties would probably have approached those of Hiroshima.
They also had a stated policy of observing the soveriegnty of neighboring nations that they ignored when it was convienient for them to so. Trusting that that "policy" would actually be enforced if Russia was losing a convential all out war with NATO was extremely naive.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
How many MORE of these damn things have been "lost", and are f**king lying around somewhere in easy grasp of anyone with a dive team and a geiger counter?
If that doesnt scare you shitless, i dont know what else should. If we can't even hold onto our OWN nukes, what have the former soviet russians done with theirs?
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
If I ran the Weekly World News, I'd sue you for slander. It's MUCH more reliable than Slashdot. After all, it's at least POSSIBLE that Bigfoot had Elvis's baby. :)
Serving your airship needs since 1995.
The Mk 15 had skinny fins. The bombs with cool fins (B-43, B-57 and B-61) came out a few years later. A couple of the Air-to-Air nukes (GAR-11, AIR-2A) had cool fins too.
No they won't.
Go read the law some time.
I have.
If this description of the bomb is correct (IANP, but I have very little knowledge of historical designs of nuclear weapons) it should be a cause for concern.
Uranimum bombs are very easy to detonate. Plutonium bombs are much, much harder. This is the fortunate fork of the modern terrorist's dilemma: sufficiently enriched 235U is very hard to produce, but very easy to detonate. 239Pu is relatively easy to produce, but very hard to detonate.
The Hiroshima bomb was a gun-type uranium device that had never been tested--Trinity was an plutonium implosion device. The reason why the uranium bomb hadn't been tested is because it's so damned easy to make the things blow up.
The good news for the modern world is that while we have lots (i.e. many, many tonnes) of plutonium lying around, we have very, very little highly enriched uranium. So a hundred-odd kilos of HEU would be a terrorist's delight.
If this bomb is as described, it should be raised and destroyed.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
See WWI,WWII And Vietnam conflict.
See what? In WWI, there wasn't mass civilian killings; but there were a lot of them made up for propoganda value. In WWII, the Germans paid dearly for their actions against civilians, starting with losing the war against Britain because they targeted London instead of military targets, and extended on to continuing issues with the Holocaust. Dresden is still high on the propaganda value.
What Vietnam teaches us is that if you don't have a clear military target, wars are a pain in the ass.
As for the Japanese bombings, it does indeed raise questions about the generality of the rule. But Japan was a united government that could stop the war at its choice. It worked by sending a clear message to those who controlled the power to stop the attacks. Iran doesn't control Al-Quedid. No government does.
It doesn't matter who said it, becasue it's out of context and they clearly didn't understand what it meant.
It's about reparation.
Not unless we're robots, and can just plug that eye into our empty eye socket. Reparation would have been "a donkey for a donkey". According to a Baptist preacher I once talked to, it's about limiting the amount of vengence.
several things: 1. facts do not equal arrogance. 2. love of country is bad? or is it only americans who should hate themselves? 3. I don't think that most marines had leather chairs in WWII. 4.if you were a marine at that time, you had already fought your ass off! 5. I would not call bombing of cities genocide, at no time did we advocate the detruction of all japanese. Bombing of industrial and military positions is a completely accepted methodology. Even when the military esablishment is firmly entrenched in a civilian city. Now, if you had said cocky, then I might have agreed with you. :)
...microsoft (lower-casing-deprecation intentional/perpetual in my writings).
-==============
Go ahead, Duke, Nuke'em. NUKE'EM TWICE.
-===============
(Think Gene Hackman in 'Crimson Tide' when his character gave his political cold-war stance toward then-Soviet Russia: "Aye, Aye, Sir! Drop the Nukes. Drop those FU*#KERS. Drop'em TWICE. Happening to microsoft, we'd be gifted with "Micro-Flotsam Tide".)
David Syes
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The above inciting bit was a bit of ...
metaphoric speak, but if it happened to ms, there'd be no love lost, by me or most of the developing or legally-hamstrung world needing to get from under the ms yoke of suppression, oppression and intellectual REgression. Seems to me ms needs to undergo some SERIOUS "regression" therapy... Too bad ms and all it's backups are not sitting on some sliver of Washington state coastline due for collapse into the continental shelf-- or slope, even. Actually, there is an historical but overdue Tsunami out there... Maybe Duke will get that shock and rolling, but only flood the ms campus, nothing else. Get rollin', Duke.
Seriously, though...
Moreover, think TWICE about nuking India. It's not India's fault. India, like many other developing or crowded nations has to eat, too. If we tech nations raise the tide and benefit by rising with it, so MUST others, lest they drown in the tide, their boats swamped. To assert that they are not deserving of parallel rise with us is to assert they are worthless, undeserving of progress, not equals as humans, nor deserving of benefitting from their being exploited by tech and power nations.
Does India have trillions or even hundreds of billions of rupees ANYTHING worth gate's & ms' ill-gotten money? No.
Take a look at who's selling out the country and the workforce, if you see it as 'selling out'. It's either the (various rich nations) ultra rich, their lobbyists, their shill, bought-and-paid for politicians, and/or dumb consumers who are not very thoughtful of which domestic companies which they purchase from.
The ultimate, and inevitable solution to this vexing problem is multi-part:
--- get lobbyists out of politics
--- nuke the dirtiest of the dirty politicians
--- remove from wealth any ultra-nationalist super rich and let the new youth run their own futures
--- Make F/LOSS more pervasive and proprietary software more deprecated, but charging for service and customization is ok
--- Make the government/s live within its/their means
-- Make governments print special cash to cover the pay and retirement planes of public employees, thereby removing that onus from non-government employees
--- Defang the "materialism monster" such that it's pointless to become "ultra rich", since the rich SHOULD be at the mercy of consumers, not the other way around. (Even I need to de-consumerize to an extent...)
--- Place global human rights, dignity, esteem, nourishment, and face above corporate or national agenda
--- Shrink the chasm between the haves and have nots
--- LOTS of other ideas out there???
Reality is, "outsourcing" has been around for QUITE a long time. The sick/depressing part of it is the relatively recent uptick to save a buck. Displaced workers, as long as they have debts and need food need money, or they'll die, become criminals, or leech (by necessity) "the system".
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
...strike" to that half life of 24,1000 years?
If they don't defuse, or diffuse the matter, for that matter, then lots of us will be singing "Got Georgia on my mind..." And, just last week I finally, after 3 or so years, got another quarter with the state of Georgia. I slapped it to my forehead and said, "Got Georgia on my mind" to the amusement of a number of people.
Now, by coincidence, we HAVE got "Georgia on our mind"...
seys divad
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
Of course not. Very few things are "beyond the realm of possibility."
For example, he could have had Elvis (who could have been living there since the CIA could have helped him fake his death) just make the construction workers promise on a copy of "Love Me Tender" (which they might possibly hold to be more holy than the Koran) not to tell anyone.
But that isn't they way I'd bet.
-- MarkusQ
As I told you, this was not a matter of wartime exigencies (as those weapons were a mere plane ride away in case of imminent war, anyway), but of peacetime posturing, of drawing the blocks closer to war by threatening to use nukes on invading armies.
I'm sure you felt really nice and comfy sitting somewhere on the American continent, unlikely to be hit by anything but the draft, while we were between the grindstones of two superpowers, waiting to be crushed.
I give up. There's no way I can convey that atmosphere of fear.
For a second, I thought he was saying they should put the nuclear material on display in the Smithsonian.
"My mom and dad got irradiated at the Smithsonian, and all I got was this crummy T-Shirt."
Those words do sound less insane in that order.
Mind the Gap
Actually, it would be "whom" in "whom we'll know" but not in "who will be known," since "who" is a subject of the verb "be"--in passive voice, but a subject nevertheless--but in any case, I believe it should be: "it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke who shall be known as 'Duke Nukem' forever." Pun most definitely intended.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
an account of how we lost 4 nukes over Italy due to a refueling accident in the 60s. We recovered 3 and only later recovered the 4th bomb in the water. Whole crops were contaminated with radioactivity as some of the bombs broke open on impact with the ground. We had to bulldoze farmland and help pay for a desalination plant to appease the government. Interesting read.
You are only popular on the Internet.
Man, imagine how many radium watchfaces you could make out of that thing!
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
To wrongs don't make a right.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
A rolling stone gathers no moss.
Late comment, but wouldn't this be a great honeypot to catch baddies?
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
I grew up in Washington, DC. Ground Zero in the event of an all out war. Please spare me the condescending crap. As any European war was likely to flare in to an all out nuclear armageddon, I fully understand the "atmosphere of fear." As the Mohawks say about working on tall buildings it's not that you don't feel fear, it's how you deal with it.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
and
It's that "few days" in the 320 rem and up exposure (320 rad or 3.2 seivert is considered the LD-50 according to this table) where you could lose the war.
Don't learn about radiation from Hollywood.