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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!
"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
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.
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!
This is a much bigger thing to be concerned about.
SCO Headquarters.
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?
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.
If it is the bomb that Duke has found, the question now is what, if anything, should be done with it?
Utah would be a good spot.
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.
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
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.
and it was found off Tybee Island by retired Air Force Lt. Colonel Derek Duke...
... who forever shall be known as 'Duke Nukem'
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.
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.
If it was just for practice, why put any uranium in it at all? Or for that matter, why put conventional explosives in it? Sounds like "Ye olde cover up" to me.
Well, since Uncle Sam called for these weapons to be created, I'm sure they'll be thrilled to pay a billion dollars to all of the tax payers, then have to front the money to put this bomb away for good, and at least giving a try to find the other ten.
At this point, I'd be happy with them disposing of the radioisotopes in a safe mannor, then blowing the rest of the bomb. Hopefully not enough of the radiation has leaked into the environment to still allow this to be possible.
It should be a matter of National Security to secure the radioisotopes from this weapon. Since they practically broadcasted the location of the weapon, and the fact that a nuclear weapon on the bottom of the ocean is still viable as a dirty bomb, the question is, how long will it to be until a terrorist organization or a country with enough balls goes looking for one of these bombs? I'm not too worried, but I'm just tired of the government hiding things like this from us.
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
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!"
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
Move it please.
Thank you,
A Concerned North Carolina Resident
Jay | http://oldos.org
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)
-
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
" Since nobody knew this one was missing until it was found, how many more are out there?"
It's been known for a long time that it's been missing...like, since the plane carrying it dropped it. The problem has always been that they were never able to locate it; granted the Government only searched for it for 9 weeks immediately after the incident. You'd think with our current technology the military would have been able to find it now. In 2001, the Air Force conducted a study where they claim the safest thing to do with it is leave it where it's at. Whether or not that report is actually accurate...I won't speculate.
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.
1- Chechen rebels are responsible for killing kids in Russia. They don't really qualify as "arabs"
/., I'll assume you are simply ignorant and not an idiot (although you might be a troll...). You should study what OBL really wants, why his supporters are upset enough to support him, and last but not least, you should read up on what an Arab is.
2- "Radical" (rather, extremist) muslim arabs such as OBL are not intent on killing as many people as possible. Ignorant comments such as you make guarantee you'll never find political actions that could undercut their popular support.
Since you're posting on
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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.
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.
Unfortunately, this weapon might not prove terribly effective against the kind folks at SCO.
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.
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. :)
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.
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).
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
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."
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
Knew there was some explanation for Zell Miller.
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
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
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.
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.
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 ...
So if we put a US base in Newfoundland, Canadians shouldn't think that you really have a base in our country, because we didn't always own NF? No more than a military base in Germany or Northern Italy would be seen as French territory.
What matters is present boundaries. Some half-assed historical answers are only going to piss off people that are already angry.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
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.
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"