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Radioactive Snails Crawl Up From Beneath
slidersv writes "Reuters is reporting discovery of radioactive snails in the area where three hydrogen bombs were lost by US in the 1966. The radioactive creatures crawl up from underground, where authorities suspect deposits of uranium and plutonium may be located."
Jokes about radio-cochlear overlords aside, two things come to mind:
- If we don't survive nuclear holocaust: what creatures, more robust than we, will? (Reminds me of the thriving Chernobylian fauna.)
- What ungodly mutations must an organism undergo to thrive therein?
If the future is bleak for humanity, it may be less so for simpler, more robust organisms.Imagine all the stupid giant mutant nuke-spewing snail movies this will inspire. Bruce Willis versus ..... slime?
Table-ized A.I.
I for one welcome our radioactive overlords... Sorry, i tried.
...are gonna git them some good eatin' now... Escarglow!
Clearly, they are in cahoots with the giant bug that was found on Google Maps, not too long ago.
Also, I understand they are radioactive...
But do they run Linux?
On a more serious note, I find this fascinating - radioactivity is one of the least understood and possibly most useful sciences in the world.
-Red
Guns don't kill people, "with glowing hearts" kills people.
Isn't this not so much a non-story, as a story fragement, or story-ette, that's too small (or too specfic) to expect anyone to make comments other movie and TV references? Sounds like Quickie-fodder to me.
> How the fuck do you lose a goddamn hydrogen bomb?
Maybe it was packed into the same box as the moon landing videos.
Sigh. From the article:
three U.S. hydrogen bombs fell by accident 40 years ago may trigger a new joint U.S.-Spanish clean-up operation, officials said on Wednesday.
The hydrogen bombs fell near the fishing village of Palomares in 1966 after a mid-air collision between a bomber and a refuelling craft, in which seven of 11 crewmen died.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
If you're in Tokyo right now...
RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!!
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
I thought the TFA might be talking about the crash of the B52 in Thule. This incident refers to a 1966 crash in Spain whereas the Thule incident happened in 1968.
Perhaps scientists should check out the Thule site for similar happenings? More here: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot.php?biotID=5 and http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/low/dates/stories/ january/28/newsid_2506000/2506207.stm
Not so much 'lost' as misplaced: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palomares
I for one will be happy to welcome our radioactive slime-spouting overlords.
In, oh, just over twenty years, which is the time it'll take for the snails to crawl from Spain to menace Tokyo (which, as we all know, is the ultimate goal of everything radioactive, oversize or alien in this world).
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
It ends up they basically found them after and detonated them which spread uranium and plutonium in the soil hence radioactive snails. But the summary definetly made it sound like the snails were the least of our problems.
Teenage Mutant Ninja...Snails?
If anyone post anymore snail jokes, they will be slugged.
"How the fuck do you lose a goddamn hydrogen bomb?"
Uh, you crash a plane containing hydrogen bombs.
Technically, none of the bombs were "lost". The B-52 that crashed (due to a collision with a mid-air refueling tanker) carried 4 B28 1.1 megaton thermonuclear bombs. One of the bombs landed intact in the ocean, another landed intact on land, both were recovered. The parachutes on the other two bombs failed to deploy and their conventional high explosive charges went off when they hit the ground. Thankfully, the safety systems of the bombs prevented a nuclear explosion, but the conventional explosions nevertheless distributed a large quantity of radioactive bomb guts over a wide area (thus the contamination problems mentioned).
P.S. RTFA. UTFI (Use The F'ing Internet).
Why should Spain pay for part of the clean-up? It was our mess. We should be cleaning it up. Either the military goes in and fixes it, or we taxpayers foot it.
When I was a kid, I was raised to clean up the mess I made, not entangle everyone else (financially) into the task. I broke a window, I worked it off.
It's all about responsibility...
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I'm not really good at history, so I'm wondering if someone could explain why in 1966 the Americans had B-52 bombers flying over Spain carrying 4 nuclear bombs.
Was this some kind of pre-emptive strike plan?
We're ICBMs not so good back then?
It seems to me that if you could damage and capture one of these planes, you could lay your hands on 4 nuclear bombs. Something that would be a bit of a security risk.
Australian running a company that does C# / C++ / Java / SQL / Python / Mathematica
They were trying to get rid of the spanish inquisition before monty python showed up
This situation is the result of what is now popularly known as a "broken arrow". A nuclear weapons accident that does not produce the risk of nuclear war. The weapon (a missing weapon on the nuclear scale)would actually be known as an "empty quiver".
As reported by wikipedia, there are currently 11 such weapons known to be missing from the United States arsenal. It should be noted that these weapons are not the pitiful 1-5 kiloton weapons that Korea is detonating. It is likely they are 10+ megaton city-killers.
All that being said, I wouldn't worry too much about the situation. Anyone (or anything) with the capability to decipher how to actually set one of these missing weapons off is most likely nothing short of a country. Countries with nuclear weapons aren't something terribly dangerous, due to nuclear deterrance (MAD).
Add to that the fact that the US is unable to find these weapons (Some are presumed destroyed or at least damaged beyond repair)and I find it much less likely these will be a threat than, say, the car that passes by me when I walk to school.
As for why it was there, the US had plenty of nukes in western Europe, with the idea that if a war broke out, those bombs would be headed into Russia. Where this particular plane was going I do not know, but it wasn't alone or out of place over Spain.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
I guess the same guy lost these that lost the Apollo Moon landing tapes
"If it's lost, it'll turn up. Things always do" "I love it when a plan comes together"
TAKE ON THE WORLD! The Day of the Tentacle is upon us. :P
ICBM is one thing, but both sides also had some nuclear bombers waiting near the ennemy borders 24*7 to either back up a first strike ICBM launch or retaliate if the homeland was destroyed. I don't have the details, but I think Spain was just on their route from an US base to the waiting point when they had that accident.
Have you ever seen Dr Strangelove? Of course, it is a comedy, but it is based on a real situation: during cold war, there were constantly dozens of nuclear warheads flying around with the risk of something going wrong. That accident was fortunately in the lower range of possible consequences.
> This situation is the result of what is now popularly known as a "broken arrow". A nuclear weapons accident that does not produce the risk of nuclear war. The weapon (a missing weapon on the nuclear scale)would actually be known as an "empty quiver".
Wonder what Freud would have said about that jargon...
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"How the fuck do you lose a goddamn hydrogen bomb?"
"Uh, you crash a plane containing hydrogen bombs."
More here: http://www.milnet.com/cdiart.htm
From the above source: "[the second most serious nuclear weapons accident on record - MILNET]" (it also goes on to describe a similar accident at Thule).
The B-52s were performing Airborne Nuclear Alert duty under the code-name "Chrome Dome" where bombers would loiter near points outside of the Soviet Union (see Dr. Strangelove).
During this program a mid-air collision between a B-52 and a KC-135 tanker aircraft occurred during aerial refueling over Palomares, Spain on the 17th of January, 1966.
Four megaton-range hydrogen bombs were lost. Two were recovered eventually fairly intact while the other two underwent a minor detonation of the conventional explosives that were an integral part of them. The safety fuses in them prevented a disastrous nuclear detonation. However dispersion of both plutonium and uranium material over several hundred hectares resulted in thousands of tons of contaminated radioactive soil having to be sent back to the USA. The USAF decided this was too expensive to risk again, and it ended that part of the airborne alert program.
There have been several reports of contamination remaining in the area in recent years and currently U.S and Spanish governments have agreed to investigate the need for further clean up, this time sharing the costs.
Interestingly the search efford for the missing bomb out at sea was performed using the Bayesian search theory. Eventually the bomb was recoved with the help of a local fisherman, who then claimed salvage rights from it under the high seas (usually a reward of a few percent of the actual value). But not before U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara had publicly stated a value of no less than two billion U.S. dollars for it. The Air Force settled out of court.
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
They were trying to get rid of the spanish inquisition before monty python showed up
I, for one, didn't expect that.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Don't forget about the Tybee hydrogen bomb, lost in 1958 during a collision between two planes. The Air Force has never located it, and it's presumed to still be buried in mud just off the coast of Savannah, GA. Supposedly it didn't have the plutonium core installed, but did have enriched uranium and high explosives.
So I'm reading the wikipedia article you listed there, and I learn that they searched for one of the bombs using something called, "Bayesian search theory".
Who would have thought nuclear weaponry and anti-spam technology would be somehow related?
And now I have to worry about not just nuclear excitement to the northwest, but also radioactive snails??
Well, I guess I can at least give a play-by-play when they---holy shit WHAT'S THAT?! NO NO NOT WITH THE TAIL NOOOOOOOO
NO CARRIER
It's interesting to think about what kinds of food would be safe to eat after a large scale nuclear war. You certainly couldn't eat shellfish or snails, because they soak up toxins very readily. Also, you should probably avoid pigs, because they eat everything. And, if you eat meat, it would be advisable to bleed it first because toxins build up in the blood.
Makes you wonder about the real history of Kosher laws in Judaism.
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
USA NUCLEAR WEAPONS LOST or MISSING
March 10, 1956, Over the Mediterranean Sea
July 28, 1957, Over the Atlantic Ocean
February 5, 1958, Savannah River, Georgia
February 12, 1958 Savannah, Georgia
September 25, 1959, Off Whidbey Island, Washington
January 24, 1961, Goldsboro, North Carolina
December 5, 1965, Aboard the USS Ticonderoga (CVA-14) in the Pacific Ocean
Spring 1968, Aboard the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in the Atlantic Ocean
List does not include the much larger list of fully recovered and contained accidental weapons drops.
Some diverted material (noit in weapons) was CIA swapped to israel some think.
Enough weapons grade plutonium was mysteriously stolen from the US gov over the decades, according to accurate reports, to build over 20 H bombs.
"Imagine, reading Beowulf by the light of a cluster of these snails..."
Much better.
Immune to radioactivity, yet incredibly susceptible to salt. Nature sure had fun making you.
>The hydrogen bombs fell near the fishing village
Such simple times when you could have a crash, lose 3 nukes then shrug and say 'ah well, never mind'.
These days every ounce of anything remotely useful for bomb making needs to be accounted for just in case some nasty terrorist gets their hands on it. What went wrong? I want the good old days back when you could casually leave weapons of mass destruction lying around near fishing villages ('if they trawl one up they'll probably just throw it back, right?) and not worry about it.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
Pretty slim, I'd say. The fission reaction will only be started correctly if everything is working right inside the bomb, i.e. it is armed and detonated intentionally. Otherwise, you'll just wind up with an imprompty dirty bomb.
and what effect it would have had... a tsunami perhaps?
Not likely. The energy required to power this event dwarfs even the most powerful nuclear weapon. Maybe if you stick the bomb inside a fault line. But that's a big maybe.
I have always wondered what sort of chance there was of a nuclear detonation when it impacted the ocean bottom and what effect it would have had...
Almost no chance of nuclear explosion. There simply isn't enough fissionable in a bomb to go up unless you set it off in one specific way, requiring timers to set off a series of chain detonators at exactly the right time, sensors to tell the timers when that time is, an altimiter to determine the bomb is at target height and charged batteries to power the whole rig.
Sure, they'll blow up. But we're talking 300lbs of TNT boom, spraying radioactive all over the place.
But say a warhead did go off. We're talking something on the order of a megaton. Odds are there would have been a small surface swell, the wreckage at the bottom would have been blown to pieces, but I doubt that the ship at the surface would have even been damaged by the event. The US did undersea tests to figure out how to use nukes against boats and subs; The effective range wasn't all that great.
.sig: Now legally binding!
1) The French eat snails.
2) The French eat anything with garlic on it.
3) You takes your basic radioactive snails and then you puts your garlic on them nice and even like. Then you can em and sell em in France
4) Profit!!!
And it's only Frenchmen, so who cares what this does to their DNA. Maybe you'll get a glow-in-the-dark superpowered French mime. And he can fly, if he falls off the Eiffel Tower.
I mean, with a half life of several centuries, where's the rush? :-)
Insert
the term bayes just means that conditional probabilities are being used..
the safety systems of the bombs
Whuh? Does that mean someone can hand over a bomb to his adversary (under duress, perhaps), but neglect to tell him the safety's on? The first guy then pulls his reserve bomb out of his ankle holster and *blam* blows away the bad guy!
Why is it that many people who claim to support standards have such atrocious spelling and grammar?
It should be noted that these weapons are not the pitiful 1-5 kiloton weapons that Korea is detonating. It is likely they are 10+ megaton city-killers.
It should also be noted that the thing that separates a 1-5 kiloton weapon from a 10+ megaton city killer is tritium which has a relatively short half-life of ~12 yrs thus after 40 yrs approx. 12.5% of the original tritium is around to create that megaton nuclear event. Thus these bombs are no longer "city-killers". Though the uranium and plutonium primaries should still be usable.
I laughed at the weak who considered themselves good because they lacked claws.
Immature Radioactive Samurai Slugs theme song
...
We're Immature Radioactive Samurai Slugs
We love to thrash criminals and slice 'n' dice thugs!
We're totally radical, gnarly dudes,
Cowabunga homeboys with nothin' to lose
Our arch-enemies want us iodized
But they can't beat us 'cause we're merchandised!
(Iodizer: "DESTROY THEM!!")
Count off!
Picasso!
Warhol!
Rockwell!
Grandma Moses!
So kick back, dweebs, it's the end of our rhyme,
The show's gonna start and it's time to slime!
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
If god made humans in his image, does that mean he is also a weakling?
Nah, we just tell ourselves that to cover for the undeniable fact that we were scraped together at the end of the Creation project. And at that, using leftovers after the main project deliverable: implementing every imaginable variation on the the concept of "beetle".
And if that weren't enough to kick us in the anthropocentric nutes, it's clear we aren't even in the same league as termites, as measured by biomass or biodiversity. This caused some severe editing of the Creation story, particularly Genesis 1:25 - 1:31, which originally went something like this:
25 And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.
26 And God said, We have checked our deliverables and Creation is complete; so let there be Slack; and God saw the Slack, that it was good, and God separated the productive phase of the Project from the mindless consumption of excess Resources.
27 And the Slack was fruitful of all manner of Diversions of surplus Resources; so God said, Let Us celebrate; and the Celebration begat the Kegger, and the Kegger begat Beer, and Beer begat all manner of amusing indiscretions. And God saw that these where more or less Harmless.
28 Then God noticed that the Project had this left-over mud, and this He fashioned into a Man; but there was not enough fuel left over to fire the clay, so when Man was half-baked, He breathed upon Man and brought him to life.
29 Then Man opened his eyes, and looking on God asked, are You Me? And God said no. Then looking around, Man asked, Is all this for Me? And God said, No, you are only the half-baked leftovers, but if you study Creation perhaps you can become full-baked. And Man thought that this was Bad, and set out to Improve on Matters.
30 So Man said,let there be Self-Serving Sophistry, and let there be Willful Ignorance; and these were fruitful beyond all Measure, and so begat Religion, Conformism, Bigotry and every manner of Officious Narrow-Mindedness. And Man thought these were Good, and he wrote his version of Events down so that none would ever challenge Conformity without Fear.
31 And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good, except for the bits that came after the Beer which in retrospect looked somewhat Doubtful. And God, seeing that Slack had used up the Resources He needed to Fix the Problem, said, Let there be Muddling Through; Let there be Counting On Things Working Out in the End. And seeing that these were not Satisfactory and He was over budget anyway, God said, Let there be Hope. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Insert "what would ICBMs look like if women ran the Pentagon" joke here...
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
That plutonium might not be "missing". I heard a talk from one of the chemists working on remediation at Hanford, who said that at Oak Ridge they'd discovered a significant portion of the "missing" plutonium hanging out as drifts of barely sub-critical plutonium dust in the ventilation system. Not 'explode' subcritical, mind you, but 'a little more accumulation, and we'll have a real radiation event' subcritical.
So, rather than having been repurposed as weapons, it could still be polluting the facilities where it was used.
the more accurate the calculations became, the more the concepts tended to vanish into thin air. R. S. Mulliken