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Nuke-Proof Bunker Turns Out Not Waterproof
An anonymous reader writes "The AP reports on the opening of a vault in Tulsa, OK which was designed to withstand a nuclear attack by the Russians. 50 years ago they put a Plymouth Belvedere in the vault to preserve it so that we could get a good look at it in the (for that time) magical year of 2007. Unfortunately it turns out that the vault wasn't even waterproof. The once beautiful car is now a literal rust bucket."
Agree? Disagree?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
You aren't forced to read it, Timmy.
I'm waiting for a nuclear engineer to show up and tell us how water can get in, but gamma particles can not. This is not a jab at nuclear engineers, I'm truly interested.
I think the moral of this story is that archiving anything, even if it seems durable, is hard. Now, how confident do you feel about those backup tapes that are in the closet down the hall? How much moisture is getting to them just from the humidity in the air?
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
what about the fallout from a nuclear attack? Seeing as so much is soluble in water, that's probably the last thing we want leaking in to a shelter.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
The USA bluffed them into spending their way into bankruptcy and collapse with all these stories of super weapons and facilities that the USA was supposed to be developing and the Russians had to match dollar for ruble. Well it turns out most of these facilities were junk just like Star Wars and the manned space program. The Russians had the more reliable manned program (Soyuz) all along but got demoralized from all the talk about how capitalism can make everything cheaper and better and they just gave up. I guess we should thank Hollywood for our victory in the Cold War more than the Pentagon or the White House.
**Life is too short to be serious**
What's so worthless about duck and cover? In the event you're not close enough to be vaporized or significantly irradiated, why would you want to just stand up and die due to head injury if you have an opportunity to protect yourself? Plus it's useful for natural disasters.
And most importantly of all, it helped traumatize the public, keeping them in the palms of exploitive politicians.
Evidently, the key to understanding recursion is to begin by understanding recursion. The rest is easy.
The story says it is a "literal rust bucket". No, it is not a literal rust bucket, it is a FIGURATIVE rust bucket. This is a literal rust bucket. Actually, no, that isn't a literal rust bucket either, that is a literal rusty bucket, a literal rust bucket would be a bucket which holds rust.
And if you are too close--well, it makes finding your remains a bit easier.
They should have taken a clue from Planet of the Apes and used a Volkswagon Beetle.
1976 Ford Granada. 4 years from show-room to scrap yard, at 60,000 miles. Front end literally fell apart after 2 years, and the power steering managed to disconnect from the steering wheel - fortunately while parking. Also developed the infamous "Ford transmission that wouldn't stay in Park" around the 50,000 mile mark, the undersized Uniroyal tires that wore out prematurely, etc.
If any manufacturer today put out a POS like that, they'd be forced to make multiple recalls, and then they'd go belly-up. If it weren't for the current low interest rates and the home equity ATM buying spree, both Ford and GM would have gone bankrupt by now.
As it is, Toyota has taken the #1 spot worldwide
Given how much radiation sickness sucks and the fatality rate, being close enough to die of a head trauma guarantees being close enough to die from radiation poisoning. OF the two I'd prefer head trauma.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
I'm sure we could find the same car (same model, same year) that's been used every day since the 50s in better shape! No joke.
We have moved way beyond that. You can't buy leaded gasoline anymore and that car only runs on leaded gasoline.
Although, you can buy artificial imitation lead additive.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
Not really way beyond. Removing the lead is an incremental step. Way beyond would be fuel cells, full electric, solar, whatever. Anything not fossil would be way beyond.
And the car would run on unleaded. It would run a bit hotter and, in the long term, wear out quicker because the lead acted as a lubricant.
qz
I'm amazed not one slashdotter here realized the point I'm about to make.
Most revisionist historians often reflect on the fear that Americans had of being obliterated in the 1950s from a nuclear catastrophe. For a midwestern American city in 1957 to have a contest to determine how many would be living there in 50 years and especially predict the winning guesser (or closest of kin) would be alive in 50 demonstrates there was hope for a future.
As for records archiving, as long as the net stays up we have a global backup system, because we can keep leapfrogging technologies, there is no start and stop point where we change everything all at once. Static archiving gets into troubles because of entropy, stuff just starts falling apart. If the whole net ever goes down hard globally for some years, we would lose a lot of data. Current paper isn't that good, photos fade fast on most media, plastic disk based isn't that good, harddrives aren't that good, etc. Each has a few good points and some bad points, but none of them are really designed for centuries or millenia AFAIK. A few years or dozens of years anecdotal from someone with their pet favorite media does not equal centuries or millenia. It's a guess and a crapshoot really we just don't know. We've already lost just a ton of old filmed media, TV shows and movies, from the last century, film just didn't cut it long haul, requires a lot of expensive care, and we need something that doesn't require expensive and elaborate care, and digital format requires the media to be matched to the hardware it was designed for, that has to be archived as well, and kept in perfect operating conditions.
We are a society that lost our freaking moon tapes! And even before that it had gotten to the point only a few existing pieces of hardware could even access the stuff, and that was some pretty important records. And that is *short term* historically speaking. Real short term.
We have to keep human nature involved in this discussion as well as just the nuts and bolts of archiving. Stuff gets lost or stolen and artificially lost or just gets wet or forgotten about and starts to just rot away. We have right now a fastfood society, nothing is considered all that important. We pay lip service to archiving, sure, I'll admit that, but really, it's a symptom of our short term profits business world and throw away society.
Then you have to consider, exactly what is really worth saving for that long anyway? All of it, all of everything we do, all the records? It's gonna get pretty expensive eventually if we keep trying to do that.
What's interesting about 'duck and cover' (and other civil defense campaigns from the era) is that it's nowhere near as useless as it sounds. The primary kill mechanism of a nuclear bomb (not 'neutron bomb', which really should be called 'reduced blast nuclear weapon'), so being in cover can help a lot. The secondary kill mechanism is prompt radiation, manifesting as the flash - likewise, if that doesn't hit you, then you have a much greater chance of survival. The tertiary mechanism is fallout, and it's one that a lot of systems are designed to minimize (who wants to conquer a highly radioactive landscape?); most fallout comes from the actual explosion cloud touching down, sucking in dirt particles that are rendered highly radioactive. Because of this, a lot of work was done to minimize the fireball radius - and also most warheads were designed to airburst high enough to avoid the problem. You can read about this in The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, and also in a number of discussions of the issue in various defense studies/international studies journals.
What's REALLY interesting is why we, in the West, abandoned civil defense. With the wholesale adoption of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) theory, it was considered a DOWNSIDE to be able to save one's population - so civil defense, missile defense, air defense, and shelters all vanished from the budget. The theory being that you want everyone to be as vulnerable as possible - because otherwise the cost of launching a nuclear strike may seem low enough to make a nuclear war palatable. It amazes me to this day that the US persuaded its allies to buy into that theory. Yes, nuclear war sucks - but it seems that maximizing the damage it would do to you in the name of avoiding one is rather shortsighted. That's especially true in the post-cold war multipolar world. It's hard to say 'MAD works' when suddenly you are trying to deter anyone capable of building a nuclear device - which overall, really isn't that hard to do.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
I think 'duck cover' went out with the sober realization that the US & Soviets had built up enough firepower to destroy the world over multiple times. Duck and cover doesn't help so much when you have the initial blast plus the extra five 'just to be sure' blasts on the way.
That not true at all. Civil defence and ABM systems were abandoned because the cost was higher then the cost for the opponent of building more missiles to offset the defences. There is only one country in the world with a significant chemical/nuclear civil defence infrastructure. And that's only because the Swiss were smart enough to have their fallout shelters built and paid for by foreign tourism companies, the Alps greatly reduce the impact of nuclear and chemical attacks, and the Swiss are rich. Very rich. The MAD argument (defence is more costly then the additional attack capability to destroy it) is not relevant because it was supposed that during nuclear war both blocs would respect the neutrality of Switserland.
Except for the simple fact that It Worked.
-dZ.
Carol vs. Ghost