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Nukes Against Earth-Impacting Asteroids
TopSpin writes "Flight International reports that scientists at the Marshall Space Flight Center have developed designs for an array of asteroid interceptors wielding 1.2-megaton B83 nuclear warheads. The hypothetical mission for these designs is based on an Apophis-sized Earth impactor 2 to 5 years out. According to NASA, 'Nuclear standoff explosions are assessed to be 10-100 times more effective [at deflection] than the non-nuclear alternatives analyzed in this study." On April 13, 2029, Apophis will pass closer to earth than geosynchronous satellites orbit.
extinction-level-event nuke-shielded overlords!
-WtC
*please insert sig*
Creator of RPerl, Scouter, Juggler, Mormon, Perl Monger, Serial Entrepreneur, Aspiring Astrophysicist, Community Organiz
If it's not going to hit Earth, will Skynet or the terminators even care?
Is that a Friday?
with an alternate reality gateway, and a crack commando team consisting of a linguist with allergies, a wise cracking Colonel, a brilliant astrophysicist, and someone with a horrible gastronomical infection. Also some grenades.
Rhymes that keep their secrets will unfold behind the clouds.There upon the rainbow is the answer to a neverending story
In case you were wondering, Apophis is the Greek form of the name for the Egyptian Demon Apep.
Otherwise known as the personification of all that is evil.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
I think I'd be pretty hard for them to miss so badly that they somehow manage to hit the earth, since they'd be trying to hit it in space.
Would an explosion in space would function in the same manner?
What if they don't try, and many people die because of it?
Worse yet, it might hit a main tube from me to the intarblags! GET YOUR HANDS OFF MY INTARBLAGS!!!
Get Ben Affleck's spacesuit ready.
Apophis was lowered to 0 on the Torino scale sometime last fall. I'm not sure why it even warranted a mention in this particular context..
We don't need nukes! We need some Wil Wheaton to reprise his role as Star Trek TNG's Wesley Crusher, then "...come off the main lead, split off at the force activator, then reversing power leads through the force activator, repulsor beam powers against Tsilokovsky..." err...the asteroid. At this point, everyone will remember that this idea sucked and we'll use that sucking power to pull the asteroid into the sun.
Billions saved and problem solved. All we need now is some sort of "suck converter"! Get on it NASA!
exploding nuclear weapons from a distance only works if the asteroid is fairly solid, like the metallic [M-type] asteroids. The more porous asteroids [there seem to be many] don't seem to respond as well to such explosions. As for the Armageddon-type way of dealing with asteroids, you just made a single asteroid into a hail of dangerous shrapnel. Although if we exploded a nuclear charge [a smaller one] that only tosses up a part of the asteroid and direct the shrapnel away from Eath, the shrapnel would go in one direction [wherever your plan dictates] and the asteroid generally goes in the opposing direction, knocking it off course. over a period of several years even a small orbital change will result in Earth being safe for now. [hopefully we have that much time if not start sipping your favorite alcoholic beverage :) ]
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
So we're not supposed to put weapons in space and point them at Earth, but we can stick them up and point them at asteroids... I suppose if we ever need them here we can always just turn them around
Couldn't we simply send a small spacecraft to intercept the asteroid? Say, a small craft, probably with one primary weapon that has plenty of ammo... probably shaped like a triangle, I think. It could use this "weapon" to then shoot at any incoming asteroids.
Of course, the weapon wouldn't be as powerful as a nuke, and would probably split the asteroid in, say, half. The ship would then have to shoot both halves, breaking them again into half, creating four asteroids where just one was originally. The pilot would repeat this process until the asteroid is broken into such small pieces that they'll be deflected by earth's atmosphere.
I'm still working on how the ship and asteroid fragments would warp to the other side of the field when they hit the edges, though... probably why NASA decided against this approach. That, and they wanted to avoid ripping off The Last Starfighter too much.
Tell me something...it's still "We, the people"... right?
edit: Would an explosion in space even function in the same manner?
Because I don't want to miss a thing!
I have to wonder if you where just kidding or are don't know anything about nuclear weapons.
From the 40s up through I think the 70s many nuclear weapons where detonated in the atmosphere. While it was a really bad plan life pretty much kept on living. A miss would probably not hit the earth and a launch accident wouldn't cause a nuclear detonation. A common method of safeing a nuclear weapon involves filling the pit with a neutron absorbing wire. Once the weapon leaves the atmosphere a motor will pull the wire out of the core and only then the weapon will be capable of nuclear detonation. Not only that most modern weapons are much cleaner then the bombs of the 50s.
So I wouldn't to see them launching them daily I think risk to benefit ratio is pretty good.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
...always wondered what happened to them after their big radio hit ""Keep Your Hands to Yourself".
Engineers say a bee can't flap its wings and fly; and it cannot. A bee (and for that matter, flies) remain airborne because their wings trace an s-like path through the air, allowing them to move through the air in much the same way as a shark.
Think of it like a ceiling fan that goes back and forth. If it didn't have the ability to turn back on itself, it wouldn't do much to the air. However, if the blades bent in different directions for each direction, it would be able to produce a downdraft.
The best magazine in the universe.
--
OK, think how far that damn warhead will be after 2-5 years worth of travel? that asteroid will be moving a helluva lot faster than that warhead, so the distance they are thinking of is extreme. You probably wouldn't be able to see the explosion with a terrestrial telescope.
Add to that distance the fact that the radiation, well... radiates in all directions, and the very small peice of that radiation that would reach the earth is going to be, in whole, less than that coming out from the diode in your TV remote.
The thing will be so large and so fast, and so far away, even knocking it slightly off course will likely steer it farther away!
Space is really, really, really big, and things move really, really, really fast.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
This isn't the conspiracy you're looking for.
They can go about their business.
Move along.
-- I'm old enough to have lived through six different meanings of the word "hacker."
I would like to know what margin of error would be required in order for Apophis to hit Earth? not large, I'll bet.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
I, for one, wish the Flash ad window did not land on top of the first article.
You won't have time to die of radiation...if they miss the asteroid, it's gonna get you first.
rj
Yeah I guess all them pot holes we see on the moon, other planets and their moons show just how small a chance it is for a big rock to slam into another body in space.
Why this is modded interesting confuses me, then again after looking at your sig I can see why you said what you did. If you wanna turn any conversation dealing with weapons into some governmental conspiracy then so be it I guess, I on the other hand do realize the REAL possibility of a life destroying huge rock slamming into the earth and will support anyone who tries to prepare for such an event.
Because a large asteroid would do so much damage, your odds of being killed by an asteroid is about the same as being killed by lightning. The problem with that is in the asteroid scenerio, the reaper comes to punch *everyone's* ticket at the same time.
One person being killed by an act of nature is an unfortunate personal tragedy. Everyone being killed by an act of nature is extinction. Having the wealth to escape this kind of treat is the point of all our economic activity from a larger evolutionary perspective.
That's true. The potential damage from getting hit is very, very large though - and the probability isn't quite small enough to completely discount. Major meteor impacts have occurred with some frequency on a geological time scale - it seems prudent to actually do the risk assessment and take appropriate action if necessary.
As for the foreign energy independence issue, sure that's important. That doesn't mean that astronomers who specialize in asteroids should drop their careers for it any more than you should drop your career (whatever it is) to worry about potential meteor impacts.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
Are you serious? No Earth atmosphere is gonna stop a 17 mile wide rock coming at the Earth. I suggest you go read up on what that comet did to Jupiter when it slammed into it a few years back.
You've just proven that you don't understand statistics. Your odds of being killed by an asteroid are much less than by lightning, because it is so much less likely to happen. Just because something kills lots of people when it extremely rarely happens doesn't mean it's more likely to happen. In fact, it's likely that no human has ever been killed by an asteroid.
People with actual ability to use statistics know that it's unlikely that anyone will be killed by an asteroid for hundreds of years, if not thousands or even millions.
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make install -not war
then explain it with a simple analogy!
Well see, it's like a car...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The reason you don't see as many craters on earth is because of the natural resurfacing done by erosion and our still active volcanism. The moon is a good indicator of the historical likelihood of a body intersection earthican orbit precisely because it contains the unmarred record of such events over billions of years.
A better indicator of the possibility of meteor impacts is the fact at least one large one has happened WITHIN RECENT MEMORY. While this wasn't a civilization-ending event, it was only sheer luck that it did not occur over a densely populated area. The Tunguska object would have been an excellent candidate for redirection both due to it's relatively manageable size and the known area of devastation.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Jupiter is a much larger target, and therefore far more likely to get hit by the random motion of asteroids in space. Also, all them "pot holes we see on the moon" are a) spread out over a period of billions of years making the chance that it'll happen in *this* millennium very low and b) mainly the result of asteroids the size of golf balls, most of which would burn up in our atmosphere.
The chance of an asteroid large enough to get to the ground without burning up *and* hitting us in this millennium is so low that you really, honestly do have a better chance winning the lottery. Good luck with that too, by the way.
I hate printers.
Even assuming that you are joking, this is a non-issue. The atmosphere and magnetosphere shield us from a metric butt-ton of solar radiation. Space is not pristine, and at risk of being damaged. Space is trying to kill us all, whether by pulling us atom from atom (vacuum), freezing us solid, radiating us 'til we're crispy, or throwing large rocks at us. Just offa the top of my head, my guess is that you could probably fly through the location of a thermonuclear blast in space minutes after the event.
Don't trust anyone under thirty.
Well... In theory, at least, there is a point in time the nuke will again intersect with Earth orbit. It's only a matter of time until it comes back.
On the other hand, it could take a good couple million years.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
They claim 10-100 times more effective than other methods. First of all they dont define more effective. Second of all, they seem to dismiss ideas like a gravity tug out of hand as not developed enough.
The idea of throwing nukes at an object of potentially unknown size bugs me, especially when much more controlled options exist. All that needs to be done is to nudge the NEO out of small zones known as "keyholes" that are small, finite portions of space where the pull of the Earth will push the object into a collision course on its next orbit rather than another random non-intersecting orbit.
A fairly massive object (something a Delta IV Heavy could launch) would be perfectly capable of handling an Apophis sized object with enough lead time (on the order of years, but certainly less than decades), by flying in formation with the object in the right location to shift its orbit slightly. This is a lot easier than Apollo, which we pulled off in less than 10 years, so to dismiss it as too difficult is ridiculous, and it seems a lot more responsible than launching nukes at an object we dont fully understand.
Just my thoughts anyway.
If they want to strap themselves to a asteroid, let them.
April 13, 2029 is a Friday.
The chances of getting hit by an asteroid are extremely small.
It's clear that there is a slim to none chance of getting hit by an asteroid, after all the moon is in pristine shape with absolutely zero crater impacts on it.
I think you need to unscrew your tinfoil cap a bit.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I'd also like to know how the shark moves through the air.
But, I wanted socialized health insurance!
Proposing conspiracy theories, without any evidence to back them up, is the mark of a delusional mind.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Liv Tyler is still hot... I hope they keep her. I hear that Cowboy Neal is going to try out for Ben Affleck's part and that the title is going to be "Armageddon II: This time we'll just shoot the fucker".
load "$",8,1
"If we were spending this money on actual threat priorities, we'd be spending it getting out of the crosshairs of foreign energy suppliers."
But the money being spent on this research and all active missile defense research absolutely pales in comparison to what we are spending in Iraq. Yes, we should get out of Iraq - out of the "crosshairs of foreign energy supplies" - but that doesn't mean we can't also continue to pursue missile defense technologies, and secure our borders while we're at it.
In my opinion missile defense is precisely the sort of national security policy that should be supported by someone interested in limited government or interested in limiting U.S. imperialism around the world.
If we have a mature, comprehensive air and space defense solution, we don't have to worry about policing the world, and we don't have to have talk about nuclear first strikes against sovereign nations.
And if there are no asteroids, just direct the nukes to Argentina instead. Two birds with one stone.
The probability of the Earth catching an extinction asteroid this year is very small. Like compound interest however, over time the small fractions add up to more than one. Ultimately this outcome is not only certain, but it's certain to happen more than once. Not that we would care about the second and third times.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Plenty of Nukes have been set off high in our atmosphere. It is actually more dangerous if the nuke doesn't 'go nuclear' and disintegrates in our atmosphere. I recall a NASA incedent where a radioactive decay powered probe burned up in our atmosphere. Now virtually every living organizsm has a measurable amount of radioactive isotopes in them.
The Moon? Tell me about all the asteroids that have killed all those people in the thousands of years of human history.
I think you need to remove the blinders from your eyes and notice how much of your money has already been spent on worthless Star Wars boondoggles by capitalizing on paranoia.
--
make install -not war
Perhaps it's also the right day -- after all, nuclear bombs in this case are being used to save rather than slaughter.
-b.
I remember this one! This is one where the coyote sat his ass in a slingshot then strapped himself to an acme rocket. Is that what we're doing here?
Missile defense against extremely low priority missile threats are the job of a "limited government"? No wonder "Conservatives" aren't winning many elections lately.
--
make install -not war
I can very easily see how an attempt to divert a near miss could turn it into an something far more dangerous.
The effects of such a blast could easily turn a meteor into a cloud of large boulders some of which will impact the earth.
With blast patterns, most of the force will push the center of gravity away from the source of the blast, some will be deflected back in the opposite direction towards the blast.
For example look at the high speed photos of an apple being shot with a bullet, some of the apple is ejected back in the direction of the bullet.
even if the debris miss us, now we will have a much higher chance of scattered smaller meteors hitting us in the next pass.
This is why the gentler approaches are preferred, keeping the meteor in one piece, by using a solar sail or ion engines.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Instead of destroying what will be a huge supply of mass and resources why dont we put it into orbit between the moon and earth. One of the major issues with space exploration is "mass and fuel" as it costs a fortune to put it into space. I think we are wasting a huge opportunity here to accelerate space exploration while making it 1,000 times more cost effective.
>I'd also like to know how the shark moves through the air.
Obvious.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
Nuke explosion high in the orbit was tested as a radiation shield in antibalistic missile experiments (Operation Argus, by Nick Christofilos of Lawrence Livermore fame) and it was found ineffective for the defense purpose. A side-product of these experiments with artificial radiation shields was discovery of Van Allen radiation belts.
It was later found by accident that multimegatonn explosion high in the orbit can dump lots of charged particles (mostly high-energy electrons) into Van Allen belts where they persist for many weeks during which time they gradually degrade solar panels and electronics of satelites - this happened in 60s (after operation Starfish Prime about 5 satelites went silent...)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
My 51st birthday. If it does hit, at least I will have some student loans left when I die.
What you say is correct: there is a _very_ small chance that something _very_ bad will happen. Maybe it's worth doing something about.
Having said that, we are talking about the same administration that ignores global warming - against the advice of the scientific consensus. Global warming is looking a helluva lot more likely than a deep-impact scenario! Why take precautions for a _highly_ unlikely scenario, and ignore a probable scenario? I suspect that there are other reasons, and DocRuby's suggestion seems plausible to me.
They could just fart the Earth out of the asteroid's path like they did in Futurama, and end global warming to boot!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
> While it was a really bad plan life pretty much kept on living.
8 ,411056,00.html
Sometimes it takes a while for bad decisions to catch up with you. Sometimes 20 years* is only the beginning. You need to pay more attention to history, not Hollywood.
[*] - http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,151
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
Ever hear of the inverse square law?
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Just as I figured. It's a Friday.
The large damage from theoretically possible asteroid impacts doesn't make it any more likely that they will happen. That's a statistical fallacy.
Huh? Of course the damage it would do doesn't make the event more likely, but it makes the event more serious.
If one event is likely, but has minimal impact if it occurs, it might be worth ignoring, in order to concentrate on a less likely event that has disastrous consequences.
Since a large asteroid impact could be a mass extinction event, something capable of wiping out our entire ecosystem -- not to mention civilization -- even if it's unlikely, it's worth working to prevent. Compared to that, everything except the possibility of nuclear war (or equally disastrous environmental collapse) pales in comparison.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Great.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Do you, by any chance, know exactly what the sun is?
Or any star for that matter?
It is not true at all that "most modern weapons are much cleaner than the bombes of the 50s. In fact the fusion yield of modern weapons accounts for less than 40% of the total yield, most of the yield actually comes from fission of the uranium container that doubles as a reflector. "clean weapons" can be produced by using non-fissionable reflector like lead, this causes at leat 40% increase in total weight of the weapon design while reducing the total yield approximately to one half. The example of a super-clean bomb is Tsar Bomba that exploded at about 52MT, a lead-reflected test of a 100MT design.
For military the intense radiation from fission of the uranium reflector is an "added bonus". The premium in thermonuclear warhead design is on light weight and narrow diameter (long narrow-cone re-entry vehicles have much better precision than fat ones) in compromise with low cost (low consumption of expensive materials like tritium and plutonium) and high reliability.
The clean weapon was a temporary fad in 50s and early 60s, it was used by rival weapon design team to justify existence of Lawrence Livermore Laboratory and was oversold, being seized upon by politicians it got disproportionate coverage in print - but it never resulted in a weaponised design. The reality is that even a "clean" bomb designs are still an order of magnitude dirtier than Hiroshima and don't offer any military advantage so they are not stockpiled. The peaceful uses of clean nukes like digging harbors and re-livening natural gas and oil fields never materialized as it turned out that produced crater (or gas) was unpleasantly radioactive (because of neutron-induced radiation, with long-lived radioisotopes like C-14 and tritium)
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
Do you think the radiation from a nuke comes close to the daily bombardment of the earth by the sun, that's normally handled by the magnetosphere?
Anyone who loves or hates any language, platform, or manufacturer, doesn't know what they're talking about.
I was thinking of some of the very dirty bombs of the 50s.
My bad.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Chernobyl and an air burst nuclear bomb are two VERY different things. I suggest you start paying attention to science and not mindless fear.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Here's a sci-fi scenario for you.
I'm standing on the bridge of my brand-spanking-new Super Star Destroyer, fresh out of the dock from Kuat Drive Yard. When what do you know, a massive fucking rock is headed straight for Coruscant! (Cue: Gasp and "OH NO!").
But never fear. Our government's undying research in Star Wars, with the help of the ancient and all knowing Jedi Master Lucas, have yelded unto me a great many advantages. First I'll use my force grip to slow it down, then I'll have my TIE Bombers systematically pulverize it... just hopefully there aren't any big snakes living in it, Allstate doesn't cover "Space Monster Bites".
Our only problem now, is what if the asteroid is actually a Yuuzhan Vong worldship?
Of course, the Apophis-level event is nothing to worry about. If we're faced with the Anubis-level event, however, our attempts to use a nuclear blast to destroy the asteroid will result in a cataclysmic solar-system-destroying detonation due to the large amount of naquadah in the asteroid's core.
We'd better get to work on those hyperdrives!
I think the words you want to use are "expected outcome," which allows you to conclude that a somewhat unlikely disaster is worth avoiding more than a possible problem. Your rebuttal to Doc Ruby is correct, however (as I've said in a sibling post) why is the government ignoring global warming? - according to scientific consensus this is much more probable than a meteorite impact, and could be nearly as devastating.
I'm not saying we shouldn't worry about asteroids, but rather that this suggests that the government may have some other motive for funding such research.
f we have a mature, comprehensive air and space defense solution, we don't have to worry about policing the world, and we don't have to have talk about nuclear first strikes against sovereign nations.
The only people you're pissing off with a rocket shield are big nations like Russia, China etc. firing up the arms race again. The "sensible" thing for someone like North Korea to do wouldn't be to launch an ICBM, it'd be to threaten smuggling the nuke into the US and blow it up. Or place it with a sleeper cell way out in nowhere who'll drive it in and blow it up. I frankly don't see any tactical advantage for someone like North Korea in actually launching it from their own territory. Plus I'd say you're ignoring a whole host of other possible threats...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
All the scientists? There are lots of them you know. And I doubt they are being paid enough for each and every one of them to keep their mouths shut.
Or just another cosmic event?
Discuss amongst yourselves... if the "end of the world" happens sooner, rather than later, I don't think it will affect my inevitable fate one way or the other.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
april 13th 2029?
2+0+2+9=13
somebody wake the 911 conspiracy theorists from their slumber!
It seems there are only 3 ways for us (as a race) to die off:
1. asteroid impact
2. nuclear war
3. global warming? (debatable)
Aside from those things, the nature of the solar system and galaxy seems stable enough to sustain the planet for another 5 billion years. May as well strike #1 before it becomes a problem.
If I'm not mistaken, that's not the incredibly uncommon happening you imply. Ones that are big enough to cause real destruction are. This site says 20 to 50 hit every day. Now I just hope that this asteroid hits a CNN satellite, keeping everyone from hearing about the asteroid as it goes by.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Momentum change [in log10(kg m/s)], given a 9,000kg vehicle launch mass:
Nuclear, Subsurface: 11.9
Nuclear, Surface: 11.5
Nuclear, Standoff - Neutron: 10.3
Nuclear, Standoff - X-ray: 9.9
Kinetic @50km/s (avg): 9.0
Kinetic @10km/s (avg): 8.5
Surface Thruster (non-rotating asteroid) @10 years: 8.1
Surface Thruster (rotating asteroid) @10 years: 7.7
Gravity Tractor, @10 years: 6.9
Conventional Explosive, Subsurface: 6.8
Conventional Explosive, Surface: 6.4
Momentum change [in log10(kg m/s)] required to deflect the following:
Hypothetical long-period 1km comet with 9-24 months to impact: 12.8
Hypothetical 1km asteroid 15yr ahead: 10.5
VD17, a 500m asteroid for 2088: 9.6
Apophis after 2029 approach, assuming a 2036 a collision prediction: 9.4
Hypothetical 200m asteroid 10 yr ahead: 8.7
Apophis by 2029 (with current orbit knowledge): 8.5
Apophis by 2029 (with highly accurate orbit knowledge): 6.3
The point of the distinction between the last two is that the probability window we have to push out of the earth's path becomes much smaller the more accurately we know the orbital parameters of the object. So the more accurately we can calculate it, the less we have to actually push it (up to a point, of course). Also, it looks like very little is gained by exploding things underground as opposed to on the surface. So we apparently aren't going to need a crack team of good-looking drilling experts after all.
Before Shoemaker-Levy hit Jupiter, many scientists were skeptical that impact collisions in the modern solar system could even occur. How quickly people discount things that haven't been demonstrated.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
If there is a one in 60 million chance of an asteroid wiping out at least 90% of the world's population this year, that's the statistical equivalent of it killing at least 90 people a year.
While this is, true, I certainly hope that we will be in the next "hundreds of years, if not thousands or even millions."
Many SF scenarios have a way of becoming history. I'll be disappointed if we're not moving asteroids in my life time.
Of course, there's no reason for you you to be so fucking hostile: my quip should back up the point about Star Wars not being necessary, not attack it - we'll be moving asteroids well before any forseeable time frame in which we need to worry about natural asteroid disasters.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Bah. Tunguska wasn't an impact event, it was a weapons test. (pdf alert)
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
Good to see you moderated to oblivion over this.
The kinds of large objects you're afraid of are not headed to hit the Earth.
You forgot the one, grand caveat: that we know of. And in this case, what you don't know CAN kill you, and everyone else on the planet.
I think using a modified B83 nuclear bomb to detonate on a relatively small asteroid is kind of overkill. A better solution would probably be using a smaller nuclear device derived from the B61 bomb detonated in the 35-40 kT range. All we need to do is the change the trajectory of the asteroid in question, and detonating a relatively small nuclear bomb on the asteroid may change the trajectory just enough to miss Earth by fairly substantial margins.
The chances of an asteroid destroying ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT are very small. The chances of energy independence destroying ALL LIFE AS WE KNOW IT are 0.
Your priorities are wrong, Ruby. I bet you aren't even a real doctor.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Like a balloon...and something bad happens!
We should be considering what it would take to steer Apophis into a stable orbit. Can you imagine the amount of raw material on that thing? It would be a heyday for science, and then the space progam, and then the economy. Any manufacturing we could do with that significant quantity of iron and rock in space rather than this precious biosphere is worth looking into, and it's a lot easier to bring things down here than to launch them up there.
And no, I don't mean making "rods from God" or any of that other military nonsense.
Actually the chances of us getting hit by an asteroid are close to 100% -- it's just a question of when. The chances of us having to use the technology in our own lifetimes are extremely small, but even if those chances were zero, it would still be worth our money to have that technology ready for when it IS needed.
Here are a few examples from this documentary. BTW, I own both Atomic Bomb movies. Awsome stuff! Can't wait for the high-def version.
Life is not for the lazy.
The standoff neutron bomb. 1,001 uses.
Indeed... (The next set of numbers came from ass). Perhaps the best alternative had a probabilty of success of 0.01 percent. Maybe nukes have a 1 in 100 change of succeeding.
It's new! It's improved! Its 100X more effective...
Unlike other slashdotters, I wonder if this is really just another plot to get very long-range nukes in geo-synchronous orbit.
The higher-ups at NASA are doing one of two things:
Gee. Which one is more likely?
It seems clear that a craft that can remain on or near a target asteroid would be more efficient in detecting its actual path and gradually steering it into a safe trajectory. I am wondering now if it might also be possible for such a craft to improve the effects of a nuke by for example generating a gaseous envelope around the asteroid that could capture horizontally directed energy, if it is icy, or creating a column of pulverized bits of rocky or metallic asteroid directly beneath the nuke's standoff target, creating essentially a directed energy weapon or line of plasma bullets aimed right down the column. It would seem that there are a number of ways to soften a target in advance. Of course if the lander is sophisticated enough and arrives early enough, it should be able to create a mass driver that would nudge the asteroid away, although this would pollute space with a spray of rocks which might however be useful for their raw materials or momentum if captured later. Anyway these thoughts came to me when considering the difference between space-based and terrestrial nuclear explosions, not that I'm an expert or anything, and thinking that the column of rising gas that makes the stem of a mushroom cloud might provide thrust possibly (although if so, filling space with hot radioactive gas).
Save rather than slaughter? I find your disregard for our alien overlords' lives utterly disgusting!
*picks up phone and calls PETA. Or something.*
It's these people called the Gamelons. They want to take over Earth. Now I have this plan where we resurrect an old battleship...
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Actually global warming will kill us off if we live long enough.
The Sun has been increasing its output since the beginning and at the rate it is going the Earth will be too hot to support most life in only a billion or two years.
On top of that Andromeda is coming down our throats and will collide with our galaxy in only a couple of billion years setting of lots of star formation increasing the odds of super novas getting us or just radiation from blue giant stars.
On top of that there is always a chance of the Sun having a close encounter with another star which quite likely will alter the Earths orbit. Also there is a chance that the Suns orbit around the galaxy could be perturbed into a more elliptical orbit that takes us close to the galactic core which would also kill us due to the extreme radioactivity.
All in all I doubt that we have 5 billion years of safely living on the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Looks like its going to be close to Venus sometime April 24th 2016 that'd prolly make more of a mess than it would hitting earth. :)
But the really cool thing is on June 14, 2060 when this
http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi?sstr=99942;orb=1
shows Venus and Apophis so close that the dots overlap
That'll be fun to watch (assuming nasa's java applet is accurate and that I'm not blind in 2060)
No worries, we should be able to come up with an anti-extinction-level-nuke giant laser beam by then.
The chances of dying from an asteroid or comet impact are about equal to the chances of dying in a passenger aircraft crash. In fact, you're *less* likely to die from a flood, tornado, or from a venom bite/sting than from an asteroid/comet impact.
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It depends - if the nuke reaches solar escape velocity, it won't ever come back. Also, if it suffers significant gravitational influence from a planet/planetoid/moon, chances are it won't ever again intersect Earth's orbit
That is unless that "tiny nuke far out in space" shatters the crystalline conduit which inadvertently frees the evil villains General Zod, Ursa, and Non from the Phantom Zone.
Now I admit, this is a pretty obscure reference. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superman_II and probably a little long...
On the gripping hand, I'm pretty sure nukes aren't designed to just explode on impact.
Because the likely scenario is politically charged. It's not that meteor impacts are being funded instead of global warming, it's that global warming is being intentionally ignored. That's a real issue - but it has nothing to do with this article.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
if we do this we have a very good method of launch....
...lets say... 20,000 feet and goes off I imagine it won't do good things to us.
Obviously if it gets outside of our atmosphere and the bomb goes off not that big of a deal...
if it takes off from the launch pad gets to whatever doesn't matter...
I must also say... yea I live in the US... but if I lived anywhere else I don't think I'd want us putting nukes in orbit.
just my ~0.0145 Euros
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Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
It's called "insurance". And with the stakes really high, we can't afford NOT to be looking for a solution. That said however, this should be a global effort. We shouldn't be the only one footing the bill on such a massive undertaking project.
We may not get hit by a giant space rock tomorrow, next week, year...or 100 years from now. But if and when it happens, it will not only shatter the earths crust, but also the very foundation of human civilization. I seriously doubt man will become extinct, but our many nations around the world will fall from its domino effect of destruction. Those that survive will no doubt be jockeying for political power and waging war like tribal men.
Maybe I've watched too many Mad Max movies, but this is a very serious problem that ought not be brushed aside.
Life is not for the lazy.
I would feel much more comfortable with a planetary defense system that does not rely on a single, unbuilt launch vehicle.
Instead of carrying six weapons on a single platform it would be better to have smaller vehicles that can be launched on Atlas, Delta, Ariane, SpaceX falcon, etc.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
So what ? We've already set off dozens, if not hundreds of nukes all over the planet (and some in space, too). One more (especially one that detonates really, really far away from Earth) won't make things that much worse.
It then ranks the alternatives by their ability to how much speed change ("delta vee"} per second they can apply to the object as a function of the mass of the interceptor vehicle. In this comparison, unsurprisingly, nuclear explosions come out ahead.
What's less clear to me is why "slow" methods are considered less effective. A low "delta vee" applied over a period of a few months or so should also be able to deflect the object from impact.
Is it really warranted to conclude at this stage that nuclear explosions are "way ahead" of other methods?
I'll tell you why I'm a bit sceptical about the "nuclear option". It could provide legitimacy for keeping a few nuclear bombs on standby in orbit. Once we cross that threshold, what's to stop everyone who can slap a nuclear warhead on top of a big rocket (and secretly throw in a re-entry shield when no-one's looking} to put a few nuclear warheads in orbit? Who's to check that someone won't put MIRVs up there?
And besides ... I thought that the current crop of (ridiculously expensive} ABM systems focused on intercepting missiles during their boost phase. With orbiting bombs there wouldn't even be the warning of a boost phase.
Any comments from knowledgeable people?
Before clicking on this article, I tried to guess whether the "Armageddon" tag would be in positions 1st, 2nd, or 3rd.
I picked 2nd. Slashdot has let me down.
Well.. I don't know when you learned /your/ facts, but it is quite widely accepted that Japan was sure to surrender in a very short time anyway. Either the people responsible for the bombings were unaware of the situation at that time or they wanted to be unaware of it. I don't think the Japanese could in any manner have killed two cities of people in a week or so - no matter how cruel they were, they sure were no Soviets - , so the idea of using the a-bombs was indeed very naughty.
Where have your banknotes been?!
The impact of a cubic kilometer of matter (with density = 1000 kg/m3) traveling at 11 km/s is 6e+19 J. The explosion and the debris falling all over the planet would heat up the atmosphere significantly. Calculating from http://www.oco.noaa.gov/index.jsp?show_page=page_r oc.jsp&nav=universal, the atmospheric heat capacity is about 3e+18 J/K. so if the bulk of the energy is absorbed by the atmosphere, there will be about a 20-kelvin average short-term temperature increase around the globe. If the asteroid is slightly larger or denser, oven-like average temperatures are possible
For one thing, an air burst would produce a much bigger EMP. Life might go on, but it wouldn't go online for a while if the happened anywhere near a major city.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
April 13th 2029 is, yes you've guessed it, a Friday!
The chances of getting hit by an asteroid are extremely small.
Well let's consider this. Apophisis has one chance out of 45,000 of hitting us in 2036, releasing as much energy as a 400 MT bomb. Note that Hiroshima released the equivalent of 15 kT, and the largest H-bomb ever detonated 60 MT. I don't know if it's a pessimistic estimate or not, but if we consider that let's say 450 million people might die if this asteroid hits Earth in 2036, that means that in average 10,000 people will die from it. If we get really pessimistic and estimate it'll kill the 9 billion of us, that's 200,000 who'll die in average
Does it still sound like an acceptable risk?
You just got troll'd!
Yeah, but not unconditionally surrender. This was to prevent the Great War mistakes. Japan had seriously violated just about every reasonable practice of war, and the dropping of the atom bomb shortened the war, and help stop them.
Japan was not going to surrender in two weeks, they were via diplomatic back channels suing for peace, this is not the same as offering unconditional surrender. In the end the Japanese still insisted that they be allowed to keep their Emporer, and the allies agreed to this demand, instead of being belligerent. I don't know where you got this myth that the Japanese were willing to surrender unconditionally, but the whole point of further increasing the size of their armed services during and after Okinawa was to make taking the islands of Japan as much like the battle for Okinawa as possible. That would have resulted in extreme causalities on both sides. The idea was that by a few tens of thousands of casualties the Americans and their allies would agree to more favourable terms than unconditional surrender. Heck if it had been like Okinawa they might even have managed to force those terms, which would have been a disaster.
The Japanese were determined to fight on to get a better peace deal. They had already lost the war so of course they were suing for peace. The only question remains, is it right to target military installations in the cities of your enemy during a time of war to force his surrender, knowing that tens of thousands of civilians will die. If you believe the allies were right to demand unconditional surrender (which I do), and if you believe that the Americans should have kept their nerve conducting the invasion and no accepted a lesser peace, then one is forced to ask the following question. Which course of action would cost more civilian lives, more destruction of infrastructure, and more military lives. The answer to all three is invasion. Dropping the bomb saved lives, civilian, military, and preserved what little remained of Japans infrastructure.
It is to my mind, the only time in history dropping the bomb would be acceptable, because of the unique set of circumstances at the time.
What if they hit it at the wrong side? Can they guarantee that won't happen?
Exactly. Even if a superpower, or even suitably-armed power, wanted to launch a nuclear strike against the US, a sea-launched nuke-carrying cruise missile would do the trick. Flying low and fast, space-based anything won't help. And if that's out of the budgetary question, a container with a nuke in it would be just as acceptable. Taking out just one large US port will harm the US in so many different ways it's not even funny.
For this to work it is absolutely critical that the US make this an international project, open to inspection and participation. While many might feel that the Chinese and Russians and Europeans can get lost and should not be offered participation, it is almost guaranteed that if the USA puts nuclear weapons into space without international control and participation, then the others will fear that the USA is planning to do an Iraq on them and will react by placing their own nuclear weapons in orbit, and what is more important, those will probably not be pointed away from the earth. The result will be a dangerous arms race.
sadly, with the current US government not exactly giving the impression of stability, trustworthiness or inttelligence, I fear that exactly that will happen.
True, but depending on where they hit (and the speed) they can be a mess to clean up. ;-)
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
How pathetic that you fantasize about my sex life while stalking my responses on Slashdot and other websites I read.
Stop leeching off my online life just because I flamed you to death sometime in the past. Worthless punk.
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If this thing is going to be closer than some satellites, here's a cartoon that could creep you out. The premise was that a comet got too close and caused armageddon...
And what if the Yuuzhan find out that the energy efficiency/generation/transmission system they beamed us back in the 20th Century in exchange for giving up nukes has instead run up our nuke arsenal to billions of micronukes secreted around the planet, interspersed with overwhelmed Star Wars lasers and countermissiles now good for only blasting giant, dumb rocks?
Since that arms race bankrupted Earth before we could get our energy industries out of the hands of fanatical theocrat (of every denomination) capitalists, the ecocalypse eventually wiped out everyone but me, the last Jedi, and the machines I long ago lost interest in shutting off.
Should I spend the time left stopping the automated defense system, or backing it up with the Force? Only the Yuuzhan know for sure, since humans committed to armageddon instead of Paradise.
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Can someone please remove the statement about it "passing closer than geosynchronous satellites," as it has already been WELL established it will come nowhere close to the moon or earth when it passes us. There will be no doomsday and we don't need to redirect it, or make misleading statments about it.
No, it doesn't sound anything like that. Statistical probabilities like the 1:45K you cite cannot be multiplied by the damage if it materializes to predict any single event. If that probability of occurrence and damage is correct, then all it means is that there is a 1:45K chance that 450M people will die.
If there were a hundred thousand asteroids each 1:45K probable to kill 450M people, then the only average that could be applied would be that it's nearly certain that 450K people will die, because at least one asteroid is most likely to hit. But that's it.
Meanwhile, the chances are high, estimated at something like 95%, that failing to reverse atmospheric CO2 (and equivalents) to 1990 levels by 2020 will force us past a tipping point by 2100 that will raise the average Earth surface temperature by 10'C. Which will melt at least enough land ice (West Antarctic, Greenland, Himalayas, Andes) to raise sea levels an average of 15m. Which will drown over 80% of humans, who live near coastlines. And in the process drive billions of refugees across the world, destroying our civilization, and possibly the species in the fighting.
But our government is spending the money on "space defense", while ignoring (and spending on suppressing) research into that Climate Change. Even though the greater risk is also a higher priority for America's population.
That prioritization defies the odds.
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Most of Earth is totally unpopulated. So it's not "sheer luck" that the Tunguska impact wasn't deadly.
The land surface of the Earth, at this point, is most definitly not 'mostly totally unpopulated'. That's only true if you include the ocean and polar regions. An asteroid impact is fairly unlikely to hit in the polar regions due to orbital mechanics, and a Tunguska event hitting an ocean would cause a tsunami that would most likely cause fatalities.
Even for the time, Tunguska was unusual as to how unpopulated it was.
I'd prefer to find out if we have an asteroid/comet on a collision course, and preferably early enough to divert it rather than take the risk.
I don't read AC A human right
Our energy crisis is an undeniably real problem right now that obviously will be getting excruciatingly worse over time. By the time your imaginary asteroid finally arrives to satisfy your paranoia, we will have damaged ourselves beyond our ability to respond to it, even if we have built the weapons to fire at it. Among other problems (like the civilization has collapsed from billions of refugees), there won't be energy left to fire the weapons.
But since your paranoia about big sky rocks overwhelms rational fear of real problems, you're likely to get just that Mad Max scenario you dream about.
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Why then did they NOT surrender after the first nuke was dropped?
Show me the trajectory. You can't, because it's imaginary.
You've got nothing but paranoia. I've got a record of covert Star Wars budgets getting paid continuously, despite Congressional shutdowns and worthless results.
Leave a note for your descendants describing the deliciously warm feeling your blinders gave you when you had the luxury to squander investing in real defense of their future on your favorite SF paranoia. Be sure to sing the praises of knowing nothing about statistical probability and comparative risk. Feels so good, so free!
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I don't call 40 000(nagasaki) + 70 000(hiroshima) + Radiation kills (around 250 000 (sources varies on that one))civilian death a few tens of thousand.
please don't glorify killings of civilians or try to justify them...
The answer to the question of "when" is "not bloody likely in the next 100, 1000 years". The chances of having to use the money on that defense on something else instead are 100%, like the foreign energy dependence I cited - or a thousand other real threats.
And of course the government economists and budget hagglers know that. Which is why they're banking on the real payoff: Star Wars contractor bribes. Just like they have for over a quarter century for that fool's programme that produces nothing but pork, never even any missile defense.
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Well, taking into account that the need to humiliate the Germans after WWI is what actually made it possible for Hitler to get in power, I'm against the idea of requiring completely unconditional surrender. I see no other point than humiliation in forcing an absolutely unconditional surrender. And I see no point in wanting to humiliate anyone. I don't know perfectly what the conditions would have been, and for sure even most of the conditions would have kept on causing a threat and they should therefore naturally not be accepted. But I don't see the point in not accepting conditions that don't cause a threat. It is very likely that such conditions did exist in between the stupid ones.
So the point in a nutshell: There's no logical reason (other than deserved humiliation) why an unconditional surrender could be considered a value as for itself. However, not accepting any of the conditions can be logical, if the conditions required read something along the lines: "While surrendering, Japan will get Spain and France under its control".
Where have your banknotes been?!
You aren't really "Lord Ender". But you do live in a SF fantasy.
The chances of an asteroid destroying all life in the next 100-1000 years are negligible. The chances of energy dependence destroying all life is closer to 100% than than to 0. When the nuclear countries are fighting over the gasping energy markets, when terrorists have nukes to grab oil or other energy producing territory, as is already starting in Russia, India/Pakistan, East Africa, Iraq...
Wake up. Reality is scary enough without dreaming of _Sudden Impact_. And we've got the money to do something about reality. Which will incidentally produce all kinds of fun toys for people like you. Maybe not collectible figurines, but alternative energy is cool enough if you're not a child.
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Anonymous dinosaur Coward, you just admitted that you spend all your money on the lottery. You are innumerate. Since you're clearly generally pseudointellectual, I'll explain that "innumerate" means that you're not good at math. Which means you don't know enough about statistics to be dangerous, but evidently enough about posting on Slashdot to reinforce the dangerous innumeracy rampant in this thread.
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Let's see the citation of those who know more than you (I'll be the judge of whether they know more than I do) calculating the equal asteroid/planecrash death likelihood.
Meanwhile, you should play the lottery every day. Because that's the statistical logic you're using.
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Just because I mildly mocked you doesn't make my mockery hostile. You want hostile, look at some of my responses to actually obnoxious posts in this thread that are also wrong.
You have a faithy approach to SF. And just because you'd rather spend money on frivolous asteroid mining doesn't make this programme get us there. It gets us Star Wars boondoggles, actually deployed in space and on Earth. And your SF faith helps us get that, instead of either asteroid mining or any other solution to our real problems.
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That was only a way to show that this is a threat we can't afford to ignore. Having the life of a large part of mankind to have 1 chance out of 45000 to die is important, even if unlikely. That's as if you calculate how much in average lottery can make you win compared to how much you pay, or how much in average accidents will cost you, compare to insurance price.
Then, if you decide that being sure to get $10 is better to have one chance out of 10 to get $100, your problem, it's a matter of philosophy I guess.
You just got troll'd!
Alright Woodrow Wilson, if thats what you want to believe.
I firmly believe that Hitler was helped by the fact that he was able to convince many Germans that the treaty of Versaille was unfair because the 'November Criminals' had signed it while Germany still had some effective military and could still fight the war. Coupled with the fact that the terms of the treaty were humiliating themselves (full blame for the war placed on Germany, reparations, Sudentenland handed over to the new Czechoslovakia, splitting Germany in two). Unconditional surrender is not about humiliation. The requirement of unconditional surrender existed because the conduct of those states with which the allies were fighting required wholesale removal of thier leadership and replacement by an authority that would be cast iron allies of the West. Unconditional surrender was just another way of saying to the militarist leaders of Japan "we will dismantle your government, and you will be tried for war crimes".
Yeah, because suppressing the logic is the way to win the argument. Wouldn't want anyone else to have your chance to be wrong arguing poorly about ignorance.
We also don't know that there's a flying spaghetti monster at the Earth's core about to get us. Better get on those anti-FSM depth charges right away. It's mathematically inevitable!
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Just because I post on Slashdot, don't presume that I necessarily watch SHIT television. There...I said it.
The land surface of the Earth is still mostly unpopulated. 150M square Km for 7B people is 46 people per square kilometer, which is still pretty unpopulated. But billions are squeezed into the tiniest areas, like cities in India, China, West Africa, Western Europe and North America. Only about 13% of the land is habitable at all, which is less than 4% of the planet's surface. And I'd like to see a citation for the Tunguska event hitting the 70% that is water causing a wave that would kill lots of people. Enough people to justify spending $billions on defending from it.
But the real problem here is not what geeks like us would prefer. The problem is that the certainty of other real problems that need funding and science to solve them right now shows that asteroid defense isn't driving this programme. What's driving it is expansion of the existing Star Wars programme, which has always been mostly covert (though not unknown), and often illegal. If we could reform the system to actually shut down Star Wars with some new oversight system that keeps it shut down (unlike past shutdowns), I'd be happy to spend my tax money on tracking solar system objects, because it wouldn't be a pretext for Star Wars science - which would corrupt the research by dragging it into tracking powered missiles rather than momentous asteroids.
Because tracking solar system objects is an investment in (nonmilitary) space industry. And would have the byproduct of generating real data about asteroid collision risks. If real data showed a real risk soon enough to compel investing in a defense, then that's a different argument. The paranoia and retarded statistics argued in this thread, the predicted result of the cover story smokescreening Star Wars, is no justification whatsoever for ignoring real problems in favor of SF paranoia.
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Actually, the literature mostly agrees on the fact that the atomic bomb was not a significant factor in the surrender of the Japanese ['The Second World War' John Keegan iirc]. The Japanese exited the war because the Russians entered it. They were to fight a two front war and were faced with an enemy that they didn't think would be merciful (the Japanese weren't throughout the war in the South Pacific, China, or Russia). To them, the nukes were really not all that different from 200 B-17s starting a firestorm using incendiary and high explosive bombs on cities made of paper and wood.
People are selfish. Why?
The ships^H^H^H^H^H sharks hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't. ;)
By your reasoning, I guess you wouldn't waste the money to make NYC skyscrapers capable of withstanding hurricane force winds, since it's not bloody likely that a hurricane will hit NYC in the next 100 years.
The estimated American casualties alone for the invasion of Japan are around two to four times that. Now consider that they are better equipped and supplied than their conscripted Japanese adversary who would have suffered far worse. In addition most of the Japanese casualties would be civilian.
I'm certainly not glorifying the killing of civilians. However, if I presented to you a choice. Kill a quarter of a million Japanese now, or kill half a million Americans and 4 million Japanese over three to four months of bloody combat, what would you choose? If you choose to kill four million more people just because you don't like the word nuclear or because you think in some way being shot is better than dieing in giant fireball, then I believe you to be a cold heartless bastard.
Hell the United States is still handing out purple hearts of 1945 manufacture because of the anticipated casualties of the Japanese campaign were higher than the sum total of wounded or dead servicemen in every war since.
I suggested what the Japanese intent was. They believed they could break their 'inferior' American foe. The Americans had plans for Olympic which forecast many more casualties that the Japanese thought the Americans could take. All you have done is prove my point, the Americans would have accepted the high casualties and pushed on, since they planned for them anyway. The bottom line is that while the Japanese hoped to bring the war to an end with tens of thousands of casualties by breaking the American will to fight, that was not going to happen. You are suggesting an option (American capitulation to the Japanese plan) which was never on the table to begin with.
You totally let me down on that one.
I was really hoping you'd take the angle that Tunguska was the result of government funded weapons research. You, of all people, should have records of this somewhere in your various filing cabinets and such.
It would be even cooler if you had the records on microfilm.
Or Minox negatives.
Come to think of it, if you don't have Minox negatives recording some nefarious governmental carryings on, you make some documents up and I'll shoot them for you, because to collection is complete without such things.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed, actually. Does that change your opinion at all? Would you have insisted on the righteousness of "keeping American nerve" if it had required killing millions of innocents? If so, how many millions?
Seriously: WTF? Why do people still buy these tired WWII-era justification in the 21st century? Hasn't everyone realised by now that the bombings were to scare the Reds?
If the plan was just to shorten the war, wouldn't a demonstration of the bomb suffice? Why was it necessary to strike without warning? (I don't count the Potsdam ultimatum, which threatened unprecedented trouble for Japan, but in such an unspecific way as to have seemed like mere bluster). The fact is simply that the actions of the US military at that time were not, by civilised standards, morally defensible. Why do you feel the need to defend them these evil acts? Was Truman your grandpa? Why not just acknowledge the reality, that the US military has in fact, been responsible for some evil acts? Is it so hard to admit your own country's fallibility? Or would that undermine your position on Iraq?
Your argument must surely be filling some powerful psychological need considering how logically weak it is. On the one hand you correctly assert that the Japanese military had violated conventional rules of war, but on the other hand you consider that these violations are ample justification for 2 of the most horrendous war crimes in all of human history!
You assert that even though the Japanese militarists were suing for peace, these genocidal bombings were OK, because the supreme importance of exacting an "unconditional" surrender outweighs all those individual lives. Then you refute your own barbaric argument by noting that the Allies actually did accept a condition (namely the retention of Hirohito).
And as for "targetting military installations", please! Why didn't they drop it on a purely military base then? Sure, Hiroshima contained a naval base, but did that justify destroying a city packed with civilians? If you think so, can't Osama Bin Laden also justify his killing of thousands of innocent people in NY in order to take out some his enemies? Face it! It was an act of pure terror, and morally just as indefensible as those of the 9/11 terrorists. And why Nagasaki? if it was such an important target militarily, why had it not been targeted by conventional bombers? The reason for the second bombing a few days later was purely that the US military had 2 types of bomb and wanted to be sure they'd tried out both kinds.
Wouldn't that fsck with the tides? Well, I guess it wouldn't after we strip-mine the rock and remove most of its mass.
Statistical probabilities like the 1:45K you cite cannot be multiplied by the damage if it materializes to predict any single event.
That's actually one of the basic techniques used in decision theory - action priority as a function of the probability of success and payoff. No, it is not as simple as just multiplying, but the premise remains the same. If the probability of success remains static (as well as other factors), but the reward increases, the weight given to choosing that action also increases.
Not that I think anyone has actually sat down and calculated a matrix that includes asteroid defense, global warming, energy dependency, and H5N1; I'm just saying, if you did, probabilities modified by damage IS one of the calculations you would include.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA
I read a novel, I can't remember which, where the author made a great case for using enhanced radiation weapons against asteroids instead of conventional nuclear devices. His argument was that a non-impacting explosion using an enhanced radiation device might be able to divert even a fragile asteroid without necessarily breaking it up. The radiation from the weapon would transfer it's energy evenly to the surface of the asteroid. (Not exactly, but way better than a regular nuke) That would blow away the top layer of the asteroid on the side facing the blast, pushing the asteroid in the opposite direction. A series of such blasts might be able to divert the asteroid without causing it to break up.
I'm sure there are problems with the idea, but it seems logical to me.
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
EMP depends a lot on how high up the blast is. Again not hard to prevent.
Do not unsafe the weapon until it clears the magnetosphere. They will be launching the weapons when the target is still years away so there is no need to unsafe the weapon until it is a long way from the earth.
The simplest way to safe the weapon is to fill the core with wire that absorbs neutrons. You just pull the wire out to arm the bomb. as long as the core is filled a high yield event is impossible. No high yield event no EMP.
Plus the launch would be from the Cape. Most of the flight would not be over any large cities. It would be over the Atlantic and equatorial Africa.
No it isn't 100% safe but nothing is. It would beat the heck out of getting whacked by a big honking rock.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Even if the asteriod misses it's supposed to back in our general vicinity around 2038, so it would probably be prudent to keep an eye on it.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
There is another element of a "hypothetical known impending collision (HKIC)". The orbital mechanics will give a very precise time of impact, because, if it ain't then, it ain't gonna happen. While the Ground Zero is going to vary with chaotic factors, we will know this much: "It will hit on [this] side of the planet at this time." Chances are, it would hit the Pacific Ocean. But if the groundtrack wends into heavily populated area, let's say for example, USA, then those people know that they are on the bullseye and will feel the devastation of even a Barringer Crater sized event. That is simple rocket science... But...
What is NOT simple is said locale's reaction to being on the target! WWDUBYAD? What would George Bush do? If (in this hypothetical case) the US Government knew for fact that metric oodles of its territory, including its breadbasket were going to be devastated by an asteroid, what would we do? What would China, India or Russia do?
To quote Sam Kinison: "MOOOOVE!" What we would see would be a push to move into territory that was safer than where we would be sitting then. China might move into India or the Steppes of Russia. If it were to hit the Pacific, where would Los Angeles go? Arizona? Where can you bivouac 8 million people for an indefinite period? And who will be shipping in the food?
One of the first effects of an HKIC is a directional diaspora. The blast wave of the asteroid would pale in comparison to the advancing ring of nuclear fire as one massive group clamors out of the target zone, and those already there fight for their very existence. The first HKIC will not trigger mass extinction before it triggers mass extermination.
This, more than any other reason is why planetary defense should not be handled by any one of us, but by ALL of us. A United Federation of THIS Planet!
The Yuuzhan Vong were committed to paradise? You're into S&M aren't you.
I dunno... Lets ask what the Allied High Commanders and Staff thought:
General Dwight D. Eisenhower "In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet "The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman "The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender." Report from the post war United States Strategic Bombing Survey "Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." And my favorite from the guy who actually encouraged Einstein to write FDR, Leo Szilard "Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?" Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_H
So yeah... According to some of the major members of the US military and those who took part in the Manhattan project, the bombs were unneeded.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
While it's up to debate whether thats true or not, it should be noted that afterwards we helped reconstruct Japan and lo and behold it appears to be doing quite well now. So we diverted that potential problem you proposed. Was it learning the lesson from Germany? I don't know, but it obviously turned out alright in the end.
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
Decision theory will tell you that the action priority cannot be called on a single rare event like a huge asteroid collision.
If you're going to be purely theoretical, then those other risks each would have a higher priority, because some of them (or their equivalent in identical defense actions) are nearly certain in our lifetimes, or that of people we'll actually meet, like our grandchildren.
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If you simply wanted to stop the Japanese, why didn't you simply drop the bomb on Fujiyama (for example)? I think that the sight of a giant volcano being blown to smithereens would have been just as effective as dropping the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The sad truth is you wanted to test the bomb as well as show to the Soviet Union that you have some big guns.
A hurricane hit NYC 20 years ago. I was standing in it at the time. We're overdue.
Meanwhile, Climate Change is increasing those probabilities, and the size of the damage when they do hit.
Thanks for weighing in to demonstrate you don't even have the basic facts or logic to weigh in on this subject. Saves a lot of time humoring you in a boring, drawn out display.
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Here's some:
7 0308-asteroids_2.html 0 -will-we-catch-a-falling-star-there-are-many-aster oids-outthere-in-space-and-the-chances-are-that-so oner-or-later-one-will-head-forearth-but-no-one-kn ows-what-to-do-if-we-find-ourselves-on-collision-c ourse.html 0 901.html 0 2
http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=44
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/03/0
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg13117854.70
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/fl_side2_02
http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/s2.cfm?id=7989920
http://www.newsobserver.com/105/story/415367.html
http://www.sciencebits.com/PlanesAndMeteorites
Not sure how your lottery analogy applies. The nasa article sums up your logical fallacy: "The perception of risk from impacts is smaller than for being killed in a plane crash because planes crash at a steady rate with (relatively) few deaths per event, whereas lethal impacts are rare but kill a lot of people. At the very least, the potential consequences of impact are large enough to cause concern."
Kinda. I'm really a Chazrach slave posting disinfo to shut down these Star Wars programmes before they stop our invasion.
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There is considerable debate on this issue as far as I know. Militarily the Soviet Union posed far more of a threat to the short and long term security of the civilians of Japan (it's not like what happened to Berlin was a secret, or what would happen to eastern Europe wasn't known). There is however one thing that is clear. The atomic bomb gave Emporer Hirohito (and to some extent Togo) the excuse he was looking for the push for an end to the war on all fronts. Civilians would understand surrender faced with this new terrifying weapon. The coup attempt that resulted from the repeated attempts to surrender was probably far smaller than it would have been without the bomb. The terms of the surrender were sufficient for the allies. The last one is the key. Without the bomb, would the Japanese have accepted unconditional surrender (with the exception of the retention of the Emporer) if the allies did not have the bomb? Maybe, but we know four of the big six wanted to reject the Potsdam declaration out of hand until the extent of the Soviet attacks became known, and the attack on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then it was split 3-3. Without the intervention of Emporer Hirohito (who certainly considered the bomb important) this deadlock may have lasted.
I don't know what the result would have been without the bomb. Perhaps the Japanese would have continued fighting until it was clear that the Soviets were preparing to invade Korea, or perhaps the Japanese islands themselves. It is possible that without the bomb the Japanese would have used losing territory to the Soviet Union as a bargaining chip against the Americans to get more favourable terms.
Your point about American B-17 raids on Japan is a good one. It is important to remember these were small nukes. The building directly under the bomb survived the explosion in Hiroshima. This does strongly suggest that the bomb was not, in the military leaderships mind, a deciding factor, considering that the death toll in Tokyo from fire bombing was higher than in Hiroshim or Nagasaki through the atomic bomb. However, the bomb is more than a incendiary weapon. I believe the Emporer said it best in his radio address to the Japanese people:
"The enemy now possesses a new and terrible weapon with the power to destroy many innocent lives and do incalculable damage."
The key word being terrible. The atomic bomb, more so than any other weapon, was terrifying. It is this terror that gave the Emporer the option of offering surrender (along with the Soviet invasion).
They are a bigger threat to our existence then some rogue asteroid.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The sad truth is you wanted to test the bomb as well as show to the Soviet Union that you have some big guns.
The irony is that the Soviets did not know about the bombs until after they were dropped. Had we sat quietly on them, then the Soviets might have not had an impiety to have their own nuclear program until we had engaged them openly in the Korean War.
Which might have meant 60 less years of communist rule in Eastern Europe, Russia, China, and North Korea.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v
It takes a Titan IV to accelerate something as massive as an SUV into "orbit between the earth and the moon". The delta-V is about 10Km/s, ball park, plus or minus, give or take. The delta-V of an asteroid would have to be half an order of magnitude more and what... 10 orders of magnitude more mass? Picture a Saturn V which is scaled up so that the Command Module is the size of the New Jersey.
Got it? They don't call it Rocket Science fer nothing.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
Let's say that the two risks of damage are equal, measured by my chance of dying from the respective events. If I spend $100B (or any meaningful amount) on asteroid defense, I might possibly stop a few asteroids of all those that actually kill people. But if I spend that same money on making flying safer, I will certainly save more lives for my money.
But we're not spending more money to prevent plane crashes, even though it's a better deal. And the greater perception of plane crash risk is also causing other damage, by inhibiting economic growth in many ways, as well as all the unmeasurable loss from failing to stay connected by air travel. Real damage, steadily.
So before we spend any money on asteroid defense, we should spend it on air safety. Even if NASA wants us to spend the money on space programmes instead, without proper prioritization. Thanks for the perfect example.
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I am absolutely amazed at the stunningly new idea of using a nuclear weapon to stop, prevent or ameliorate some potential disaster on earth. Gee, whiz, why didn't someone think of that idea before?
The lessons of history teach us - if they teach us anything - that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.
I'm not American, I'm British. And I agree with most of what you have said. The American military reasoning for dropping the bomb was reprehensible. Doesn't change the fact that the 'excuse' they gave for doing so holds water.
I'm well aware that the total deaths from dropping the bombs total around a quarter of a million. I also had in my mind the bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. However, the fact remains that if Imperial Japan had been allowed to survive that number would be a drop in the ocean, because you can bet your arse that the Soviet Union would have found an excuse to restart the war at a later date if Japan didn't essentially become a satellite state of the United States.
A demonstration would not suffice. For a start it would tell the Japanese that the Americans had the bomb. The Japanese were not intercepting lone bombers at this stage because of a lack of fuel. If they know that they were carring the atom bomb that might have changed that. Besides, a demonstration would appear weak, like the Americans were unwilling to use the bomb.
I believe the US military has been responsible for many immoral acts. The Vietnam war immediately springs to mind. The premature invasion of Iraq in the second gulf war. The premature exit from the first gulf war without forcing unconditional surrender, leaving thousands of Shiite insurgents to die in a rebellion the Americans encouraged.
It is not a question of inability to admit the failing of my own (or in fact your country), but rather my capacity to way evidence without becoming overwhelmed by the horror of the facts.
What purely military base should they have targetted? You know of a naval base not inside a city?
Osama bin Laden is not leader of a sovereign state. Nor was the intent of the 9/11 attacks to target military infrastructure in the case of the World Trade Center. Nor did the people delivering the attacks wear a uniform marking them as combatants. There was no declaration of war (at least in part because you have to be a sovereign state to declare war). If the West was at war with Saudi Arabia and they fire bombed Washington to get to the pentagon, that would be a fairer comparison.
The actually reasons for using the bomb are morally reprehensible, but the excuses given hold. All I am saying is you put me in Harry S. Truman's shoes and give me the two choices he was faced with, I would in good conscience make the same decision he did.
While your opinion with regards to humiliation is admirable, your knowledge of this specific history is nonexistent. After being given unconditional surrender, we went into Japan and helped them in every way possible. We spent billions of dollars helping them rebuild, created a newer and more efficient infrastructure and shared most of our technology with them. We did not humiliate them--we treated them like equals. To quote wikipedia, "MacArthur and his GHQ staff helped a devastated Japan rebuild itself, institute a democratic government, and chart a course that made Japan one of the world's leading industrial powers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupied_Japan/
MacArthur supervised the occupation of Japan, and made sure that the Japanese food network was the first thing reconstructed; he even forbid the US forces from eating any of the scarce Japanese food. Democracy flourished, and MacArthur and emperor Hirohito became friends.
Please do not accuse the United States of attempting to humiliate Japan, because there is simply no credibility to that statement.
No, in fact I designed the risk-governed development model at my own 30+ person international consulting firm that later showed up in the same form as the late 1990s "Microsoft Solution Framework" project management regime. I then led the development personnel of another such firm, Microsoft based, under that regime, for several of NYC's biggest insurance corps. During which time I produced several disaster-mitigated architectures that have run without fail through such events as the 9/11/2001 terrorist attacks, several blackouts, and some cracking attacks, among others I'm not at liberty to discuss.
So I can tell you with some authority that actuarial analysis requires a larger statistical population than one large asteroid every 50 million years to make any kind of prediction about any single such asteroid. And that any other kind of analysis is equally worthless.
Or would you care to predict precisely when the radioactive sample at Fort Collins/WWV will first decay after noon tomorrow? You've got a lot more data to work with, and the world already depends on its regularity. I'll bet you everything in those banks I secured, to make the motivations approximately equal. And just for fun, I'll require you to spend it on asteroid defense first, if you win.
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I'm Argentinian you insensitive clod! (seriously)
Check out my blog!
lol. moron.
I've addressed every point you have made else where. I have already conceded that the reason the Administration had for dropping the bomb was morally reprehensible. However all of the quotes you have given talk of surrender, not unconditional surrender. If you do not believe that a power which has committed copious war crimes and conducted a war in a manner so morally reprehensible as to deserve the title infamous, should be deconstructed, that is your choice.
I will answer some of the quotes you present. Eisenhower was mostly involved in Europe. His pacific counterparts did not agree with his assessment and I choose to believe them because they would know better.
Suing for peace != unconditional surrender. I've already acknowledge that militarily the atom bomb did not determine the outcome of the war. Heck the outcome of the war was known after Midway.
Surrender != unconditional surrender.
Dropping the atom bomb to force unconditional surrender is not the same as dropping the bomb as a last ditch spiteful move to kill civilians. A better comparison might be, what if the Germans had the bomb in 1941 and destroyed Scapa Flo?
I was wondering how long it would take for the conspiracy theorists to start jumping up and down and putting on their tin foil hats.
To maximize E you should consider influencing events with large P*|V|. If |V| is large enough, it can compensate for a small P.
Disclaimer: This is only a first order analysis. A more complex analysis would consider things like statistical variance, the likely hood of gambler's ruin, events that are non-additive, etc.
1) The only hurricane in modern times known to pass directly over parts of New York City was in 1821. The Hudson and the East River merged over Lower Manhattan.
http://www.livescience.com/environment/050601_hur
2) Accusing people of not knowing the basic facts when you don't know the basic facts is pretty lame.
3) I don't mean to blow your anonymity, but did you happen to invent the Internet?
Your link says the atmosphere's heat capacity is equivalent to that of the top 3.2m of ocean. We have 361e12 square meters of ocean, so the top 3.2 meters at 1000 kg/m^3 would be about 1.16e18 kilograms of water, which at 4186 J/kg/K gives a total heat capacity of 4.84e21 J/K. So dissipating our hypothetical asteroid's 6e19 J into the whole atmosphere would raise the temperature by about 0.012 K, not 20 K.
What do you propose to do about our galaxy colliding with another, or even just resurging ancient infections? Instead of spending that money on the certainty that thousands of Americans will die from our oil addiction over the next few years.
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Comparing asteroids to His Great Noodliness is just silly. That's the great thing about conspiracy theorists: their logic only makes sense to them.
You coincidence theorists always get there first.
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Ask people who lived along the Gulf Coast in 2005 whether the eye has to pass over for the storm to devastate. Or ask the rest of us who stood in 1985's Gloria.
Better yet, don't ask anyone. You'll just piss us off when you try to pretend that actual disasters that kill people are less real than your asteroid paranoia.
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Ah, a Climate Change denier squandering our money on asteroid paranoia. You just keep punching yourself in the face. Makes it so easy, I'm not going to bother even pointing at you anymore.
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Sigh I can't resist this one. Kudos for actually attempting to identify the underlying ramifications of the actions you are discussing, most people only see the base value.
First off, the initial detonation of the two nuclear devices killed approximately 120,000 people. This is actually less the the previous firebombings. However, it was done with 2 devices instead of 2438 tons of munitions, (thats what was dropped on Tokyo on March 9th, 1945) that was the message. So, as far as the US government knew at the time it was no different then previous attacks, hell they did less damage, although that was not the point as I previously said. Radiation poisoning was not very well known at this point, hence why most people closely associated with the handling aspect (or who people lived too close to the test site) of the project started dying over the next few years from it so it was most likely not factored into the damage the devices would cause.
While it may have been also partially to scare the Reds as you say, I do not see how that could not be construed as a bonus side effect. Doing so may have prevented Russia from attempting to expand it's borders, which we know it wanted to do from Russia's previous agreement with Germany and from the previous Russo-Japanese War. It is argued that Russia itself may have committed far more crimes then any other nation in WWII and the years afterwards, and most of those were against their own people! You also assume that Japan would honor a surrender, why? Almost every time their is a surrender without breaking the military power of the nation they just return later to cause problems again. Go check out Napoleon (though luckily in that case Waterloo went horribly for him).
Why do you discard the Potsdam Ultimatum? It was a warning, and Japan ignored it. From you reasoning you would show a test of your SECRET WEAPON just to convince them that the threat is real, thats just all around bad military advice. Using the weapon not only showed it's power, but it showed the willingness to use it if needed. Testing it may have done nothing, perhaps it would have rallied Japan and Russia to oppose us. To truly defeat your enemy you must break them of their will or ability to fight. Only when they realized not only that we had the power, but were willing to use it, did they unconditionally surrender. You must remember that the Japanese, especially at this time, had a very different sense of honor and duty. Would you conceive of American Kamikazes? By the way, the reason they used the second bomb was because even after the first they did not surrender. Perhaps they thought that it was a one shot and we could not duplicate the feat? Thus we would have no more power over them. The use of nukes may have saved countless lives in the long run, preventing any residual conflicts among the World Powers.
You simplify the issue, as did I. But my point stands, its all well and good to sit back, 50+ years later and judge the actions of others who were in very difficult positions that you and I will never be in. Does that mean they were all right? No of course not. But you ignore three thousand years of human warfare and politics because it's easy to sit back in your chair, in ignorance, and spout crap you were spoon fed by someone else.
I would love if there was no war in the world, it is a horrible thing and there is no glory in and of itself. But unfortunately their are still those out there who don't share that sentiment. Some of them cannot be reasoned with, they can not be converted, we cannot imprison them, they will fight to the death. What else are we to do?
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle!"
Yeah, because suppressing the logic is the way to win the argument
What logic is being suppressed? Certainly not yours, since you don't have any. There have been several documented extinction level impacts on the Earth, and a whole lot of others that, while not extinction level, would cause civilization to have a rather bad day. The only thing illogical is your insistence that a modest effort to cataloguing the threats and having a plan to deal with them is a waste of money or a sneaky way of weaponizing space.
The total casualty estimates if we had invaded Japan, based on the island hopping campaign so far in the war, were over 1 million allied and as many as 10 million total Japanese. We were planning on using gas, including captured Nazi nerve gas to cut down on allied casualties.
Even if we had not invaded Japan, any potential non-nuclear outcome would have been MUCH worse.
Japan depended heavily on inland water craft for transport. We had decimated this system and were in the process of finishing it off. Their railway system was very vulnerable to air attack and we were working on that two.
Almost all agriculture in Japan at the time was FAR from most of the population. If we had simply continued to bombard Japan from the air, the Japanese people would have starved to death. The estimates run as high as 60% of the population in less than a year (1944 and 1945 were bad rice years to begin with). The Japanese leadership did not care. This did not take into account the fact that ALL allied prisoners would have died, along with possibly millions in China and other parts of Asia.
Also, the USSR would have invaded more of the northern islands if the war had not ended when it did. If you think Berlin was a mess, think how bad THAT would have been.
You seem to be avoiding the question of whether or not NYC skyscrapers should be built to sustain hurricane force winds, seeing as they were last seen in NYC 186 years ago. Obviously they should. Just as we should protect ourselves from other rare but devastating natural disasters.
Your statistics are correct.
Visit the Holocaust Museum in Hiroshima, and then tell if your statistics still matter
People for the Ethical Treatment of Alien overlords?
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Very moving and emotive. What would you have done that would have saved those lives?
From what I understand your figures are the mid to high end estimates for casualties. I agree with you, but I wanted to be sure my figures were defensible, so I opted for the low end. I knew I could continue to make my point accepting high figures for the deaths from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and low figures for the deaths for Operation Downfall.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Hate to burst your bubble, but not only did the Soviets know about the bomb before they were used, but they already had the blueprints.
The thing I wonder about is, I am sure that NASA can successfully knock an asteroid off course. The asteroid is in an orbit around the sun. So id NASA accounting for the new orbit of the asteroid. What if the new orbit puts the object in a direct collision course with earth? We could keep firing nukes at it I guess. I just kinda wonder if they are considering the outcome before we go blowing stuff up, or pushing stuff around. Actually, considering NASA I am sure they are, but do we have the technology to plot the new orbit after a certain size explosion?
All points of time and space are connected.
Questions for the Technically gifted. If we wish to change the directory or speed of the asteroid could we not increase its mass significantly? What types of matter could we send its way which would stick to it thereby increasing its mass sufficiently to cause a miss? Alternativley, are there ways in which we could change the reflective nature of the object such that it creates a primitive solar drive? Perhaps paint the sucker white or silver? Additionally, is there a way to warp space using a nuclear blast such that the relativistic effects cause a miss? What about spearing it with numerous relatively cheap and simplistic harpoons which will have a long teather which will itself deploy solar sails? What about sending out darts which peirce it and then vibrate at a specific frequency which causes the object to break up or slow down or speed up because of the vibrational effects on mass/momentum/you'rethescientisthere? Moreover, if peirced with the vibrating darts said darts using relatively simple mechanisms could ascertain the structure of the object vis a vis how said object responds to the vibrations which themselves could be varied. This information could then be relayed back to earth and used to vary the frequency of the vibration to acheive optimal effects. Actually, this is a great idea which should precede any attempt to use a nuclear stand off device. Use darts to figure out structure then determine the particulars of using any type of nukes.
I'm willing to spend the same on this as for any other cause of death: $1 per 1:1e6 reduction in chance of dying from it.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
And Rockhound (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Buscemi/) Steve Buscemi was born on Friday the 13th.
There was one condition.
The Japanese got to keep their emperor.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
You're repeating propaganda here.
Germany was not assigned full blame for the war by the Versailles treaty. The treaty specified that Germany and its allies were to assume full responsibility for the ill effects.
The Sudetenland (which I don't believe was a word in general use at the time) was never part of the German Empire. (It was part of the Holy Roman Empire, along with a whole lot of other territory that was never really German.) The Germans were upset that they couldn't snarf pieces of Austria-Hungary. In other words, that they couldn't have a large part in starting a war that inflicted tremendous amounts of harm on France and Russia (and much less on Germany), lose badly, and pick up some territory into the deal.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
So, why didn't the Japanese surrender after the first bomb? It wasn't so much that the process took time as that the peace coalition didn't think it worth the extraordinary political maneuvers to outflank the war coalition until the US demonstrated the ability and willingness to nuke another city.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Hate to burst your bubble, but not only did the Soviets know about the bomb before they were used, but they already had the blueprints.
Actually, my bad. I forgot Beria had started a program in 1942 after being tipped of by someone that the American physicists had been stopped publishing information about the topic.
However, only after the atomic bombings in Japan happed did the Soviets know the American design worked. Had America played dumb and said the project was a waste and failure than the Soviets would have pursued the German design of dropping the entire reactor from the plane. (Which doesn't really work out that well)
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
Interestingly, none of the people quoted would have had the responsibility for actually invading Japanese Home Islands - even Nimitz would have been largely out of the picture once the troops hit the beaches.
Any quotes from, say, MacArthur? The guy who would have actually done the invasion, if one had been done.
Hindsight is easy. Try looking at the situation with EXACTLY the information in hand when the decision was made, rather than all the extra information available in 1948...
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Nonsense! Blowing up Fujiyama would have worked just fine to impress the Russians, even if they hadn't already known about the Manhattan Project. And the Bomb had already been tested, at Los Alamos.
The reason we blew up Hiroshima was two-fold - one was to find out how much damage would be done to a city, sure. Note that we did more damage to Tokyo when we firebombed it than we did to Hiroshima.
The second reason was that we only had two Bombs, with no chance of another before 1946. Wasting a Bomb on a volcano would have been silly, if the two Bombs had not, in fact, caused Japan to surrender.
And frankly, the Emperor of Japan chose to intervene and force his Government to surrender as a direct result of Hiroshima. With no Bomb, there's no reason to believe that the militarists in Government wouldn't have been willing to fight on until the Americans hit the Beaches on Honshu (the SECOND part of the invasion of Japan, not the first).
Note also that Hiroshima and Nagasaki (and several other cities) were specifically not bombed during the war, just in case we got the Bomb working and had to use it - we wanted to demonstrate a fully functional city's transformation to rubble with one Bomb, rather than just watching the rubble rearrange itself. This is from Hap Arnold's autobiography - apparently he had quite a time coming up with justifications for NOT bombing the cities on the list without spilling the beans about the Manhattan Project to people who weren't allowed to hear about that then.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
A nuclear bomb the size of fatman or little boy would have barely scratched the surface of a mountain.
How would you then communicate this explosion to the Japanese people? Would you show them pictures of the mountain and say "See this boulder was jostled a few meters to the left which shows just how terrible this new weapon is."
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
The difference between WW I and WW II come down to that little thing called post-invasion planning. The Marshall plan was phenomenal, it got people working again, kept the power on, water running, etc.
The Bush Administration feels that no such thing is necessary, which is why you have a massive insurgency in Iraq. If we kept the power on for more than 6 hours a day, gave the military that we fired new jobs, etc. we wouldn't be having the problems that we're having now. Of course the hubris of the neo-cons said that the State Department plan was dreck, but that plan advocated the very things I'm talking about.
Regards nuking Japan, I'm ambivalent about the act. Partly because the evidence is now saying it was a political move more than an expedient move. Sure, losses would have been much higher if we had to island hop, but as others have pointed out we were ready for that.
You might feel the nuclear bombing of Japan wasn't justified, and that feeling would be entirely rational, but thinking that no killing of babies could ever possibly be justified is not rational.
Because the Japanese government didnt actually believe it was the Americans that did it.
Which is reasonable really, considering the scale of devastation, something like that could only have been perpetrated by a thousand bombers or more, yet there had been no raid, so the idea 1 bomber and 1 bomb could have done something like this was pretty hard to swallow.
If that's all you've got, I'd say it's negligible.
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Yea... You havnt heard of the Rape of Nanking? or Perhaps Unit 731? I strongly suggest reading up on even those 2 topics before deciding they were less cruel than the soviets.
You have just demonstrated beyond all doubt that you understand neither statistics, nor risk prioritization, nor how to either make or understand reasoned arguments.
Goodbye.
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What am I missing here?
That was the accepted condition after the bombs. A single condition of minor impact. The key is what conditions would Japan have required if the bombs were not used? It seems quite possible that there would have been additional conditions. If those conditions were not acceptable, the war would most likely have continued. It seems to be believed that a full invasion of Japan would have been unnecessary for acceptable terms of surrender. Many estimates indicate that far more casualties of all types (Allied, Japan Military, Japan Civilian) would have occurred in those battles. I do not know if this truly would have been the case. If it would have, then the use of the bombs may have been the best decision. If not, then it may have been a very poor decision. This is one case where hindsight does not appear to be 20/20.
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
Keep in mind that at the time, the general Japanese population was convinced that the allies were out to rape, pillage, and torture every last civilian they came across. There are Japanese people who, upon hearing that the Americans were coming, killed their own mothers, and sisters and grandfathers in order to spare them the expected atrocity. They were brainwashed by their government's propaganda to resist to the last man. It would not have been a pleasant invasion.
...because "hacker" sounds way sexier than "code drone."
None of things will kill us off as a race.
Utter and total BS. Readup on it some - and not in lefty "10,000 reasons the USA is Satan" books either. It was a near thing for them surrendering even after 2 nukes. We were killing all their civilians and cities anyway with conventional firebombing. The ONLY thing the A-bomb did was make it easier. General LeMay would have burned every single building and person anyplace in Japan with conventional weapons sooner or latter. Also read up on what exactly the Japanese were up to. Read "Flyboys" for one . The Japanese ATE some POWs. Yes - you read that correctly - they fucking ATE some of our captured men. They also killed MORE people with SWORDS than we did with A-bombs. Given all they did, they are astoundingly lucky we didn;t nuke the home islands from one end to the other.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
When I was getting my degree at Harvey Mudd College, they managed to get us the opportunity to have lunch with distinguished Physicist Freeman Dyson. Someone asked Dyson a question about blowing up asteroids with nuclear weapons at the session. My recollection of the response was that he said he thought it was a bad idea that would make shrapnel and magnify the problem. Dyson told us that the best solution he could think of was to build a ship to go to the asteroid and then assemble a "mass driver". The mass driver would be a piece of equipment that broke off pieces of the asteroid and hurled them at right angles to the trajectory in an appropriate direction in order to divert the orbit. While Dyson is only one man, I suspect that his opinion on the matter might incorporate more finesse that a bunch of weapons engineers.
We don't have an energy crisis at all. There is plenty of energy.
There *IS* a problem with the most popular source of energy (fossil fuels) producing atmospheric CO2, and thus effecting the climate.
But humanity is in no danger of running out of energy any time soon! Fossil fuels will continue to last for a while, and after that there is enough fissionable material to last until the next millenia. That is ignoring solar, wind, geothermal, and in the far far future off-planet mining.
Now you've changed your tune!
First you asked whether it was "right" and concluded that it "was acceptable". Now you say it was "reprehensible". But nevertheless, you would still "in good conscience" make the same "reprehensible" decision, for reasons which were "actually" "reprehensible", though justified with "good excuses". I can't even fathom the moral confusion in your argument.
Regarding the value to the Americans of using the bomb on civilians (vs just demonstrating it), I think you are correct that the main benefit of using it was to show not only that they had it, but that were "morally" prepared to use it, and would not e.g. quail at the prospect of committing genocide with it. In other words, the value of the bombings lay precisely in demonstrating that America's new military strength was not trammelled by moral considerations. In other words, an act of terror, an ideological act, a demonstration not so much of the bomb itself, but of the brutality of the American state. Modern historians will say it was the opening gambit of the Cold War with the USSR, and the germ of the later MAD stalemate.
The "targeting of military infrastructure" you mentioned (by contrasting with OBL) is a misdirection. It's clear that the a-bombings were actually for other strategic ends ("terror" is what we'd call it today, if we weren't so imbued with respect for "our" great military leaders of the past), and the actual tactical value of the destruction of the 2 cities was nil. Hence the contrast with OBL's terror (which you allege was not targeted at the military - incidentally ignoring the attack on the Pentagon) is invalid.
Your statements regarding "the State" are also misdirection. What does it matter, morally, if OBL was not an elected president? Does wearing a uniform, or sitting in an oval office, make otherwise reprehensible acts praiseworthy? It seems so?
The USSR had spies at Trinity - they knew within days that the plutonium device worked. They already had known the uranium device would work, it's dead simple - and that's why the first test of it was on Hiroshima.
The latest Slashdot meme.
Your odds of being killed by an asteroid are much less than by lightning, because it is so much less likely to happen. Just because something kills lots of people when it extremely rarely happens doesn't mean it's more likely to happen.
No, but it's more likely to happen to you. If car accidents that kill 10 people happen with the exact same frequency as car accidents that kill 1 person, you are 8x more likely to be killed in the former than the latter.
An interesting combination of Ad Hominem and a straw man.
I said the justification that was in the minds of those using the bomb was reprehensible. Not the decision itself. Is that so hard to grasp? They made the right choice, for the wrong reason.
Your next points disregard the rules of war glibly. Your philosophy would cause more civilian death than a thousand of the men who undertook Hiroshima. You do not understand the nature of war.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
Not so much technology but mathematics. Yes, we defiantly have the math to calculate the orbit. My cell phone can figure out the exact azimuth and elevation of the sun and moon using only my coordinates and the date and time. Celestial mechanics are very well understood.
If we knock the asteroid off our orbital plane, and then knock it away from the sun slightly on its periapsis we can even knock it right out of earth's orbit completely. (periapsis being the shortest poles of an elliptical orbit)
Besides, we can let it hit us, or we can knock it away and it might come close to hitting us again... we have better chances with the second option.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
It's probably not clear from the submission or perhaps even the article, but the same effect is being described in both.
When a nuclear reaction occurs, energy is released primarily in two ways:
1.) Kinetic/thermal energy carried away the reaction products and free neutrons and electrons.
2.) Radiation (mostly x-rays and gamma rays) emitted directly or by secondary effects like Bremsstrahlung (collisions of particles from method 1).
If there's a lot of extra matter around, like an atmosphere, it absorbs most of this energy, thereby converting it to more conventional effects like a shock wave, and UV/infrared/visible light.
However, in space there's little to absorb and re-emit the radiation or collide with and be displaced by the moving matter, so a far greater amount of the nuclear energy is carried away as radiation. As you said, this heats and vaporizes a thin layer of the surface. The vaporized material flies away, giving an equal and opposite impulse to the bulk of the asteroid. A minor drawback is that most of the energy is wasted, since the radiation is emitted 360 degrees around the warhead.
A similar concept would have a super-powerful laser vaporize small amounts of surface material gradually. This has an advantage of being aimable to get some steering benefit but would require much more forewarning.
I thought it interesting that they proposed six smaller warheads instead of one big one (a 10 MT bomb is not out of the question), but that not only allows them to use existing warheads, but also to have some extra control. I could see them parking the warheads in a safe position a few thousand miles from the asteroid and sending them in one at a time. After each blast, you determine the effect on its orbit, then detonate the next one at an optimized angle and distance to account for uncertainties in the position of the last warhead and the composition and density of the asteroid.
I hope he who decides about such calamities does not think loss of life is okay as long as we're not the ones who killed them. We should do whatever produces the least deaths, even if it means killing people ourselves.
It also means we should accept a few deaths of ourselves if preventing it would mean killing millions of others. Some of the actions for the "war on terror" are killing many more people than they save.
Ive seen the CBC documentary, its pretty good.
I wouldnt call them "Well aware" of the capabilities of atomic weapons though, both the Manhattan project AND the Japanese project were all conducted under the strictest of secrecy, almost NO ONE really knew the capabilities of the weapons, even the pilots that dropped the bombs were in shock, and if the documentaries have it at all correct, it would appear that the Japanese navy were completely running the show for their own project on their own with very little interaction from the government or the other services, so its not unreasonable that the civillian government (the ones that actually made the decision to surrender eventually, not the military) had no idea at all of the power of these weapons. Ive actually read reports that Tokyo was under the impression it was a natural disaster (earthquake or somesuch) for almost a day and a half afterwards.
Well, This is my idea.
Your idea has been addressed else where, but I will point out the obvious problems.
Your plan needs 3 bombs (between 4 and 6 if you want to do more than one strike and you are lucky), and they only had 2, with the next one some time away. Every week of delay cost lives (Japanese, American, Chinese etc., and soon Russian).
Your plan demonstrates an unwillingness to use the bomb, precisely the opposite of what you want to do.
You plan alerts Japan to the existence of the bomb. At this stage in the war Japan was not intercepting small bomber groups to conserve fuel. You make it obvious you have the bomb, then they would have started intercepting again.
Any human being whose reaction to the death of a quarter of a million people isn't sheer horror is a monster. However, that doesn't make the alternatives better.
lol. OK, I reply on the same topic on which the parent got a +5 insightful, and get modded offtopic.
Must have been an Obamasama lover. Too bad your guy will never be President.
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
Every physicist knew with 100% certainty that the "gun" design would work, it did not need to be tested. The only design no one was sure that they could make work was the implosion method, this is why the trinity test took place. Dropping the bombs was not a test of the gun design, everyone knew it would work, nor was it a test of the implosion design, that had already been tested.
People for Eating Tasty Aliens.
There are 11 types of people, those who know unary and those who don't.
I stand corrected. While the sum of the casualties since WWII wouldn't have run out the stock pile of purple hearts of 1945 manufacture, the design was changed and new ones are manufactured. Those new design purple hearts are what are currently being awarded.
I wasn't aware of the new design, so I guess it's my turn to sit corrected.
Without the 2nd Amendment, the others are just suggestions.
Presuming you're correct -- which for me is a big presumption -- a variant of the plan could be performed with only two bombs. (1) Demo first, with threat to hit some unspecified city; (2) Hit the city only if surrender is not forthcoming.
Because it's a rough and tough world and you've got to show you're tougher and nastier than anyone else on the planet -- but this isn't working so well for the Bush regime is it? There's something to be said for keeping the moral high ground.
But this is just a verbal fig-leaf from you: you believe in being rough and tough and showing how nasty you are don't you?
Correct: it's all a matter of second-guessing on my part, and in any case, no one can play the counter-factual game with any certainty. Still, it's interesting that even at the time, a lot of people on the inside had their reservations, didn't they?
It may take more than one device to either deflect or destroy the object. Although there are no explosives of the yield of Ivy Mike (10.4 Mt) in the present stockpile, consider the crater that was formed by reason of just sitting there. There may be required a cluster of five to ten devices on one side of the body. Detonation should occur when the group of charges would be on the antisunward (night) side for maximum deflection (~90 degrees) towards the Sun. The intention is that the Sun would capture the fragment(s) and/or eject them from the solar system in hyperbolic orbits. Perhaps what may be needed is a Deep Impact delivery system with Tsar Bomba equipped impactors (mother of all bunker busters). I know many here would groan at the mention of this http://www.space1999.net/~moonbase99/collision.htm / but it was my inspiration to write this (This episode featured an array of lay-down charges to destroy an oncoming asteroid).
Submission as evidence constitutes plaintiff and/or prosecutorial misconduct.
I didn't say it was compounded like interest. I said it was like compound interest. They are both expressed in ratios, fractions or percents and accumulate over time. Those similarities are enough for a fair simile. In your post you say that extinction of the human race is probable:
But then you go on to suggest we have more pressing needs. While I would disagree with "Probable" for values of probability less than .999999, let's avoid splitting hairs on this point. What is it about the probable demise of all human life that leads you to the supposition that its prevention is not a matter for current study? Will the discovery of a solution to this problem prevent the cure for cancer, prolong the quest to end hunger, cause balding in kittens? What? An untimely asteroid can solve all of those problems by making them moot. Yes there are other worthy goals to pursue but there are also many people to pursue them.
Help stamp out iliturcy.