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Oldest Weapons-grade Plutonium Found In Dump
Urchin writes "Researchers have just identified the first batch of weapons-grade plutonium ever made. The batch was produced as part of the Manhattan Project, but predates Trinity — the first nuclear weapon test — by seven months. It was unearthed in a waste pit at Hanford, Washington, inside a beaten up old safe."
Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
At the cost of hundreds of thousands of civilian Japanese lives.
Do you have any idea of the kind of balls it took to be a part of this team? Under intense time pressure to work with previously theoretical isotopes that just might save tens of thousands of American lives?
And you judge them? You, with the heat on, comfortable, probably overly fed.
What. A. Putz. You. Are.
Nuclear isotopes were treated with quite a degree of reckleness for a good many years. Also I don't think they were any more heroic then anyone else who assisted with the war effort, although unlike many they were establishing for themselves quite a lucrative career. The men working in coal mines to supply energy to head up the war effort we far more heroic then a bunch of scientists getting paid handsome salarys to do what they like to do anyways, ground breaking science.
peace for the enemy maybe, How long has US spent in the time since then NOT at war?
>peace for the enemy maybe, How long has US spent in the time since then NOT at war?
With all due respect, there has been nothing to compare with WWII. All states of War are not equal.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
No, minor skirmishes don't count. Even with the most pessimistic of calculations about civilian deaths in Iraq there have been about as many traffic fatalities in the US since the conflict began as there have been deaths there. I'm not saying conflict isn't horrible and bloody and messy, I'm just saying that most people alive today have no real concept of what war is.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
And yet the first time a team of engineers tried to build one, it worked. They didn't even have a supercomputer to do simulations on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
They're also highly ineffective. Very little fallout can be spread through conventional means. And of the fallout that does spread, you'll kill very few people. The explosion intended to disperse the materials is guaranteed to kill more people than the radioactive fallout.
As a terror weapon, it works. The people who do not understand the difference vastly outnumber the ones who do.
BOMB? Radiation!?! SERIOUS PANIC
Will it actually rack up a large body count? No. But the resulting panic (OMG terrorist Radiation!!) would be far, far worse than anything we've yet seen.