Slashdot Mirror
Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself
kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
In the case of the Travis accident, there was no nuclear disaster precisely because the nuclear core was not loaded. The Air Force was all too aware of the number of B-29's that crashed on or shortly after takeoff and never armed the weapons until they were close to the target area. To call this a "close call" is simply fear mongering to get page hits.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
>> Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
So now we see why the bomb wasn't "armed with its fissile capsule", don't we?
Seriously, sad about the lives lost at the time an all, but to describe this as "almost nuked America" is facetious at best. This being the example chosen to represent the articles contents (and so probably the "best" of the incidents) I see no reason to read any further.
This is no more "nearly nuked" than the making of the movie "Broken Arrow". After all, they had props that looked like nukes in that. What if there's been a mix-up somewhere along the line? OMG! Nearly nuked America again!
kartune85 : Incapable of reason, observation or learning. A kind of dim, drab, flightless parrot.
Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
And maybe that's the reason the fissile material wasn't inserted into the bomb? And in any event I'd be very surprised if the fire caused the explosives to detonate sufficently simoultaneously to actually cause anything more than a fizzle.
This is a non-story and a waste of time.
IANANP, but AFAIK a regular explosion or fire will not set off a nuclear weapon. The trigger explosion has to be carefully controlled, otherwise it'll just blow apart the nuclear material instead of compressing it to supercritical. That's why it's so hard to build a nuke. Crashing with a nuke is at worst going to spread some nuclear material over a small area, in the same way that any other material in the crash would be. No nuclear explosion.
Did they try dropping the B29 from orbit? It's the only way to be sure...
This reminds me of the time the US was almost attacked by giant killer terrorist robots. Luckily, Osama didn't invent and deploy them, otherwise the death toll could have been in the 9 figures.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
If the fission capsule were in there, it most likely would not have gone off. With a implosion bomb (fat man style, as the Mark IV was), all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds). If some goes off first, it just blows the core apart instead of pushing it to supercriticality.That is, if the core weren't scattered in the crash before the fire set off the explosives anyway.
Basically, you would have had a dirty bomb, no more.
Now, a little boy (uranium gun-type) bomb can go off by accidentally more easily, but getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
So none of these times did we almost nuked our self... ,people that will not bother to read, and those that are already full of fear mindless fear. Move on nothing to see here.
The first on in 1950 at Travis the bomb wasn't armed. AKA it had no nuclear material in it.
So there was zero chance that we would get nuked.
The second at Fermi 1. A reactor problem that was contained and couldn't have caused a nuclear explosion as in a bomb going off. It could have been bad but the systems worked.
The third was another un armed bomb.
The forth another reactor problem and again the emergency systems worked and no chance of a bomb like blast.
The last was a when a training tap was played on real systems. Yes air craft where launched and that mistake was never made again but the the safety systems and procedures worked.
What is this a piece of FUD? Good at scaring children
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
It's a good thing that those aliens have ben monitoring our nukes.
In addition nuclear plants cannot cause nuclear explosions so while the US may have come close to contaminating areas there was zero danger of a nuclear explosion in such cases.
I wonder how many other times good risk management and fail-safes prevented a nuclear disaster?
To err is human, to err without planning for eventual mistakes can be criminally negligent homicide.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Or at least one of the top two.
It has nuked itself on quite a number of occasions, often in Nevada. It hasn't done this for a long time now, but it used to.
Scary scary oooh nuclear we're all gonna die! But somehow, against all odds, life on the planet survived the repeated nuking of Nevada. It was a slim chance! How we made it through, god only knows. Good thing luck was on our side.
Captcha: TARGET.
A an accidental detonation from a bomb twice the size dropped on Japan would not result in " immediate death toll" that " may have reached six figures".
In 1950, the population of Fairfield was around 3000. I don't know the size of the air force base, but I don't think it was close to the 6 figure range (today it has 15K military and civilian workers, it may have been higher during the cold war). Suisun City today has a fraction of the population of Fairfield.
Just 3km from the hypocenter of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, most structures withstood the blast and most people that were indoors survived the initial blast.
And that bomb detonated at an altitude of 500m to maximize destruction. An accidental surface detonation in an airplane crash is going to have a much smaller destructive zone, even though the bomb is twice as powerful. So even if that bomb had detonated in the crash, there would be survivors even on the airbase itself.
Even in a 1 megaton blast (50 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) , there's a 75% survival rate just 7.5 miles from the blast.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtblast.html
So even if a a 1 Megaton accidental detonation occurred in the NW corner of the base today, it wouldn't cause an immediate 6 figure death toll.
This, of course, this ignores the long term deaths and illness caused by radiation exposure.
B-52 crash at Thule, Greenland, 1968.
4 hydrogen bombs aboard, contamination of a large area. The secondary of one the 4 bombs were never found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash
He who pays for the thing, controls the thing. The government has just increased its control over how health care gets paid for to over 50%. Yes, it has not yet legislated itself as the single proprietor and employer of doctors, but it legislated itself a strong controlling interest in what will be paid for and how much.
Kudos to using the correct term supercritical instead of critical like they do in the movies.
I was nearly incinerated by Godzilla yesterday! I remember it well. The only thing that saved me is that there was no fire and Godzilla wasn't actually there!
Man, what a relief that was!
Sorry folks, but "nuking" oneself is not as easy as this article tries to make it sound. If you define "nuking" as meaning setting off a Nuclear explosion rather than just making a radioactive mess of the area. All these accidents would never have resulted in the detonation of a nuclear device. At the very worst, detonating the conventional explosions by ANY method except the devices triggering mechanism would simply scatter radioactive debris for a few hundred yards. It is HARD to create a nuclear explosion. If it was as easy as this author tries to have you believe, Iran would have had the bomb in 1969.....
"Oops"
Are they saying there was no fissile material on board at all? Then it's just a plane crash. Even if the material was on board, the bomb was not armed. I don't know what's involved in arming a nuke. Perhaps something has to be inserted into it, and it's physicly impossible to have critical mass without that something.
Of course we should still be careful with this stuff, but this seems just a bit sensationalist... oh... it's Slashdot.
Anyway, interesting bit. I guess this is why it's called Travis AFB now.
So the safety features worked as designed.
Bombs were not armed. The critical igniter capsule which was designed to be installed just prior to attack was not in the bombs, as per design and regulations, yet you are handing out Darwin awards?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Seriously, this is one of the most significant mischaracterizations I've ever seen on slashdot.
The US spends over $1 trillion on defense. More than the rest of the world combined. It needs to be reduced by a large percentage.
So now we don't have to be afraid of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons anymore. Hell, we should even give them to them!
The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures."
This is like calling gun movies where actors fire off blanks "Five times hollywood firms almost massacred their staff." As a demonstration that gun movies should not be allowed to be made.
If the US was not handling things properly and carefully, there would be no concept of Arming the weapon. Everything would simply be always armed.
This concept of 'arming' and 'disarming' is a special protection measure designed to prevent accidental activation, and the measure did exactly what it's supposed to do.
Show me a case where a plane crashed with an armed weapon over friendly or neutral area, and i'll agree with you, maybe.
Hell... show me a case where a plane flew over friendly airspace with a nuke armed, and i'll agree with you about incompetence.
This article shows neither.
Nuke the whales!
Pretty much all this shows is that, at least when it comes to nukes, the safety systems are pretty good. Almost nuking yourself means something like "The bomb was going to detonate, but a technician was able to defuse it in time." Not "A bomb was in a perfectly safe condition when the airplane it was on crashed and the bomb did not go off."
Even the NORAD incident. It wasn't a case of one lone guy staving off a nuclear strike while his superiors yelled for launch (as happened in the Soviet Union). It looked like an attack was happening, so things went to high alert. Everyone was ready. What did they do? They WAITED FOR CONFIRMATION. When it turned out that it was a false alarm, they stood down. That is precisely how things should happen. They didn't ignore ti and go "Eh, probably just a bug," but they didn't go full out WW3 for no reason. On the warning, everything got ready to go, but confirmation was needed. For that matter, even had there been confirmation an order would still have been needed.
To me, looks like the US has pretty damn good nuclear safeguards. If the best "almosts" they can find were things when nothing even came close to actually going wrong that is good.
Hell look on the civilian side, at Three Mile Island. The "Worst nuclear disaster in US history." Even with a rather major screwup making the problem so much worse, something the NRC discovered, it still didn't release any significant amount of radiation, not enough to cause any adverse health effects (and it has been studied for decades now). That's pretty fucking good, if the worst it gets is a case of "Nobody got hurt."
here's another could shoulda woulda: http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/
More of Slashdot jumping the shark and further emphasizing how irrelevant this site has become.
Because we all know, that....
wait for it.....
In Soviet Russia, Nukes drop on you!
After reading the article, all I can do is wish for better luck, next time...
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures." Says it all. Fail. Technologically illiterate dreck bereft of so much as a wisp of credibility to anyone even passingly familiar with the field. Shame.
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Nukes have to be detonated in a precise fashion or they don't reach critical, no mushroom cloud, just a normal explosion with radioactive debris, aka dirty explosion.
Hollywood likes to show terrorist making nukes and using normal blasting caps to set it off, trouble is, normal blasting caps have way too much variability in their timing. Of course, Hollywood likes to set off nukes by having them engulfed in fires or shot by pistols. Again, these are situations that may destroy the nuke, but won't cause a nuclear detonation, and in fact, may not cause any detonation at all, even a conventional one. I don't know which explosive is usually used in most nukes, but I do know there are various explosives that are not detonated by fire, C4 being one of those. (We often demil'ed C4 for sticking blobs of it to the berm wall and lighting them. It's amazing what you can do with a burning silly putty like substance.)
No, I'm someone who designs or builds nukes, but I have had military training in special weapons and have read a lot of the scientific articles about them at that time out of curiosity about what I was working on. Yes, they are devastating weapons and very dangerous tools, but like so many things that Hollywood has sensationalized, the public perception of how they work and what their dangers are tend to be completely fictional. Just one more note on this, you can't detect a nuke with a Geiger counter unless the shielding over it's core has been compromised, or the device has been detonated. (Of course, if it's been detonated, you can't bloody miss it.)
Have fun with your fiction, but remember that in reality no revolver on the planet shoots 22 shots without reloading outside of the movies.
America just "stopped worrying and learned to love the bomb"...
At first I thought this would cover issues like the one caught on film by Genesis back in 1986. The video clearly shows Reagan getting confused and pressing the "Nuke" button by mistake when he meant to press the "Nurse" call button. That incident threatened the USSR, not the US though. Maybe Clinton nearly did the same thing when he was wanting some "Nookie" though.
Jeeze. It's bad enough to have ridiculous politics, but at least be classy about it.
The only reason he didn't die is that there weren't any bullets around.
So, now slashdot needs to add a filter for pathetic troll stories submitted by kdawson too? What, he's not happy with just approving pathetic troll stories anymore?
Ah, the "investigative" "reporting" from morons type post.
A while back, I planned to stop reading Slashdot, but it obviously didn't "take". Now it's time to remove the link from my bookmark bar.
Anyone with an updated list of alternatives?
Anger issues. You have them.
Try to regulate your physician into seeing patients if he doesn't get paid.
Good luck with that.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
You are not pushing the people's anti-nuke agenda! More fear mongering! More misinformation! MORE MORE MORE!
"It nearly turned the Earth into another Sun!" has a much NICER ring to it!
Now conform or your opinions are invalid! ;-)
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Bringing this up as "technically possible" makes this article automatically idiotic.
Ever heard of this one? My father in law told me about it.
A Nuclear Incident "Worse Than Three Mile Island"
The wikipedia version.
And this one is fairly close to where I live (though thankfully not WHEN I lived here. Which is now. And not then).
Please don't humanize the morons around me. It makes me very uncomfortable.
I don't even want to know all the times we almost nuked ourselves ON PURPOSE...
Mod me down, I shall become more off-topic than you could possibly imagine.
Let me explain the situation to you. People paid into Medicare their entire working career and now the Democrats have decided to cut Medicare benefits to pay for something new and shiny. If I make you buy a hamburger for $50 you'd be upset. If I hand the burger to someone else after you paid me you'd be furious. Why is that so hard to understand?
That isn't flamebait. here, let me show you how to do flamebait, from the master.
Every fucking faggot involved in ANY level of politics needs to be dragged out into the street and shot, Rethuglican, Libtard, or Dimcrap, from the lowest levels of the citizenry all the way to the top level of our government and MOST DEFINITELY every lobbyist. The fact that these groups of people want to force everyone else to conform to THEIR whims for only their PERSONAL (and usually religious-based) benefit demonstrates that these people are untrustworthy, dangerous, and likely to be unfaithful to their oaths of office, not to mention totally unfaithful to their beliefs which often interfere with their personal desires. Look at the voting records and look at the lobbyists if you need any further proof.
I hope enough people get up the nerve to start a civil war, because we sorely need one. And I hope the first person that dies is you, Mr. AC, because you're too cowardly to be visible and stand up for what you believe.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
kdawson, you dumbass. You need to learn about a subject before you start making stupid comments.
Here, let me enlighten your stupid ass. A nuclear device will not cause a nuclear explosion unless it is armed. It can cause a conventional explosion but it can not cause a nuclear explosion.
Now, please shut the fuck up about shit you know nothing about, you pathetic shithead.
Learn to spell, asswipe. Or, learn to spell "asswipe." Either one.
Your "or" is ambiguous. Did you mean one or the other or even both, or did you mean either one or the other but not both?
The grammar nazi profession has fallen on low times when a retired one has to correct an active one.
Infuriate left and right
Where we actually may have nuked ourselves.
Perhaps the powers that be learned from their mistakes...
I worked there for five years. It's the only job I've had that had a yearly body count.
One of the comments on the article points out a Romanian mathematician named Bernard Bereanu, who "figured out in the 70s that the cold war and the nuclear standoff is doomed sooner or later to produce such incidents, pretty much bringing inadvertently the two superpowers on the verge of extinction through a series of mistakes."
I suppose it would be appropriate to add nuclear mistake to the list of other other incidents, such as asteroid impact and volcanic eruption, which could potentially result in an extinction event on this planet. While the probability of a single incident resulting in a world-wide catastrophe may be small, over time the probability of such a catastrophe occurring approaches 1.
Okay, let's use this thought experiment: suppose there are 100 parallel universes that split off just after the first nuke was created. Suppose 75% of these earths had accidents that started WW3 which killed most humans (up to 2010). If you are a random human chosen from among these 100 worlds, most likely you'd be living in the 25% that didn't have a WW3 mishap. Thus, as an observer, your observational position is biased by those earths that "got lucky". There may not be 100 such earths, but it would still affect the probability of observing near misses.
In other words, our very existence as individuals pondering the probability is biased by having nothing significant gone wrong (so far). If there was a mistake that killed 90% of us, then most likely you and me would not be around discussing how good the government's safeguards are.
Table-ized A.I.
TMI was good initial design and sheer good luck overcoming later complacency, stupidity and cost cutting. The control systems wouldn't have been found acceptable in a fertilizer plant (I'm not making that up, they did not meet that standard). It was the best possible nuclear accident to have since it woke everyone up out of their complacency while nobody actually got hurt, and it marked when civilian nuclear power started to come back under adult supervision. After that a lot of plants were upgraded and some that in hindsight were a lot more dangerous than Chenobyl were shut down forever.
The lesson is to take dangerous things seriously and to have people with a clue keeping an eye on them - not "Hell dawg, we done OK eben when dose eggsheads sayd we can't".
A lot of defense theory is based on ancient proven tech. When a paradigm shift happens every preconceived notion falls flat. A hacker can bring a standing army to it's knees just by modifying immunization data. Break into a vaccination center change some ATCG into a delayed time bomb. And when they vaccinate their own army with a tainted cure for smallpox they all wind up with something really unpleasant several years down the road. Until we develop a protein folding system with an understanding of all major variables in the human body we shouldn't deploy such a weapon until we can defend against it.
Ideally, going to the doctor would be something you pay for out of your own pocket.
Everyone clamors for national health care; most everyone in the US drives a car and must have car insurance by law, but nobody is clamoring for national car insurance. That's because there's actually competition in car insurance. And that's because car insurance doesn't cover when I run out of gas or hit a nail with my tire, it covers things like when someone runs into the side of me in an intersection.
Likewise, in health care, a terrible illness or accident would be something that insurance would pay for. A routine check up (which would include mammograms for older women, prostate exams for older men) is something that all insurance would provide once or twice a year (not due to regulation, but because competition would force them to, like with car insurance). If I get sick with strep throat and all I need is to see a doctor for 15 minutes to a Biaxin prescription, then I should pay for it myself. If I know I have something simple, I don't need to go to Mayoclinic to have the health care gods look at me. I can go to the doctor that has good reviews online for $20 and get my medicine. For someone genuinely too poor to pay for medicine, we already have something like that for food -- they're called food stamps.
And if I'm in charge of my own money and making my own medical decisions for my own self, I'm not going to go to the doctor that refuses to quote me a price before I go in. I'm going to go to the doctor that has a clear, transparent pricing scheme. Would you give your car to a mechanic that wouldn't tell you how much he was going to charge?
National health insurance may inevitably be necessary in the US. But it won't have been necessary because you can't have privatized health insurance. It will have been necessary because the US government was too incompetent to properly set up a competitive industry for health care. Our car insurance system is running mostly fine, and honestly, a sick car in the US is just as detrimental to your livelihood as being sick, yourself. The deal is that car insurance is very transparent, it covers only what is necessary (i.e., not everything), and you have a choice of where to get your car fixed, by whom, and for how much.
You resoundingly do not have any such choice in medicine, and that is why it is so god damn expensive, mismanaged, and quite frankly, often downright evil (doesn't matter if health insurance company X makes little Suzy die in the emergency room, none of their "customers" are really capable of switching to a different insurance company).
Typical liberal-biased Slashdot. This time catering to the anti-American sentiment shared by the left. It's no more or less shameless than when it's done on CNN.
The only sad thing about it is this is supposed to be news for nerds, where by nerd, "an intelligent person" is implied.
Luckily, judging by the comments, this typical Slashdot Shit was laughed at and dismissed.
Score one for rationality.
US$2,139,150,000.00 is (a bit over) 2 billion, not 2 trillion (using US numbers). In UK numbers, that's 2 milliard. Either way, not 2 trillion.
Oh, and I'd like to see the aforementioned cost estimate (the one with rebuilding everything twice). That's a spectacular claim, especially in view of the figure you bring for California.
" ... "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress ..." ... means a story about how five times the US [population] [area] came close to accidental nuclear disasters. The hanging "s" on "disasters" doesn't really fit, but we've already read the "five times the US" bit and come to our comprehension.
There's a word we sometimes use in English. It's called "the". It helps us understand sentences, used appropriately.
"lo9 has a scary outline of the five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters."
Oh, I see. Five incidents, not five times the US population. The "s" fits now too. Isn't English wonderful?
You haven't been reading io9 much, have you? 'O' in io9 stands for OMGSensationalism!..
They don't do "articles". Those are blog-posts.
It's all about the page hits baby... Journalism and correctness be damned.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
My problem isn't that the logic of the Anthropic Principle is technically invalid. It's that it doesn't really get us anywhere interesting, whereas other explanations often do. Postulating parallel Earths might be interesting, except that it's fundamentally unprovable when they don't interact in any measurable way.
There are much more fruitful lines of reasoning, like how it's actually really hard to make an implosion bomb go off by accident, or how triggering mechanisms simply aren't installed during routine transport for exactly the problems highlighted in TFA.
Not a typewriter
You could have an armed nuclear weapon in your living room and your tv set would be more a danger to you.
E Proelio Veritas.
This isn't even "reporting." I saw where this was going immediately. If a plane carrying a nuke goes off, it WILL NOT explode. They made sure of that because they thought maybe that might happen. When they said "had it been armed" that is complete fantasy. Strict rules say do not arm a nuke above airspace you aren't going to nuke. I'm fairy sure the military, even back then, had to remotely enable the nuke before dropping it so it couldn't be pilot error or a rogue pilot. So since there's 0% chance the weapon would have been armed when the plane crashed, this is a made up non-story.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
Nukes will not go off accidentally. Which should be obvious if there were five opportunities and none of them went off. It's hard to get a nuclear explosion. It will not happen in a fire etc.
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Oops, you are right, thanks for catching that. Poor choice of source there, even as the basic scale is right (since that is apparently for just one year, and they total the whole year at US$16.5 billion) and in my haste I though they were talking about the total costs and the ballpark was close. So, the total is going to be more like 100 time that.
From:
http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
"The amount spent through 1996--$5.5 trillion--was 29 percent of all military spending from 1940 through 1996 ($18.7 trillion)."
I've seen higher figures too (What about clean up costs? What about cancer costs? What about interest on those costs incurred as national debt? What about lots of other hidden costs? Etc.)
So, add another fourteen years on to that $5.5 trillion estimate (which may be low, and not include interest) and you'd probably get, say, seven trillion dollars for the total cost of the US. So, the cost to California, base on being 13% of the population, would then be about $900 billion for the total cost of the weapons program, not including interest on past expenses (or interest paid on military-related debt that was never funded by taxes).
So, US$900 billion is only about approaching half of the two trillion dollar figure I cited. So, I'm still in the ballpark, even as you were right to point out I missed several decimal points by a poor choice of data source which I misinterpreted as total costs, not one years cost -- I guess, luckily, my two mistakes just about cancelled out. :-) But I might have noticed it if the figure was not about what I remembered from other sources.
Glad someone around here is double checking calculations and posting about it. :-) Thanks again. Sorry about the sloppy math.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
According to this it would cost about US$23 trillion to buy all residential real estate: http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=493795
However, that includes land costs, so you may have a US$100K house on a million dollar piece of land. So the rebuilding cost is probably only, guessing, US$10 trillion?
Of course, that is only residential real estate. There is a suggestion there that all commercial real estate comes to around US$3.7 trillion. Again, some of that is probably land, so let's guess $2 trillion to rebuild, or adding the two, about US$12 trillion in costs to rebuild every building we have now.
The total cost listed here as a *minimum* is $5.8 trillion dollars through the mid 1990s: http://www.nti.org/e_research/e3_atomic_audit.html
And as in my other reply, we can probably guess it is around US$7 trillion total now as a minimum. But it may be higher with hidden costs, including interest on the national debt and opportunity costs. What if that money had gone into medical research instead? Or robotics? Or green energy? Or biotech? Or what about all the social energy that has gone into prosesting against nuclear militarism and a MAD policy?
So, certainly, by that estimate, the US nuclear weapons program has cost more or less enough to rebuild everything once. As for rebuilding twice, in that nuclear cost, I'm not sure it includes interest on that money had it been invested. So, it may be a simple addition of all the costs, not any consideration of what it means to spend money way back then as far as returns on investment. Also, when I read that, it was probably twenty years ago, so the ratio may have been different.
Certainly the orders of magnitude are comparable, even if it depends on exact natures of the estimates.
Thanks for questioning this. I hope you look into it more for yourself. :-)
Obviously, then there is the cost of the roadways, industrial infrastructure, and contents of all that. So, the cost of rebuilding absolutely everything in the USA might be more. But, it is still ironic that the "insurance" against losing everything in the USA to the "communists" has been ... about the cost of everything in the USA. :-)
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
That's important stuff, but I'm looking at the bigger perspective of whether nuclear weapon mishaps have not ended (most) the world because there are plenty of safeguards, or because we are "lucky". The Soviets had their own close-calls. What if a Bush-like prez was in Kennedy's shoes at the Cuban Missile Crisis? We've had a lot of very close calls and feel "lucky" to be here, but are we really lucky, or is there a filtering mechanism affecting our viewpoint? The 100 earth example is not meant to imply there are parallel universes, but to test our probability models.
Table-ized A.I.
I think it's interesting that the bomb dropped on Mars Bluff, SC in 1958 didn't make the list. It was flown out of Savannah, GA too. I guess 1958 was the year that Savannah almost got it twice!
Well I read his blog and there is absolutely no reference to any medical studies. I find his opinions of "the Davis-Besse situation", the Price-Anderson Act and Yucca Mountain lack any real depth to be taken seriously. He says "Nuclear pioneer Alvin Weinberg, long-time director of Oak Ridge National Lab, repeatedly characterized nuclear technology as a "Faustian Bargain," urge[d] me to continue using the term, in order to spur nuclear workers to maintain the extraordinary level of technical excellence" he refuses, I feel illustrates his unwillingness to see the Nuclear Industry progress.
Basically the guy looses all credibility here. So rather than refute any of the statements in his blog, that can be found on slashdot on any other day, everything and I do mean everything in his blog I have already analysed and refuted before - just go search through my previous posts.
On a final note I will leave you with the words of a man whom we co-incidentally greatly admire. One whom I would characterise as the greatest Responsible Nuclear Advocate to have lived Four Star Admiral Hyman G. Rickover who directed the original development of naval nuclear propulsion and controlled its operations for three decades sums up this entire discussion;
"I do not believe that nuclear power is worth it if it creates radiation. Then you might ask me why do I have nuclear powered ships. That is a necessary evil. I would sink them all. I am not proud of the part I played in it. I did it because it was necessary for the safety of this country. That's why I am such a great exponent of stopping this whole nonsense of war. Unfortunately limits - attempts to limit war have always failed. The lesson of history is when a war starts every nation will ultimately use whatever weapon it has available." Further remarking: "Every time you produce radiation, you produce something that has a certain half-life, in some cases for billions of years. I think the human race is going to wreck itself, and it is important that we get control of this horrible force and try to eliminate it." (Economics of Defense Policy: Hearing before the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 97th Cong., 2nd sess., Pt. 1 (1982))
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
that demonstrated that low-dose radiation is actually beneficial, acting like a vaccination to reduce cancer rates and extend lifespan of nuclear workers and atomic bomb survivors.
Basically the guy looses all credibility here.
Well, maybe you can help me. I'm having serious difficulty finding any serious refutation of in-depth studies of radiation hormesis (which you claim makes someone lose all credibility). Maybe if you're so experienced in debating these issue, you could provide me with such a refutation to Bernard L. Cohen's paper published in Health Physics from 1995 titled "Test of the linear-no threshold theory of radiation carcinogenesis for inhaled radon decay products."
Here is a link to the original paper: http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/~blc/LNT-1995.PDF
A tl;dr version of it was described here.
Certainly. Thanks for the paper, I look forward to absorbing it.
Well first of all, and most obviously, Rockwell draws a long bow to compare "acting like a vaccination to reduce cancer rates and extend lifespan of nuclear workers and atomic bomb survivors" presumably to the paper which you link. Radon is one of the comparably benign radionuclides and a nuclear worker is likely to encounter that and more yet the paper (presumably - as that is the title) only speaks to radon and it's daughter products whose half lifes fall *within* a human life span.
However there is plenty of work surrounding ingested low-energy emitters, in particular Tritium which a nuclear worker is as likely to encounter.
Tritium is biologically mutagenic *because* it's a low energy emitter, like radon. This characteristic makes readily absorbed by surrounding cells. The available evidence from studies conducted journal a list of effects if you are looking for similar studies as refutation. From those works;
Tritium can be inhaled, ingested, or absorbed through skin. Eating food containing radionuclides 3H can be even more damaging than drinking 3H bound in water. Consequently, an estimated radiation dose based only on ingestion of tritiated water may underestimate the health effects if the person has also consumed food contaminated with tritium. (Komatsu)
Studies indicate that lower doses of tritium can cause more cell death (Dobson, 1976), mutations (Ito) and chromosome damage (Hori) per dose than higher tritium doses. Tritium can impart damage which is two or more times greater per dose than either x-rays or gamma rays.
(Straume) (Dobson, 1976) There is no evidence of a threshold for damage from 3H exposure; even the smallest amount of tritium can have negative health impacts. (Dobson, 1974) Organically bound tritium (tritium bound in animal or plant tissue) can stay in the body for 10 years or more.
It's often said "of all the elements in nuclear waste tritium is one of the more harmless ones" and while it's more benign than most other radioactive effluents it's toxicity should not be under-estimated.
Tritium can cause mutations, tumors and cell death. (Rytomaa) Tritiated water is associated with significantly decreased weight of brain and genital tract organs in mice (Torok) and can cause irreversible loss of female germ cells in both mice and monkeys even at low concentrations. (Dobson, 1979) (Laskey) Tritium from tritiated water can become incorporated into DNA, the molecular basis of heredity for living organisms. DNA is especially sensitive to radiation. (Hori) A cell's exposure to tritium bound in DNA can be even more toxic than its exposure to tritium in water. (Straume)(Carr)
First, as an isotope of hydrogen (the cell's most ubiquitous element), tritium can be incorporated into essentially all portions of the living machinery; and it is not innocuous -- deaths have occurred in industry from occupational overexposure. R. Lowry Dobson, MD, PhD. (1979)
Perhaps you can find that in the paper Histopathologic findings of lung cancer in Navajo men: relationship to U mining and you can read Lung Cancer after Exposure to Radon Daughters and for materials and circumstance background you can read
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
Heh, that was one poor estimate. 300M people in the US. Say 1 house for every 4 and each house costs $200K. That's $15T in house values. That doesn't include commercial, industrial, or government buildings. You say $2B for CA. If CA were an average state (ha), that would be $100B for the country- 2 orders of magnitude off from an estimate of house values for the country let alone twice the value of every building...