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Coming To a War Near You: Nuclear Powered Drones
An anonymous reader writes "American scientists and engineers are researching a new generation of UAV's that would be nuclear-powered. Why do this? They would have the capacity to stay over a target area for months and only be limited by the ordinance they could drop on a potential foe. They would be similar to a nuclear attack submarine but not limited to the amount of food on-board. The article notes: 'The blueprints for the new drones, which have been developed by Sandia National Laboratories – the U.S. government's principal nuclear research and development agency – and defense contractor Northrop Grumman, were designed to increase flying time "from days to months" while making more power available for operating equipment, according to a project summary published by Sandia,' the paper reported."
I suppose this would provide some disincentive for shooting them down too:
Should I shoot it down and stop myself from getting attacked with an air-to-ground missile, or should I not shoot it down and stop myself from getting a lungful of plutonium dust. Hmmm... choices, choices...
Uhhh, you do realize that slashdot is group moderated by users with excellent karma, right?
And unsurprisingly the Slashdot headline fails to note that the program work has been halted and that it was never approved. Doing a little feasibility research is entirely reasonable for the military. That is, assuming they don't waste too much money on something that has serious downsides -- yeah I know, leap of faith time.
Crazy ideas turn out to be reasonable once in a great while -- we call they breakthroughs.
Awww, did da widdle trolly-wolly get his bum-bum spanked?
Come back when you're potty-trained, threadshitter.
They would ... only be limited by the ordinance they could drop on a potential foe.
Not surprising that it's the United States which comes up with a device to literally drop their laws on unsuspecting nations.
Oh wait, slashdot, you must have meant ordnance.
Trolling is what makes slashdot a worthwhile site. But good trolling isn't just saying offensive or outrageous things to provoke an angry response. That's lame. Good trolling is writing something that seems serious, and yet at the same time somehow flawed. Then, given the nature of the kind of people who read slashdot, you get a bunch of responses from people who want to show their intellectual superiority by pointing out the factual errors, or the ridiculousness of the argument, or whatever the flaw was. You can keep it going for a while by making ignorant counter responses. Eventually the trollees figure out they're being trolled and get disgusted. Everyone else who was just reading along finds it all hilarious and enjoyable.
The United States started work in this field back in the 60s, trying to build cruise missiles that would be able to fly around continuously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
In all other cases where we implement nuclear technology, there's not a huge risk of it falling into enemy hands. So how will they address these concerns for a drone?
I don't believe the decision-makers are concerned about that. They have great security and lots of bunkers they can hide out in to maintain "continuity of government" etc.
For them, that risk is probably viewed as political capital (because it's all just a game and winning is all that counts). That's how sociopaths think. The whole 9/11 thing is wearing thin. Imagine how many pointless foreign wars of aggression you could justify if some enemy with an unpronouncable name who dresses funny had NUCLEAR SECRETS! You'd really be super-ultra unpatriotic to oppose THAT one.
If you're a private military contractor with lots of clout in Washington, then even the worst-case scenario is a goldmine. After all, it's not like it will be you personally or your own sons who go off to some foreign shithole to get shot at by the locals.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
So when these inevitably are downed for some reason (e.g. technical malfunctions, enemy interference, etc), what's to stop the enemy from reverse engineering the technology and gaining "nuclear secrets"?
I wouldn't worry so much about the secrets, but rather the nuclear materials you provide them free of charge for anyone who manages to shoot (or lure) one down.
And the summary completely misses the main point of the story:
The fact that the program has been halted is something that Peter Singer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an expert on drone warfare, suggests may be lost in the attention on the nuclear aspect of the project.
“What people seem to be missing is that the program was not approved. We are not building it!” he told me. “All sorts of ideas are proposed by scientists, and this one was found to involve a technology not yet ready for prime time and which carries some deep concerns about its implications for operations, legal concerns, and fear of accident impact. So it was not approved.”
Apparently the submitter, in typical Anonymous Coward fashion, failed to read past the first paragraph.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I suspect lighter than air technology has less capability for transferring wealth from the poor to the rich and therefore is a non-starter / invalid to the successful continuation of the status quo.
You know, one of the most insidious and diabolical tricks the rulers ever pulled was (through the media they own) to make into a popular notion something so close to the truth of the matter, that the person who accepts it as truth will never see what's actually going on.
Don't let the concern about wealth and wealth envy distract you. It's not about transferring wealth. The people who make things happen already have enough wealth to secure a high standard of living for the next 20 generations of their descendants. They have wealth in effectively limitless quantities.
It's about power. It's about transferring more and more power from the masses to the ruling elite. Money is involved only because money is a form of power; it is economic power. Old-style slaves had to be fed and housed; economic slaves will feed and house themselves. That's why it is not just money.
It is also increasingly intrusive government, declining privacy, demonization of things like guns that are also a form of power, demonization of things like drugs that tend to alter conscious enough to make people see things differently and not through the media-defined lenses, attacks on the family and on religion because those demand loyalty to something other than the state, control of the education system so that childhood immaturities extend well into adulthood, conditioned helplessness instead of independence, obsession with group identity and ignorance of individuality, promotion of left/right either-or thinking, unreasonable laws and burdensome tax codes, marginalization of the tiny minority who can see what's wrong with this, etc.
You really, really want to put a population under your thumb, you subject them to a blitz by throwing all of these at them at once. Then you supply them with charismatic, popular, almost Messianic leaders who claim to understand them. They fall for that one every time, as though telling the truth required slick presentation and the great speaking skill to sway the crowds.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Yes! And they could keep the nuclear-powered mothership floating in the ocean instead of the air so that it could hold a lot more cargo and have a larger landing surface.
Great dissertation. Old school idea, though, of Illuminati / Freemasonry / Mormonism.
But to what end? So you have control of everything, to argue hypothetically. Then what? You've established the worldwide government, religious or not, run by elitists, who just happen to still have to drop their drawers to poop, unless they are descendent's of Cuthulu. What is the master plan of the New World Order past conquering everything? If it's the same old bullshit, then they just wasted our collective time.
Or is their plan to implement the Georgia Guide Stones? What is really the master plan? I'd humbly advise the "great ones" who wish to implement the plan of the New World Order that they should pay heed to and meditate upon Puma Punku and what it says if you're open to reading between the lines.
One final morsel for thought: If I were a galactic civilization, I would keep the human race safely contained on the planet like a nasty plague by whatever means necessary, including sending them back to the stone age. Just because of the way we roll...
Seems to me the very best way to avoid doing that is to restrict the military to securing one's own border (and only one's own border) against unprovoked foreign attacks. Then you could also reduce expenditures until we're only 2-3 times more powerful than the second strongest military.
That's also why I would never make it in politics.
Agreed in concept. Today US aircraft fly the world's most advanced air weapons systems against no threat, so it's easy to argue US military power exceeds the needs of the nation. But that factor of 2-3 times is where the question comes in for everyone. The rapid and unexpected growth of the German war machine in the 1940s makes a very strong historical example to support the argument that 2-3 times is not sufficient. The boundary conditions of what worst case scenario to base the analysis on and what contribution from allies to assume makes for solid arguments that would support a very wide range of numbers.
The other side of the story is that the US military's R&D spurs and creates technological innovation in private industry, which adds to global wealth. Military R&D goals are different from market or academic goals, so it often will ask and fund very different research questions from academic and market channels. The research is done by firms that fully intend to make profit-producing products out of the research results, so a small percentage of the technology trickles down into major advances in commercial goods.
It's not the best way to do it, but this is very politically safe funding for basic research. It produces real fruits too. GPS is one, and the most important is probably ARPANET, a legitimate parent of the internet. I would hazard a guess that the work and funding from DARPA accelerated the development of the modern internet by ~10 years. Earlier development of the internet had huge positive implications on the genuine wealth of our world--not just the wealth of the US, and it came directly from military spending.
If the general category "military spending" were cut and we wanted those external benefits to not die with it, the US would need to simultaneously fund politically vulnerable organizations such as NASA and the National Labs to offset for the losses in research. They are very technically effective, but NASA's money could go on the political chopping block at any election cycle and not recover for decades--just where it is now--whereas defense funded research is politically secure.
"demonization of things like guns that are also a form of power"
How so when the NRA is one of the nation's biggest lobbying groups and most of Congress is in their pocket? Soon they will push to allow prisoners to have guns.
Sorry, no. This is patently ridiculous.
Although, perhaps you meant "ex-convicts". I actually think that maybe they should be allowed to have guns. What happened to "you've served your time, now rejoin society as a regular, productive person"? Somewhere along the way we created this label of "ex-con" and used it to take away the rights of people unfortunate enough to land in jail.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)