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Interactive Nukemap Now In 3D
Lasrick writes "The brilliant Alex Wellerstein has an interactive map that shows the effects of a variety of atomic bombs on whatever city in the world you choose (you can designate the yield or choose from a wide variety of pre-programmed yields, like Fatman, Little Boy, or what the Soviets had at time of the Cuban Missile Crisis). Compelling in a scary sort of way. A 3D version is available."
The only way to win is not to play.
1. USA
2. USRR
3. China
4. North Korea
5. UK
6. France
7. India
8. Pakistan
9. Israel
10. NATO nuclear weapons sharing group
Of course the maps weren't as pretty, but this has been done to death.
The danger of nuclear war in minuscule compared to the days when Soviets and Maoists were a threat. Now Russians and Chinese are our business partners.
Detente worked, thanks be to Richard Nixon!
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On Phoenix it was not as bad as I thought it would be.
welcome to 1999?
Christ, it really puts into perspective the rate at which these things have gained destructive power since their inception. The difference between the effects of "Little Boy" and the Tsar Bomba on Hiroshima are...jarring.
This is so outdated; Today's significant threat to US is a 30 years old person hidden in a Moscow airport.
I want to see the geology of the area taken into account as well -- it would affect both surface and airbursts. With amazon, google, and microsoft buying CPU's for everyone on earth in their datacenters, can't we just run the simulations in real time in the cloud every time I blow up seattle in my browser?
wasn't this link passed around to virtually everyone on the internet some 6 months ago..
Sounds like Eric Meyer's HYDESim from 2005.
At the Capital during a state of the union address. Hopefully it takes out K street too. This would cut out so much of the cancer that has infected this country since 9/11.
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Terrain effects are very important. Nagasaki is a practical example.
What he's basically done is take the calculations form the Nuclear Bomb Effects Computer and draw circles on Google Maps. A good first step, but really, not particularly useful.
A decent model would
a) take into account terrain (there are all the databases, and a simple approximation for shadowing isn't all that tough. You don't need to model the shockwave over ground, for instance, but the flash is important for large yield devices.
b) do fallout analysis based on climatological model for winds. Easily available databases (NCAR reanalysis project for instance)
Now Russians and Chinese are our business partners.
So were Germans and Japanese in 1939.
...and the simulation reported a 40% increase in property values inside the blast radius.
I had no idea the sim was that accurate.
(I kid. I kid because I love. 519 represent! )
DG
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My expectations are simpler than all out war. At some point a terrorist group will manage to get their hands on a nuke. The easiest delivery method is cargo container. One day, one of our ports is going to disappear. I hope I'm wrong...
You forgot the Intro
This is a relatively boring app. It's drawing circles on Google Maps based only on estimates of yield, height, and level of destruction. I wanted to see the effects of geography and prevailing weather patterns on the distribution of destruction.
Have a nice time.
My expectations are simpler than all out war. At some point a terrorist group will manage to get their hands on a nuke. The easiest delivery method is cargo container. One day, one of our ports is going to disappear. I hope I'm wrong...
You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.
The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges.
It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I always wanted to know just how dead I was if the local military facilities were nuked during the cold war. Now I know that I would have died in agony.
Seems Oppenheimer studied Sanskrit and that was his own translation into English.
So were Germans and Japanese in 1939.
And some multinationals continued those business relationships between 1939 and 1945, or nominally severed the relationship with their subsidiaries in those countries and then collected the profits after the war.
Big business is only loyal to profits. Flags, ideals, countries, and people are secondary concerns at best.
I am officially gone from
I had heard of nuclear mining and excavation in the Plowshare Program.
Nuclear construction demolition of old buildings?
Considering what a mess governments made of the 20th century, I'm all for letting the evil multinationals have a crack at it.
People still believe a nuclear war is winnable.
Good point,
however, the outrageous audacity of biligerent nuclear-powers willing to conduct false-flag ops in the usa is an issue.
It is exactly the same audacity which shocked me when i first saw the vid where benjamina netanyahu said *dont worry, we run the americans*
youtube.com/watch?v=rRBb6L2eY40
Someone please call 911, tell them the chief negotiator is a wanted war-criminal warrant evader!
It was the multinationals that made a mess in the 19th century. The 20th century was supposed to be a step up from corporate anarchy. It was corporations charted by both Britain and the Netherlands which subjugated almost the entirety of South and Southeast Asia.
The answer isn't to simply shift power around. It's to devolve and extinguish power completely.
Legislative democracy is not a democracy, anymore than a King surrounded, manipulated, and imprisoned by his Court is a monarchy.
It would look like Detroit
Looks like you guys nuked their server.
It was the multinationals that made a mess in the 19th century.
Like England, France, Russia, Germany, Belgium, etc.
The answer isn't to simply shift power around. It's to devolve and extinguish power completely.
Can't be done. Someone will always be stronger, smarter, or have a hold on someone else.
Pakistan. Should an islamic revolution take over the military, I fully expect a bomb to go "missing" only years later to be found exploded on US or European soil. Of course, not by Pakistan, but by some Islamic fuck looking to jihad himself to paradise.
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yes.. soon citizens from all three nations can have the oppressive, paranoid, and freedom leeching state of the soviet union, the thankless slave lifestyle of the average chinese, and the corporate greed of america, I can't wait!
Now Russians and Chinese are our business partners.
So were Germans and Japanese in 1939.
I guess that means that relationships with ideological opponents based on trade don't always work out. Well, Russia that has been reverting back to Soviet style nuclear sub and bomber patrols of NATO countries and the US, with the occasional threat of nuclear attack. China has been rapidly increasing its defense budget, is planning to build multiple aircraft carriers along with a blue water navy, is threatening its neighbors and trying to take land from them. Maybe the US shouldn't draw down its military too much after all. Maybe it should also set aside some extra cash to replace the systems that Snowden has compromised. Where is he now, Russia, isn't it?
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
The only way to win is not to play.
Actually the only way to win is for nobody to play. Even if you don't play yourself the fallout from the idiot playing next door may still get you.
The main fear for nuclear terrorism is not that they build their own bomb, but rather that they get one thru stealing/corruption/or jsut plain buying from the soviet or other state with nuclear weapon. Can you be sure that nuke from ,say , France are as secure as the US one against stealing ? Now repeat the same question with say, Pakistan or India ? That's the real deal. If nuclear terrorism ever happen, it will be that way.
But far more likely before nuclear terrorism will be bio-chemical terrorism which do not need as much facility. VX gas, for example. Or even some changed virus, because some apocalyptic cult want us all dead.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Gee... what does that say about the US as a business partner? ;)
My understanding is you can make a "gun-type" weapon with plutonium. The perfection of the sphere helps to stabilize the explosive lense, but getting a critical mass to go critical is a matter of several variables such as pressure, mass, & temperature, with geometry being only one of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demon_core
(I like how the core used in a nuclear weapon is described by both weight and diameter)
The cat is out of the bag and someone is gonna go "nuclear boy-scout" and breed their own plutonium using a neutron generator. It's only a question of "when?", not "if?"...
a more accurate version of the original Nuclear War game can be done? The original version always seemed to side with Ronny Raygun.
Yeah, it worked for Germany with Russia and Britain in the early 30's.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The bombs are still there, though, and as far as I can tell the only thing between us and another cold war is our collective, international decision to ignore that particular elephant in the room.
The logic of MAD wasn't attached to any ideological disagreement, it was just the consequence of that type of weapon; there's nothing stopping us from returning to it if/when mutual distrust passes some invisible line.
Heck, look up 'chinese secret nuclear tunnels' to see proof that Dr. Strangelove is still alive and well. He's just not getting as much press these days.
At least as probable a scenario would be some fundamentalist with access to nuclear weapons deciding that God wants him to wipe out the godless liberals in NYC.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
The duty of our generation is to avoid war with China. First, we have to make sure the West doesn't start a war; second, if they become the top dogs in terms of GDP, we have to accept that and give up some of our power; third, we have to individually and collectively find a way to maintain a mutually respectful but non-provocative relationship with them. Eg we can't be pushovers but we can't let things get out of hand.
My only real fear is that there are so many flag-waving idiots on both sides, if they get into power at the wrong time we are doomed (dooooooooooooooooomed, to be specific :) )
I dropped one at the base of the Garrison Dam in ND - it said there'd only be 220 fatalities. In reality the destruction of a dam holding back that much water would wipe several cities off the map as the wave + flood took out city after city that was downstream...
Who cares about blast radius estimates? We did that sort of thing when talking about nuclear weapons in 7th grade civics classes. I want something that takes secondary chain-reaction sort of damage into account, such as hitting dams, nuclear power plants, etc.
The answer isn't to simply shift power around. It's to devolve and extinguish power completely.
Can't be done. Someone will always be stronger, smarter, or have a hold on someone else.
The best answer I know is to dilute power. It never goes away but giving a huge number of smaller groups and individuals power makes it less dangerous as no one group or individual has a lot.
A Little Boy design requires an artillery tube and regular explosive. It can be built from a standing start with 1940s technology and is so straightforward the Manhattan Project didn't need to test it.
It's inefficient and unsafe but it works.
As accuracy has improved there's been less pressure to compensate for missing by simply destroying more things.
Just that this time, it's you Americans who are the warmongering expansionist extremist crazy country.
Yep, to us Europeans, you're worse than Russia and China. Combined, even.. I think only North Korea or Pakistan can still beat you. But Pakistan doesn't have a big lead on you, to be frank.
And I'm a European who usually defends the USA by saying that one can't generalize this, since there are a lot of great people in the USA too. But honestly, that's true for Pakistan and North Korea too. It's always the few confident assholes who spoil it for the pathetic rest.
Oh, and we here in Germany try hard to imitate you guys by the way. So the joke's on us, I guess... ;)
And some multinationals continued those business relationships between 1939 and 1945, or nominally severed the relationship with their subsidiaries in those countries and then collected the profits after the war.
And just think, without WW2, Fanta would never have been developed! What kind of a world would that be?
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Hit Israel, Mecca, and the Vatican at the same time. Watch all the Abrahamic nutters wet themselves. Bet none of the books predict that coming.
The difficulty of manufacture all great, unless terrorists steal a nuclear bomb. How much do you trust the security in Pakistan? In Israel? In Ukraine?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
The servers responsible for simulating an attack on Redmond have been slashdotted.
Seriously, folks. Get a grip.
Just that this time, it's you Americans who are the warmongering expansionist extremist crazy country.
And just where have we expanded into?
All we did was help the people of Iraq get back in control from a really crazy dude. Meanwhile in Afghanistan we set back a group that throws acid on little girls for daring to go to school.
But we aren't controlling the governments of either place.
So where is the expansion? There's not even a hint of it.
As to war-mongering, you can thank Obama for that. At least with Bush there was a point to use of force. Obama just likes to use force to show the world how big his metaphorical dick is. Bush would never have been stupid enough to go into Libya for instance, which has totally screwed over a country that was just starting to open itself up. And Bush would not have backed an islamic ruler in Egypt over the will of the people.
The 3d doesn't actually add ANYTHING over a flat map, sadly. :(
"Politicians are interested in people. Not that this is always a virtue. Fleas are interested in dogs." P.J. O'Rourke
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Interesting how we calmly discuss this and applaud the idea. However a school kid who draws a picture of some guns at school is arrested ????
On the contrary, the danger of nuclear war is higher than at most times during Cold War. Nuclear arsenals are rotting away in badly protected bunkers, the danger of proliferation is high, and many more nations than formerly have nuclear weapons.
Moreover, if you were a little bit more conscious of history you'd know that it's more reasonable to say that the conscious of particular officers at nuclear launch sites and of politicians as opposed to MAD worked. The almost complete destruction of the world was about the press of a button away at least 2 times during Cold War.
Efficient, compact nukes are hard but given enough fissile material a simple nuke is trivial. Little Boy was a length of artillery barrel, two interlocking cylinders of uranium and some cordite.
So you think that the Russians and Chinese are going to turn against a Stalinist regime with offshore internment camps, invasive secret service, the largest worldwide population rate in prison and a record of excessive state violence internally and externally, including assassination without due process?
Dude, they might have made progress regarding human rights in the last few decades, but they are not likely to turn against a business partner as large as the U.S. in spite of it becoming fascist.
Assuming that the terrorist group is bulilding the thing yes. What about a simple purchase / theft from a nuclear state?
At least I can fantasize of doing what we all want to do to Washington DC!!!
You are wrong. The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material. The bomb will spread radiation across one or two city blocks and that's about it.
The reason that they will never actually detonate a real nuke is that they are complicated and extremely delicate. The shape of the bomb must be absolutely perfect and the timing of the charge detonations must be accurate to within microseconds, else nothing happens. Getting the shape right is so important that people working on at least one major nuclear programat Los Alamos had to classify all spheres, including oranges.
It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil and no matter what any war-mongering politicians have said, no actual nation-state is stupid enough to do that because it means the end of that country. Not Iran, not North Korea. Not going to happen.
I don't know about that. Most of the problems in shaping it comes down to having the machines to craft and shape the bomb to tight tolerances. We've been able to keep the machines that can make objects and refine materials with such tolerance out of foreign states for the most part. That's what has saved us as much as anything. The math is pretty much out there in the open to a degree. With 3d printing and 3d shaping (lathes/cnc/etc) I don't think we are far from being able to shape any material into any shape. And there are explosives that could certainly be printed and shaped to the nth degree. With some of the new technologies going mainstream and available from all quarters it's going to be downright impossible for us to control those technologies. I think the chances are going to be much higher.
Don't forget the Scientology HQ :D
When you apply this to the city I live in, it becomes very clear what a nuclear blast can do. The numbers ( casualties, wounded, destroyed infrastructure, area affected ) are staggering, for a "common" B-61 charge.
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Depends how you do it, doesn't it? For example, the US has several divisions of power, federalism and the breaking of the national government into legislative, executive, and judicial. And other democracies have similar setups (a common additional division being separation of executive powers to a head of state and administrator).
I see need for more divided power as the size of the group increases. So there's not much need for divided power in a small family grouping (though traditional families have two parents), but there is in a nation of millions or larger.
"It will take the resources of a nation-state to blow up a nuke on US soil"
Yes, or a failed nation-state, or a nation-state that can't keep their nuclear weapons secure.
It requires a *lot* of bomb grade material. The hardest part of making a bomb, is bomb grade material by a long shot. Microsecond timing is easy these days, your computer, cell phone and even that AVR has timing that accurate. These days once you have the material there is not much hard about a bomb. So a implosion device is almost certainly what would be used.
If information wants to be free, why does my internet connection cost so much?
Yes. Because when has a country's rulers ever foolishly ensured their own regieme's destruction by helping terrorists attack the USA? Nope, that could never ever happen
Now Russians and Chinese are our business partners.
Hardly. The Chinese and Russians *tolerate* the US only to the extent that money makes it necessary. When money becomes a problem, things get ugly. Especially if it means the demise of your civilization. Then, leaders tend to get desperate. Case in point, DPRK however you've probably forgotten already.
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And just think, without WW2, Fanta would never have been developed! What kind of a world would that be?
And nothing of value was gained. There's your proof - war is evil.
The worst a terrorist is ever going to be able to do is a dirty bomb - basically a bunch of C4 next to the radioactive material.
You ought to read Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears
IMO, the safest way to be for a nation is to have no enemies. Of course, that's not entirely possible, but it's still the safest direction one nation can choose.
The cube root scaling has been known for at least a century. It's in the Blaster's Handbook.
Once you go thermonuclear, it's harder to make a small bomb than a big one. Mike was 10MT, after all.
The big advances in the 50s and 60s (and largely still classified) are in how to design and build small devices that are efficient, where small is 20kT. If you want to breach a dam, for instance, you want something that is soldier portable and in the 1kT range (a SADM, as it happens).
The real advantage of small devices is that the radiation lethal radius is about 2000 ft regardless of size (e.g. even a tiny bomb puts out lethal doses of prompt radiation) because of atmospheric absorption. However, a small device like 1 kT, only makes a crater about 100-200 ft across. A 0.1 kT device is even better: still the 2000 ft lethal radius, but a few hundred feet damage radius. This has significant tactical advantages: kill the people without damaging the infrastructure.
Making such enhanced radiation devices almost always requires the use of boosting (using e.g. Tritium) and thermonuclear (fusion) techniques in general. As they say, any idiot can make a 20kT fission device; making a 1kT fission device or a 20kT fusion device takes real engineering.
Pretty much all of the British empire was ran by companies ( such as the East India company which had the largest private army in history ).
It was the atrocities committed by these companies that caused parliament to bring the colonies under state control.
If you could get isotopically pure Pu-239, which doesn't exist, it would work - but even the tiniest traces of Pu-240 will spoil it. Quoth Wiki: "The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram),[20] raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation."
Long story short, all those extra neutrons make a chain reaction far more likely to occur - so likely that if you use gun assembly, supercriticality is reached long before the two pieces are physically together and they just blow back apart with a negligible yield. Granted, "negligible" in the sense of nuclear weapons means anywhere from a few to a few hundred tons, and there's still an intense load of radiation and fallout, so for terroristic purposes it might suffice...but you aren't building a city-leveling device with Pu and a surplus artillery barrel.
Anyway, breeding it with a neutron tube would be slow, Like building a skyscraper with a set of Craftsmen tools slow. Reactors are the *only* way to synthesize >mg quantities of any transuranic. If you have those resources, a simple (albeit large) implosion system is pretty much trivial.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The US could reduce its war toy budget by 70 percent and still spend more than Russia and China combined. We could reduce it by 80 percent and still be spending far more than the next closest (Russia), to defend less than half the territory. That's only the official budget, plus there's the unconstitutional Black Budget, the alphabet soup of the intel agencies, and the several hundred thousand mercenaries that we pay for.
The reality is that the US is not under threat of invasion from any foreign power, and hasn't been since Canada gained independence from Britain. The Soviets never even bothered to develop an occupation plan for the US, they could barely control the unarmed population of Eastern Europe, not even the most fanatical Kremlin apparatchik had any illusion of being able to successfully invade the US. The only functions of the US military, now or at any period in the last half century, was as an unending source of money for Pentagon contractors and to protect the interests of multinational corporations (none of which are incorporated in the US and very few of which pay any US taxes at all).
Of course since the Pentagon has the home addresses of all the US legislators and unfettered access to snipers I don't foresee the situation changing any time soon.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Oppenheimer's pith, poetic, and prophetic "I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds" makes for a great quotation, but it probably has as much to do with the original text as say, the King James Bible.
Then why hasn't it happened already? Pakistan is already Islamic. They still pay lip service to the USA, and they won't do anything too rash.
(though traditional families have two parents)
Traditional families have no set structure. You could have two parents. You could have one parent cuz mother nature claimed on of them early, or maybe one of them cheated and ran off. You could have parents and grandparents living together. You could have no parents (again, mother nature) and the kids are raised by grandparents or some other relative. The kids could be sold off, or they run off themselves. Or you're one of them slaves and your blood family is ripped from you, and in practice your family are the other slaves who got packed onto the same ship as you. Better yet, you're a rich noble or from a royal family, then your family tree is completely fucked up as it tries to maintain its bloodline or whatever, and you're married off for political convenience, and people pay close attention to how fucked up your heritage is, because that determines your place in line for the throne and/or family fortunes.
"Traditional" family is nothing but a liberal construct to push their various welfare programs to preserve their moral standard on what a family "should" look like. Not too long ago, a "traditional" family would not include homosexuals, but hey, when it turned out their votes mattered, that changed, and anybody who advocates "traditional" marriage better meant to include gays, or they'll be attacked as a racist right-winged bigot (don't ask how race got involved, liberals are not known for their consistently in logic) /rant
Holy shit. Talk about "When men were men"
My jaw is on the floor. If I believed in reincarnation, I would be looking to find his soul having cropped up somewhere in appalchia where he is now chain smoking cigarrets while distilling moonshine and cooking up meth, all in a small room with no ventilation.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Interesting but disturbing.
I'm of the understanding that the military is not in fact Islamic - yet. Essentially we (US Gov) are paying them a lot of money to keep the boat from tipping over. We are basically being blackmailed implicitly insomuch as no official demands being asked of us, just that we know what will happen once the money stops flowing.
Life is not for the lazy.
Gas the jews
it's you Americans who are the warmongering expansionist extremist crazy country.
we here in Germany try hard to imitate you guys by the way.
If you truly believe statement #1, then what level of intelligence does statement #2 indicate?
I think this is a honeypot for would-be terrorists ;)
If you set the kiloton above several 100 megatons it just refuses to run, so inputting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event fails