Slashdot Mirror
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!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
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This is so outdated; Today's significant threat to US is a 30 years old person hidden in a Moscow airport.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?
Actually one reason they went to smaller bombs is because they're more effective. Two 500 Kiloton bombs actually do more damage than one 1 Megaton bomb.
Sounds like Eric Meyer's HYDESim from 2005.
And with separate delivery mechanics, one is likely to come through.
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)
There is a contingency plan for that: The Designated Survivor
This sig is not paradoxical or ironic.
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
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
What's the largest bomb that could be loaded into the elevators at the Washington monument? Send one up to the top and detonate, and it should do good damage to the White House and Congress. Or a smaller one on the steps of Congress in a joint session with presidental address.
Learn to love Alaska
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...
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.
Explosive power dissipates as a function of the cube root of the equivalent mass of explosive.
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
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.
Thus, MIRVs.
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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?
People still believe a nuclear war is winnable.
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.
Life is not for the lazy.
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!
I wonder how the fallout spread.
Rethinking email
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:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Gee... what does that say about the US as a business partner? ;)
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.
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'?
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?
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Don't be naive. All those buildings would be rebuilt, and those positions refilled. We'd end up electing exactly the same kinds of people. The new congress would end up just as corrupted.
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."
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Assuming that the terrorist group is bulilding the thing yes. What about a simple purchase / theft from a nuclear state?
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.
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.
I was going to mode this up, but you lacked a link to the story. I'm curious to know what school and too lazy to google it (well okay, I tried Is this the one you're talking about? It is a little old, but a disgusting story nonetheless.
If a child draws a picture of aliens and says "my daddy went on a trip with them", would they be getting a visit from the DoD? We're losing it ... quickly.
Life is a great ride, the vehicle doesn't matter
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.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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
Yes, sadly, this would have the opposite of the desired effect. People would be scared to run for office, so the only people who would consider running would be people who really wanted to rule—the power-hungry—which is slightly worse than the system we have now.
What is needed is a means of somehow leveling the playing field so that people without lots of money can run for office and stand a chance of winning. The details are left as an exercise for the reader.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
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.
Bertrand Russell said something on the order of (highly paraphrased, and I can't find the original quote), "When you have elections there are two kinds of people who will run; those who are in it for the power, and those who are in it for the money. Under no conditions do you want those type of people in charge. What we need is a system to select people who don't WANT the job."
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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.
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"
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.
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?
If you set the kiloton above several 100 megatons it just refuses to run, so inputting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_event fails