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Surprise Nuclear Strike? Here's How We'll Figure Out Who Did It (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes: Many experts believe that a nuclear attack on U.S. soil is more likely than ever; a bomb set off in a city street is seen as the most likely scenario. The conceivable need to unmask a perpetrator, and mount an effective response, is propelling the emerging area of post-detonation forensics. Scientists are devising new sensors, manufacturing artificial fallout to hone analytical techniques, and studying how the glass formed in the furnace of an atomic blast would vary depending on the nature of the bomb and the city where it detonated. Discreet Oculus, a sensor array that would collect data during a nuclear attack on a U.S. city, was tested in the first exercise of its kind last summer.
And the real story is... Where is the biannual training on reaching and living to your closes 3 fallout shelters? I happen to grew up in a country where this was a regular drill in school years - know your way to the shelter, know how to don a gasmask properly sealing around your face and how to attach your filter properly, try running with that gas mask on, so you are not that much confused, know how to do a primitive decontamination with iodine, water, and I don't remember what else. Get to know what is where in the shelters, etc.. Those are not everyday things, you push them out of your mind in about a year or so. And no, first responders numbers (declining die to budget cuts in the recent years) are woefully inadequate to direct the panicked masses to the shelters. Or do they plan to deploy FEMA and the national guard right away?
...zero. There is absolutely no possibility of such an attack, on US soil or anywhere else.
A dirty bomb? Those have bugger all effectiveness, except against the emotions of the weak. The amount of radioactive material required to build a dirty bomb that actually did something would exceed the amount needed to build a real bomb. It would be utterly stupid.
By far the most effective weapon is the human imagination. Tell enough people that a dirty bomb, or a biological weapon, has been released, in some location where there is strong mistrust of any kind of official source, and you wouldn't even need a bomb or to go there. The viral nature of the message, the paranoia of the citizens and the psychology of mass hysteria will guarantee that symptoms will be felt. If those people believe firmly enough that they will die, then - as is well known from studies in shamanism - those people will will themselves to die. There needn't be a single thing wrong with any of them, aside from their own credulity.
The US is reasonably well guarded. Certainly, it's enough to stop any serious physical weapon from getting through. A psychological bomb, where the "explosive" is the insanity demonstrated on a daily basis, that you can't stop, you can't trace and you can't respond. There is only one way to stop a psychological bomb and that's to have a rational, sane, well-educated nation. And nobody wants one of those.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There is a catch in all that talk. Fire off enough nukes, no matter where on the planet and the radioactive dust will come back to haunt and mutate your DNA. Russia could nuke itself out of existence and still kill the rest of us over the following decades. First strike, second strike, neither alters the outcome. They stopped above ground nuclear testing for a reason, that they still pretend does not exist, they had managed to raise the background radiation of the entire planet with a corresponding increase in cancers, with just those tests and a couple of mass murdering strikes. So nuclear wars just a big old lie to generate more profits for the military industrial complex. Now the rich and greedy might be safe in the nuclear bunkers but who the fuck wants to live in a self made prison. So if the US nukes Syria and Russia is poisoned by nuclear fall out, is Russia not entitled to counter strike the US. Easiest completely unstoppable WMD guaranteed to take out humanity on the entire planet. Simply tip nuclear material into the nearest active volcano, for it to spew out into the atmosphere from there on in and poison the entire planet, once done, can not be undone.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen