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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.
>> Many experts believe that a nuclear attack on U.S. soil is more likely than ever
No, that's just the vendor speaking. Time to Google something called the "Cold War" I think...
I'm guessing that anyone who surprises us with a nuclear detonation, or more probably a radiological attack like a dirty bomb, is going to *tell us that they did it*, because you don't just set off nuclear bombs or dirty bombs and run away and go "tee hee".
It's not like someone had to figure out who flew the planes into the WTC towers, right?
Let's save it for Monday.
this seems ripe for abuse given our shadow government's propensity for false flag operations and manufacturing smoking guns (ie, OMG, WMDs!) to implicate our enemy of the moment.
I'm just sayin'
They will bring back the wildly successful and hearlded "duck and cover" campaign.
Now the US government can retaliate against the wrong country with more precision than ever before!!!
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Announcing how you will detect something is a good way of educating your enemy as to the best ways to avoid detection.
Should for some reason such a bomb go a-boom somewhere, I am pretty sure the lengthy and costly analysis will return that it was the nuisance country du jour that was a pest and annoying like all hell, but stubbornly refused to give us a good enough reason to bomb them.
Until that kaboom, of course.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Autonomous vehicles turned into car bombs...Guy with a home wet lab and a lot of savvy creates a serious disease and releases it, someone poisons an an entire metro areas water system....
These things are several orders of magnitude easier, more damaging, and likely than a nuke. I'm not worried about those things, so how am I going to find the time and motivation to be worried about rogue nukes? Anything can happen, but I can also stub my toe.
It is important because it has the word "Oculus" in it.
It will no doubt be a zero cost operation to do all that crap. The simpler solution is to not be there when the US figures out where you were.
...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)
North Korea yapping about it's nuclear capabilities.
Iran is let off it's leash pending good behavior.
Putin's Russia making lots of noise.
So-called 'islamic state' assholes doing every violent thing they can think of -- why not a nuclear attack of some sort?
Then here comes these jackasses, spreading more fear, uncertainty, and doubt, by talking about the 'inevitability' of a nuclear attack on U.S. soil, and their alleged ability to detect who did it (as if that would fucking matter all that much at that point). If they were in front of me right now, I'd fucking punch them in the mouth.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
Just the way you support your scum bag government which bombs civilians at will round the world and destabilises legitimate governments. Which makes *you* a legitimate target.
Iran did it. Duh.
:T:R:A:N:S:
But there are far too many people who would regard such a nuke as a wonderful achievement; Iran, North Korea, IS and Al Qaeda being the obvious candidates, whilst elements within China, Russia and the revolutionary left in Latin America aren't inconceivable. Remember that on 10th September 2001 noone conceived of 9/11 as a possibility. Put the bomb in a large container ship coming somewhere where the bomb definitely didn't start - Lagos springs to mind - and it would offer no routing information. I'd bet it will happen in the next 20 years.
nuclear fuel is traceable to origin, even after used in fission bomb. we'd even know what location inside of which reactor the stuff came from. (fun fact, 70% or more of the nuclear fuel of a fission bomb just gets sprayed over an area without fissioning)
there would be hell to pay for the perp country
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.
It depends on what your goals are. The goal of a dirty bomb denotation is not likely large-scale destruction -- it would be terror. Detonate even a small one in Times Square and watch how much disruption it will cause. Actual number of casualties are almost irrelevant. Look at how much the deaths of 3000 people on 9/11 did -- it's not the body count that terrorists are often after, but the repercussions that follow the feeling of insecurity.
The US is reasonably well guarded. Certainly, it's enough to stop any serious physical weapon from getting through.
I cannot fathom how a post with this in it got modded "+5 Insightful." A kiloton weapon could be smuggled into the U.S. in a heavy backpack. You could move that in through a port. ABC News moved depleted uranium in back in 2002 and 2003. Congress passed laws requiring 100% scanning by 2012, then 2014... it's not here, and it's doubtful it would happen anytime soon.
Or you could drive it across the border from Canada. Cars are rarely inspected in detail. Hell, if you're a random septuagenarian nun, you could even wander into a U.S. nuclear weapons or depleted uranium facility restricted area in this country itself without a huge amount of trouble. Our own security within the U.S. to protect nuclear material is pretty abysmal -- and our ability to screen for a smallish nuclear weapon entering the U.S. by land or sea is nearly non-existent.
I have no clue how you equate this with a statement like "The US is reasonably well guarded" against nuclear devices. Could you easily smuggle in an ICBM? No. Duh. But you could easily smuggle in something that would incinerate many blocks of a major city. And again, terrorism isn't about the magnitude of the event, but the feeling of insecurity it creates.
Sorry -- small correction: of course, I meant weapons-grade uranium storage in facilities when talking about the nuns. And at least two of the people in the group were in their 80s, not just their 70s....
Yes, everybody knew after 9/11 (or maybe even before) who the perpetrators were. The question was where. During the Cold War, it was easy enough to locate the targets of retaliation. Just stick a pin in your red-colored globe. Now, what would we do? Bomb every country in the Middle East except Israel and Turkey? Bomb maybe even India because they have a large Muslim population there? North Korea is probably an exception to the confusion. At least we know where to send the postcard.
it got modded insightful because it is. your old fart wandering into storage facility couldn't leave with anything, even if armed with a handgun.
kiloton weapon in back pack.....nope, you're not going to beat the U.S. government's best efforts of a 51 lbs. device that only had 0.015 kiloton yield (about five times the explosion at Oklahoma City bombing...whoop de fucking doo someone get the mop)
We leave huge dirty bombs next to our cities ready to be used. http://fortune.com/2016/03/08/...
...zero. There is absolutely no possibility of such an attack, on US soil or anywhere else.
There's this little thing called "statistics" you're completely ignoring. The probability is extremely low, but calling it "zero" is simply wrong. When I buy a lottery ticket, do you also call the chances of me winning "zero"? My house burning down is also probably pretty low-probability, but any sane person has insurance just the same. When you simply dismiss any chance outright, you destroy your own credibility. And if you're wrong, it's not like you will be held responsible. It's pretty easy to be dismissive when it's not your problem in the first place.
Also, I'm not sure where your faith in our impenetrable borders comes from. For fuck's sake, we have illegals from Central America pouring into the US all the time across our southern border. You seriously believe we'd actually detect a suitcase nuke coming across? Highly improbably, of course. Impossible, not at all.
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.
It makes me wonder a bit that you got modded +5 interesting with this little gem in there. WTF? Since when did Slashdot collectively believe in "booga-booga" witchcraft? And you're talking about rationality?
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Nice job nitpicking without actually addressing my major points. My point about the nuns wasn't that they could have easily gotten away with something themselves, but a well-armed and trained team could get disturbingly close to weapons grade uranium without anyone really paying much attention... but that's all beside the point. You offered nothing to critique my primary point about GP, which is that we don't have adequate security to prevent entrance of a dirty bomb or even a small better nuclear device. The kiloton backpack was based on a nuclear expert quote in a news story I read some time ago... after researching after your post, I agree that sounds inaccurate. But you could certainly put a kiloton weapon in a space roughly the size of a backpack or a little larger, and it would only weigh a few hundred pounds, so it could easily be transported into the US without notice in a car or shipping container as I discussed. And a backpack bomb with even a 15-ton yield would probably result in a significant death toll in an urban center... but again the point is the perception and fear that will ensue, not whether 100 or 1000 or 10000 or 100000 are killed.
Indeed. I think GP was just a troll here. I can't figure out how all of this wacko uninformed nonsense otherwise comes together in a single post. Just goes to show that low ID number still gets treated differently, though.
15 ton yield bomb isn't going to be made by amateurs, that's HARD feat. Initiator system, properly machined shaped charges, ditto for neutron reflector, synced detonation electronics. Resources of a government or large corporation to build or buy. Stealing one might be possible if a government destabilized, say in Pakistan. That's the one scenario I'll grant.
The nuns spray painted an extremely well fortified building that can't be shot open, or blasted open, by anything a team of no-goodniks could carry. If intruder gets inside I'll change my tune. Then your hypothetical no-goodniks are going to stuff their pockets with the 110 lbs. or more of HEU and waltz away to build the bomb I mentioned in paragraph one?....as if.
Fear from terrorist use of a nuke? would be totally overshadowed by lust for revenge and execution of a kind of Final Solution that would go on for more than a generation. Rage, not Fear would be the main emotion after that. Horrible genocide. Huge divot in the muslim population curve of planet earth.
A nuclear attack isn't about destroying a city; it wouldn't take very much to, say, make it so a financial district or a couple of buildings would be unlivable for a few years. It would also wreak havoc on the local, and possibly global, economy.
Would it be hard? It depends. There are plenty of soft targets. I mean, just look what an e-coli outbreak can do.
In the US you'd be sucking wind to get the iodine, "might be used in drug manufacture". (Hypochlorite bleach is still available)
All terrorists would be hunted down and killed. Any nation that make the slightest attempt to protected them would be severely punished. This action would go on for decades. And you can forget about privacy.
Nuclear strike in america. First thought ... strike back!
Sounds like a good idea, let's start global thermonuclear war!
When it happens it will be a device below a safe house that had been placed there for years and nobody will be able to figure out who it was.
The resources of a government that subsequently collapses, can't pay its scientists and soldiers, has its country break up into uncountable fiefdoms which are pretty good scores in Scrabble, and by the time it even realises there's a problem has no idea where half of its boomy-bangy shit is?
Lucky that'll never happen, eh?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I suggest you go back and re-read my original post in this thread. You seem to want to argue about things I didn't even talk about instead of what I actually said.
The original post in this thread (which I replied to) made two main arguments: (1) a dirty bomb would be stupid and a detonation of one would have no major effect, (2) the US is sufficiently secure against entrance of a nuclear device.
Neither of these is true. You do not dispute these. So it seems we are in agreement about my actual points.
Instead, you seem to want to debate other nuances. Please note I NEVER said that I thought such an event was likely, nor did I argue that this is something that the US should spend a lot of time worrying about. On the list of stuff I think the US government should be spending money on, preventing random nuclear attacks seems unlikely enough that I don't think it should be high on the list. I was just pointing out that the original post's logic was horribly flawed.
recent news points out the truth that for terrorists there is far more bang for the buck and effort to be had with chemical weapons. No need for exotic materials or equipment, could get everything at local hardware stores including the reagents.... and hundreds at least (or thousands if enclosed stadium or convention center targeted) can be maimed or killed if for example truck used as delivery container. More fear and emotional impact than plain ol' ordinary bomb too. Seems ISIL agrees with their R&D efforts and recent attacks
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
Acquiring a lot of radioactive material is easy.
Acquiring enough to initiate an uncontrolled fission reaction is hard. Initiating it on demand is properly difficult.
I could build a dirty bomb. Shit, I could self-fund one. I couldn't get remotely fucking close to a fission bomb, let alone a fusion one.
Chemical and biological agents are plausible, certainly, I could see such an attack being planned.
However, I stand by my claim that psychological attacks are cheaper, easier and almost impossible to cure. False news, conspiracy theories, destabilizing whispers, SWATting - there's nothing you can do to stop them from any of this and you know yourself that such rumours can last 50 years plus. No risks, no possibility of being identified, just the same old PsyOps the US has authorized against them turned back on its point of origin.
The two combined would, of course, be much worse. ISIS could DDoS the emergency services, then attack somewhere else. Or ISIS could bring the emergency services to a confined region where exposing many of them to a biological weapon would be easy. Those I could easily see. However, that risks exposure of the culprits. Not that ISIS cares too much about people being caught, but if you want something to be successful, the obvious path is to not send anyone at all. The rumour mill has been adequate for many domestic terrorists for centuries, sooner or later the foreign wannabes like ISIS will figure it out.
If you want to really make a mess of the US economy, pump up the value of gold, wait for the hedgefunds to panic buy into it (because gold never goes up if there isn't an emergency and the computers doing high-speed trading will be programmed to look for that) then dump the gold all at once. It's long been feared as a tactic for economic terrorism, because high speed trading operates in much the same way, it just uses a much lower volume per slice of time and many thousands more slices of time per second than a regular trader can. The only way to secure the system against deliberate crashing is to cap (total volume x frequency) at a sensible level, but stockbrokers and hedge funds would prefer the economy occasionally go belly up. More money to be made, if the prices all drop to well below real worth.
An attack via the markets would find the markets actively cooperating - at least as long as there's money to be made in it.
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)
One in a billion? Sure, sounds low odds.
There are 7 billion people on the planet. That one in a billion is rather more likely all of a sudden.
Low individual probabilities start to add up at a population scale. But do keep talking total shit if it helps your ego.