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WWII Allies Tested Tidal Wave Bomb
Bent Udder writes "According to todays' Independent, the US, Britain and New Zealand worked on plans for a bomb that could cause tsunamis during the latter part of the Second World War.
The war ended before the device be put to use, but an Australian professor tested several small versions of the bombs in New Zealand in 1944.
Weird, non? " I have visions of "Deep Impact" running thru my head right now.
Java is the true weapon of mass destruction.
I'm guessing this might happen, since "saltwater incursion" is considered a Bad Thing by farmers in Florida (where it happens for nonmilitary reasons).
Indeed, especially as Tsunamis would have almost no effect on a ship hanging off the continental shelf - they only rise up as they get close to the coast and will only be about 1-2 feet high off the coast.
If you're into H-bombs and tidal waves, check out a book called, "Ice Fire", by Judith Reeves-Stevens (fiction). I can't vouch for the physics of the "Soliton Wave", but I did like the book. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/067101403X/ qid=938441587/sr=1-2/002-5996529-0920040
Would have been VERY useful at places like Iwo Jima and Okinawa where the first several waves of Marines took something on the order of 90% casualties.
This is not a new revelation. In the seventies the US tested the use of hydrogen bombs trigger massive earthquakes. The idea was to plant these hidious devices right under continental plates with nuclear submarines.
you took the words right out of my mouth.
> Jet engine, the first intercontinental ballistic missile
Makes you wonder what would have happened if D-Day had been delayed by six months or so. They could have destroyed the Allied forces before they even crossed the channel.
p.s. wasnt the Jet engine a british invention(pre war), albeit in the typical british fashion the MOD didn`t see the worth in it?
>how hard is it for people to spell "tidal" right?
:)
Perhaps a busty woman walked past as he was typing the tit.le
During WWII, I don't think any justification was necessary. The US and Britain did drop massive numbers of incendiary bombs to cause widespread fires in major Japanese cities. Those attacks did far more damage and killed far more people than the two nuclear bombs.
Yes, the Jet Engine was invented by Frank Whittle (later Sir Frank)some time before the war, and the MOD saw no use for it. Doh! The war might have been over sooner had we had jet-powered fighters and bombers... Mind you, the British would have been the first to break the sound barrier had some non-flying bowler-hat wearing civil servant not said "No no, that will never work" and cancelled the programme.
The navy has always been and still is "We'll have you executed if you tell" secretive about the top speed and maximum diving depths of its big nuclear submarines.
There are several ways that large tsunami can be generated. The most well known and productive (meaning overall size/power of the tsunami) is by earthquake, but land slides also cause them. The tsunami produced are generally much smaller, but can still be extremely dangerous. I think some of the largest tsunami on record were actually caused by massive landslides on the Pacific side of Alaska. Tsunami generation is really kind of wierd, the shock waves can diffract one way and you get a gentle wave half a foot taller than a wind borne "standard" wave, if the power is diffracted a different way you get a 200 foot tall wall of death. Even if these devices couldn't cause apocalyptic tsunami, they could be VERY focused and centered where the military wanted them. Think of it like comparing a tornado versus a hurricane (they would be much closer in scale, but the analogy holds...). Often hurricanes fizzle out in the open ocean or hit at low tide in fairly unpopulated areas and cause no real problems. An F5 tornado in downtown Dallas on the other hand (or OKC like earlier this year...) would cause MASSIVE damage.
Almost..it's to clear the way for their cheese-based processors...
Could the tidal wave energy be an economically viable power source?
I could have sworn we signed a treaty with the Russia a few years ago about NOT using weather weapons on each other. I don't remember where I read that. And for those of you who are interrested in weather weapons, go get this book - Angels Don't Play This HAARP : Jeane Manning & Dr. Nick Begich : Earthpulse Press
The nuclear tests in the Pacific would completely roll over nearby ships like they were toys, but-- I think the energy behind a true tsunami or eathbquake is much greater than this. If you set off a nuclear device under the water near something, you'd totally swamp it, but it wouldn't travel hundreds of miles like a true tsunami. Think about the energy needed to move half the California Coast a couple of inches-- (i.e. a large earthquake, like that which could produce tsunami) It is orders of magnitude above what a nuke delivers (of course, it delivers the energy differently)
Sigh-the Scud. beautiful knockoff weapon-a v2 in cyrillic. still has about the same chances of hitting its target too(about 1:24 as i recall...)
Yes, it is a nice pic. The reason for the bouncing was that an approach from downstream (the logical way to hit a target like a dam) was heavily defended and the Germans had nets in the water to stop torpedos. The bouncing bomb would skip over the net and sink against the dam, then go off.
>Germany had lost the air war in 1942-1943
Try telling that to all the brits that died at the hands of V1 and V2 rockets, we may have had air supremacy but that didn't stop most of the rockets from getting through.
I dont know when the first V1 was launched but if it was after D-Day then a 6 month delay or a year as you suggested could make a huge difference to the outcome of the war. Though I guess we would have nuked them at the same time as we did Japan
in a Beowulph cluster baby
Well, here in Texas the Army classified a bat cave as top secret and tried to train bats to carry little bitty incindiary bombs. The idea was to release the bats at night over Japanese cities, where they would roost in the wooden buildings, then later the little bombs would go off and set the buildings on fire. There were problems with this, and it was abandoned.
During WWI the both sides in the war caused avilanches to kill each other. Over 200,000 were killed this way.
Presumably the idea behind this was to have the damage of a nuclear weapon without the radiation (unless you are a fish or a French frogman), but the idea is badly flawed. An tsunami generated by the nuclear detonation would radiate in all directions, so only a fraction of the energy reaches your intended target, and there are too many variables to make it reliable. The neutron bomb solves these problems, except for the fallout (political and radioactive.) Nuclear weapons are so "closed source" - "open source" solutions like the UN and the international community are much more likely to succeed in the long run, once everyone contributes and people don't think they can cheat with impunity. UN IPO here we come...
Okay, let's pull the bus over to the side of the road here and get a few things striaghtened out: Problem 1: The ME262(the only really usable german fighter to be produced) wasn't produced until late 1944 as i recall ,in small quantities and had a huge appetite for high octane jet fuel. Problem 2: Germany had lost the air war in 1942-1943. They lost almost any effective command of the air (even over germany proper) by early 1944. At the latest. and 3 Have you ever seen pictures of germany after the war? Anywhere there was a suspeced factory got entirely pulvarized within a week or so. That was one reason that the beloved panzers mentioned soemwhere above never got produced in large numbers - The factories kept getting bombed, and the workforce(constantly shrinking) kept getting killed. Same goes for the plane builders. Also ,the ME262 wasn't exactly cheap or easy to build. It required relatively complex fabrication facilities(for the time) and took a long time to produce. The underlying point:Extend d-day by 6 months and all you have is d-day coming six months later(actually more like a year later-December in northern France is a damned lousy time to try to launch a seaborne invasion.)
There are many fault lines everywhere, but not necessarily all are known. They are both big and small.
Second, you seem to believe that nuclear reactors can have a supercritical explosion. Here you are wrong as well.
By the way, are you one of the people who came to Vancouver, B.C. in the mid-1970's to march across the Lion's Gate bridge to protest nuclear testing in the Aleutian islands because it was going to "cause the earth to split in two?".
Misinformation is a great enemy to progress.
Very good! You should write for segfault!
Sorry for posting as an AC, but... The idea of a tidal bomb was discussed in the USSR back in mid-seventies and early eighties. However the strategic concept was rather different form one in the newspaper article. The stroke was (of course!) targeting the US and meant its total physical distruction. The plan was to plant a network of nuclear explosive in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Something like nukes burried under concrete block were mentioned. After their simultanious explosion, a tidal wave would have been generated that can reach kilometers high as approaching the American coast. Two waves (from the East and from the West) were expected to meet each other somewhere in the middle of the continent. Also a similar counterattack from the U.S. against the USSR territory would not be feasable just simply due to USSR geographical location (only the Far East, Kamchatka and some areas in the North can be affected). Having some background in earth sciences I would strongly doubt if this idea is realizable, at least it would have become the main burden for the weak USSR economy for decades. Also all this I've heard from a person who worked for KGB, so it can be just a hoax. However, I know for sure that USSR Academy of Science had a very wide research on solitons that are used to model tidal waves (tsunami).
We could get the fish to jump right into the boat!
Hmm, doesn't like long subject lines, eh?
n ks.html
Anyhow, why worry about explosive devices, we're already (and have been) damaging Cetacean communication systems with huge sonar stuff...
In spring 1998, Navy sonar testing on the breeding grounds of the humpback whales off the kona coast of Hawaii.
The US Navy began a few years ago to secure approval for using low frequency active sonar (LFAS) in 80% of the world's oceans at decibels and frequencies that will ultimately be classified and thus hidden from your awareness, yet so powerful they could potentially kill all marine life and the ocean itself.
Although the 180 decibels the Navy claims in their DEIS that they will not exceed in their quest to flood hundreds of square miles of ocean for post cold-war submarine detection, this amount is still dramatically more intense than the 160-decibels known to harm human divers or the 140-decibels known to cause whales to change their course and calves to be abandoned.
And remember, decibels are measured in orders of magnititude, not linearally.
Blah, blah, blah, nobody cares.
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Sure, on a small scale, this is fine (for a torpedo). What we are talking about here is a wave whose breadth would be measured in miles... The problem with using a nuke is that most of its energy is expended in the form of Electromagnetic Energy (ie light, heat) and a very small percentage of it is converted to Kinetic Energy. It would take dozens of nukes in one spot and dozens more arrayed in a line to come to anything close to what we would call a Tsunami. And this would still be a fairly local phenomenon. The depth of the charge would be critical. Too deep and too much energy is lost to the resistance of the water, to shallow and you burn off most of what you wanted to paush out. Same with distance from shore... Further = bigger explosion... who is gonna let someone detonate many nukes off their shores? Impractical weapon... Aurora.
If you set off a big enough nuke, of course you will cause a tsunami. Said tsunami will then travel in all directions. I would imagine from what seems to be said here, that they were trying to focus the effect of several (relatively) small charges in a particular direction.
If it had been successful, it would have been interesting to see how one could justify such a weapon as being other than indiscriminate and anti-civilian, which I believe the Geneva Conventions hold strong views about.
1. The Germans did the same thing to London during the Blitz.
2. It was just the Americans bombing Japan.
3. The Brits and Americans firebombed Germany too (Hamburg, Dresden).
While the firestorms in the Japanese cities did more damage and killed as many people as the atomic bombs in WW2, it took hundreds of planes every night for 2-3 days. The atomic bomb takes one plane.
When did Germany launch an ICBM? If you are talking about the V2...it was an SRBM - like a SCUD or Lance missile.
Yes they did. Becuase the British did the work for them in the Med.
On November 12,1940, British torpedo bombers launched an attack on the Taranto harbor in Italy. It was studied by the Japanese and many of the same ideas were used against Pearl Harbor.
Yeah, but would it pick up a bus and throw it back down?
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
This sounds like pyrkrete (sp) which was a mixture of ice and wood pulp. It was resistant to melting, very cheap to produce, extremely sturdy and floated in water. IIRC a few prototype ships were made out of the stuff and worked just great. It's still probably not a half-bad idea.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
Wax up those surfboards, d00d!
And you thought the "Point Break" wave was impressive...
Various ramblings
A cylindrical bomb, rotatating on its axis, that's designed to fracture a dam. See "The Dam Busters."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
The paint schemes weren't silly; you just don't understand their true intent, which was to make visual ID and target ranging more difficult. The zebra pattern, when viewed from afar, was supposedly harder to focus on from periscopes and (optical) fire-control directors.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
the PS is correct. Frank Whittle had had the idea up to a static-thrust-test proof of con
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
(sorry for not proofreading)The PS is correct. Frank Whittle had had the idea up to a static-thrust-test proof of concept, but the MOD considered the jet relatively unreliable (arguable) and a fuel hog (undeniable). V-1 buzz bombs and the advent of Luftwaffe rocket- and jet-propelled manned aircraft made these detractions less important.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
The kamizake onslaughts against outlying destroyers on "picket duty" on the edges of carrier task forces grew so horrendous that some DD crews supposedly made giant signs out of bedsheets reading "CARRIERS THIS WAY."
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Well, did you ever hear about the top-secret WWII antisubmarine-warfare program to teach seagulls to defecate on periscopes? And I bet you think I'm making this one up.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Picture ships rolling through the water like logs.
Supposedly the USS Constellation, an Essex-class CV (carrier) about eight hundred feet long, can be seen blown skyward in one piece in one bit of footage of the Bikini test.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
At the risk of pissing off any WW II Pacific vets on Slashdot, the Japanese really pulled off a beautiful number on Pearl Harbor. Worse luck for them.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Ummm, I guess if you're in the Navy at all, you're a skimmer, not a bubblehead. The real deal is that the US Navy will not publish nor admit to submarine speeds in excess of 30 knots or depths in excess of 200 feet. IOW, say what you wish; the US Navy is free to disavow anything you say, and they've got the last word on the subject. Now, unofficially, how does 45+ knots (just sprints, not sustained) and twelve hundred feet grab you?
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Even in WWI, the U-boats had really bitchin' scopes courtesy of Zeiss. But without any effective passive sonar, ELINT, or spotter aircraft, the boats had a hard time attacking submerged from any respectable range. And so they didn't. They made most of their kills surfaced and at night. Submarines then were torpedo boats that had the added feature of submerging for a few hours; they weren't at all like submarines as we understand them now.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
In fact, a tornado-producing storm front rolling across a Kansas plain has megatons of energy to it, too -- again, distributed entirely differently over time and space. Relative to Momma Nature, a nuke ain't a fart in a whirlwind.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
We're all thinking "tsunami" like it's some monster cresting wave dozens or hundreds of meters high. But to devastate a port area, the event doesn't have to be more than the kind of storm surge usually associated with a typhoon. Force a measly five meters of seawater into Long Beach or Charleston, and you have a multi-billion-dollar mess -- a "mission kill" instead of a "hard kill."
Obviously there's the water damage you'd get when everything gets flooded for a mile or two inland, but the worst aspect of storm surges is the way the water current pushes and pulls at things. Imagine a dockside crane getting pulled right off the pier.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Also, by late 1941 the IJN was waaaaay ahead of the USN PacFlt in quality and quality, particularly in naval air warfare. We were just plumb lucky the carriers were out to sea. We were even luckier at Midway.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
I'd like to see some documentation to the effect that anybody was worried beforehand about the ethical considerations of A-bombing Japan at the time. By Hiroshima, we'd been at war with Japan for three and a half years. The Pearl Harbor revenge factor was still a prime motivator, as was, to a provable degree, basic ethnic hatred. (Ever see some of those wartime propaganda cartoons shown to motivate US troops? In case not, the Japanese are portrayed as grinning, sadistic little bucktoothed, bandy-legged yellow devils in thick glasses.) Nobody had yet seen what a nuke would do to Japanese cities and Japanese flesh, so no haunting involved. We hadn't shown the least compunction about firebombing Osaka, certainly.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Well, not necessarily 'coastal' areas (I didn't realize the implication of salt water), but with some ingenuity there are some rather large rivers, estuaries, lakes, and other freshwater bodies of water in which this may be of practical use?
Now, couldn't there be some positive applications for this technology? How about a device that can counter a tsunami or a potential tsunami?
Or maybe a wavemaker device to help flood coastal farming areas that require it or whatnot? We have something here that can move a lot of water, why not put it to practical use?
Remember Wing Commander, anybody?
hehe..... destroying the planet wasn't the way I thought that game would end though.
Without the use of such a devastating weapon, the world at large would not know the true consequences of a nuclear war.
Had the nuclear arms race occurred before the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon, I doubt humanity would have survived the ensuing nuclear firefight.
This is why I would've chosen to use the bomb directly, rather than try to induce a tidal wave... even if we could induce a tidal wave.
The world was on a precipice at that time, and few people outside the scientific community really understood the magnitude of the problems we would face with this new technology prior to the example set in these bombings.
I'm surprised no one has thought of this before...
all you would need is a series of not so large explosives set to go off right as the concussion wave of the first explosion goes past them, adding to the force of the wave, add to it as many explosives as you want until you have a wave of the force you want....you just need to find out the spacing and timing that would work best...and that's just some math...
this has all the local distruction of a nuclear device, but none of the global nuclear problems fallout problems, and you're only safe if you are a sizable distance inland.
the threat of some terrorist group with scuba gear trying to do this is frightenning.
I post links to stuff here
Well using a nuke in a war is a very political decision - it'll make you hated all over the world. Not to mention it would certainly escalate almost every conflict. It'd work if you have any kind of nuclear war at your hands already, but then you could just drop the nuke on the target in the first place. In other situations, nukes are a big no-no.
Besides, there's nothing like fallout and mutated seamonsters to screw up your day.
The main point behind those tidal wave bombs probably would have been to clear beaches and coasts. Remember, they were still planning to invade Japan until they found a "better" solution, and those tidal wave bombs probably would've made setting up a beachhead much easier.
I seriously doubt that governments willing to fire-bomb much of two enemy countries would've been concerned at all for some sort of animal.
How much would underwater nuclear explosions affect whales, anyway?
Reminds me of the very cool introduction paragraph of the Twilight:2000 role playing game. I'm at work so can't type it in, but it was about how the fact that democracies would make the world peaceful because afterall democracies never make war is a lot of crap... Democracies are about the will of the people, and the will of the people is very often FOR war...
That said, I think the only reason why they didn't push the development of tsunami bombs and whatnot is that they found the "ultimate" weapon in the atomic bomb.
As for using these weapons, it'd be a very cold calcuation - I can easily imagine the US or some other country use a nuclear weapon if the spoils of war are great enough.
I have a hard time seeing either working out well. Underwater nukes make a big ol' cloud of radioactive steam, and even the atol tests back in the 50s barely made a wave large enough to wiggle those battleships around... woe unto the coral or anything in a fragile underwater ecosystem. One o' these would put a serious crimp in the lifestyle of your typical lobster.
There's a big difference between the Crossroads shallow explosions and the deeper ones. The shallow ones do indeed create huge amounts of radioactive fallout. It's actually one of the most destructive things one could do to an enemy navy if you could find a large collection of their ships in one place. Most of the Crossroads ships were originally only loaned out for the test. But in the end most of them were found to be complete write offs thanks to the fallout.
However, everything changes when you set off a nuclear device at great depth. You end up with almost no radioactive release in this case. The shock wave created does serious damage to any ships in the area, though.
For a tidal wave, though, you'd probably set the device off either next to or inside the side of an underwater cliff. Current studies suggest that natural tidal waves are caused by underwater landslides. So you'd use the nuke to trigger the land slide. The hard part would be finding a properly aimed cliff....
You've never watched Dam Busters??
It was a bomb designed to take out the Germans' hydroelectric(?) dams. Basically it was a round bomb, dropped from a Lancaster. The bomber would fly towards the damn (at a set height/altitude/whatnot), drop the bomb, the bomb would bounce (hence the name) and hit the dam.
Very effective considering the other option was just to drop bombs and hope they'd hit. Although it was more dangerous, as it required lower level flight etc.
And for those who prefer pictures.
.o..........[air]...............___
....o......o......o.......o....|...|
.......o......o.......o.......*....|
............................/.[dam]|
........[water]............/.......|
key o = bomb
~ = water level
* = impact
. = formatting kluge
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~/.....|
My ascii art sucks, and you can fill in your own plane. And if anyone wishes to correct me, feel free as my memories a tad vague, the jist of it's there though.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Nope. Wouldn't work.
I read this is Saturdays' paper, both the web articles are a bit of a hack job. If only I'd kept the paper. Had a few more details.
--- "If a man speaks in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?"
Actualy, the allies did a lot of research on a lot of odd weapons towards the end of the war. The A-bomb is the most well known, and probably the most 'effecient' of the superweapons, but they researched others such as:
-Special bombers filled with bats, with small timed charges. The theory was to drop the bats of Japanese cities, and the bats would rest in the mostly paper and wood houses when the bombs went off.
-A special bomb to drop on the Mt. Fuji to paint it blue and red, to strike at the moral of the Japanese.
-Another bomb, designed to penitrate Mt. Fuji and cause it to go volcanic.
-A special device that would send out harmonic waves right on the fault lines near Japan, causing a earthquake.
-Japan had its program, such as the human torpedoe, which would be filled with explosives, and ridden into ships by underwater kamakazi pilots.
-Germany had its own superweapon programs. For example, a sound cannon that was actualy produced, that would be so loud and at such a pitch that it would kill enemy soldiers.
-An 'OS' that would crash all the time and be the mon...er, wait, thats today. Sorry.
...but I'm thinking that maybe an atomic/thermo could so such a thing if shaped. Dunno. We have any physics majors in the house?
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I also noticed that it didn't go very far in explaining precisely the destruction that such a device would convey, or even any casualty projections.
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A thermonuclear explosion would just vaporize water. Make a big wave, sure. But not destructive in of itself.
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- How do you trigger a directed wave?
- How do I stop a wave that is going where I don't want one?
and a whole host of others.You see the problem: some bozo general/admiral/whatever triggers a tsunami to wipe out the Japanese and doesn't consider the fact that that same detonation has put the Hawaiian islands in direct danger. Wipes out his target, then two days later his own family gets it too.
D. Keith Higgs
CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Wasn't that the plot of a james bond movie, where some jerk was trying to create a chip shortage by setting off bombs in some fault line in california, breaking open an aquifer, and flooding silicon valley, all to make his chip business more profitable?
---
Play Six Pack Man. I
I don't think it would crimp the lobster's lifestyle at all. You would end up with a 300-foot tall lobster that would ravage Tokyo. Sounds like an improvement from the lobster's point of view.
(Or didn't you watch Godzilla movies?)
Save the whales. Feed the hungry. Free the mallocs.
That large invasion fleet would be the Mongols under the leadership of Kublai Khan. They amassed a HUGE (even by modern day standards) invasion fleet and attacked Japan arround 1260 (I can't remember, sorry). I believe something arround 800 ships... the attack was initally successful, but the Mongol commander decided to bring his troops back on board to make them easier to defend. Turns out the night after he did that a typhoon came by and whiped out most of his fleet. Doh !
--- "Komm liebes Kind, geh mit mir Ein ganz schoenes spiele, spiel ich mit dir" -- Goete
Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens proposed something similar in their thriller "Icefire".
Six nuclear warheads were used by a rouge Chinese faction to collapse the Ross Ice Sheet in Antarctica, and at the same time a high yeild nuke was detonated above the ice sheet, driving it into the Ross Sea at high velocity. The resulting wave was initially 1400 ft high and travelled outward at around 500 mph. The wave threatens to put the entire LA basin under a minimum of 20 feet of water.
Scary...
Although my memory's a bit vague on this, I think I remember reading that Barnes-Wallis (inventor of the bouncing bomb) had a not-dissimilar idea that he eventually abandoned in favour of the bouncing bomb.
More likely he couldn't get the support for it, many of his ideas were never taken up.
couldn't i just explode a nuke in the pacific ocean and do the same thing? (say i had a nuke)
Well it worked in a novel, "Dragon" by Clive Cussler...
I had thought about the possibility of using it against the Imperial Navy's carrier groups
Wouldn't work tsunami have little effect mid ocean, since the energy is distributed through out the depth of the sea. You only get huge waves once they reach shallow water. IIRC there are cases of fishing boats returning to discover the scene on a disater, where the crews never noticed. (Since from their POV it was simply a wave arround 2 metres.)
The optics were good, but they didn't have any image enhancement. That means that they were sharp, but they don't have the sensitivity of a modern scope.
correct analogy would be a flat stone skipping across the water surface...same principle. BTW, in iceland they have 800HP dune racer type vehicles that can drive across water (as long as they run faster than 70mph..if they dont..they sink)...cost $50K each and burn methanol type racing fuel.
1200 feet ? bah. how does this >1800 ft depth sub (http://popularmechanics.com/popmech/sci/9812STMIM .html) grab you ?
There were a number of tests of water-burst nuclear devices. The effect on a fleet of ships was astonishing. (They tested it on captured Japanese war ships after the war). Picture ships rolling through the water like logs.
Presumably that's the level of force that would be required to generate a tsunami - and I know that the USN does posess nuclear mines.
--
Clear, Dark Skies
It wasn't a nuke but conventional bombs that they were using to make the title wave. Although it says in the article that they were going to send him to the Bikini islands to watch the nuclear tests to see if it was praticle to their wave bomb.
This does't seem very suprising to me, alot of weapons and ideas on how to make mass destruction of an enemy that were far sillier then this came out of WW2 and the Cold War. Doesn't even seem that stupid, causing a small one could wipe out a island or clear a beachead.. somthing that cost many many lives when fighting for islands around Japan.
Actually the Japanese did not exactly follow the Geneva convention rules. Thats ok though we werent the ones getting Nuked in the end
Ya like i'd believe me if I was you!
If a nuclear bomb was detonated just below ("below" being a relative term - dependant on the size of the fireball) a ship in the ocean, could the steam resulting from the fireball lower the density of the surrounding water enough to sink a large ship in one fell swoop?
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Yeah, the French quaked Taiwan so their germinating silicon-based chip-producing industry can take over the world market....and stuff...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Yes we did some silly things during WWII.
/first/ general-purpose digital computer.
Like painting our battleships neon pink with zebra stripes (!!) to "psyche-out" the enemy (whuh??).
Or shooting bats with incindiary chemicals attached to them to the Japanese islands, hoping they would set fire to all the wood houses.
The scary thing is, some of our best modern weapons originated from wwii german technology (i have no doubt that we won by an absolute fluke, and that if hitler hadn't invaded russia we'd all be living in a very different world). Jet engine, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, some pretty damn mean tanks, the Z3, the
Trivia from PBS: Both Japanes kamikazes and Nazi stormtroopers were loaded up on methamphetimine.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Well the army seems to be using macs now, so you'd probably be seeing a bomb icon...
--
Don't lead me into temptation... I can find it myself.
(inventor of the bouncing bomb)
OK. I'll bite. What's a bouncing bomb?
However that last point is probably about the only thing that stopped MAD during the Cuban Missile crisis. Paradoxically, having our devastating weapons destroy the planet may be a good thing.
These views are not necessarily the views of the human race
The wave would be directed. It's kind of like Fourier analysis( synthesis ) where you add a series of sinusoids to produce different shapes. In this case, you would want all sinusoids to be at their peek at a single point ( just in front of the ocean shore ). Because the amplitudes of the sinusoids would be decaying over distance, they would only ever be devistating at that one point ( a non-decaying wave would produce periodic peeks all around the world ). In addition to this 1'st order mathematical analysis, you have to consider that the explosions will be directed ( most likely in a line ), thus the compounding effect will only be towards the target. It will not, therefore, produce a radially expanding wave ( as in a point disturbance like a single explosion ). In fact, you should even be able to safely station your ship or sub not too far behind the starting point of the wave.
-Michael
The only problem with your comment about the Missiles is that they were first engineered and designed by Goddard (an american) it was just that the US Forces laughed at his ideas. Something like 90% of the German designs were Goddard's designs. After the war when some of the german scientists were interrogated as to how they came up with the designs, they told the allies to go talk to Goddard. Goddard was also very disturbed when he finally got his hands on a V1 and saw some of his designs being used. Being a true scientist, before the war he was always willing to give info about his rocket designs and it just so happened that the only ones interested were the Germans. In fact I think his basic designs and theories are still in use today and the Saturn V is a modification on a design of his which is why we have the Goddard Space Center
"Have you seen my marbles"
I believe that Japan (and maybe China) both have defenses against moderate sized Tsunamis. I would guess that man made tsunamis wouldn't be large compared to some natural ones, so this makes me ask the question, will this work anymore?
That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
JM
--Justin Mitchell
"2nd Place is a fancy word for losing" --Bender (Futurama)
funny i never heard of such a thing as a tidal bomb before, i wonder what other thinges they keep hidden from us
This message complies with part 15 FCC rules, (CE) Approved
Somehow, I doubt you want to see a Blue Screen of Death on a nuke... "SAFETY.dll caused a General Protection Fault at xxxxxxxx:xx." *clicks OK* "Safety disabled. Beginning countdown sequence."
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
> The US, or its allies, would never use one.
What a joke! I know that's always been the official U.S. propaganda line, that in contrast to the recklessness of foreign totalitarians, the U.S. only has reasonable, peaceful intentions, but still I can scarcely believe that there's anyone who is so credulous as to take that propaganda at face value.
The U.S.A. is the only country in the world to have used a nuclear bomb as a weapon of war. And in 1962 John Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air, over the issue of the Russians basing IRBMs in Cuba the same way the U.S.A. based their IRBMs in Turkey. The hemisphere-destroying nuclear catastrophe was only averted at the last moment thanks to Khrushchev's superior intelligence and sanity.
Don't take my word for it. For documentation, please refer to In Retrospect by Robert Strange McNamara (the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis), and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes.
Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net
The name of the book escapes me, something like "Icefire".
It had an interesting twist on the tactics for actually creating the wave. It involves setting off two or three nukes to shear off a section of the ice shelf around the McMurdo station in antartica, then detonating an airburst nuke to drive the broken piece into the seabed. This would create the concussive force necessary to drive the wave. It was a neat theory, going beyond the usual technotrash research.
I have no idea about the physics behind it, but it did sound fairly logical.
In WWII, even the Allies were willing to flash-fry hundreds of thousands of _people_. I really can't see them being overly concerned about sea life.
Makes you wonder what would have happened if D-Day had been delayed by six months or so. They could have destroyed the Allied forces before they even crossed the channel.
I don't know too much about the weather in the channel, but wouldn't it be tough to invade during winter? Any delay in the invasion would have resulted in the Soviets taking more of Europe. There was nothing Germany could have done to stop that after 1943.
>More likely he couldn't get the support for it, many of his ideas were never taken up.
Sir Barnes Wallis had some very good ideas, and many of them were taken up, including the "minor" invention of the Wellington Bomber, which used a partially geodesic frame to increase strength while minimizing weight.
He was convinced early on that by exploding a bomb underground, the increased compressibility of the earth would result in a far greater shockwave then detonating them willy-nilly.
The Wellington was partially designed to carry these supersonic earthquake-generating bombs, but he couldn't convince the War Ministry that the required 10-ton bomb could be dropped accuratly enough from high enough.
So, he put the idea on hold, and designed a bomb that could be placed at the exact base of a dam, and use the density of the water to help it along (not as good as earth, but better then air).
It's amazing it worked, even though it took up to 6 to destroy one dam, and in the process quite a few crews from 617 Squadron were shot down and killed. The destuction of the dams in the Ruhr Valley cut into the German steel industry for many months, allthough the final effectiveness is argued.
This led to the approval of the 5-ton Tallboy and 10-ton Grand Slam bombs, and the training of 9 and 617 squadrons as "sniper bombers", who were incredibly accurate from 20,000 feet, almost as accurate as a modern day LGB.
The 10 ton bomb would penetrate up to 150 feet underground, and then detonate, causing craters up to 360 feet wide, and they excelled at dropping these in marshalling yards, tunnels, bridges, and even played a part in the destruction of the Tirpitz (a 12,000 pound ton bomb through the bow tends to hurt ships)
As a sidenote, plans were underfoot to ship Tallboy bombs to the Pacific theatre for use in the invasion of Japan, but before they could do it the world found out that the US had their own genius bomb team...
The bomb actually spun backwards so that when it hit the dam it's angular momentum would make it roll down the dam and deep under water, detonating near the base using a pressure sensor.
Nice pic btw
I recall a program on either Discovery Channel or History Channel, perhaps PBS. The piece had a few minutes allocated to the use of explosive devices to create massive waves of water to distort the enemy ships view of impending danger. The danger could come in the form of attacking aircraft, missile, or even an old fashioned pirate style raiding party. The peice mentioned that at one time there were plans to take out whole ships with a similar device, but testing did not yield the desired results. I beleive the program was related to a theme of "smart explosives," the kind that takes down buildings in one big pile.
The demonstration explosion that was shown on the program was very cool. Boom, big wave, wet deck, ship moving back and forth.
Will try to find the link and post later.
LeRoco
Not that I don't trust our government or something, but who out there is positive that research on this has stopped?
It stills sounds like an extremely effective weapon to me. Maybe submarine deployed?
Computers can only simulate determinism. ~Hermetic.
I don't see the point of bombs really, but that's where our money goes. Human nature I guess. What are you gonna do? Turn Amish?
couldn't i just explode a nuke in the pacific ocean and do the same thing? (say i had a nuke)
See the text: "Water Waves Generated by Underwater Explosions" by LeMehaute and Wang (1996) published by World Scientific. During the period 1950-1990 much theretical and experimental work was conducted regarding tactical uses of nukes to inundate harbors and capsize submarines. The theory and capability to predict with reasonable accuracy the effects of near surface and subsurface explosions is well established (and overviewed in the above cited text). The bottom line is that it is rarely practical because the energy transferred into wave motion decreases very rapidly as the wave propagates outward in all directions from the blast center. The exception might be when the bathymetry is such that the wave front is diffracted toward a convergence point. Steve Hughes, PhD Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory Waterways Experiment Station
Exactly two (2) of the ships sunk that morning did not see action during the war, the Arizona, which remains down, and another whose name I don't recall that was floated but used only for artillery practice.
Two major mistakes by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor:
1) You can't sink big ships in shallow water. They're easy to recover.
2) They *grossly* underestimated our reaction. The point was to keep us *out* of the war by smashing our pacific presence. But it's in our nature that we get *really* steamed about being dragged into things. Only very few of the Japanese comprehended what our reaction would be (such as Yakimoto (sp?) and the "I fear we've awakened a sleeping giant).
I have a hard time seeing either working out well. Underwater nukes make a big ol' cloud of radioactive steam, and even the atol tests back in the 50s barely made a wave large enough to wiggle those battleships around... woe unto the coral or anything in a fragile underwater ecosystem. One o' these would put a serious crimp in the lifestyle of your typical lobster.
Hmmm... Maybe these were some of the guys who took Teller's idea to nuke-to-order a deep water harbour for Alaska completely to heart. ;)
--
rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)
"People will pay big bucks for the luxury of ignorance."
By the short 'n' curlies, definitely. How does > 2100 ft depth grab YOU? That's what a titanium-hulled Alfa could do (still can, if there are any left). If you're citing Popular Mechanics as a source on submarine performance data, you may awe some Penguinheads around here, but I remain unimpressed. Tell ya what: Why don't you try a Jane's All the World's Ships annual review and see what it says? (Although to be fair, I bet Jane's doesn't have cool articles on how to wire your house for a home network.)
BTW: Concrete submarines my @$$. That article got laughed to death on sci.military.naval. I know because I posted it there to watch the fun. Steel doesn't have a "crush depth" (more properly, a test depth); submarine hulls do. Submarines, like balloons, tend to compress at greater depths. A concrete hull is less compressible, but that's precisely because it's also less plastic. Would you like to be in one when rapidly changing depths or when getting hammered by a shock wave, even at relatively shallow depths? You bet you wouldn't.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
Did I miss something? The 'why' of it seems obvious.
Japan. We were at war, but taking obvious credit for nuking Japan would haunt us after the fact.. It has. If there had been a way to send tactical 'natural' disasters at Japan, we would have jumped on it.
I'd be curious to learn how the gov wanted to cover up the evidence of the detonation though.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
My thoughts on the tidal nukes were that:
Why do it in the first place, if not to make the itdal wave appear natural in origin? If a nuke could create a tidal wave (or it was seen a worthy of study) then it itself would be devastating.
We had no problem dropping the bamb on Hiroshima. But, if we didn't want to be blatant, or wanted to appear able to control/influence the weather.. A tidal wave or earthquake induced by a nuclear weapon would probably be a good way to achieve the goal.
In retrospect, I suppose the 'tell-tale' signs of a nuke were not well known, and difficult to test for - so covering up our handiwork would not have been a high priority.
The whole concept stinks of Lex Luthor.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
First of all, not all the French nuke tests were underground; you may want to ask the residents of certain Polynesian islands about that one.
d 8.html
Second, France was hardly alone in conducting underground nuke tests. The US and USSR moved to underground testing in the sixties; the decision to end atmospheric tests was one of the first agreements between the two countries. France never signed (claiming they wanted a disarmament treaty).
http://www.greenpeace.org/~comms/nukes/ctbt/rea
As for testing on fault lines, no, the Kerguelen islands (where the drill-bore tests were conducted) aren't really on fault lines; they're actually well within the Indian plate.
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
The tide had turned in the Pacific War, and the Japanese were demonstrating that they would fight to the last man to hold any island. The first Kamikaze units were deployed in 1944. The plans were being drawn up for an invasion of the Japanese mainland, and everyone expected massive Allied casualties in the process. The Atomic Bomb was a secret project whose outcome was uncertain (the first test would not be until April 1945).
... certainly the "asteroid drop" will be a weapon of choice in any interplanetary wars!
World War II saw unprecedented technological innovation in the means of war; some of these ideas were crazy, some of them were impractical, some of them were unethical.
What is more important to remember is that this was never used. Although a future society may not be so prissy
lake effect weblog
{Network engineer in Chicago--looking for work!}
I'm not positive that the earth is flat ;-)
Seriously, salt is BAD for crops. If anyone even considers the idea of "Tsunami Irrigation" then I hope for their sake they are simply extremely ignorant. Besides the obvious saftey risk, structural damage and, or course, massive erosion, salt is BAD for most plants. Certainly for crops. A high concentration of salt in the soil around the roots of a plant prevent the root from absorbing water - the low concentrations of salt in the cells would force the water back into the soil to balance salt concentraions.
As for Florida, the "non-military" reason is that the Everglades are one huge Estuary (area where fresh river water and salty seawater are mixed) and most of the state is just a couple feet above sea level.
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
And then, one must ask, how would the French use this technology? Well, all the conspiracy theorists out there are glancing at Taiwan ... 35% of the world's silicon. That's as close to a weak link that you can get, now isn't it!
We'll omit, of course, the whole Pacific ring of fire status.
Detonating a Nuke would not have the same effect. A tsunami needs a line of disturbances to become cumulative and reach destructive size. Keep in mind any attempt to use this device would probably kill as many whales as people. The explosive sound would a) jam their prefered communication and navigation frequencies b) sound like that destructive noise used on Star Trek to knock out the crew, c) create a concussion wave that would be all they could sense for quite awhile.
Of course, a string of nuclear detonations would work. But then again, the cumulative affect on sealife.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
I had a wrestling coach in college who asked his class who the three participants in a match are.
Three?! There's only two, dangit -- the two wrestlers. But there are three he insist. Ok, I guess, the two wrestlers and the referee? No, the ref is just a scorekeeper.
Finally, we all give up. The answer...the two wrestlers and the MAT. The mat can be friend or foe depending upon which wrestler is smart enough to use it to their advantage.
I've taken that lesson to heart in recent years. In any battle there are three participants, one being the environment in which the battle occurs. Native americans fought invading settlers much more effectively than their numbers because they used the environment to their advantage. The settlers did the same against the English in the Revolutionary war.
These experiments were nothing more than an attempt to turn the sea into a destructive force to use against the Japanese. Nothing really spectacular.
For the people all concerned about giving whales headaches, BWHAHAAAHAAA... Think about it. We were at war. The intent in war is to KILL the enemy (or at least severly wound them so that they are a burden and help demoralize their compatriats (sp?)), so that you don't get killed yourself. If a few whales (hell, a lot of whales) must be sacrificed in that goal, then so be it.
"Let the other guy [and his whale] die for his country." General George F. Patton.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Actually, Dazzle paint was from the first world war, not the second. Here is an example of the Olympic, Titanic's sister, in Dazzle paint. The reason was nothing to do with psyching out the enemy, but to make it hard for the U boats to count the number of ships in a conviy, or identify the the individual ships.
As far as I can tell, it was quite an effective technique in the pre-radar times, both the above picture, and the ones referenced on this page do make it hard to tell how many ships are in the picture. I can certainly imagine that with primative optics through a WW1 periscope it made a difference.
A covert Tsunami weapon is useless.
The use, or threat of use, of a weapon of mass destruction is used primarily for its political impact, not its wanton ability to destroy. Observe the United States bringing imperial Japan to its knees with 2 nuclear devices, or India and Pakistan more recently seeking greater respect on the world stage with nuclear testing. The idea of a covert WMD is pointless, even for terrorist organizations, which would require state backing (and a consequent static target for reprisals) for such a large undertaking.
The US, or its allies, would never use one.
The United States (and the West in general), as the current leader atop the world economy and international politics, has the most to lose from the use of an indiscriminate weapon such as a Tsunami-causing weapon, even covertly, as global trade would be curtailed, not to mention the loss of international backing and support if the culprit was known.
Given the alternative of a much less costly set of precision airstrikes, which could achieve the same effect to a given infrastructure in a short period of time, it's easy to see why there's zero interest in the Tsunami weapon currently.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
...during a war in which many, MANY military research projects ranging from the odd (siege engines), the truly bizarre (incendiary-carrying bats), to the occasionally practical (computers, radar, rockets, etc) were conducted.
Presumably the target would have been the Japanese archipelago?
That's gotta take a lot of energy, 'tho, to move that much water. And, if you only want the wave to go one way, say, rather than as an ever-growing circular wall of water...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Sounds 'bout right. I had thought about the possibility of using it against the Imperial Navy's carrier groups, but given the distances versus the speed of the waves it doesn't seem as much of an anti-fleet weapon as anti-coastline. 'sides, that late in the war, IIRC (could easily be wrong 'bout this; dates were never my strong point) the Imperial Navy had already sustained severe losses and forced on the defensive...
I'd suspect WWII Japan had a significant part of its population at near sea-level on exposed coastlines. In addition, it was rather dependent upon its navy and associated facilities... They've also had losses due to tsunamis before, so the exact nature of an artificial tsunami might not have been immediately obvious.
...and in their history, legend has it that a large invasion fleet (don't recall whose; pity) sent against them was swept away by divine intervention through the weather. The "divine wind", or Kamikaze, had the (failed) purpose of keeping away a more modern invasion fleet; yes, were that to turn against them might have caused a shock...
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
This is not really news. In the 1950's, the US tested both submerged A-bombs and surface detonated H-bombs for efficacy against ships and submarines. If a small A-bomb detonated on the oceans surface can produce a thirty foot wall of water five miles from zero, imagine the devastating effect of a H-bomb several powers of magnitude larger. Thankfully, the experiments in New Zealand appear to have been conducted with conventional munition, and were just a 'proof-of-concept'.
Just an observation: The world would be much safer if all nuclear weapons were required to run Win 95. If they even make it off the pad, they'll bluescreen before the target.
.sig: Now legally binding!
So a BIG tsunami could be created with just a modest amount of high explosives? And at a distance? The only way this could be done is for that small explosion to be placed at such a spot to create a secondary, much larger shock, which then creates the tsunami wave. Otherwise there is simply not enough energy. Also, the distance is crucial. A shock that creates a 20 m tsunami at 10 km from null will be only (at most) 1 dm high at 1000 km. If you set off the biggest hydrogen bomb there is (100 Mt) some kms below the sea you would get a substantial tsunami out to, say 1000 km, but coasts further away would hardly notice it. Only earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (and impacts) with energies far larger than the biggest nuke (100x - 1000x) produce tsunamis that are devastating across oceans. Of course lesser events, including nukes, can cause much destruction, albeit on a regional scale. There are two types of spots where you could, conceivably, produce substantial tsunamis with non-nukes. 1) Detonate in a submarine fault near the victim, precipitating an earthquake - and tsunami. Pro: Explosion signature may be cloaked by earthquake, avoiding suspicion of agression. Con: Unpredictable, level of stress in fault must be high to begin with. 2) Detonate in submarine scarp to create submarine landslide - and tsunami. Pro: Slopes are already unstable at many places. Con: Unpredictable, explosion signature harder to conceal. To sum it up, tsunamis could possibly be created using non-nuclear methods. They would however have to be effected relatively near the target, and are very unpredictable. /Dervak
Or is it stuff that matters?
Oh, wait, this calls for something new:
Strikehot
News for mercs. Stuff that shatters.
It would be extremely difficult to target such a thing since they are basically created by the equivalent of impulse or point sources and propagate in a circle around the point of origin. Those who think that shape charges could be used to target tsunamis should sit in a bathtub and attempt to target a surface gravity wave by poking their finger or dropping their rubber ducky in the water. You can push a whole lot of water in one direction, but that would be an advective process that would propagate not nearly as far as a wave.
The damage done by tsunamis is due to their kinetic energy being transformed into potential energy when they near land. After generation, they travel at tremendous speeds through the ocean. The speed of propagation is basically SQRT(G*H) where G is the gravitational constant and H the depth of the water, i.e. hundreds of miles an hour in the deep ocean. Their surface signature, on the other hand, is lost in the noise of the other waves on the ocean surface.
When they near land and the seafloor shallows, the hundreds of miles an hour worth of kinetic energy is transformed into a huge wall of water that, while moving much more slowly than before, still packs a hell of a wallop. Another key factor is the general variation of the seafloor topography as it shallows. Refraction and reflection processes can focus energy such that what would be a 5-10 foot wave on a flatly sloping beach could be several times higher. This is basically the same process that makes some beaches much better for surfing since the offshore topography focuses the wave energy.
You could probably use an explosion to effectively generate a tsunami if the situation were just right, i.e. you have a seafloor configuration near your target favorable for refraction processes significantly increasing the size of your generated wave. Otherwise it would take one hell of a huge explosion to impart the same sort of energy you get from a massive seafloor shift or a large bolide impact, and that could end up doing as much damage to you as to your target.
As to the suggestion that additional waves can be generated to cancel out a tsunami, ponder (for just a second, Pinky) how you can cancel out a tsunami that has reached the shore and become a huge wall of water. At that point it's no longer a wave since nonlinear processes have turned turned the tsunami into an advective process. And if you attempt to cancel it out while its still a wave in the deep sea the counter-wave and the original will certainly sum to zero at some point, and then continue on in opposite directions to wreak havoc.
I'd recommend checking out the University of Washington's Tsunami site for further theoretical and historical information. On a side note, many of the foundations of modern oceanography were laid by the research performed by Walter Munk and others during WWII. Most of the work involved wave forecasting such that the wave environment during certain invasions could be predicted sufficiently accurately to avoid overly large surf conditions.
Check out the
A "tidal wave bomb", whether conventional or nuclear, could be used to devastate harbors. Why Harbors ??? Naval vessels, cargo vessels, warehouses, and trans-shipment points to road and rail routes. Often, as a bonus, you also get Petroleum refineries and/or Storage areas (known in the military as POL: Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants) All your big logistical targets, covieniently placed in one large area. Until the advent of nuclear weapons, you couldn't take out an entire harbor area in one blow. Whereas a Tidal Wave COULD devastate an entire harbor area.
Furthermore, if deployed by submarine, it could even be done covertly: after all, who's to say it wasn't a natural tsumami ??? AND, if used against the Japanese in WWII, could have been used for psychological operations as well: i.e. the ALLIES controlling the "Divine Wind". . .