"Yes North Korea is run by an evil man - but he's not insane enough to fire a missile at America."
Then why, exactly, is he interested in developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles? North Korea is barely even a regional power and doesn't have any real political/economic/military interests outside the penninsula, and yet DPRK currently has enough missile range to hit Alaska (and working to increase that range). So are they building these things because Kim thinks they'll look nifty in his living room?
The same reason the British and the French developed nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Having nuclear weapons allows you (in Douglas Hurd's words) to 'punch above your weight' - you have to be taken seriously.
Having nuclear weapons allows North Korea to insist on being taken seriously by all of the regional powers.
"Those countries faced with any ABM system have one easy remedy. Assuming that few, if any countries out there can defeat America technologically, the only solution is to build more nuclear missiles with multiple warheads. History will repeat itself, except it won't be the US versus the Soviet Union, it will be dozens of countries proliferating advanced weapons like crazy. "
More flawed reasoning. The old US/Soviet arms race you mentioned gives the US a 2000+ warhead lead in any future nuclear arms races. Nobody other than Russia (with whom US relations are still steadily warming) can possibly close that gap in under two decades, and that's assuming the US lets them catch up.
You don't need two thousand warheads, you just need enough to overwhelm part of the system and carve nice deep holes in the Eastern Seaboard or reduce California to ash. That alone is sufficient deterrent.
For the same reason the British nuclear arsenal was never as big as the country could have afforded or deployed. It was large enough to constitute a major threat to the Soviet Union by promising to wipe out every city from the Baltic to Vladivostok.
"President Bush has approved money to the Department of Defense and Department of Energy for the development of 'bunker buster' nuclear warheads "
First off, as I just said, use of nuclear weapons alone does not constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions. If they're bunker busters, they're for use against bunkers.
Maybe they are, but that brings us back to the old Reagan doctrine of battlefield nukes and the 'limited nuclear war'. Reagan believed that the use of nuclear weapons could be restricted to the battlefield, the Soviet Union warned publicly that any use of nuclear weapons would threaten a strategic response.
So okay, perhaps we would only use them on countries that couldn't retaliate - doesn't that bring back shades of imperialism that the US has historically loathed in other powers?
We use nuclear weapons - we automatically lower the threshold for their use. Other countries would see our example and use them themselves.
Finally, new weapons, new testing programmes and an encouragement for other countries to test their weapons. We're currently living in a period without any nuclear testing - why end it?
Secondly, there is a great deal of difference between stratiegic nuclear weapons (what most people think of) and tactical nukes. Tactical nukes by definition are smaller by several orders of magnitude. Typical stratiegic arms yield around 20,000 kilotons, while those bunker busters you mention will likely have a yield less than a single kiloton. Tactical nukes are also designed to minimize (if not outright eliminate) fallout, because fallout is a tactical hinderance (and detonnating these things underground will bury the insignifigant amount of fallout produced). They're not trying to make a bomb with a blast yield bigger than a Daisy Cutter, they're trying to put the power of a Daisy Cutter into a package small enough to burrow.
Except by detonating underground they will create an enormous volume of irradiated rock and soil. History suggests that even carefully planned underground tests can vent considerable amounts of radioactivity into the environment.
"why shouldn't other countries have the right to the ultimate protection?"
They are also free to develop their own ABM or buy one from us.
Do you think the US will sit there and watch its strategic advantage be eaten away?
"Saddam Hussein must be kicking himself that he didn't wait a couple of years before invading Kuwait under the protection of a nuclear bomb."
Wouldn't have done a damn thing for him. The US nuclear arsenal is why he didn't use chemical or biological weapons in the invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War. Why would have he been more inclined to use a nuke?
You misunderstand me.
He wouldn't need to use the weapon, he'd just need to let the World know he had one. The US and Britain would have quickly come to a diplomatic solution just to keep the oil flowing and their arms sales rumbling. Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan all show just how willing the West is to compromise on principles when nuclear weapons are involved.
--It's threatening and romantic! It's threatmantic!
" This government weapon will be tuned to the frequency of silicon atoms." One can only hope the enemy won't think to use this ype of weapon against California....
I seem to remember reading about a Soviet 50 megaton nuke. A warhead of that size wouldn't be usable against ground targets, as the force of the blast would cause it to bury itself and reduce the actual damage--or something. I'm no physicist.
The Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs), detonated in 1961. It was a rush design to beat the likely introduction of the amospheric testing ban. When detonated, the heat was felt over 250 kilometres away whilst the flash was visible beyond 1000 kilometres from the destonation.
Believe it or not, the bomb was originally designed to detonate with a force of over 100 megatonnes. However, Soviet scientists did some calculations and came to the conclusion that it would have increased the total amount of fallout in the atmosphere by 25% and contaminated most of the Arctic. They successfully petitioned to have the uranium casing replaced with lead.
Although the aim of the bomb was a propaganda stunt by Khrushchev to show the supremacy of Soviet nuclear weapon design (in part true, it was the 'cleanest' bomb ever exploded), the Soviets did apparently put the design into limited production.
It never became important because it could only be carried on a bomber which would have been vulnerable to American fighters. The Soviet Union was forging ahead with ICBM technology that was much less risky.
Big bombs went out of fashion because of the improved accuracy of missiles. With a gravity bomb, you needed a big bang to make up for sloppy targeting, the wind on the way down... with a precision missile, a small bomb landing much closer to the target would do the same damage.
As for why not a bigger bomb still - essentially, with a 50 megatonne explosion you are already irradiating a huge area of land - there aren't targets big enough to warrant more destruction. And most of the energy in the bomb is going into heating and moving an enormous amount of air, an even bigger explosion just produces hotter air.
Footage from the last Gulf War is pretty darn gruesome. The "highway of death", shelled-out tanks, etc. There doesn't appear to be much censorship there.
Trucks and tanks are one thing, but what about the dead people - they are much less visible in photographs of the Gulf War. There was a gruesome picture originally published on the front page of 'The Observer' here in the UK. It was an Iraqi soldier still at the wheel of his truck, he had essentially been reduced to charcoal but was still recognisably a human being.
The paper received an enormous amount of criticism from elsewhere in the media and many American news organisations refused to reprint the photograph.
I'm sure its out there on the Net, but it is so disturbing I really don't want to go and find out.
The DEPLETED uranium used in US armor-piercing shells is just that...depleted. It's still radioactive on a very low level, but nothing like ENRICHED uranium that is used in bombs and reactors. The biggest danger from DU rounds is that uranium burns rather readily after hitting its target, and creates lots of un-nice oxides that are not good for humans. But radioactivity? Naah.
Actually yes. Whilst U238 is much less radioactive than U235, it is still considered a radiation hazard. The problem being that those tiny particles formed when the round burns get inhaled or swallowed where they continue to irradiate surrounding tissues with energetic alpha particles. Whilst alpha particles don't penetrate very far, they deliver lots of DNA-busting energy in a small area.
Uranium is also toxic, but the effects can be minimised by giving the victim a chelating agent (something like EDTA) to bind to the uranium and remove it from the body.
That treaty had an exit clause that we chose to excercise. You can disagree with the policy but we are not doing anything "despite signing a treaty" nor are we "breaking a treaty." We have fulfilled every requirement of the treaty. In either event the treaty did not bar research only deployment in more than one location. (We never deployed any ABM systems despite being allowed by the treaty to do so in one location - IN SOVIET RUSSIA they chose to protect Moscow with an ABM system)
Sigh, yes you did deploy a system. It was called Safeguard, started in 1969 at two sites, one in Montana one at Grand Forks in North Dakota. Additional sites were planned in Wyoming and to protect Washington DC.
The signing of the ABM agreement in 1972 limited the USSR and USA to two sites for ABM systems and a total of 100 missiles. The US abandoned plans for Safeguard in Wyoming and Washington DC. Shortly afterwards, the USSR and the USA agreed a further codex to the ABM Treaty limiting themselves to a single site, either around the nation's capital or around a ICBM site.
The Soviet Union chose to protect Moscow with the GALOSH system. The US chose Grand Rapids and abandoned all work on other sites.
Safeguard was declared operational in early 1975 and reached its full deployment of 100 missiles later that year.
In October 1975, Congress declined to continue to pay for the upkeep of Safeguard and the project was dismantled from 1976 onwards.
Your argument about MAD is weak in that you seem to assume that all of the nuclear powers out there, with the exception of the United States are much more willing to use these weapons, whilst on historical grounds it has been the United States military which has countenanced the use of nuclear weapons in a series of conflicts. Richard Rhodes' 'Dark Sun' gives a whole series of deliberately provocative actions by American forces during the Cold War that very nearly ended in disaster.
All of the countries out there know what the use of nuclear weapons means. None of them are so stupid as to threaten the United States with the handful of weapons that they possess. Any American retaliation would mean annihilation. Yes North Korea is run by an evil man - but he's not insane enough to fire a missile at America.
Those countries faced with any ABM system have one easy remedy. Assuming that few, if any countries out there can defeat America technologically, the only solution is to build more nuclear missiles with multiple warheads. History will repeat itself, except it won't be the US versus the Soviet Union, it will be dozens of countries proliferating advanced weapons like crazy.
Then I'd argue with your claim that the system would decrease the chance of nuclear conflict. The US and UK have already said that they would use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear opponent that they believed was going to use chemical or biological weapons. We have already lowered the threshold for our countries exploding nuclear warheads. President Bush has approved money to the Department of Defense and Department of Energy for the development of 'bunker buster' nuclear warheads - to be used to destroy hardened underground bunkers in an otherwise non-nuclear war. We are already foreseeing new uses for nuclear weapons, they are no longer being seen as the ultimate protection against attack.
And as the Devil's Advocate in Chief here, I have to ask - why shouldn't other countries have the right to the ultimate protection? We seem to need it to uphold our national interests, why should Iran and Iraq be denied the same choice. Its quite clear that North Korea can feel completely justified in its development of nuclear weapons - the West has excluded any attack on the country and chooses a diplomatic solution. Saddam Hussein must be kicking himself that he didn't wait a couple of years before invading Kuwait under the protection of a nuclear bomb.
Finally, we have to consider the (hopefully remote) possibility of an American government that is belligerant, that chooses to threaten other countries with nuclear conflict in the knowledge that it has a working ABM system. Let's hope it never happens, but ABM can be seen as part of an offensive capability.
But let's be honest, NMD is just a Bush pork-barrel pay-back to the defence contractors who poured so much money into his election campaign. At the end of the day I doubt they care very much whether it works on not, just as long as the money keeps pouring in.
No, but they're going to come in handy if the US ever develops cyborg troops.
ZZZAP! Game over man - unless someone can invent an EMP weapon to take out EMP weapons, but then the bad guys would just develop an EMP weapon to destroy EMP weapons designed to destroy EMP weapons.
Hmmm perhaps we'd better go back to chucking rocks at one another?
But then, someone in the defence industry will try selling National Rock Defence - involving high speed missiles capable of destroying a pebble before it can break someone's window.
Hospitals shouldn't be considered valid targets in the first place.
They're not valid targets, they're specifically protected under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
But then, water and power plants are protected under Article 54 of the Fourth Protocol of the Geneva Conventions. Britain and America are both signatories of the protocol, yet they bombed Iraqi water, sewerage and power systems during the last Gulf War. Neither party has been charged with war crimes.
Actually this is not the same as in the US, I know because we have the same law in Denmark. Basically any result of a lower court can be appealed to a higher court granted that the higher court wishes to take the case.
Very similar here in the UK, although the lower court can refuse the plaintiffs right to appeal to a higher court. This is unusual and only done when the evidence against the plaintiffs is overwhelming.
We had a case of a man who was first acquited by a city court then found guilty by a national court. But he fled to England and now can't be extradicted, because according to a brittish law, you can't be tried for same crime twice. (in america this is called double jepardy)
It's being scrapped in the UK. The government is planning to allow retrials if sufficient new evidence can be gathered, although it seems open to abuse.
It's quite easy to foresee people being dragged back in front of the courts every time the police or press decide to renew a case that had been previously acquitted. I can't see how it could work in a jury system - if you know someone has been tried once and now they're back, the jury is naturally going to be thinking that there is something in the case.
I know juries are told to disregard anything that isn't presented in the case, but they are only human. How do you ignore screaming headlines?
Still the announcement was popular with the 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' and we know that's all that matters to the government.
Civil liberties can go to hell just as long as no one writes anything nasty about My Little Tony.
The CFCs quickly diffuse into the atmosphere and form a near uniform concentration. They eventually migrate into the stratosphere.
Weather patterns over the Antarctic remain remarkably stable during the winter in a so-called circumpolar Vortex. Now, during the Antarctic winter, it is permanently dark and even colder than normal at altitude. Ice crystals grow in the intensely cold atmosphere and these trap the chlorinated compounds.
The chlorinated compounds are busy reacting with water, hydrochloric acid and nitric acid all of which are found in the ice crystals. This produces (amongst others) molecular chlorine - a chemical which is not normally found at high altitude.
Come spring, the arrival of the Sun brings an intense blast of ultra-violet light. Chlorine gas is readily dissociated by UV into chlorine atoms which are intensely reactive. Within a very short period of time, large amounts of atomic chlorine are circulating in the stratosphere.
The chlorine atoms then start tearing ozone (O3) into O2 + a free oxygen atom, which then reacts with the chlorine atoms to form chlorine oxide - itself unstable, which breaks down under ultraviolet light to regenerate a chlorine atom.
Eventually the chlorine atoms all settle down into stable molecules and the depletion ends. Gradually the influx of UV regenerates the ozone layer - just in time for winter when the process can begin again.
The important point here is that a single chlorine atom can tear apart hundreds of ozone molecules, so you don't need much chlorine in the upper atmosphere to cause havoc.
Outside of the Antarctic, the high altitude stratospheric ice clouds are much rarer. Without an icy substrate, the chlorinated compounds don't form chlorine molecules. No chlorine up there - no ozone depletion.
Granted Chernobyl was a particularly egregious design, but plenty of reactors have been built without full containments. Some of the British Magnox stations do not have proper containment buildings and even some Soviet-era PWRs lack full containment. Chernobyl was the worst of a bad bunch.
There is quite a comprehensive site here detailing the effects.
I seem to remember that Einstein took out a patent on a fridge. He had heard about a tragic accident in which a family was killed by ammonia coolant leaking from their fridge. (ammonia was the only common refrigerant before Thomas Midgely took time off from developing leaded petrol to invent CFCs).
So he invented a system with a metallic coolant that was completely sealed in a tube. It was moved through the tubes using a magnetic motor.
Anyone know more? I'd love to know what the coolant could have been.
Almost all rocks of similar ages have been through one or more periods of metamorphism and have undergone physical and chemical changes. Their age just makes it nearly inevitable that they will have been through a mountain-building phase or two. Those rocks that weren't just recycled get heated up, squeezed and exposed to hot reactive fluids. Naturally they don't come out that well.
The Isua Complex in Greenland which appears to be older than these new samples has undergone several metamorphic episodes during which igneous and sedimentary rocks have been converted into new rocks like gneiss.
Sadly that process tends to destroy all of the potential fossil evidence. There are blobs of carbonaceous material in the Isua rocks which some people have ascribed to early life.
If these new rocks really do contain sediments it could be a fascinating chance to see if life had been kick-started by this time.
At a guess it was inspired by the wacky Vortex Rainmaking Cannon of the late 19th Century as used in the Australian Outback to try and break periods of severe drought.
From memory these were dirty great guns that pointed directly skyward. They carried a charge, but no shell. The idea was to create turbulence in the atmosphere which would create clouds and then rain.
Actually we can't tell if its cloudy in London, all the pea-souper fogs get in the way. Plays havoc with the coppers in their hansom cabs looking for Jack the Ripper down at the pie and mash shops.
OK that 1952 experiment was a disaster in terms of the damage it caused, but hey! It worked!
Why go to all the trouble of making this massive, errr, "thing" to scoop up sea water when we know that just sprinkling the clouds with silver-iodide and salt (or whatever it was in 1952) works effectively.
Actually you can't draw that conclusion.
It rained on Exmoor after cloud seeding experiments. We have no way of knowing if it would have rained at all in the absence of such experiments or if it would have rained equally heavily.
That time of year in the UK is strongly associated with cloud bursts. This could have been a perfectly natural event, albeit on the upper end of the scale.
Seeding works (or rather doesn't) by encouraging existing moisture to condense into rain. This is a project which intends to inject additional moisture into the atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
We saw the horrible sight of American dead. We most certainly did not see the hundreds if not thousands of Somali dead - including many civilians.
They were also conveniently airbrushed out of the movie.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Then why, exactly, is he interested in developing nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles? North Korea is barely even a regional power and doesn't have any real political/economic/military interests outside the penninsula, and yet DPRK currently has enough missile range to hit Alaska (and working to increase that range). So are they building these things because Kim thinks they'll look nifty in his living room?
The same reason the British and the French developed nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Having nuclear weapons allows you (in Douglas Hurd's words) to 'punch above your weight' - you have to be taken seriously.
Having nuclear weapons allows North Korea to insist on being taken seriously by all of the regional powers.
"Those countries faced with any ABM system have one easy remedy. Assuming that few, if any countries out there can defeat America technologically, the only solution is to build more nuclear missiles with multiple warheads. History will repeat itself, except it won't be the US versus the Soviet Union, it will be dozens of countries proliferating advanced weapons like crazy. "
More flawed reasoning. The old US/Soviet arms race you mentioned gives the US a 2000+ warhead lead in any future nuclear arms races. Nobody other than Russia (with whom US relations are still steadily warming) can possibly close that gap in under two decades, and that's assuming the US lets them catch up.
You don't need two thousand warheads, you just need enough to overwhelm part of the system and carve nice deep holes in the Eastern Seaboard or reduce California to ash. That alone is sufficient deterrent.
For the same reason the British nuclear arsenal was never as big as the country could have afforded or deployed. It was large enough to constitute a major threat to the Soviet Union by promising to wipe out every city from the Baltic to Vladivostok.
"President Bush has approved money to the Department of Defense and Department of Energy for the development of 'bunker buster' nuclear warheads "
First off, as I just said, use of nuclear weapons alone does not constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions. If they're bunker busters, they're for use against bunkers.
Maybe they are, but that brings us back to the old Reagan doctrine of battlefield nukes and the 'limited nuclear war'. Reagan believed that the use of nuclear weapons could be restricted to the battlefield, the Soviet Union warned publicly that any use of nuclear weapons would threaten a strategic response.
So okay, perhaps we would only use them on countries that couldn't retaliate - doesn't that bring back shades of imperialism that the US has historically loathed in other powers?
We use nuclear weapons - we automatically lower the threshold for their use. Other countries would see our example and use them themselves.
Finally, new weapons, new testing programmes and an encouragement for other countries to test their weapons. We're currently living in a period without any nuclear testing - why end it?
Secondly, there is a great deal of difference between stratiegic nuclear weapons (what most people think of) and tactical nukes. Tactical nukes by definition are smaller by several orders of magnitude. Typical stratiegic arms yield around 20,000 kilotons, while those bunker busters you mention will likely have a yield less than a single kiloton. Tactical nukes are also designed to minimize (if not outright eliminate) fallout, because fallout is a tactical hinderance (and detonnating these things underground will bury the insignifigant amount of fallout produced). They're not trying to make a bomb with a blast yield bigger than a Daisy Cutter, they're trying to put the power of a Daisy Cutter into a package small enough to burrow.
Except by detonating underground they will create an enormous volume of irradiated rock and soil. History suggests that even carefully planned underground tests can vent considerable amounts of radioactivity into the environment.
"why shouldn't other countries have the right to the ultimate protection?"
They are also free to develop their own ABM or buy one from us.
Do you think the US will sit there and watch its strategic advantage be eaten away?
"Saddam Hussein must be kicking himself that he didn't wait a couple of years before invading Kuwait under the protection of a nuclear bomb."
Wouldn't have done a damn thing for him. The US nuclear arsenal is why he didn't use chemical or biological weapons in the invasion of Kuwait and the ensuing Gulf War. Why would have he been more inclined to use a nuke?
You misunderstand me. He wouldn't need to use the weapon, he'd just need to let the World know he had one. The US and Britain would have quickly come to a diplomatic solution just to keep the oil flowing and their arms sales rumbling. Israel, North Korea, India and Pakistan all show just how willing the West is to compromise on principles when nuclear weapons are involved.
--It's threatening and romantic! It's threatmantic!
I like it!
Thanks for an interesting discussion.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
To then deny important components under sanctions because of their 'dual use' potential is even more criminal.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Particularly not against Hugh Hefner's ranch...
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Tsar Bomba (King of Bombs), detonated in 1961. It was a rush design to beat the likely introduction of the amospheric testing ban. When detonated, the heat was felt over 250 kilometres away whilst the flash was visible beyond 1000 kilometres from the destonation.
Believe it or not, the bomb was originally designed to detonate with a force of over 100 megatonnes. However, Soviet scientists did some calculations and came to the conclusion that it would have increased the total amount of fallout in the atmosphere by 25% and contaminated most of the Arctic. They successfully petitioned to have the uranium casing replaced with lead.
Although the aim of the bomb was a propaganda stunt by Khrushchev to show the supremacy of Soviet nuclear weapon design (in part true, it was the 'cleanest' bomb ever exploded), the Soviets did apparently put the design into limited production.
It never became important because it could only be carried on a bomber which would have been vulnerable to American fighters. The Soviet Union was forging ahead with ICBM technology that was much less risky.
Big bombs went out of fashion because of the improved accuracy of missiles. With a gravity bomb, you needed a big bang to make up for sloppy targeting, the wind on the way down... with a precision missile, a small bomb landing much closer to the target would do the same damage.
As for why not a bigger bomb still - essentially, with a 50 megatonne explosion you are already irradiating a huge area of land - there aren't targets big enough to warrant more destruction. And most of the energy in the bomb is going into heating and moving an enormous amount of air, an even bigger explosion just produces hotter air.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Trucks and tanks are one thing, but what about the dead people - they are much less visible in photographs of the Gulf War. There was a gruesome picture originally published on the front page of 'The Observer' here in the UK. It was an Iraqi soldier still at the wheel of his truck, he had essentially been reduced to charcoal but was still recognisably a human being.
The paper received an enormous amount of criticism from elsewhere in the media and many American news organisations refused to reprint the photograph.
I'm sure its out there on the Net, but it is so disturbing I really don't want to go and find out.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Actually yes. Whilst U238 is much less radioactive than U235, it is still considered a radiation hazard. The problem being that those tiny particles formed when the round burns get inhaled or swallowed where they continue to irradiate surrounding tissues with energetic alpha particles. Whilst alpha particles don't penetrate very far, they deliver lots of DNA-busting energy in a small area.
Uranium is also toxic, but the effects can be minimised by giving the victim a chelating agent (something like EDTA) to bind to the uranium and remove it from the body.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sigh, yes you did deploy a system. It was called Safeguard, started in 1969 at two sites, one in Montana one at Grand Forks in North Dakota. Additional sites were planned in Wyoming and to protect Washington DC.
The signing of the ABM agreement in 1972 limited the USSR and USA to two sites for ABM systems and a total of 100 missiles. The US abandoned plans for Safeguard in Wyoming and Washington DC. Shortly afterwards, the USSR and the USA agreed a further codex to the ABM Treaty limiting themselves to a single site, either around the nation's capital or around a ICBM site.
The Soviet Union chose to protect Moscow with the GALOSH system. The US chose Grand Rapids and abandoned all work on other sites.
Safeguard was declared operational in early 1975 and reached its full deployment of 100 missiles later that year.
In October 1975, Congress declined to continue to pay for the upkeep of Safeguard and the project was dismantled from 1976 onwards.
Your argument about MAD is weak in that you seem to assume that all of the nuclear powers out there, with the exception of the United States are much more willing to use these weapons, whilst on historical grounds it has been the United States military which has countenanced the use of nuclear weapons in a series of conflicts. Richard Rhodes' 'Dark Sun' gives a whole series of deliberately provocative actions by American forces during the Cold War that very nearly ended in disaster.
All of the countries out there know what the use of nuclear weapons means. None of them are so stupid as to threaten the United States with the handful of weapons that they possess. Any American retaliation would mean annihilation. Yes North Korea is run by an evil man - but he's not insane enough to fire a missile at America.
Those countries faced with any ABM system have one easy remedy. Assuming that few, if any countries out there can defeat America technologically, the only solution is to build more nuclear missiles with multiple warheads. History will repeat itself, except it won't be the US versus the Soviet Union, it will be dozens of countries proliferating advanced weapons like crazy.
Then I'd argue with your claim that the system would decrease the chance of nuclear conflict. The US and UK have already said that they would use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear opponent that they believed was going to use chemical or biological weapons. We have already lowered the threshold for our countries exploding nuclear warheads. President Bush has approved money to the Department of Defense and Department of Energy for the development of 'bunker buster' nuclear warheads - to be used to destroy hardened underground bunkers in an otherwise non-nuclear war. We are already foreseeing new uses for nuclear weapons, they are no longer being seen as the ultimate protection against attack.
And as the Devil's Advocate in Chief here, I have to ask - why shouldn't other countries have the right to the ultimate protection? We seem to need it to uphold our national interests, why should Iran and Iraq be denied the same choice. Its quite clear that North Korea can feel completely justified in its development of nuclear weapons - the West has excluded any attack on the country and chooses a diplomatic solution. Saddam Hussein must be kicking himself that he didn't wait a couple of years before invading Kuwait under the protection of a nuclear bomb.
Finally, we have to consider the (hopefully remote) possibility of an American government that is belligerant, that chooses to threaten other countries with nuclear conflict in the knowledge that it has a working ABM system. Let's hope it never happens, but ABM can be seen as part of an offensive capability.
But let's be honest, NMD is just a Bush pork-barrel pay-back to the defence contractors who poured so much money into his election campaign. At the end of the day I doubt they care very much whether it works on not, just as long as the money keeps pouring in.
Best wishes,
Mike.
They don't work.
No, but they're going to come in handy if the US ever develops cyborg troops.
ZZZAP! Game over man - unless someone can invent an EMP weapon to take out EMP weapons, but then the bad guys would just develop an EMP weapon to destroy EMP weapons designed to destroy EMP weapons.
Hmmm perhaps we'd better go back to chucking rocks at one another?
But then, someone in the defence industry will try selling National Rock Defence - involving high speed missiles capable of destroying a pebble before it can break someone's window.
Best wishes,
Mike.
They're not valid targets, they're specifically protected under the 1949 Geneva Convention.
But then, water and power plants are protected under Article 54 of the Fourth Protocol of the Geneva Conventions. Britain and America are both signatories of the protocol, yet they bombed Iraqi water, sewerage and power systems during the last Gulf War. Neither party has been charged with war crimes.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Will it work on Verichip implants?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Very similar here in the UK, although the lower court can refuse the plaintiffs right to appeal to a higher court. This is unusual and only done when the evidence against the plaintiffs is overwhelming.
We had a case of a man who was first acquited by a city court then found guilty by a national court. But he fled to England and now can't be extradicted, because according to a brittish law, you can't be tried for same crime twice. (in america this is called double jepardy)
It's being scrapped in the UK. The government is planning to allow retrials if sufficient new evidence can be gathered, although it seems open to abuse.
It's quite easy to foresee people being dragged back in front of the courts every time the police or press decide to renew a case that had been previously acquitted. I can't see how it could work in a jury system - if you know someone has been tried once and now they're back, the jury is naturally going to be thinking that there is something in the case.
I know juries are told to disregard anything that isn't presented in the case, but they are only human. How do you ignore screaming headlines?
Still the announcement was popular with the 'The Sun' and 'The Daily Mail' and we know that's all that matters to the government.
Civil liberties can go to hell just as long as no one writes anything nasty about My Little Tony.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Landsat and its relatives can use an infra-red channel which is particularly sensitive at detecting vegetation.
This is then mapped to red in the final image. Or it can be processed as green - but the colour is usually a little 'off' of what you'd expect.
Gorgeous images though, the Iceland picture is breathtaking.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Hold on to your seats.
The CFCs quickly diffuse into the atmosphere and form a near uniform concentration. They eventually migrate into the stratosphere.
Weather patterns over the Antarctic remain remarkably stable during the winter in a so-called circumpolar Vortex. Now, during the Antarctic winter, it is permanently dark and even colder than normal at altitude. Ice crystals grow in the intensely cold atmosphere and these trap the chlorinated compounds.
The chlorinated compounds are busy reacting with water, hydrochloric acid and nitric acid all of which are found in the ice crystals. This produces (amongst others) molecular chlorine - a chemical which is not normally found at high altitude.
Come spring, the arrival of the Sun brings an intense blast of ultra-violet light. Chlorine gas is readily dissociated by UV into chlorine atoms which are intensely reactive. Within a very short period of time, large amounts of atomic chlorine are circulating in the stratosphere.
The chlorine atoms then start tearing ozone (O3) into O2 + a free oxygen atom, which then reacts with the chlorine atoms to form chlorine oxide - itself unstable, which breaks down under ultraviolet light to regenerate a chlorine atom.
Eventually the chlorine atoms all settle down into stable molecules and the depletion ends. Gradually the influx of UV regenerates the ozone layer - just in time for winter when the process can begin again.
The important point here is that a single chlorine atom can tear apart hundreds of ozone molecules, so you don't need much chlorine in the upper atmosphere to cause havoc.
Outside of the Antarctic, the high altitude stratospheric ice clouds are much rarer. Without an icy substrate, the chlorinated compounds don't form chlorine molecules. No chlorine up there - no ozone depletion.
Hope that helps,
Mike.
There is quite a comprehensive site here detailing the effects.
Best wishes,
Mike.
So he invented a system with a metallic coolant that was completely sealed in a tube. It was moved through the tubes using a magnetic motor.
Anyone know more? I'd love to know what the coolant could have been.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The dominant effect of CFCs was to eat away at the Ozone Layer. However, CFCs are also greenhouse agents and actually far better at it than CO2.
Most of the compounds we have now introduced to replace CFCs are also greenhouse agents.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The Isua Complex in Greenland which appears to be older than these new samples has undergone several metamorphic episodes during which igneous and sedimentary rocks have been converted into new rocks like gneiss.
Sadly that process tends to destroy all of the potential fossil evidence. There are blobs of carbonaceous material in the Isua rocks which some people have ascribed to early life.
If these new rocks really do contain sediments it could be a fascinating chance to see if life had been kick-started by this time.
Thanks for posting!
Best wishes,
Mike.
At a guess it was inspired by the wacky Vortex Rainmaking Cannon of the late 19th Century as used in the Australian Outback to try and break periods of severe drought.
From memory these were dirty great guns that pointed directly skyward. They carried a charge, but no shell. The idea was to create turbulence in the atmosphere which would create clouds and then rain.
They were a dismal failure.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I want them working with me on my next grant proposal. Someone who can get a Scottish university interested in creating more rain could sell anything!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Why go to all the trouble of making this massive, errr, "thing" to scoop up sea water when we know that just sprinkling the clouds with silver-iodide and salt (or whatever it was in 1952) works effectively.
Actually you can't draw that conclusion.
It rained on Exmoor after cloud seeding experiments. We have no way of knowing if it would have rained at all in the absence of such experiments or if it would have rained equally heavily.
That time of year in the UK is strongly associated with cloud bursts. This could have been a perfectly natural event, albeit on the upper end of the scale.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Seeding works (or rather doesn't) by encouraging existing moisture to condense into rain. This is a project which intends to inject additional moisture into the atmosphere.
Best wishes,
Mike.