The deal is that there ARE canon drivers on that client machine, even though you didn't install them. The client itself sucked them over the network and installed them silently. Poke around the/windows/system directory, you'll find the drivers sitting somewhere.
I believe that the first H-Bombs derived about 80-90% of the effect from the fusion, but now it is a LOT higher.
Actually early H-bombs derived most of their yield (80-90%) from fast fission of the natural uranium outer tamper.
According to Dark Sun, "more than 75 percent of Mike's yield (or 8 MT) was from fission of the U238 pusher." This leave 2.4 MT generated by fusion. So, in essence these early fusion bombs were really massively boosted fission bombs. You just use the fusion reaction to generate fast neutrons to fission the natural uranium.
Later fusion bombs have much higher fusion components. This results in much cleaner bombs, as the fusion doesn't create much radioactive waste, I believe the cleanest H-bomb is still Tzar Bomba, the soviet's (and the world's) largest (50 MT i think) explosive device.
Not quite. I have seen Chenrenkov radiation and am alive and well. There was about 3 meters of water between me and the reaction.
Arrgh... I knew I shouldn't have left out that line... Yes, one can safely view chenrenkov (does anyone have a proper spelling for this name?) radiation through a couple of meters of water. (I've seen it and lived to talk about it...it's quite neat, actually).
However, if you see it in your immediate vicinity without the water, you've basically had it.
I had hoped my quote would provide enough context to make this clear...
How do you propose to mine asteroids (a very good idea, though) without nuclear power? It's the only energy source dense enough and cheap enough to make such a venture feasable.
First rule of thumb when working with fissionable materials: If you start seeing a blue glow, and there isn't at least 20 feet of water between you and that glow, slowly stop what you're doing, and run away. Get in your car, roll the windows up, and drive as fast as your car will go until you run out of gas.
Not quite. By the time you see cherinkov radiation you've already had it. You might as well stick around and try to shut the reaction down to save other people.
The following is from J. Robert Oppenheimer, Shatterer of Worlds, by Peter Goodchild.
On 21 August, Harry Daghlian, a young scientist working under Frisch, was assembling small bricks of uranium as a reflector around two very nearly critical hemispheres of plutonium. Each brick weighed about 12 lbs and as the last one was being put into place it slipped and fell into the center of the pile. Immediately the assembly went critical and a blue ionisation glow burst across the room, as Daghlian desperately tried to knock the brick off. In that instant he had received a lethal dose of radiation. He rapidly developed second degree burns on hands and chest, a fever developed, and after two weeks the burns blistered and he lost his hair. He died twenty-eight days after the accident.
Nuclear power offers us the chance to concentrate the nastiness, rather than spreading the products of combustion in the atmosphere, or polluting our water with the nasty stuff that solar panel production produces.
Finally! Someone else who understands! Now the few other enlightened humans just have to teach everyone else...
Besides which, why should we assume we need to use up all the fissionable material now? Maybe we'll be better capable of using it in a few centuries if we wait.
There is a huge amount of fissionable material available on this planet alone. Even if we converted to use it as out sole energy source we wouldn't run out for a very long time. Add breeder reactors and it'll last even longer. We're talking eons here.
Similarly, do you think our nuclear arsenal and lack of ABM capability will serve as a deterrent to N. Korea when they develop nuclear weapons? These are the threats that we are trying to develop an ABM capability to counter.
Yes, I do think our nuclear arsenal is a huge deterrent to North Korea. These people are like all other Communist governments, they just want to stay in power. If they bomb the U.S., they loose their whole country. They no longer have anything to rule.
We in the west have a tendency to think of enemy government types as being insane. This simply isn't true. It all comes down to personal gain in the end. No one can hope to gain anything by bombing the United States (or any other large nuclear nation).
The only people we really have to worry about are screwy religious terrorists. Thankfully they are incapable of aquiring both a nuclear device and an ICBM.
So even if the core does survive, it's not going to detonate. But it would probably make a nice crater somewhere...Yet another non-issue except for the person who's house that it crashes through.
It'd be a nice little bonus for the recieving country...Free (if you discount the cost of the ABM system) bomb grade plutonium or uranium.
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....
He meant "ps a", the unix command to show all user processes: [amalmin@skaro amalmin]$ ps a PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND 373 3 SW 0:00 (mingetty) 374 4 SW 0:00 (mingetty) 375 5 SW 0:00 (mingetty) 376 6 SW 0:00 (mingetty) 22398 2 SW 0:00 (mingetty) 30593 1 SW 0:00 (mingetty) 2796 S3 S N 0:00 heyu_relay 16 off 22011 p2 S 0:00 bash 22027 p4 S 0:00 bash 22491 p4 S 0:00 emacs wow 22539 p4 R 0:00 ps a
Although he probably meant "pa aux", which shows all processes (user or daemons) on a machine...
That doesn't have anything to do with the loading mechanism, which just gets out of the way when the disk is actually being played.
Car CD players run hotter because they cram a bunch of electronics (and power amplifiers) into a dinky little box which is installed in a big plastic dashboard with poor ventilation. All that excess heat has to go somewhere...
All right, I'll give you that. In fact the hit would almost certainly be a glancing blow. The simplest anti-ABM defence is to encase the warhead in some kind of light weight tent structure, to give the ABM kill vehicle a big, mostly empty target to fly harmlessly through.
I still think that a glancing blow, at these speeds, will most likely set off at least some of the HE implosion system. That should vaporize any of the remaining core.
But you're right, it's certainly possible for larger chunks to make it to the ground. Of course, the result of this whole situation will alomst certainly be full-blown thermonuclear war...so it probably won't make much difference..........
There is one problem with your whole argument: you are only thinking one step ahead. Yes, for one strategic moment an ABM system would make (parts) of the world safer. But, when the next moment rolled around (in a year or so) the whole world would suddenly be a much more dangerous place.
Instead of having a whole bunch of nuclear weapons around which noone can use, you would now have a whole bunch of nuclear weapons around which a few people can use.
Now, in general, I would not think of the current U.S. to be the one to first use a nuclear weapon (although there is an historic precedent). But, once the technology has been developed, it will leak to other, less sane countries. We've seen this this before. Even if the technology itself doesn't leak, just the knowledge that it is possible is a huge help to someone who wishes to replicate it. This is exactly what happened with nuclear weapons...the Manhattan project proved that they were feasable. The Soviets stole the technology. The British used a little US help, but basically did it themselves. The French and India did it entirely themselves; South Africa almost did the same. China did it with a little Soviet help, and then passed it on to Pakistan... The same thing will happen with ABM technology.
Collisions at these speeds are not like normal every day car wreaks. Things explode or vaporize at these speeds. Very little of the pit would be in one piece after the collision. Plus, the collision happens very high up, so you also have reentry to deal with. A plutonium core isn't going to make a very good heat shield.
It's a non-problem anyway. The amount of plutonium is so small, and it will be scattered over such a wide area that it wouldn't even be detectable.
As a matter of fact, this is probably a pretty good way of getting rid of unwanted nuclear material. Scatter it evenly over the whole planet, it wouldn't even register above the background levels.
People are so damned scared of anything with the word "nuclear" in it these days. The whole US public seems to think they all know with certainty that anything nuclear related is evil. And yet they're far too stupid to actually go out and READ something about the subject. Most don't even know that every smoke detector in the country has a radioactive substance in it. You can be sure there would be a huge uproar if the media ever noticed......
Modern nukes use very small quantities of uranium or plutonium. Even the older ones didn't use much.
Where do you think uranium comes from in the first place? It's mined. It's in the ground, all over the place. Other radioactive compounds, such as radium, are far more of a problem then anything which would be released by any number of destroyed nuclear armed missles.
"But it won't be until access to space significantly cheapens and technology significantly improves."
Technology has nothing to do with it. If we were to sit down tomorrow and actually design and build a modern launching system we could, in less than 5 years have a completely realistic low-cost airplane-quality launch capability. The obstacles are entirely political.
If I remember correctly, the Soviets started work on their Shloka (sloka?) hydrogen bomb long before the US started serious H-Bomb work.
One must remember that Laventia(sp) Beria ran the Soviet atomic bomb project during the Stalin years. He was not going to wait around for the US to build one first.
Even without the espionage it would only have been a few years until they can up with the idea of staged ignition.
We also have to remember that fission bombs can only grow so far. They basically top out at about 700 Kt. Whereas fusion bombs have no pratical limits.
Nuclear bombs are also quite useful for propulsion. The concept is called "Orion." You take a large (and I mean quite large) ship with a heavy parabolic pusher plate at the rear end. Then you set nuclear bombs off at the focal point of the plate... One can make voyages to the outer planets within one human lifetime using such a system.
As to your other point...there really isn't any reason to send nuclear waste into the sun. Not only is it seriously hard to GET to the sun, nuclear waste is almost always useful for some purpose. Plus you have a huge ammount of empty storage space available in which to stash it until it's needed. So just stick it in solar orbit somewhere, then you can at least go get it again if you want at some future date,
The Soviets had more than plans... They performed several Plowshear-like operations. They used nuclear explosions to re-vitalize several oil and gas fields, and excavate underground holding caverns.
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The deal is that there ARE canon drivers on that client machine, even though you didn't install them. The client itself sucked them over the network and installed them silently. Poke around the /windows/system directory, you'll find the drivers sitting somewhere.
I believe that the first H-Bombs derived about 80-90% of the effect from the fusion, but now it is a LOT higher.
Actually early H-bombs derived most of their yield (80-90%) from fast fission of the natural uranium outer tamper.
According to Dark Sun, "more than 75 percent of Mike's yield (or 8 MT) was from fission of the U238 pusher." This leave 2.4 MT generated by fusion. So, in essence these early fusion bombs were really massively boosted fission bombs. You just use the fusion reaction to generate fast neutrons to fission the natural uranium.
Later fusion bombs have much higher fusion components. This results in much cleaner bombs, as the fusion doesn't create much radioactive waste, I believe the cleanest H-bomb is still Tzar Bomba, the soviet's (and the world's) largest (50 MT i think) explosive device.
Not quite. I have seen Chenrenkov radiation and am alive and well. There was about 3 meters of water between me and the reaction.
Arrgh... I knew I shouldn't have left out that line... Yes, one can safely view chenrenkov (does anyone have a proper spelling for this name?) radiation through a couple of meters of water. (I've seen it and lived to talk about it...it's quite neat, actually).
However, if you see it in your immediate vicinity without the water, you've basically had it.
I had hoped my quote would provide enough context to make this clear...
You can stick one in my backyard. Go right ahead.
How do you propose to mine asteroids (a very good idea, though) without nuclear power? It's the only energy source dense enough and cheap enough to make such a venture feasable.
First rule of thumb when working with fissionable materials: If you start seeing a blue glow, and there isn't at least 20 feet of water between you and that glow, slowly stop what you're doing, and run away. Get in your car, roll the windows up, and drive as fast as your car will go until you run out of gas.
Not quite. By the time you see cherinkov radiation you've already had it. You might as well stick around and try to shut the reaction down to save other people.
The following is from J. Robert Oppenheimer, Shatterer of Worlds, by Peter Goodchild.
Nuclear power offers us the chance to concentrate the nastiness, rather than spreading the products of combustion in the atmosphere, or polluting our water with the nasty stuff that solar panel production produces.
Finally! Someone else who understands! Now the few other enlightened humans just have to teach everyone else...
Personally I like my power from good-old coal burning power plants! With extra Sulfur!
Mmmm. And all that airborn radioactive contanimination from the coal seams. Cool stuff, that coal...Smog AND radioactivity...
Besides which, why should we assume we need to use up all the fissionable material now? Maybe we'll be better capable of using it in a few centuries if we wait.
There is a huge amount of fissionable material available on this planet alone. Even if we converted to use it as out sole energy source we wouldn't run out for a very long time. Add breeder reactors and it'll last even longer. We're talking eons here.
Similarly, do you think our nuclear arsenal and lack of ABM capability will serve as a deterrent to N. Korea when they develop nuclear weapons? These are the threats that we are trying to develop an ABM capability to counter.
Yes, I do think our nuclear arsenal is a huge deterrent to North Korea. These people are like all other Communist governments, they just want to stay in power. If they bomb the U.S., they loose their whole country. They no longer have anything to rule.
We in the west have a tendency to think of enemy government types as being insane. This simply isn't true. It all comes down to personal gain in the end. No one can hope to gain anything by bombing the United States (or any other large nuclear nation).
The only people we really have to worry about are screwy religious terrorists. Thankfully they are incapable of aquiring both a nuclear device and an ICBM.
So even if the core does survive, it's not going to detonate. But it would probably make a nice crater somewhere...Yet another non-issue except for the person who's house that it crashes through.
It'd be a nice little bonus for the recieving country...Free (if you discount the cost of the ABM system) bomb grade plutonium or uranium.
Twit.
Someone should PsYcHo ChIcKeN that monkey.
twit.
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....
He meant "ps a", the unix command to show all user processes:
[amalmin@skaro amalmin]$ ps a
PID TTY STAT TIME COMMAND
373 3 SW 0:00 (mingetty)
374 4 SW 0:00 (mingetty)
375 5 SW 0:00 (mingetty)
376 6 SW 0:00 (mingetty)
22398 2 SW 0:00 (mingetty)
30593 1 SW 0:00 (mingetty)
2796 S3 S N 0:00 heyu_relay 16 off
22011 p2 S 0:00 bash
22027 p4 S 0:00 bash
22491 p4 S 0:00 emacs wow
22539 p4 R 0:00 ps a
Although he probably meant "pa aux", which shows all processes (user or daemons) on a machine...
That doesn't have anything to do with the loading mechanism, which just gets out of the way when the disk is actually being played.
Car CD players run hotter because they cram a bunch of electronics (and power amplifiers) into a dinky little box which is installed in a big plastic dashboard with poor ventilation. All that excess heat has to go somewhere...
All right, I'll give you that. In fact the hit would almost certainly be a glancing blow. The simplest anti-ABM defence is to encase the warhead in some kind of light weight tent structure, to give the ABM kill vehicle a big, mostly empty target to fly harmlessly through.
I still think that a glancing blow, at these speeds, will most likely set off at least some of the HE implosion system. That should vaporize any of the remaining core.
But you're right, it's certainly possible for larger chunks to make it to the ground. Of course, the result of this whole situation will alomst certainly be full-blown thermonuclear war...so it probably won't make much difference..........
There is one problem with your whole argument: you are only thinking one step ahead. Yes, for one strategic moment an ABM system would make (parts) of the world safer. But, when the next moment rolled around (in a year or so) the whole world would suddenly be a much more dangerous place.
Instead of having a whole bunch of nuclear weapons around which noone can use, you would now have a whole bunch of nuclear weapons around which a few people can use.
Now, in general, I would not think of the current U.S. to be the one to first use a nuclear weapon (although there is an historic precedent). But, once the technology has been developed, it will leak to other, less sane countries. We've seen this this before. Even if the technology itself doesn't leak, just the knowledge that it is possible is a huge help to someone who wishes to replicate it. This is exactly what happened with nuclear weapons...the Manhattan project proved that they were feasable. The Soviets stole the technology. The British used a little US help, but basically did it themselves. The French and India did it entirely themselves; South Africa almost did the same. China did it with a little Soviet help, and then passed it on to Pakistan... The same thing will happen with ABM technology.
Collisions at these speeds are not like normal every day car wreaks. Things explode or vaporize at these speeds. Very little of the pit would be in one piece after the collision. Plus, the collision happens very high up, so you also have reentry to deal with. A plutonium core isn't going to make a very good heat shield.
It's a non-problem anyway. The amount of plutonium is so small, and it will be scattered over such a wide area that it wouldn't even be detectable.
As a matter of fact, this is probably a pretty good way of getting rid of unwanted nuclear material. Scatter it evenly over the whole planet, it wouldn't even register above the background levels.
People are so damned scared of anything with the word "nuclear" in it these days. The whole US public seems to think they all know with certainty that anything nuclear related is evil. And yet they're far too stupid to actually go out and READ something about the subject. Most don't even know that every smoke detector in the country has a radioactive substance in it. You can be sure there would be a huge uproar if the media ever noticed......
Modern nukes use very small quantities of uranium or plutonium. Even the older ones didn't use much.
Where do you think uranium comes from in the first place? It's mined. It's in the ground, all over the place. Other radioactive compounds, such as radium, are far more of a problem then anything which would be released by any number of destroyed nuclear armed missles.
"But it won't be until access to space significantly cheapens and technology significantly improves."
Technology has nothing to do with it. If we were to sit down tomorrow and actually design and build a modern launching system we could, in less than 5 years have a completely realistic low-cost airplane-quality launch capability. The obstacles are entirely political.
If I remember correctly, the Soviets started work on their Shloka (sloka?) hydrogen bomb long before the US started serious H-Bomb work.
One must remember that Laventia(sp) Beria ran the Soviet atomic bomb project during the Stalin years. He was not going to wait around for the US to build one first.
Even without the espionage it would only have been a few years until they can up with the idea of staged ignition.
We also have to remember that fission bombs can only grow so far. They basically top out at about 700 Kt. Whereas fusion bombs have no pratical limits.
Nuclear bombs are also quite useful for propulsion. The concept is called "Orion." You take a large (and I mean quite large) ship with a heavy parabolic pusher plate at the rear end. Then you set nuclear bombs off at the focal point of the plate... One can make voyages to the outer planets within one human lifetime using such a system.
As to your other point...there really isn't any reason to send nuclear waste into the sun. Not only is it seriously hard to GET to the sun, nuclear waste is almost always useful for some purpose. Plus you have a huge ammount of empty storage space available in which to stash it until it's needed. So just stick it in solar orbit somewhere, then you can at least go get it again if you want at some future date,
The Soviets had more than plans... They performed several Plowshear-like operations. They used nuclear explosions to re-vitalize several oil and gas fields, and excavate underground holding caverns.
The numbers I've heard are around 1-5 Kt...
Induced radiation (from the neutron flux) can last several weeks. However, the effected area is quite small.
A bigger worry in the modern world is what effect such bombs would have on tanks and other vehicles using depleted uranium armor...