While that sailor was stopped by a civilian visitor, I think it's unreasonable to assume that this could have led to compromising the missile or propulsion systems of that ship. One danger of working around people with guns is that they can shoot you. One person dead, or five people dead, is not a catastrophic failure of an engineered system. One feature of the engineered system that is a ship's security force is that they are trained to kill renegades. This system did not fail in the case of the astute.
Believe it or not, the safety analyses on military nuclear reactors include combat damage.
Your statement on safety analysis practices is either supposition of fabrication.
Failure analysis for pipe ruptures in nuclear systems is not done assuming the pipe slowly blows out, it's done assuming the pipe instantaneously ceases to exist.
What I am proposing is that sophisticated sabotage would be detected before it can be exploited, not that it cannot be carried out.
This is such crap, you might as well publish an article stating that an internal safety study concluded a bomber pilot with a nuclear weapon on board could crash his plane. The way you mitigate such failures is through personnel measures. Anyone who works in job where such measures are in place understands what I am talking about. This is why you do background investigations, psychological tests, and financial monitoring.
All the report says is that a nuclear engineer onboard could intentionally cause a meltdown.
This is hardly salacious, anyone familiar with nuclear training programs would know that the training given to such engineers on cross-disciplinary systems and specific safeguards guarantees that an intelligent nuclear engineer onboard could disable the safety systems preventing overpower or prompt criticality.
There are sufficient safeguards in place to prevent a rogue agent from significantly damaging a military reactor. The watchstanding and operations systems of military reactors and nuclear weapons control systems were designed to prevent serious damage by Soviet agents, and these systems will protect against the "rogue sailor."
This phenomenon is totally unrelated to depressurizing from a pressurized atmosphere, such as diving. The mechanism of the bends is dissolved gas coming out of solution in the body. The mechanism in this case is the rapid movement into an environment with a very low partial pressure of oxygen. Climbers of high peaks slowly acclimate to the elevation, thus giving the body time to physiologically adapt to the harsh conditions. Believe what you want, if you were dropped out of a helicopter onto the top of Everest, you'd be brain dead in 5 minutes. Any high-elevation climber will tell you the same thing.
Critical military electronic loads run on DC power distribution systems in order to achieve higher reliability. Not just because it is efficient in an automobile.
The energy necessary to vaporize a gram of tissue is still enormous.
A taser and a destructive laser are similar in that they are not guns, but it ends there.
Laser weapons for use against infantry are violations of the laws of war.
The US military has operational advanced laser weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Laser
Laser weapons are advertised and marketed in international arms markets, you just don't see the ads in your sunday paper.
Well I owe you a dollar if it is not unilaterally negative and results in greater consternation/condemnation/sanctions than any country has ever experienced in the modern era of international politics.
Well here is Robert McNamara's answer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War:
The documentary's lessons-learned concept is McNamara's eleven-lesson list of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995).
We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine. We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement before we initiated the action.
After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.
We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums. We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
I don't think that it is at all unclear what "international opinion" is on the proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons present a much more severe threat to global peace for the very fact that they are less powerful and potentially more likely to be used.
Just because a nuclear weapon is small does not decrease the required technical sophistication of building an unboosted fission weapon. The manufacturing and engineering sophistication of 1950's nuclear weapons designs is still high enough that only nation states are capable of mustering the resources necessary to produce one. SNM smuggling is relatively common but that does not mean that an extra-national group has come close to acquiring such a weapon. There are no deployed micro-nukes in existence anymore and weapons as old as you mention such as the davy crockett and SADM surely have poisoned pits by now if they have not been recycled.
Just because you don't have a launch signature does not mean attribution cannot be made as to the source of the fissile material.
Rocket technology may be relatively widespread but any BM production program requires testing and these missiles have such a spectacular IR signature that satellite reconnaissance picks the event up. (in addition to the spy planes that are already waiting on a tip from the CIA)
Here's the transposition: bombing Qadafi is an act of war against tyrannical egomaniacal murderous Afro-Liberace dictators.
Is it good for the world that Qadafi is in the process of sabotaging Libya's oil export facilities? Economic turmoil is not good for the Libyans or the oil-consuming first world, and sooner or later this murderer's body is getting dragged through the street, whether after being killed by Libyan partisans or a B-2. This guy is having his people machinegunned in the streets, and the Libyan international diplomatic corps has all defected and is seeking international assistance to depose him. The arab world is not going to view Qadafi being killed as the same as the US bombing hospitals.
The true first world war occurred prior to the American War for Independence. Continental European powers were involved in global wars from the mid-18th to mid-20th century. The American War for Independence wasn't the root cause of any of them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years'_War
The United States was successful during the War of Independence with French logistical and financial support. That didn't kill the legitimacy of the new government. Your argument is false.
You choose to avoid all insignificant risks to your health? I have to assume you are trolling.
You are going to miss your flight, be detained, then have pissed off nurses ever so gently probe your anal cavity, and if you resist the police will hold you down and they'll do it regardless of how much you resist? Getting cavity searched is extremely unpleasant, by design. Ever see crack dealers squirm when they know they are about to get cavity searched? It really sucks.
"The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 Sv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 Sv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 Sv (2 mrems) — 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to U.S. regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure".
Of course, this is assuming you flew without your trusty tin-foil hat. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray http://www.epa.gov/radtown/cosmic.html
The individual dose is insignificant. The only traveler receiving significant annual radiation doses are flight crew due to increased cosmic radiation. It is still stupid that pilots get screened, from both a radiation health and practical perspective.
Well, officially you can't kill mutants. We all know that medication is good, and even though it's essentially statistically impossible that someone prescribed more than 8 medications is not having potentially serious contra-indications, it's still a good idea to give a mutant as much medicine as possible.
Scattering is the process by which a radiation flux vector field is "diverted to where it wasn't originally aimed," to put it simply. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering
I respect your understanding of the mechanisms of biological damage caused by radiation fields.
On the basis of your status as a doctor, I believe that you have a basic understanding of radiation. That doesn't include a quantitative or qualitative knowledge of the dynamics of flux scattering and typical doses with respect to flux density, particle energy, and distance. I am not going to attempt to calculate the annual dose to the average operator, because it is tedious and the outcome will be that it is safe. Safe is a relative term. By safe I mean the operator is more likely to die in an automobile accident on the way to work than from an excess cancer caused by the x-ray machine. Research the effects of these doses on your own, and as a rational physician, you will appreciate the relative danger.
Thank you for what you do.
The behavior of the radiation field is dependent on energy and the source configuration, and a backscatter x-ray machine is not going to behave like a medical source. Exposure off-axis is highly dependent on flux scattering.
I managed exposure control and monitoring operations at a nuclear power plant and, having taken thousands of radiation surveys in a variety of environments, ionizing radiation field types, and during high-radiation dynamic evolutions, I should know. Thanks for playing doc!
Radiologists experienced dangerous occupational exposures prior to 1950. Exposure control and monitoring operations are significantly more advanced and it is not unsafe to be a radiologist. Thanks for the FUD though. http://radiology.rsna.org/content/233/2/313.full
Now we have to tell paranoid schizophrenics that it is merely improbable that a microchip could be implanted in their body, monitoring various functions on behalf of the Illuminati, and transmitting to their underground city.
Destruction of an enemy ballistic missile submarine would not be detected for an extended period of time unless an emergency radio transceiver was able to be launched prior to destruction.
No singular and coherent enterprise in the history of mankind has seen greater mental and monetary resources invested into it than the business of nuclear war.
The sophistication of Western and Eastern strategic weapons vastly exceeds any engineered project you have ever encountered. I agree it is improbable that you can destroy all enemy launch vehicles, but that isn't really the point.
The primary purpose of strategic warfare is to deter strategic attack.
The secondary purpose of strategic warfare is to maintain a counter-strike capability sufficient to cause annihilation of the enemy's populace and strategic capabilities in the event of nuclear attack detection.
The unspoken purpose of strategic warfare systems is to maintain the ability to deliver a surprise pre-emptive counter-strike and deliver a counter-force or counter-command strike such that the resulting strike is less lethal than if the pre-emptive counter-strike had not been delivered. Bombers are good for this.
Slashdot Mirror
While that sailor was stopped by a civilian visitor, I think it's unreasonable to assume that this could have led to compromising the missile or propulsion systems of that ship. One danger of working around people with guns is that they can shoot you. One person dead, or five people dead, is not a catastrophic failure of an engineered system. One feature of the engineered system that is a ship's security force is that they are trained to kill renegades. This system did not fail in the case of the astute.
Believe it or not, the safety analyses on military nuclear reactors include combat damage.
Your statement on safety analysis practices is either supposition of fabrication.
Failure analysis for pipe ruptures in nuclear systems is not done assuming the pipe slowly blows out, it's done assuming the pipe instantaneously ceases to exist.
What I am proposing is that sophisticated sabotage would be detected before it can be exploited, not that it cannot be carried out.
This is such crap, you might as well publish an article stating that an internal safety study concluded a bomber pilot with a nuclear weapon on board could crash his plane. The way you mitigate such failures is through personnel measures. Anyone who works in job where such measures are in place understands what I am talking about. This is why you do background investigations, psychological tests, and financial monitoring.
I am absolutely confident in those assertions.
All the report says is that a nuclear engineer onboard could intentionally cause a meltdown. This is hardly salacious, anyone familiar with nuclear training programs would know that the training given to such engineers on cross-disciplinary systems and specific safeguards guarantees that an intelligent nuclear engineer onboard could disable the safety systems preventing overpower or prompt criticality. There are sufficient safeguards in place to prevent a rogue agent from significantly damaging a military reactor. The watchstanding and operations systems of military reactors and nuclear weapons control systems were designed to prevent serious damage by Soviet agents, and these systems will protect against the "rogue sailor."
This phenomenon is totally unrelated to depressurizing from a pressurized atmosphere, such as diving. The mechanism of the bends is dissolved gas coming out of solution in the body. The mechanism in this case is the rapid movement into an environment with a very low partial pressure of oxygen. Climbers of high peaks slowly acclimate to the elevation, thus giving the body time to physiologically adapt to the harsh conditions. Believe what you want, if you were dropped out of a helicopter onto the top of Everest, you'd be brain dead in 5 minutes. Any high-elevation climber will tell you the same thing.
How does higher heat conduction of the engine block improve efficiency? Specifically how does it raise the work done by the piston?
The mechanical efficiency of modern turbines can reach over 90%. Maybe you are thinking of the thermodynamic efficiency of the cycle.
Critical military electronic loads run on DC power distribution systems in order to achieve higher reliability. Not just because it is efficient in an automobile.
The energy necessary to vaporize a gram of tissue is still enormous.
A taser and a destructive laser are similar in that they are not guns, but it ends there.
Laser weapons for use against infantry are violations of the laws of war.
The US military has operational advanced laser weapons. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airborne_Laser
Laser weapons are advertised and marketed in international arms markets, you just don't see the ads in your sunday paper.
Why not just mount the cache directory on the built in ramdisk? Just allocate more space to it when the kernel loads.
Well I owe you a dollar if it is not unilaterally negative and results in greater consternation/condemnation/sanctions than any country has ever experienced in the modern era of international politics.
Well here is Robert McNamara's answer: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fog_of_War :
The documentary's lessons-learned concept is McNamara's eleven-lesson list of In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995).
We misjudged then — and we have since — the geopolitical intentions of our adversaries and we exaggerated the dangers to the United States of their actions.
We viewed the people and leaders of South Vietnam in terms of our own experience
We totally misjudged the political forces within the country.
We underestimated the power of nationalism to motivate a people to fight and die for their beliefs and values.
Our misjudgments of friend and foe, alike, reflected our profound ignorance of the history, culture, and politics of the people in the area, and the personalities and habits of their leaders.
We failed then — and have since — to recognize the limitations of modern, high-technology military equipment, forces, and doctrine.
We failed, as well, to adapt our military tactics to the task of winning the hearts and minds of people from a totally different culture.
We failed to draw Congress and the American people into a full and frank discussion and debate of the pros and cons of a large-scale military involvement before we initiated the action.
After the action got under way, and unanticipated events forced us off our planned course we did not fully explain what was happening, and why we were doing what we did.
We did not recognize that neither our people nor our leaders are omniscient. Our judgment of what is in another people's or country's best interest should be put to the test of open discussion in international forums.
We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.
We did not hold to the principle that U.S. military action should be carried out only in conjunction with multinational forces supported fully (and not merely cosmetically) by the international community.
We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions At times, we may have to live with an imperfect, untidy world.
Underlying many of these errors lay our failure to organize the top echelons of the executive branch to deal effectively with the extraordinarily complex range of political and military issues.
I don't think that it is at all unclear what "international opinion" is on the proliferation of tactical nuclear weapons. Tactical nuclear weapons present a much more severe threat to global peace for the very fact that they are less powerful and potentially more likely to be used.
Just because a nuclear weapon is small does not decrease the required technical sophistication of building an unboosted fission weapon. The manufacturing and engineering sophistication of 1950's nuclear weapons designs is still high enough that only nation states are capable of mustering the resources necessary to produce one. SNM smuggling is relatively common but that does not mean that an extra-national group has come close to acquiring such a weapon. There are no deployed micro-nukes in existence anymore and weapons as old as you mention such as the davy crockett and SADM surely have poisoned pits by now if they have not been recycled.
Just because you don't have a launch signature does not mean attribution cannot be made as to the source of the fissile material.
Rocket technology may be relatively widespread but any BM production program requires testing and these missiles have such a spectacular IR signature that satellite reconnaissance picks the event up. (in addition to the spy planes that are already waiting on a tip from the CIA)
Here's the transposition: bombing Qadafi is an act of war against tyrannical egomaniacal murderous Afro-Liberace dictators.
Is it good for the world that Qadafi is in the process of sabotaging Libya's oil export facilities? Economic turmoil is not good for the Libyans or the oil-consuming first world, and sooner or later this murderer's body is getting dragged through the street, whether after being killed by Libyan partisans or a B-2. This guy is having his people machinegunned in the streets, and the Libyan international diplomatic corps has all defected and is seeking international assistance to depose him. The arab world is not going to view Qadafi being killed as the same as the US bombing hospitals.
The true first world war occurred prior to the American War for Independence.
Continental European powers were involved in global wars from the mid-18th to mid-20th century.
The American War for Independence wasn't the root cause of any of them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Years'_War
Frenchmen served in the continental army and killed Englishmen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilbert_du_Motier,_marquis_de_Lafayette
The United States was successful during the War of Independence with French logistical and financial support. That didn't kill the legitimacy of the new government. Your argument is false.
You choose to avoid all insignificant risks to your health? I have to assume you are trolling.
You are going to miss your flight, be detained, then have pissed off nurses ever so gently probe your anal cavity, and if you resist the police will hold you down and they'll do it regardless of how much you resist? Getting cavity searched is extremely unpleasant, by design. Ever see crack dealers squirm when they know they are about to get cavity searched? It really sucks.
"The Health Physics Society (HPS) reports that a person undergoing a backscatter scan receives approximately 0.05 Sv (or 0.005 mrems) of radiation; American Science and Engineering Inc. reports 0.09 Sv (0.009 mrems). At the high altitudes typical of commercial flights, naturally occurring cosmic radiation is considerably higher than at ground level. The radiation dose for a six hour flight is 20 Sv (2 mrems) — 200 to 400 times larger than a backscatter scan. According to U.S. regulatory agencies, "1 mrem per year is a negligible dose of radiation, and 25 mrem per year from a single source is the upper limit of safe radiation exposure". Of course, this is assuming you flew without your trusty tin-foil hat.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter_X-ray
http://www.epa.gov/radtown/cosmic.html
The individual dose is insignificant. The only traveler receiving significant annual radiation doses are flight crew due to increased cosmic radiation. It is still stupid that pilots get screened, from both a radiation health and practical perspective.
Well, officially you can't kill mutants. We all know that medication is good, and even though it's essentially statistically impossible that someone prescribed more than 8 medications is not having potentially serious contra-indications, it's still a good idea to give a mutant as much medicine as possible.
Scattering is the process by which a radiation flux vector field is "diverted to where it wasn't originally aimed," to put it simply.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backscatter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scattering
I respect your understanding of the mechanisms of biological damage caused by radiation fields.
On the basis of your status as a doctor, I believe that you have a basic understanding of radiation. That doesn't include a quantitative or qualitative knowledge of the dynamics of flux scattering and typical doses with respect to flux density, particle energy, and distance. I am not going to attempt to calculate the annual dose to the average operator, because it is tedious and the outcome will be that it is safe. Safe is a relative term. By safe I mean the operator is more likely to die in an automobile accident on the way to work than from an excess cancer caused by the x-ray machine. Research the effects of these doses on your own, and as a rational physician, you will appreciate the relative danger.
Thank you for what you do.
The behavior of the radiation field is dependent on energy and the source configuration, and a backscatter x-ray machine is not going to behave like a medical source.
Exposure off-axis is highly dependent on flux scattering.
I managed exposure control and monitoring operations at a nuclear power plant and, having taken thousands of radiation surveys in a variety of environments, ionizing radiation field types, and during high-radiation dynamic evolutions, I should know. Thanks for playing doc!
Radiologists experienced dangerous occupational exposures prior to 1950. Exposure control and monitoring operations are significantly more advanced and it is not unsafe to be a radiologist. Thanks for the FUD though.
http://radiology.rsna.org/content/233/2/313.full
Now we have to tell paranoid schizophrenics that it is merely improbable that a microchip could be implanted in their body, monitoring various functions on behalf of the Illuminati, and transmitting to their underground city.
Destruction of an enemy ballistic missile submarine would not be detected for an extended period of time unless an emergency radio transceiver was able to be launched prior to destruction.
No singular and coherent enterprise in the history of mankind has seen greater mental and monetary resources invested into it than the business of nuclear war.
The sophistication of Western and Eastern strategic weapons vastly exceeds any engineered project you have ever encountered. I agree it is improbable that you can destroy all enemy launch vehicles, but that isn't really the point.
The primary purpose of strategic warfare is to deter strategic attack.
The secondary purpose of strategic warfare is to maintain a counter-strike capability sufficient to cause annihilation of the enemy's populace and strategic capabilities in the event of nuclear attack detection.
The unspoken purpose of strategic warfare systems is to maintain the ability to deliver a surprise pre-emptive counter-strike and deliver a counter-force or counter-command strike such that the resulting strike is less lethal than if the pre-emptive counter-strike had not been delivered. Bombers are good for this.