The Atomic Age That Might Have Been
Added 2021-11-15 19:23:08 +0000 UTCNookyooler! We really did make it through the 20th Century without a nuclear war.... But we are still living in the Atomic Age... and a new wave of proliferation is ahead that still hangs over us all for remainder of the 21st Century and beyond.
Comments
I subscribe to the theory that the reason why we have never found intelligent Alien life, is because all civilizations destroy themselves long before they develop interstellar travel. We are well on our way with climate change let alone a new nuclear arms race. Sadly I believe that the young generation now growing up will live to see the end of the world as we know it. Politicians flap their arms and line their pockets, but do nothing to improve our long term survival chances. But it can get better...
Dr Andy Hill
2021-11-22 11:55:44 +0000 UTCWell, had Throium MSRs been pursued 50+ years ago imagine what sort of world we would be living in now? It is like wondering what the world would have been like if instead of the Cold War, Russian and American collaborated on Space?
veritanuda
2021-11-17 18:37:52 +0000 UTCThink M.A.D.! As a 46er who went through grade school in the 1950s, I remember the "duck and cover" drills. The goal was to plant the idea that a nuclear attack was somehow survivable. I was a Sophomore in HS during the Cuban Missile Crisis and am also a 'Nam Vet.
Michael A Klaene
2021-11-17 14:56:07 +0000 UTCAre nu-clear weapons like capacitors at all? I mean, will they start leaking just when we beat our carbon emissions down to zero?
Ymir the Frost Giant
2021-11-16 23:58:59 +0000 UTCNoooKyeewwler. I struggle with the Philly accent, and this one always creeps around. Noooookeyoooouleeeehrrr. Oh, forget it!
Fran Blanche
2021-11-16 15:11:12 +0000 UTCNope. The only winning move is not to play.
Fran Blanche
2021-11-16 15:09:41 +0000 UTCpronounced as making a "new clearing" new clear, not nuke you lar.
Nerdful Things
2021-11-16 03:08:56 +0000 UTCI remember researching nuclear weapons a number of years ago, and found that a B-52 broke up in midair over Goldsboro, NC and the control cables that released the bombs were pulled and released the bombs as the fuselage broke up. The bombs released were in the 3-4 megaton range. They did not detonate, obviously, but there has always been a debate if the bomb malfunctioned or the final "Safe/Arm" switch was in "safe" mode or not. This wouldn't be a simple unguarded toggle switch behind an access panel on the bomb. It would have been a highly-engineered switch that would not "slip" from "Safe" to "Arm" easily. When flying over the US, I can't imagine the switch would be in the "Arm" position when flying over the US. In any case, it "almost" detonated and 3.9 Megatons would have destroyed North Carolina and released massive fallout all over the adjoining states. So, what I was interested in was the 3.9 Megaton yield of the bomb. And I remembered that Russian massive nuclear test of an unreasonable amount of megatons. What I did right away was try to find out what the yields were for the nuclear weapons in our inventory today. I was surprised at first to see that there were very few, or no yields in the Megaton range. So why would we lower the yield of our nuclear bombs instead of raising it? It appears that the accuracy of ICBMs and cruise missiles made the Megaton yield unnecessary. If a 60s-era ICBM could not be accurate enough to directly hit the target, then the solution would be to make the yield larger since if it were off the target a little, it would be compensated by the size of the blast that would ensure a HUGE area was destroyed, including the primary target. In the 70s and 80s we developed Inertial Navigation Sensors so accurate that missing the target was extremely unlikely. Thus, hitting the target precisely made it unnecessary to get into the megaton range to account for inaccuracies. 4 megatons makes a terrible mess that sends tons of radioactive fallout into the atmosphere. If 100 of those were involved in a nuclear exchange, what we blow up 5000 miles away will eventually float over our own country and add to any carnage that we suffer by direct hits. Nobody wins in a nuclear war. But at least we don't seem to be in a race with China on nuclear yields. We already made multi-megaton bombs in the past and even though the big nukes have been disassembled, the cores are stored in bunkers and could probably be reactivated easily. After all, the hard part of creating the concentrated plutonium is already done. That's the hard part, apparently. And it's what's holding up the Iranian nuclear threat. For now. Sadly, I expect some terrorist will detonate a low-yield nuclear bomb in a large American city in my lifetime. I truly hope I'm wrong. I am the same age as you, Fran. But in my schools they never told us about the Russian nuclear doomsday threat. I think they knew by then that it's pointless, especially so close to Chicago, that "duck and cover" is pointless. But in all the buildings that I explored as a teenager, the Fallout Shelter buildings were the most overbuilt and basements had crackers in tins along with all kinds of water/waste barrels, and medical kits. NONE of the stuff in the shelters had been updated since the mid 60s, which tells me that Civil Defense stopped being relevant in the 70s. Nothing edible remains in those old shelters and I have not seen a Fallout Shelter sign for years. The best parallel was the Ammonium Nitrate explosion in Beirut last year. They say that was the equivalent to 1 to 1.5 kilotons of TNT. We all saw what happened to Beirut from that non-nuclear explosion. But even at that yield, add the blinding light, radioactive shock wave, and incredible heat incinerating everything in that shock wave blast and the outcome is unthinkably horrible. That's with only 1.5 kilotons. All of the nuclear weapons I see in our inventory are FAR larger than that. So we got a terrible reminder of what a nuclear blast would be like, but without the nuclear part. I hope we don't forget that tragedy in Beirut and how close that resembled a nuclear explosion.
Matt Wietlispach
2021-11-16 00:07:48 +0000 UTCSo...Fran..."Do you want to play a game?"
Bruce Rose
2021-11-15 23:09:33 +0000 UTC
