I was actually surprised how "small" a lot of the bombs we've used are. Combining SF w/ the largest Nuke designed in the USSR is maddening though - the entire bay area essentially gets flattened - hard to imagine that.
The only upper limit on the destructive power of a nuclear weapons is the carrying capacity of the delivery mechanism.
The explosive yield of the Tsar Bomba was purposefully reduced considerably, the fallout from a full yield test was too much even for the Soviets.
There's always the option of putting the energy released into a radiation pulse as opposed to explosion. A bomb which takes out a few blocks, but whose radiation kills for miles and miles.
The explosive yield of the Tsar Bomba was purposefully reduced considerably, the fallout from a full yield test was too much even for the Soviets.
Yes. This is because in the full yield version, you double the yield by adding a jacket of Uranium that is fissioned by neutrons from the fusion reaction. That makes it a very dirty extra 50MT, distributing those hot Uranium fission products far and wide.
There's always the option of putting the energy released into a radiation pulse as opposed to explosion. A bomb which takes out a few blocks, but whose radiation kills for miles and miles.
Really? I've never heard of that. Fascinating. Can you go into more detail?
Kind of strange. I've done a lot of digging into nukes (as an amateur) and no one mentioned the radiation pulse tradeoff.
That's not really the intent. Mostly the idea was that the armor on a tank will do a good job protecting from the blast and heat but a poor job protecting against neutrons. So if you want a weapon to attack an column of armor you're better off having your warhead put as much of its energy into neutrons as possible.
Really, bombarding things with neutrons is not what you want to do if you want to re-use something. Some elements become radioactive when they absorb a neutron and if if you want to re-use that infrastructure you'd probably be better off letting it take some blast and then repairing it.
>Neutron activation from the explosions could make many building materials in the city radioactive, such as zinc coated steel/galvanized steel (see area denial use below).
I've always wondered: reused- by whom? Assuming these things would be droppped during a nuclear war (otherwise, dropping one would start the nuclear war) there wouldn't be many people left to reuse the buildings. Or any other living things for that matter.
the small ones are more efficient..past a certain size the energy of the blast is wasted upward. so we have icbms that split into a bunch of independently targetable warheads, so you dont need a tsar bomba to level the bay. just one more typically sized MIRV capable missile
More importantly, MIRVs make ICBMs unstoppable in practice. To defend against a single ICBM past the separation stage, you'd have to waste one interceptor per reentry vehicle. An ICBM can easily take 6 or 10 warheads. The attacker could further frustrate your defenses by making 2/3 of the RVs fake and sending two more ICBMs, at little extra cost to them - and now you have to use 3x as much interceptors to stop such attack.
Which is an important to aspect to MAD. While nuclear countries are adversarial, detterent-deters like laser AA and hypersonic cruise missiles are destabilizing.
Yeah. MAD requires for all participants to believe none of them can launch an attack on another that would kill the enemy's capability to retaliate before said retaliation. Too fast weapons destabilize MAD, and so do too good defensive technologies (or even credible rumors about them).
good defensive technologies are not destabilising when one credibly has no first strike capability. (this is, of course, only an option for third world countries)
If you have no first strike capability, you're not participating in MAD. With hypothetical superior defensive technologies you wouldn't be bossed around by folks with nukes, but you couldn't threaten them either. I'm saying hypothetical, because they don't exist yet - the primary defensive technology against superpowers is the ability to execute a retaliatory strike, i.e. to participate in MAD. And defensive tech cannot be allowed to progress faster than offensive tech, lest it breaks MAD and plunges the world into nuclear war.
Even sudden emergence of such superior shield in a random country with no offensive capabilities would be pretty destabilizing. The mere existence of it would put everyone on high alert, as all the nuclear powers scramble to replicate it before others do. And if said country where this technology emerged would even suggest they may be considering extending protection to one nuclear power and not the others, that alone would be enough to force others into striking first.
I don't know how superior (or even effective) it may be, but the existence is (and has been) well known: lots of underground concrete sufficient for the entire population (Saint Barbara has a strong local cult).
Nuclear powers (especially those who have already made first strikes) can't do this because (a) they would have to somehow retroactively do all the construction which we spent the whole cold war doing (it's much easier to put a shelter in before you build the rest of the building than after), and (b) as you point out, it would destabilise MAD.
(having no natural resources worth bombing us for is probably more effective. We don't want to threaten anyone, we would just prefer to make decisions, such as those concerning our bill denominations and our central bank strategy, by ourselves)
Tinfoil conspiracy theory: MAD explains why the US doesn't have decent subways :-) How deep are Warsaw's?
Not tinfoil: during the US/USSR cold war, it was the west- and east-germans who were most likely to get tactically nuked. In a hypothetical Oceania/Eurasia world, I'm guessing that distinction has moved to PL and BY. Luckily for you, the current two-minutes hate is directed to Eastasia.
On the brighter side: what do you think of Kongres Futurologiczny?
One of the things the map doesn't take into effect is terrain. If the explosion is on the other side of a large hill, it will shield you from the initial radiation burst and thermal flash, and any pressure damage will be reduced & delayed by having to go around or over.
You can set them for detonating at a certain altitude which might clear some terrain, true. You could also set it for a ground detonation where terrain will have more of a protective effect from the initial blast, but then there will be additional fallout. The prevailing winds will determine how affected you will be by that.
>I was actually surprised how "small" a lot of the bombs we've used are.
I think a lot of people overlook the fact that a majority of nuclear devices were created to act as triggers in an even bigger explosion - and those triggers, themselves, can be effectively deployed as a weapon as well as integrated into a higher yield system.
The man-portable nuclear arms that are fielded out there right now - can be carried onto the battlefield by a single soldier - started life as trigger components for bigger bombs. A lot of the fuss over strategic nuclear weapons usage in the last 2 decades is as a consequence of nuclear weapons getting smaller, not bigger.
For reference here, Mount St. Helens' 1980 blast was ~25 MT over the whole of the eruption, about half of Tsar Bomba. The initial blast was ~7 MT, a bit less than a W-53 Titan. That initial blast put a cubic mile of rock into the air, up to 15 miles high for some of it, and all over the continent.
If you put these numbers into the map, be sure to use the 'surface blast' option, not the 'air blast'.
I found this site super cool, and last year tried to extend this idea out, to actually map the areas that may be plausible targets (I'm not a researcher or anything, I just was curious to see how close a given location was to military bases, power plants, etc). Wrote up my general approach here: https://bpodgursky.com/2019/07/25/bunker-land-the-best-and-w...
Tried to make the map exploreable, although the UI could use a bit of polish: https://bunker.land/ (have some other stuff in there too, like natural disaster risk).
I've seen this before, and after the first time seeing it I wondered why is everybody talking about the Cold War, when 516 (+1 unknown) of them were atmospheric tests? And IIRC every single one of them stronger than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The deaths by those tests were negligible, compared to the expected deaths in a hot war. Just compare the millions of fatalities in Korea, Afghanistan or Vietnam. Those wars were only stand-ins for the real big one that thankfully never came.
A friend of mine recently pointed out that until this point, we didn’t generally or commonly understand pandemic as a real possibility (even if we did historically & scientifically). The same is true for nuclear weapons.
It's not true at all. The entire Cold War was spent by all sides thinking and preparing for nuclear war.
This sort of attitude is a very post-Cold War one. I also share it too, because the Cold War ended when I was a child so the threat of nuclear weapons always felt like something from the past to me. But if you read about people who were older during that period, you'll see that many people genuinely did live in fear that the bombs could start falling any day. For instance, I remember an Alan Moore interview from right before Watchmen came out where he said he felt there would be a nuclear war within the next few years. It's hard to imagine what living your life in that environment was like.
"I returned to civilization shortly after that and went to Cornell to teach, and my first impression was a very strange one. I can't understand it any more, but I felt very strongly then. I sat in a restaurant in New York, for example, and I looked out at the buildings and I began to think, you know, about how much the radius of the Hiroshima bomb damage was and so forth... How far from here was 34th street?... All those buildings, all smashed — and so on. And I would go along and I would see people building a bridge, or they'd be making a new road, and I thought, they're crazy, they just don't understand, they don't understand. Why are they making new things? It's so useless.
"But, fortunately, it's been useless for almost forty years now, hasn't it? So I've been wrong about it being useless making bridges and I'm glad those other people had the sense to go ahead."
There are generations of people alive today who don't remember the Cold War at all, and don't understand the fuss that was made about that era.
These people don't know what it was like to live with the terror that life on Earth could end, any day, within 45 minutes. That was hanging over our heads for decades before the wall fell and the Soviet's 'lost' the Cold War - and before 'terrorists' became the #1 scare factor for modern society.
I often have to remind 20-something year old folks in my circles that the 80's were absolutely terrifying for the potential for nuclear armageddon, not to mention the HIV waves that decimated certain aspects of youth society, as well. There is an ignorance for these things which I think is quite dangerous - kids these days are complacent and un-caring about the rise of the military industrial complex. In the 70's and 80's, we were all concerned not with terrorits, but with totalitarian military leaders, who might end it all ..
One of the most emotionally unsettling things I've seen is a fake BBC broadcast that was posted on youtube shortly after Trump was elected. Is was clearly labelled as fictional, but still.
It was about an hour long, and started off with a news report about some kind of stand-off in the Black sea, with footage of jets taking off from aircraft carriers and so on. The reporters say they're not really sure what's going on, and military officials aren't taking their calls. They switch back and forth between footage of non-specific military activity, and the exterior of some building as cars stop and this or that important government or military official gets out with a serious look on their face and enters the building. Then it cuts over to some people on a roof in Poland, talking about flashes of light on the horizon and how the phone lines are down and they can't reach anyone in the neighboring town where the flashes of light came from. Things go downhill from there, and the reporters eventually say they've been told that helicopters are evacuating the U.S. embassy in London and the Queen and her family are also evacuating to some unspecified safe location. The video ends shortly thereafter with the BBC going off the air and being replaced by their equivalent of the emergency broadcast system, announcing a list of cities town and neighborhoods where residents are advised to seek shelter immediately. The list goes on and on until eventually the video cuts out.
I haven't been able to find the video again, I'd guess it was either taken down by youtube or by the original poster. The message I took from it was that in the event of nuclear war, it'll be over before most ordinary people have got any idea of what's even happening, much less why. The fake broadcast was disturbing in part because it didn't have any sort of coherent story or plot.
By now I think most people's anxiety about Trump getting us into a nuclear war has gone down a bit simply because it's been over three years and it hasn't happened yet, and because we have other things to worry about. I don't think it has been quite front-of-mind like it was in the 80's or thereabout, but I also wasn't old enough to remember the cold war much.
Commonly, no, but generally we did understand pandemics. Just watch Contagion (2011). If a Hollywood movie would get it that right, then a lot of people had to be pretty sure of the details. It’s no accident that the only changes from reality can be explained by “trying to make a better movie” and “trying to be allowed to air in China”.
What philosophy do you think drove the production of these videos, if people didn't think nuclear war affecting them and their children was a real possibility?
Another possibility for the creation of films like this is to make it seem the government is doing something about a problem.
In this case, there was no evidence that 'duck and cover' saved any lives, even though some people who saw that media experienced bombs and explosions for other reasons.
Doing something ineffective is frequently better than doing nothing in the political world. The population won't accept a president saying 'We're really worried about the Soviets bombs, but we've decided the best action is to do nothing'. Saying "we're training everyone what to do if a nuke explodes" is part of a strategy to make the public think you have control of the situation.
there is a difference between the government understanding it and creating videos to teach the population and the population actually understanding it at large.
take his example of a pandemic for example. a lot of people thought that we'd be able to handle a global pandemic easily. they watch movies in which everything went to shit and think "no way it would be that bad if it actually happened". and to be honest, i think this pandemic actually enforced this mistaken believe. corona isn't that dangerous. if it killed with a 10+% chance, we still wouldn't have been handling it properly. the death toll wouldve just been higher.
Pandemic is not a “black swan” event. A black swan is by definition something you cannot know exists until you discover it. We’ve known pandemic was a real threat for a long time. pandemic was largely considered a certainty by anyone who was knowledgeable in the subject.
Pretending something isn’t a threat is a far cry from it not existing and the fact that you’re conflating the two says a lot about why we’re in the situation we are. Pandemic was a certainty we refused to prepare for. Many consider nuclear war a certainty we refuse to prevent.
I agree with your premise, but let's just not forget that we're humans with a limited life-span and our brains aren't used to dealing with events that happen this rarely. It's understandable why we may all have been caught off-guard. It's a "black swan" relative to our understanding of life.
Last century was the Spanish Flu. The century before that was the Russian Flu. Viral pandemics seem to be a 100-year event, and meanwhile your bank has no trouble insisting that you carry flood insurance if you are building in the 100-year floodplain.
Was a pandemic really a black swan event? I'm pretty sure researchers had been warning about the possibility of one for a long while, plus we had SARS, H1N1, Ebola, etc. Of course, they're not exactly the same as COVID-19 but it's not like we didn't know pandemics could happen
This one is. None of those other diseases have such a long time period where people are presymptomatic and contagious, and that's the only reason that COVID-19 is out of control.
While your characterization is valid I wouldn't call it a black swan, just because some of the characteristics are surprising/unknown.
All the top virologists I heard say pretty much the same on that front: it is a special thing, but the idea that something like this could happen sooner or later was clear as day.
I'm not so sure, If people in command have had lived through the Spanish flu the situation would have been handled extremely different, such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
> such as immediately closing airports in almost every country which would have keep a lot of places like New Zealand is now, with 0 new daily cases.
That's not what would have happened.
New Zealand has zero new daily cases only because it's an island. The same reason Hawaii has done so well relatively. It has almost been a month since Hawaii has had a Covid death. It's not because their lockdown measures have been magic, it's because they're an island, they got a massive artificial booster to their isolation efforts.
Well before it was understood to lock down all transportation, the virus was already spreading across the US and Europe, it was already too late. Direct experience with the Spanish Flu pandemic would have made zero difference to that. Practically nobody outside of China knew the virus was spreading in Wuhan or how serious it was for the first two months of the outbreak, starting in late October. By the time China stopped aggressively trying to conceal the nature of the virus outbreak (mid January), it had already spread to the US and Europe (in December).
All transportation globally would have had to have been locked down in mid November at the latest to have had a shot at stopping the spread. That's a fantasy scenario.
We only locked down mid-March, but we're back down to less than 2% of our peak and have been unlocking since end-April. Stopping the spread is easy, but it apparently requires a population that understands and is committed to hygienic measures.
Not at all. Even in the era of the Spanish flu there were no drastic restrictions like we have now while it killed a lot more people. Different times and different adversity to loss of human life.
The thing that I've always wanted to read about with nukes is what it's like to work with them i.e. being a nuclear bomb mechanic - in a philosophical sense rather than practical advice.
Supposedly US strategy was to rain hundreds of bombs on Moscow during a full exchange. Not being an insider, I have no idea if the results were ever modelled. But I'd guess you'd end up with a giant molten pool of radioactive slag that would stay radioactive and possibly molten for centuries, while hundreds/thousands of miles downwind would be sterilised.
Basically its super hard to get a nuclear bomb to detonate all of its material, because the force of the explosion tends to just blow the nuclear material away before it can become part of the runaway chain reaction. From what I have read you need extreme precision and carefully placed essentially "counter explosions" around the core to keep the material close enough together in the chain reaction long enough to get high rate of conversion of the material into as much energy as possible
The "crude terrorist nuke" assumes that terrorists aren't going to be able to get that precision and technique and will only get a very small yield because the bomb will blow itself apart before the chain reaction can consume all the material. After all nation states took many, many tries to get it right
Generally the smaller a nuclear explosion is the greater the danger of radiation relative to the blast. The bombs at Hiroshim and Nagasaki killed many people via radiation sickness. For modern strategic weapons if you're close enough to worry about that you'll have already died from the blast.
Of course fallout, especially from explosions on the ground to destroy hardened bunkers, silos, and sub pens can generate terrifying levels of fallout. It's just the prompt radiation from the explosion itself that usually isn't a concern.
No (nuclear) fizzle necessary. Just blow apart some abused Cobalt-60 source by conventional means, scrapped from medical or materials testing equipment. Imagine the scare. Effective area denial.
Even with all the work they put into making the implosion hold the fissionable material together it still apparently only consumed about 20% of the material.
But yeah its unlikely a terrorist org could get enough material for a "gun type" and the implosion type would also be very, very hard to get right
AFAIU the consensus among non-proliferation experts is that given access to HEU, even a relatively unsophisticated terrorist group could make a gun type weapon. That's why access to HEU is so tightly controlled with a lot of effort expended to minimize use of it. See e.g. the RERTR program to convert research reactors to LEU. And why the international community is aghast when some country like Iran tries to build up enrichment capability.
OTOH a plutonium implosion type device is a lot more difficult to get right, and is practically out of reach for non-state actors. On top of the device engineering difficulty itself, producing the raw materials is difficult too. The actual production of weapons grade plutonium isn't terribly difficult (e.g. a natural uranium fueled graphite moderated reactor), separating the Pu from the spent fuel with the PUREX process is fairly expensive and complicated.
it would be more feasible if it were stolen as theres a fair bit of monitoring going on
we made a bit of a big deal when it was revealed uranium yellow cake was being produced in quantity
>In the Little Boy design, the U-235 "bullet" had a mass of around 86 pounds (39 kg), and it was 7 inches (17.8 cm) long, with a diameter of 6.25 inches (15.9 cm). The hollow cylindrical shape made it subcritical. It was powered by a cordite charge. The uranium target spike was about 57.3 pounds (26 kg).<
it depends on how much heavy lifting and if you care for the safe return of a bomber crew but the gun barrel atomic bomb is very easy compared to other higher yield methods such as soviet layer cakes or teller-ulam methods
