On an individual basis? Yeah.
But these aren’t weapons of horrific destruction, or weapons of unpleasant secondary effects destruction, they’re weapons of mass destruction. A nuke is going to expose a lot more people to those secondary effects than a chem warhead is.
I’ll ask again: Why do you think chemical weapons should be included in the definition?
Because I can’t consider them harmless, and because they can affect large numbers of people at once. Weapons of inefficient mass destruction?
Last time I checked, the original use of the term ‘weapon of mass destruction’ was used, it was referring to what we would now call conventional weapons, in the early part of the 20th century. So really, the term itself is meaningless.
Is a truck full of C4 a weapon of mass destruction in your book?
I guess I should explain why I’m being such a harpy about this.
We went to war because Iraq was supposedly building “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” which at the time meant nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Afterward when a couple of forgotten shells full of inert Sarin gas were discovered, administration cheerleaders trumpeted it as “proof that Iraq had WMD.”
I don’t like the label WMD because it’s not precise. What it really refers to is Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological weapons. So let’s call a spade a spade and instead of saying WMD say “Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological weapons.” Hell if we need a short TLA we can call it NCB weapons.
I think precision is important, especially in public policy, especially especially with the idiots we have running the show. I really don’t want them to justify an invasion of Iran or whoever because that country once manufactured some mustard gas.
I’m not disputing that chemical weapons are harmless; I’m just disputing that they are uniquely capable of affecting large numbers of people at once. As pointed out throughout this thread an equivalent weight of C4 is far deadlier and easier to handle.
Another example: Right wing pundits keep stating that the addition of chlorine gas to carbombs in Iraq somehow converts them into “WMD.”
So if you’re proposing the term “WMD” be abolished because it’s becoming as generic and misused as the term “terror threat”, then I’m good with that.
Pretty much. :D
http://www.fas.org/main/content.jsp?formAction=297&contentId=367
Use the calculator to find out what it would take.
Basically to take out San Francisco, you would need a 1 megaton nuke delivered by car. 250 kiloton if delivered by aircraft. This would only effect downtown area, not Oakland, or other outlying areas.
Nukes do damage, but not as much as the movies make it seem.
I think it is more than this Jeff. I think that really gets you ( I know it gets me ) is that when the Administration was trotting out WMD as the reason for going to war they kept on referring to nukular weapons in informal settings ( “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” ) but yet when it came time to prove that Iraq has WMD any chemicals left over from industrial processes would do.
Note: when I say informal I mean when they were before the american press. When they were in front of people who could question them, eg: the UN, they were careful to say WMD. sigh more examples of this administation’s bullshit of epic proportions and our lap dog media who enabled them.
Chemical weapons are much more potent as a terrorist weapon than a military one. You could wrack up some horrific casualty figures from a small amount of material.
Chemical weapons can cause mass destruction, if we allow for, say, hundreds of deaths to be called “mass”. It’s just not likely to cause this among military personnel.
On the effectiveness of nuclear weapons, here’s an entertainingly put-together Good Magazine video, which estimates a 150kt weapon in NYC would kill 850,000 people within 10 seconds, ignoring later radiation deaths. A medical article estimating
12.5kt weapon in NYC would kill 50,000 immediately, ignoring later radiation deaths.
The short version is that nothing short of world war II-style firebombing of an entire city, or maybe taking out a perfectly located major dam, would kill as many people. Including chemical weapons in the same phrasing is laughable. Biological I can see, you could get a country-wide epidemic, but the level of technical competence required by sad terrorist is pretty implausible.
I can’t imagine how terrorists could manage to put together a 150kt one, but 12.5kt is just an engineering project if you can get the plutonium. I honestly don’t know if US democracy could survive taking 50,000 deaths in a terrorist attack. Imagine 9/11 scaled up to an order of magnitude, with again that amount in radiation sickness and eventually death.
I know you’re being funny here, but in the interest of being correct, the only mass that is even partially converted to energy in a nuclear device is the fissionable material (such as plutonium.) After the nuclear device goes off, within 50 nanoseconds, its done its dirty work. What’s left is an expanding ball of energy that does things like make air really really hot.
Other than that, you’re talking about chemical sources of energy, which any explosive (or a match, for that matter) is more than capable of utilizing.
Most US warheads are nowhere near that size in yield.
Deja vu…
Didn’t a lot of people spend a lot of time educating you on nukes and typical yields sometime in the past?
Yes they did:
And yet, here you are again.
Nope, definitely not. About half of the current stockpile are sub-launched Triton missiles (SLBMs), which have a yeild under 4 MT. Another quarter of the stockpile are bombs and cruise missiles, which mostly have even lower yeilds than that. The remaining quarter are land-based ICBMs. The warheads on those are all in the kiloton range, though some increase total yeild by deploying multiple warheads.
Nothing in our current arsenal is even close to 25 MT, though. We did have a 25 MT weapon once–the B41 bomb–but it was retired back in the 50s. The closest thing we have today is the B53 bomb, which is 9 MT. We have some in stockpile, but there are none in active service.
I’d also point out that it’s actually very easy to find exact figures on this, and that the US government, in fact, does want to advertise these facts. Our nuclear arsenal was intended to be a deterrent. Enemies are unlikely to fear your capabilities if they don’t know what they are.
Did you just do a search and not even read that thread? Apparently you did. That was about the physical size of nukes, as in could you fit one in the trunk of car and whatnot. I was also talking about small nukes in that thread, the 400kt size (yes I did reference old soviet nukes too). Then I showed actual pictures of these nukes and even some pictures depicting their size.
Oops, I guess you thought the link would be enough, rather then actually reading the thread you were referring to. I was pretty much dead on right in that thread.
I will grant you and JeffD that the yields I stated for current American nukes were off target, however, the point of the discussion was about what is and is not a WMD. Even a 2.5MT opposed to a 25MT nuke totally out-classes a chemical weapon. Even a 400kt MIRV nuke totally outclasses a chemical weapon. Lets also not forget that a MIRV is several nukes each of which can have the 400kt yield. All of the nukes are deployed so you do need to count them all collectively.
No. I searched based on my memory of that thread - that’s why I got that feeling of deja vu.
Having just reread the relevant pages it started out with your crazy claims about the yield of the average nuke and then you being schooled by a bunch of people.
You did provide pictures of rather small US warheads, but since the discussion was about what terrorist could possibly get their hands on/make, pictures of a heavily miniturized nuke made by the leading nation in the world was hardly “dead on right”.
But you also admitted in the thread that you were dyslexic, so perhaps you didn’t read the answers to your posts?
But we do agree on nukes as WMDs in this thread.
I was just pointing out that you still harbor a bunch of misconceptions about nukes, their sizes and typical yield.