You know, I knew nuclear weapons were ludicrously powerful and all, but I never had a concrete image of what it looked like. Then I stumbled on the Crossroads baker underwater explosion.
Those are battleships, for chrissakes. From the wiki article on the test.
This is a really awesome coffee table book. Basically, incredibly rare and highly detailed photos of every US nuclear surface test.
And a couple of the ships in Crossroads Baker were battleships. There were more destroyers and transports, and the aircraft carriers were more escort carrier size; not Essex class. Plus, consider this. Crossroads Baker was a 23-kiloton warhead detonated underwater. The largest nuclear test ever was Soviet; Tsar Bomba was 50 megatons.
Nuclear weapons are the one thing about modern life, other than climate change, where I just cannot figure out why other people are not as concerned about it as me. We have the capability to cause a biblical level of disaster, and by any summed series of low likelihood of accidental detonation (0.1% a year?), it eventually becomes a certainty that something truly horrible will happen - but no one really worries about it anymore now that the USSR is gone. Never mind that US and USSR policies are virtually unchanged; we get attacked intentionally or by accident, we murder everyone.
Plus there’s the moral issue: basically, the two countries have wired themselves and the world up to kill switches. Is it really acceptable to threaten to kill an entire nation if someone attacks you? I’m serious about this - whatever the intention of supposedly “attacking military targets”, the net effect of a full nuclear exchange would basically be the end of humanity. Even dialing back to an accidental exchange of what, two? weapons would be the greatest disaster in the history of humanity, with a higher death toll than anything else we’ve done as a species.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfoQsZa8F1c
the Tsar bomb, the largest ever detonated on the planet at 57MT, reaching so high into the atmosphere that the tests started to get worried, apparently.
Two weapons isn’t enough to threaten humanity. Those “global desctruction” numbers seemed to be based on a full nuclear exchange of dozens of the most high powered weapons. Maybe new information and weaponry exists to contradict that, I haven’t searched.
Perhaps if you assume worst case scenario circumstances you could make that argument about a two nukes being that way. But there are different types of nuclear weapons and it also depends a lot on how they are actually used. An airburst over a city has different long-term impacts then dropping one so that it creates a crater in the ground, for example. And not necessarily in the ways you might think.
On top of which many things have changed since the end of the Cold War. There are not as many weapons deployed for immediate use. There are not as many weapons period due to arsenal reductions. There are not as many active delivery systems. All nuclear powers still have plenty of punch, but it is not at the scale it was at the peak. Obviously a full scale war would still be catastrophic, however, and likely an extinction level event for humanity and many other species.
But what then do you propose to change things? If the US disarms, then will others follow simply because we don’t pose a threat? Will it stop other countries from trying to get their own either because they fear nuclear blackmail by their perceived enemies or because they want that leverage for themselves? Have disarmament treaties ever really meant much when a nation decides to do what it wants? It’s pointless to wish nuclear weapons didn’t exist because that genie is out of the bottle and isn’t ever going back in. And it will require a large scale shift in how we all (and by all I mean the whole world) act and think and behave to create a situation where we all are united in our desire to make them go away.
Woo take a look at an image of the area
I like that one of the related videos on Youtube is one of somebody mixing Diet Coke and Mentos.
When I was a kid, I used to wake up in the middle of the night during thunderstorms, terrified that the world was ending in a nuclear war. At age 12, it was my absolute biggest fear in life. I thought about it way too much. I even told my mother that I wished I had never been born so that I wouldn’t have to go through that. She sent me to a psychologist (I wasn’t suicidal at all…it was a hypothetical).
I’ve sense stopped worrying about it on a global scale of the sort Jason is discussing. But yeah, if even one of these accidently went off, that would be awful. I’m pretty sure the chances are much lower than .1% a year though.
“the largest, most powerful Nuclear weapon ever detonated. Developed by the Soviet Union, the bomb was originally designed to have a yield of about 100 megatons of TNT”
OK, but it wasn’t that big in reality.
I have no idea what should be done about nukes, but morally I can’t support their existence. With how the geo-political scene changes over time and the amount of bombs out there, its not a question of if one will go off in the future, but when and where. I’m actually surprised there weren’t more legitimate scares when the USSR crumbled. Not to be a fearmonger, but its true. Nukes are dreadfully scary.
I know, i’m just pointing out that they wanted it to be bigger…which is amazing considering the youtube vidoe that was linked.
… and, the rest of the sentence:
“; however that was reduced by half in order to limit the amount of nuclear fallout that would result.”
Yeah, and that is a relatively small bomb, as others pointed out. Here’s another video of the Tsar bomb, showing a number of different views, from different distances.
When the bomb detonated, immediately the temperature directly below and surrounding the detonation would have risen to millions of degrees. The pressure below the blast was 300 pounds per square inch, over three times the pressure in a car tyre. The light energy released was so powerful that it was visible even at 1000km (621 miles), with cloudy skies. The shockwave was powerful enough to break windows at even up to 900 kilometres (560 miles) from the blast. The shockwave was recorded orbiting the earth 3 times. The mushroom cloud rose to an altitude of 64,000 meters (210,000 feet) before levelling out. The thermal energy from the blast was powerful that it could cause 3rd degree burns to a human standing 100 km (62 miles) away from the blast. The radius of the fireball was 2.3 kilometres (1.4 miles). The blast radius (area in which total destruction ensured) was 13km (8 miles).
Think about that for a moment. The heat from the blast was intense enough to kill a person standing 62 miles away. So yeah: powerful. And it was detonated with one at least one (and possibly two) of its three stages removed; the actual bomb was designed to deliver a yield approximately twice as large as the one in the test (around 100 MT). Of course, superbombs like these are actually somewhat impractical, and were largely abandoned in favor of MIRVs, which are sort of like the nuclear weapon equivalent of a shotgun (they pepper an area with many smaller blasts; “smaller” in this case being a relative term–our Peacekeeper missiles, for instance, would have showered a target area with ten separate warheads, each one producing a blast about ten times more powerful than the one in your video with the battleships). This causes considerably more damage than a single warhead of similar total yield, and greatly increases the area affected by heavy radiation.
Nuclear weapons are the one thing about modern life, other than climate change, where I just cannot figure out why other people are not as concerned about it as me.
Having grown up during the cold war, I’ll say that I find nuclear weapons to be greatly worrisome. But what can we do? That genie is so far out of the bottle, it’s never going back. The dangers that you cite, like the accidental detonation or launch of a weapon from our arsenal, are so incredibly minuscule as to be essentially nil. Since most of out arsenal is located in relatively remote sites, in hardened underground silos that are themselves designed to withstand nuclear strikes, the threat posed by accidental detonation is probably similar to the chances that the large hadron collider will destroy the universe. Much more worrisome is the threat of proliferation–even a tiny bomb is a much greater threat than our largest warhead if its in the hands of someone crazy enough to actually use it.
It’s interesting how nukes just came up today in my (soopar advanced) game theory class. Clearly everyone has nukes on the brain for some reason.
Nuclear weapons are the greatest force for peace in the world today. Look back over the past five hundred years – there’s been at least one massive conflict a generation prior to 1948. Now look at us. There hasn’t been a war between two major powers since WWII.
From a game theory perspective, the advent of nuclear weapons changed inter-state relations from zero sum (there’s only so much planet, and the more we have the less they have) to cooperative (nukes will destroy the planet, so fighting brings zero value, therefore peace).
The real scary issue is the terrorist one, because they still operate in zero sum – their death is not counted as a negative so long as it brings death to their opponents. Clearly planetary destruction isn’t an issue for someone who thinks like that – in fact, it’s almost a desirable goal, as it maximizes the amount of harm they can do.
The issue here is the tension between the two games – nukes are beneficial in one game, and a detriment in the other. So how do you resolve that?
Tune in next week, when we use some scary looking maths and a non-finite number of actors and strategies to find out (or not, the professor is kind of a slacker)!
I see where you are coming from here, but disagree incredibly that “nuclear weapons are the greatest force for peace in the world today.” Nuclear weapons just ensure that when they are eventually used, the devastation will be incomprehensible. Your outlook is very short-sighted. I personally don’t want to live in a world where current peace is based on fear, because that peace won’t last long.
It’s lasted about twice as long thus far as it would have prior to their creation. And remember that a WWII style conflict would have probably occurred between Russia and the US back in the 50s had there not been nukes. How many more millions of people would have died? And right now, the logical foes for the US are Russia and China. A war between those three powers, even without ABC weapons, would be cataclysmic.
Nukes are the only thing too scary for warmongers to ignore. That’s why asymmetric warfare has become the default.
Sure, they might get used eventually. But I’d personally expect the bomb to come from a non-state actor, who has obvious incentives to use it, rather than a state actor like Iran or Russia or North Korea, who all have massive disincentives for use.
MAD worked, works, and will continue to work on state actors.
You need to study history more, my friend.
As something of an aside, my father was at several of the Bikini Atoll tests in the 50’s. Although he was an NCO in the Army, he was assigned to the AEC as a guard on several of the detonations. He described the towers they built to hold the weapons, as well as the test instrumentation.
He was also one of the last people off the island. He told me that once everything was in place, the last few of them would sprint down to the beach, where a boat waited for them. They’d jump in and the chief would slam the throttle forward and they’d run the engines full throttle until they got to the pickup point. It’s pretty funny, because that would happen at least 24 hours before the detonation. But then, if I was on an island with a thermonuclear weapon, I’d probably want to leave pretty quickly too…
On top of all that, my mother survived the Nagasaki bomb, by having her house collapse on her when she was in the basement. (She was on the periphery, not near ground zero, obviously.) She finally passed away several years ago, at age 73, from lung cancer. But that wasn’t from radiation, but from a lifetime of 2-pack a day smoking.
