What Bikini Atoll Looks Like Today
medium.com
medium.com
> the armada of sunken warships, including the USS Saratoga, an aircraft carrier the length of a Manhattan avenue block that lies on the lagoon’s bottom.
Ughh, More "Journalist-SI units of measurement." Would it kill him to actually describe the mass displaced in kg or lb, and say the actual length of the warship? I get that he's trying to to dumb down measurements so they are understandable to people who don't know what pounds and feet are, but by using Manhattan-specific units, he even fails for people outside of NYC. Further, he's using one of his JSI units incorrectly: "Empire State Building" is typically used as a unit of height rather than mass. So much fail, avoidable by just using standard units of measurement!
So at what point do eco-terrorists seek to cause nuclear incidents with the intent of causing less harm than human development and presence would cause?
(This has probably been explored in a Tom Clancy/Michael Crichton -type novel...)
This is the plot of Rainbow Six, where a scheming group of evil environmentalists plan to unleash a weaponized strain of Ebola on the world to wipe out 99.99% of the global population so that the ecosystems will survive. Other comically evil things the environmentalists do include experimenting on homeless people abducted from the street and provoking/funding acts of terror worldwide as part of some hazy cover up for their activities.
It all ends in tears for the environmentalists though, at the hands of an all-American red-blooded special forces hero and his multi-national above-the-law and above-Top-Secret counter-terrorism task force.
Not really Clancy's finest hour, IMO, but a good look into the conservative id.
Well that's the thing: The book comes from a different world. More precisely, it came from 1998, when the Soviet Union (Tom Clancy's traditional antagonist of choice) was long gone, but Islamic terror wasn't yet the obvious replacement. He wrote a string of books with odd antagonists (eg, Japanese nationalists) during the period.
Who names their covert terrorism op that? That's just asking for it.
Terrorism is, in the broadest sense, the use of intentionally indiscriminate violence as a means to create terror, or fear, to achieve a political, religious or ideological aim. It is used in this regard primarily to refer to violence against peacetime targets or in war against non-combatants.
With the advent of the B29, the US was dropping napalm and phosphorus on Japanese cities to create massive firestorms. The glow of Tokyo burning was visible for hundreds of miles. On the scale of horror or inhumanity, I’m not sure how to compare different types of aerial bombardment targeted civilians as instruments of war production that needed to be eliminated.
[0] https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-h...
[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
PS, Pearl Harbour was against military targets, and peacetime is arguable considering the embargoes, etc. Still not "high ground" by any means, but hardly unprecedented. The US already had a fleet there precisely in case it was needed against the Japanese empire.
World War 1 was where his really came to roost. The machine gun and artillery turned the western front into an industrial scale killing machine that only ended when the German economy ground to a halt. Technology improvements in WW2 enabled destruction at a scale never witnessed in history and incomparable on a relative scale to nothing except Caesar’s Gallic campaign.
The way to win was about metrics — building more arms and killing as many people as possible. Japan was no different than cavalrymen in WW1, who believed that elan and decisive victory in the field would carry the day. Sociopaths like Curtis Lemay figured that out.
And since when did saying "I hate you, I'm going to war with you" make it OK to indiscriminately kill civilians.
ISIS has declared war on England. Does that make it OK for them to bomb the subway?
That the Japanese didn't employ terrorist tactics against American civilians? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_balloon
> And since when did saying "I hate you, I'm going to war with you" make it OK to indiscriminately kill civilians
Maybe ask the Japanese? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
If you can't understand a strategic decision to bring a war to an end and avoid a larger loss of life, I don't know what to tell you.
Funny definition is that.
So, how do you call acts of agression performed by governments against non combatants?
Since the only reason not to call them terrorism is to paint (your?) government actions with a nicer brush, I assume you call those acts "liberation events"
War crimes.
The reason not to call it terrorism is because that is not what the word means. If a sovereign nation formally declares war to another, any action covered by international convention is classified seperately from "civil" or militant violence.
https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:LouvainX+Louv16x+1...
This one is the biggest bomb ever detonated. I can't find any ground pictures of the site though. Anyone find one that's not airborne?
Hollywood producers who rely on the post armageddon 'nuclear winter wasteland' will have to go back to the drawing boards.
Yet, I wonder what other long term genetic corruption will have occurred even in the surviving and supposedly thriving flora and fauna. Are we subtly developing life forms that will be able to better withstand any sort of nuclear holocaust and thrive once we are long gone?
EDIT: I am thinking the downvoters are reading the first paragraph of my post and not really getting to the last bit and getting the gist of what I am saying... ;)
The wiki article is interesting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter
I wonder just how much fire, smoke and debris was ejected into the atmosphere? I assume not much given the extent of water around the place, but if indeed 23 Skyscrapers worth of matter was moved, you would assume that most of it would have been scattered into the upper atmosphere as fine dust amongst the water vapour etc.
I wonder how that affected the weather and climate around the area over the next few days. They must have studied that, but I don't see very much available in terms of their findings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
Nuclear Winter is a case of scientists running personal social activism and using their cover as scientists to implant a false narrative.
> Even Dr. Richard P. Turco, the physicist who coined the phrase ''nuclear winter,'' discounts the idea.
http://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/23/science/nuclear-winter-the...
But if you continue on, you'll find more recent research, both pro an con. I think it's still a completely reasonable foundation for a dystopian fantasy story.
In spite of the specific events in Kuwait, I'd be willing to wager that if humans launch, say, 500 nuclear weapons there will be climate consequences resembling nuclear winter.
We probably won't agree on this point. I think we can agree, let's not find out.
So why not a nuclear exchange?
It's hyped exaggeration using rhetoric for political effect.
Well done, HN.
When a nuclear war is less bad than the alternatives, then it is unreasonable to be against it.
A lot of Western anti-nuclear sentiment was simply manufactured by KGB manipulation of useful idiots. It's sad: if not for fifty years of anti-nuclear propaganda, we might be off of coal and safely generating energy for the next couple of centuries while we work on environmentally-friendly ways to produce solar cells. Instead, we're belching forth pollution — to include radioactive pollution — at an unprecedented rate, decades after the fall of the Soviet Union, whose security the anti-nuclear propaganda was intended to ensure.
Except for micro-organisms. The Chernobyl area apparently has issues with dead matter not decaying. See https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/forests-around...
Anyways, it's funny that this thing was way bigger than expected, yet less than 1/3 the size of Tzar Bomba, which itself was down rated by 50%!
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/the-dome-runit-island-...
It's mesmerizing to scroll around looking for circles in the ocean. And then to spend all night reading depressing wikipedia articles about past behavior of the US government.
Ive seen articles with people walking on top of the "cactus" dome, so clearly some people have managed it at some point.
FWIW, Young Pioneer Tours (no affiliation, but I've been with them to North Korea and Iran, and can recommend them) offers guided tours of Chernobyl (and also the "least visited countries" tour [3], including Marshall Islands, but not the Bikini Atoll yet).
[1] http://gmbhome.com/micro05/Islandhop.htm
[2] http://www.jasonaroundtheworld.com/2011/10/the-continental-i...
[3] http://www.youngpioneertours.com/tour/least-visited-countrie...
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-11-27/the-dome-runit-island-...
For a realistic look at the aftermath, I’d suggest the novel War Day (which is set after a very limited nuclear way, but that’s already pretty bad), and the online alt-history timelines The Cuban Missile War and Protect and Survive.
Edit: and a really good analysis of an all-out war in the late 1980s: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/nuclearwar1.html
* We have found caves that have been closed off for millions of years, there might be more * Extremophiles are living around thermal vents at the sea floor * In the Russian Permafrost, Microbes have been found in suspended hibernation since a couple million years ago
In general, even if we were to nuke this dirtball to shit and back, something would be likely to survive
> Russell Seitz, Associate of the Harvard University Center for International Affairs, argues that the winter models' assumptions give results which the researchers want to achieve and is a case of "worst-case analysis run amok".[180] In September 1986 Seitz published "Siberian fire as 'nuclear winter' guide" in the journal Nature in which he investigated the 1915 Siberian fire which started in the early summer months and was caused by the worst drought in the region's recorded history. The fire ultimately devastated the region burning the world's largest boreal forest, the size of Germany. While approximately 8 ˚C of daytime summer cooling occurred under the smoke clouds during the weeks of burning, no increase in potentially devastating agricultural night frosts occurred.
and take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter#Kuwait_wells_in...
Of course, the whole article amounts to a description of how the island has healed, but let's not let that get in the way of a good finger-wagging exercise.
While life has continued there it's more because of the absence of humans. And likely despite the radiation which makes the island inhospitable for humans. I wouldn't say 'healed' is the way to describe a place that continues to have poisoned water and food for decades to come.
People displaced? Being displaced isn't, on its own, a tragedy. I'm sure those islanders didn't become some stateless, homeless street urchins. They probably did just fine in their new home. I will probably never be able to live in my childhood neighborhood because I've been priced out of the property market. That's a common story, but so what? I have no complaints at all about it and wouldn't want to suppress other people's economic activity just so I can feel familiar about my surroundings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_testing_at_Bikini_Atol...