The Effect of Atmospheric Nuclear Testing on American Mortality Patterns [pdf]
keithameyers.com
keithameyers.com
"The empirical results of this paper suggest that nuclear testing contributed to hundreds of thousands of premature deaths in the United States between 1951 and 1972. The social costs of these deaths range between $473 billion to over $6.1 trillion dollars in 2016$. These losses dwarf the $2 billion in payments the Federal Government has made to domestic victims of nuclear testing through the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act and are substantial relative to the financial cost of the United States’ nuclear weapons program. It is likely that the values of both the testing moratorium enacted in 1958 and the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty are understated. These political compromises likely saved hundreds of thousands of additional lives at a minimum."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_Exposure_Compensatio...
It's quite absurd to me that nuclear weapons are legal to possess, but not legal to use, even in self defense of a nuclear attack. [1] What a contradiction that is.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Court_of_Justice...
It's a crime to throw a billion people into gas chambers, and it doesn't become A-OK just because someone else threw a billion people into gas chambers too.
Gulf Arab states on the ground hunted him down, it was Qatari forces that likely killed him.
The US did some drones, AWACS and coordination, but to suggest it was the US is not quit fair.
This is not what the world thinks.
Gaddafi was not about to obtain nuclear status - not even close.
There's no way he would have been allowed to anyhow.
Libya is a fairly small country, smaller than Chicago, fragmented, spread apart, with no industry other than some oil.
North Korea is not remotely comparable to Libya - I don't think the North Koreans see a true analogy.
Another great country, that totally does not get pushed around comes to mind. Israel. Surrounded by enemys, with some really nasty wars in its recent history- that suddenly stopped.
Or India, dear god, that country was fractured and ripe for the taking- and yet, suddenly its independence is well respected- just like it is by all those companies and foreign powers in africa.
I wonder why.(not)
Delusional Intentions do not equal good outcomes, just because they timewise correlated.
This is ridiculous.
The US didn't take a drop of Iraqi, Kuwaiti or Libyan Oil.
The US could take all the Oil in the Middle East in a heartbeat if it wanted to.
This whole 'war for Oil' bit is mostly rubbish.
'War for continued access to energy' yes - but the us is not grabbing resources with military power, moreover, North Korea has nothing anyone wants.
Current US Intel chief on this subject: https://theintercept.com/2017/07/29/dan-coats-north-korea-nu...
"Don’t invade a country if you are too lazy to learn the language." is a good rule of thumb here.
http://www.pieria.co.uk/articles/why_the_worlds_biggest_mili...
Except for the part where Gaddaffi was using his military against half his nation in revolt.
If a nation-state is doing it's dirty work through a terrorist organization, MAD no longer works.
Nuclear weapons states and their force commanders are well aware of this capability. It’s been publicly advertised for decades for deterrence.
However, nuclear war between the US & USSR was not prevented by the existence of nuclear weapons. Even ignoring the logical absurdity this would require, the simple fact is that nuclear war nearly happened on many occasions as a result of various misadventures, and it was a matter of pure dumb luck that it didn't. It literally is just an accident of fortune that we didn't have a world-encircling cataclysm. Your and my existence hinges merely on happenstance. Huge amounts of documentation attest to this. The best single-volume account is probably Eric Schlosser's Command and Control.
Nuclear weapons don't prevent war. They reduce the frequency of some types of conventional war, at the cost of making cataclysm absolutely inevitable. They will be used at some point, whether by malign choice or accident. It is only a matter of time.
There are a whole bunch of other questions discussed by military historians which complicate the matter further, arguing (for example) that nuclear weapons increase the number and length of proxy wars. But even that's all a detail in the face of the manifest fact that if nuclear weapons continue to be deployed, we will have a nuclear war one day.
So perhaps we should be working on some less risky peace-building efforts, while there's still time?
No - this is false.
It was the existential and immense nature of the consequences of war that enabled the parties to 'back down'.
Without nukes - the US and USSR would have likely started a bunch of scuffles here and there.
There's a great chance that US/USSR navies duked it out over Cuba - because the consequences would have been likely very limited - unless they escalated of course.
Yes, we were lucky that it didn't go down as well, but nukes have been a huge factor in keeping the war basically cold..
"some less risky peace-building efforts" - there is really no such thing. 'Balancing Power' is what creates peace for the most part.
They did.
False. 'Proxy wars' is a misleading title.
The Korean war was not a 'proxy war' it was a real war, that happened to also be a proxy for other powers.
Country A does not fight random country B for no reason.
They are generally real conflicts where their actions may happen to have geostragetic alignment with other powers.
No, they usually don't. But countries, nations, and people often have very long lasting disagreements. Instrumentalizing those, for another "bigger" cause isn't really that hard of a task for the far more influential and powerful countries C and D.
C and D end up supplying A and B with money, weapons, training and sometimes even direct manpower.
The result is usually a conflict that escalates much more quickly in scope and severity than it would have without the involvement of C and D.
The outcome is a tire fire that will burn for my lifetime at least.
Run the experiment several times, and this luck inevitably runs out. Continue with nuclear weapons, and there just will be a nuclear war.
I don't have a good explanation for that number of coincidences, though.
Why these guys aren't better known, I have no idea.
[0] http://time.com/4947492/stanislav-petrov-soviet-officer-nucl...
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Hitler
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mao_Zedong
My assumption is that those scientists working on the bomb, where perfectly aware of what humanity was capable of (even with democracy and hightech) and decided to raise us this rockets as a monumental finger of "Never again or never ever after!". Way to go to tame a beast, who thinks you are a useful plaything. Well played Mr.Oppenheimer.
Rage all you want upon this monument of reason, erected against the intellectual treason you commit against the humanity that is- not the humanity you wish for.
The inferno of the first WorldWar, the Inferno of the second WorldWar, the various Colonial Wars and all the useless carnage before - these all started with a humanity capable of deducing deterrence, but true deterrence appeared first in presidential discussions after the existence of ICBMs.
They are the reason that Turkey can shoot down Russian fighters without Russia attacking Turkey.
They are the reason USA can invade Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. without being counter-attacked by others.
Because of nuclear weapons, we can have dozens of "wars" all the time where nobody has the courage to stop the 10Ks of deaths in each one because we're terrified of millions of deaths.
I don't know how you can say it stops countries from going to war. The largest nuclear powers are in a constant state of war, daring anyone to stop them.
Current situation sucks, but I'm not convinced removing nukes from the equation would improve it.
Compare with a story of a real country not so long ago. A large power invented a false reason to start a war, and then suddenly the country gets bombed all across the territory, and few days later there are shock troops in the capital. Total death toll of citizens of this country is, to date, around 0.55M [0].
Were you living there, I'm not sure you'd have time, or capacity, to "go camping until it all blows over".
Now this situation - and a bunch of similar ones in recent years - only reinforces the perception that if you don't have nuclear weapons, or don't have very close friends with some, you risk being abused or outright invaded by the larger players. It's actually no surprise NK is so aggressive in their nuclear program.
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[0] - I'm counting the 0.37M of those who opposed the invasion and 0.18M who switched sides.
By the most liberal estimates, the Iraq war killed 1 million. World War 2 killed 70 million easy.
Veto power in the security council strongly correlates with being a nuclear power.
Since we're on the U.S. - they have nukes and a clear technological superiority to everyone else. I don't see them doing much for world peace though.
It turns out if you want to blow up an asteroid coming your way, or at least nudge it off its course, lobbing some megatons of TNTs in its general direction is a lot harder than sending over some nukes.
Also, things put on top of nukes when they blow up go really high, really fast, even if they're heavy. So if you add a nuke chute to the back of your spaceship, and some mechanism for dampening the blow you can build some really awesome interplanetary transports. With enough nukes you can even go to other stars in more or less reasonable time frames!
[1] - https://www.academia.edu/1884741/Roundtrip_interstellar_trav...
It is laser propulsion that is techno-magic. Even today. I won't register on whatever site to read yet another article on that, but I do bet neither the lasers nor the sail on this one could be made today.
Realistically all we can do at this time to cope with an extinction level impact, is crying and dying.
So yes, in theory we could divert some impactors, but in practice right now? No. Nukes don’t help either.
There's nothing that comes close to the MJ/kg of a modern thermonuclear weapon.
For some discussion of the specifics...
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/7960/could-we-deal...
Oh, it's simple- we'd sent in Bruce Willis [1].
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But, anyway, unless we wait way too much, it's better to deflect an asteroid than to break it.
They are attractive to everyone. Note that the 2 biggest nuclear powers also have the most powerful conventional militaries.
Nuclear weapons arguably did end full scale war as we know it and the 'cold war' is not over, it's just thawed.
WW2 ended due to them basically - and Korea was stalemated when Eisenhower demonstrated artillery based nukes as a 'signal' to the Chinese.
Korea was the last 'real war' - since then it's been smaller scale stuff, insurgencies, smaller nations fighting, NATO overruns (Iraq, Libya, etc.).
It will take another 50-100 years to denuclearize.
The only way to stand-down is to create a framework wherein there is reasonable assurance of balance of power.
You can see North Korea's push to nuclearize is actually fairly rational survival strategy. Once they are fully there, they are too dangerous to fight. I'm not saying I agree, I'm saying it's a reasonably rational move for a self-interested entity.
As for 'ban' - who 'bans'? There is not international power than can ban this stuff. The UN? Where is the UN's army to enforce the ban? See what I mean? ...
I don't think you'll find many historians arguing for this point. By the time the US nuked Japanese, the war in Europe was already over, and Japanese were preparing to surrender anyway. Allies had more than enough conventional firepower to destroy Japanese cities, as shown by a single bombing of Tokyo in March 1945, which had casualty toll close to Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.
They were so close to surrendering that after the first nuke they had several days to surrender, but didn't until they were nuked again?
I think we should keep nuclear weapons around to lessen the risk of an alien invasion.
Assuming that a hostile alien species would suffer the same kind of damage as humans from high levels of radioactivity, possessing the power to turn the Earth into a ball of highly radioactive rock is a pretty damn good deterrent for what Iain M. Banks called an "out-of-context threat" (like the one the Conquistadores bestowed upon the ancient Mexicans, say- or like what we would risk faced with a technologically more advanced alien species).
So although I'm actually a pacifist and I am very worried about the prospect of nuclear holocaust (especially after hearing that nuclear weapons software runs on ... Windows XP... gulp) and although I do recognise that the threat of an invasion by an alien super-civilisation is at almost as remote as the threat from an emerging superintelligence, I still think we should totally keep a few nukes around, just in case.
Uh.. Is that something one can 'recognise'? (It's a way of writing that begs the question.) Seems to me the threat of the first is not high, to say the least, but who knows. The threat of the second seems very high, well, at least if there are only 'a few nukes' on the planet. Otherwise nukes will get us first. I literally can't imagine 'nukes getting us first' but it does seem likely.
A digital superinteligence (should I expect it to be organic?) will be either very concentrated or backed-up everywhere. On the first case traditional explosives will give us better bang for our bucks, and lead to less collateral losses. On the second case, nuclear weapons would destroy us much sooner than the AI.
On the case of aliens, the entire problem is how to reach them. If we can get some weapon into them, yes, a nuke would probably be marginally more effective than a lump of lead, but not by a large difference.
"Attack and the planet gets it", see?
Of course we get it along with the planet, but I'm assuming that if the aliens are invading they're planning to exterminate us anyway.
I think yes. If you think about it, we have evidence that a technological civilisation can exist- ours. We don't have any evidence that a superintelligence can exist. So an alien civilisation invading us is a more credible threat than an emerging superintelligence turning us all into paper clips and whatnot.
Remember also that nukes may not be that effective against an interstellar civilizations and the technology that implies. Almost certainly useless against the point defenses a ship that travels at a fractional percentage of lightspeed would need for targeting and deflecting/destroying small space debris. On the Earth itself it should be suicidaly useful, but if the aliens feel we're a threat to them on the ground they can simply sterilize the planet from space.
Bottom line, if we're visited by a hostile alien race, it's likely to be game over - even with home field advantage.
Doesn’t that defeat the purpose?
But you're right- determining any degree of consensus for such a decision would be nearly impossible.
Then again- extinction event.
Aliens would use pesticides and we'd never see them coming. See "The Screwfly Solution".
And it's a great point- but still, we have more chances with some sort of plan to defend ourselves than without.
What risk? What "alien invasion"? People understand about the speed of light and all right?
Alien civilizations might exist somewhere, but alien invasions are fairy tales for geeks.
That means that even for a species with a life span similar to that of humans, but possessing advanced enough technology to travel at half-light speed, it would not be impossible to launch an invasion from a point in space about 10 to 15 ish light years from here. If they started now, they'd be here in 30 years. The question of whether this is a realistic prospect comes down to how important it is to an intelligent species to have access to a planet that demonstrably can sustain life. My guess would be- really damn important. Important enough that we can be fairly sure that we ourselves will definitely look for that sort of planet in that sort of distance and time-frame, once we have achieved the technological capacity to do so.
And, like I say, the above is assuming a species with a life span similar to ours. Which is a big assumption. Maybe my hypothetical space invaders will have a typical lifespan of 1000 years, so that 50 years are nothing for them - a 20th of their lifetime. 5 of our years. Would we launch a 5-year space invasion to take control of a planet capable of harboring life? I bet we would. We'd send in the space marines alright (because an inhabited planet would present that sort of challenge to our control).
And who knows- if an alien civilisation is advanced enough to travel at half the speed of light, then maybe they also have the technology to artificially expand their life span. Maybe 1000 years is 20% of their life time. Maybe it's 1%. Maybe they don't really need to die anymore? So they can travel anywhere they like, at their own time. Of course in that case they can just wait around a few more centuries, until we've wiped ourselves out- problem solved. But maybe they have other reasons than their life span to hurry and take over a nice little blue gem like ours (theirs is all but exhausted, or a Tyranid Hive Fleet is approaching, that sort of thing).
What I'm saying is that the vastness of the distances across interstellar space may be a big problem for us but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be as big a problem for a much more technologically advanced civilisation, also. And maybe we currently don't have the motivation to attempt such travel even if we had the means- but that, too, is not necessarily a quality shared with every other technological civilisation in our near galactic neighbourhood.
Is it even possible to reliably measure this? Sure, the statistical test says 'significant', but the number of potential confounding geographic variables must be enormous. How can this study have possibly ruled out other pollutants, economic conditions, or suchlike correlating with how weapons test sites are chosen?
It seems very plausible that nuclear weapons testing caused pollution, but it also seems plausible that the weapons were being tested in areas that were wilting. I don't know, but I am very cautious about using this data to conclude what specific effect radiation pollution has. The 'Robustness' section looks fairly cursory.
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests_...
I wanna see what effect Nuclear Power has on the health of the average French citizen.
If we're going to examine power, the US is hardly the place. Only around 20% is from nuclear.
France, on the otherhand - home country to Areva, (Westinghouse's main competition for fuel supplier here in the US) gets ~75% OF Their power from nuclear reactors.
There's a couple upstarts each from Britian and East Asia, but they're not working with our 1950s-70s standards within boiling water reactors. I dont know about much with them and their fuels.
So, here in the States, we have the same companies (Westinghouse and Areva,) operating in a similar regulatory environments with similar technologies...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4267445/ Here's a link where our NIH disputes previous findings about French Lukemia. Confounding factors were later discovered in the initial study which caused the panic; this study also used a terribly small sample size.
Spain is in a similar Nuclear "envelope" of the industry. Both Westinghouse and Areva operate there. http://www.foronuclear.org/es/ask-the-expert/121594-epidemio... no risk found in the Spanish study.
Almost everyone agrees that radioactive material in the atmosphere is extremely dangerous, and almost everyone agrees that a properly functioning nuclear power plant releases very little radioactive material into the atmosphere.
The mainstream arguments about nuclear energy production involve the probabilities of malfunctions, and whether there is an under-siege mentality among designers that leads them to understate risks to the public, and also to be less skeptical of their own work compared to say civil engineers.
It’s incredible how many things humans do without considering long term consequences: nuclear testing, adding millions of synthetic chemicals to household products, pesticides (read toxins) sprayed on our food, pesticides produced by GMO crops, etc
Keep in mind "fallout" from an atmospheric test is very different than a surface test. Mostly in that it is not fallout in the traditional/popular definition, but radionuclide creation of air and h2o irradiation and not particulates at the same scale as a surface burst. That is important because half-lifes. Most(99%) of the radionuclides from an atmospheric burst are gone(halved) in 8 days.
Also interesting is that Chernobyl is estimated to have introduced 5% of the global Strontium-90 population.
Interesting tidbits. Most discussion about dangers of radiation is about cancer. But some stuff I've heard centered around Chernobyl is other types of mortality increase.
I'd be interested to know more about the current balance of thinking on the topic. The optimist in me obviously would prefer a less awful relationship between exposure and mortality but sadly I can't impose my wishes on reality.