This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like
nymag.com
nymag.com
Every time there is a hurricane, it seems that it catches everyone unaware. Same for snowstorms. When California gets hit by a big earthquake (Magnitude 8 level), I can guarantee it's going to be complete chaos, despite the fact that we know it's going to happen.
Everybody should have at minimum 3 days of sealed food and water at home. That's how long it will take emergency services to reach you in case of a major disaster.
Back on to the topic of nuclear explosions. Most people have the misconception that they sound like a low rumbling that goes on for some time. In reality, they are a sharp crack, not unlike a conventional explosion, just a lot louder, as this video demonstrates: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwkTYeukE4
It's also worth noting that a magnitude 8 earthquake in one part of California will have little effect in other parts. It's a pretty big place. LA could be totally destroyed and we would barely feel it here in San Jose.
I don't take your prediction of "complete chaos" very seriously.
I think you're right that the effect on California would be pretty ho-hum, though. California prepares for earthquakes; most of the building codes are designed for > magnitude 8 quakes, major companies headquartered here have earthquake drills to maintain continuity of business, schools teach kids what to do in an earthquake, and I'd bet that first responders and hospitals all drill for what to do. The electricity & Internet would likely go down, because PG&E and Comcast seemingly can't keep them running even in the absence of natural disasters. And transportation would be a problem - even the mudslides last winter managed to take out all the roads over the mountain and large sections of highway 1. But I don't think you'd see large-scale chaos or civil disorder, at least in Northern California.
No idea whether you'd see the same in SoCal; aside from them expecting a larger quake, sooner, than the Bay Area, they haven't had one since before urbanization. I suspect their building codes are the same, though, so unless it's Santa Ana wind season they'll probably do okay.
It was not chaotic
Highway 17, the main link between silicon valley and the coast, was closed for two months. The Bay Bridge was closed for a month. Over 40 buildings in downtown Santa Cruz demolished. 42 dead in the Cypress Structure alone (and my oldest sister just missed being #43)... which was two counties away from the epicenter.
There's an entire coastal mountain range between the epicenter and San Jose, even.
We can invest endlessly in more contingencies. Perhaps there is a level of emergency preparation that is worthwhile, but 'prepping' for complete chaos, etc. is a waste of time that could be put to much more beneficial uses.
Puerto Rico?
New Orleans?
Read about the debate over whether to attribute deaths to Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico (the government officially claimed fewer than 100; independent estimates run into the thousands).
> did people die from starvation? Was there "complete chaos"?
Unfortunately, I (and other readers) don't have time to verify everyone else's claims; that's why the burden is usually on the person making the claim.
As I said, you should expect to fend for yourself for 3 days. If you have no food or water or medical supplies ready, how do you expect to aid and assist people who need help?
My experiences from New Zealand have led me to believe that if there's a magnitude 8 earthquake under a major city, which is entirely possible, that unless you are seriously injured you will be expected to look after yourself for several days.
I don't think it's quite that pessimistic. I was raised in FL, and know that many people do prepare. To give some concrete numbers:
"An AAA survey released Monday -- the first day of the 2015 Atlantic hurricane season -- finds that 42 percent of Florida and Georgia residents do not make advanced preparations for tropical weather." - https://www.news4jax.com/news/local/aaa-survey-42-dont-prepa...
"AAA released a survey on Thursday finding 81 percent of Floridians are already making preparations for hurricanes, up from 58 percent in 2016." - http://spacecoastdaily.com/2018/06/aaa-report-most-floridian... .
Why the improvement? According to the last link: “Major hurricanes like Harvey and Irma seem to be making residents more aware of the dangers of hurricane season and the need to make advanced preparations,” Futch said.
That said, I haven't found the published survey results and I don't know what "preparations" means. I suspect many are underprepared. Then again, underprepared is different from "don't have any."
My kids, however... even if there were no physical repercussions, the amount of distraction that them being hungry would create would effectively prevent my wife and I from getting anything done.
While it may seem tongue-in-cheek, I'm also serious. Keeping non-productive family members comfortable during a disaster is very important in that it allows the productive members to apply themselves to resolving the situation.
About a decade ago, my wife was breastfeeding our first daughter. She had also gotten ill with some sort of gastrointestinal bug, and her milk supply had all but stopped - during a major ice storm in north Arkansas, which took out our electricity for almost two weeks.
We didn't have an emergency fund at the time and had very little money in the bank. There was plenty of food and water at home, but we ended up driving a dangerous and nerve-wracking 50 or so miles over terrible roads, in an unreliable and unsuitable vehicle (a two-wheel-drive '98 Ford Ranger with nearly bald tires).
It all worked out well - I kept it on the road and we made it to a hotel near a hospital, my wife's illness cleared up, and we didn't even end up needing to see a doctor - but my point is that my dependents forced me into an action that otherwise would have been far too risky to take. Had it just been me, or even just my wife and I, we would have been content to drink our stored water, eat canned food cooked on a camp stove, and sleep on the floor in the living room in front of the gas fireplace. Adding a newborn to that equation changed things drastically.
I'd say that I'm part of the periphery of that community. I certainly don't have a year's worth of food on hand, but I do have enough supplies to make it make it a couple of weeks at home without worry, and a plan to make a short journey to another family member's home if the emergency were to last longer than that.
For every serious "prepper" out there that have supplies for months or years, I suspect that are dozens of us that could at least outlast the immediate emergency and could "self-extract" from a disaster area.
> When California gets hit by a big earthquake (Magnitude 8 level), I can guarantee it's going to be complete chaos, despite the fact that we know it's going to happen.
Based solely on my own observations, I think California would be fine. Their buildings are generally designed for that eventuality, and an earthquake there would be geographically isolated and the disruption would be fairly short.
What really scares me is the New Madrid. I can only imagine the chaos and destruction in places like St. Louis and Memphis should there be a repeat of the 1811/1812 earthquakes.
Avoiding nuclear war should be one of our top priorities (and was one of the major factors deciding my 2016 vote), yet it's hardly ever discussed. It's a bit crazy.
That's your answer. By no means are Trump voters illiterate rubes. Their median income exceeded Hillary voters. People need to be reminded the stakes.
Regarding the access to the button, would you prefer to have egoistic, emotional man or rational and cold one, like Gen. Buck from "Dr. Strangelove"?
Even if they're off by an order of magnitude, it means that although highly unlikely in a single year, it means that it's fairly probable to happen within a single century.
One argument against those odds is that it gives a probability of nuclear war happening between 1945 and 2018 well above 50%. But given the several very close calls we've had I think that number seems very real. Remember that both the Cavaliers and Donald Trump had odds around the 20% mark in 2016, yet both won. Unlikely does not mean impossible.
So I agree, lowering both the probability and severity of nuclear war should be a top priority for politicians and those who elect them. Maybe not as high as global warming, but close behind it IMO.
I have seen this work first hand myself when India and Pakistan mobilized their militaries on a large scale a couple of times after the 1998 nuclear tests by both nations. A few articles that came out during that time about the effects of nuclear weapons decidedly served to cool off the fervor of several uber-patriotic people I knew.
Scary stuff.
Construction cranes falling in NYC, otherwise known as "Tuesday"
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/04/22/bomb-silhouettes/
As in, how the physics packages of the weapons actually look.
We actually know very little about that.
0: https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-static/static/2016-03/8/22...
I was not aware of that, interesting.
The biggest threats to nuclear peace at the moment are India/Pakistan, Israel, the United States, and Russia. I'd like to emphasize that the US is the biggest threat to world peace of all of the above, though a general nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India isn't implausible.
Don't let the media distract you from the real story. It is the ambitions of nation states and their imperial capitalist backers that are the threat to civilized life on Earth.
You can watch Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsburg discuss the prospect of Nuclear War here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imXAiv53_o8
Second, atomic weapons fired at ground level are missing the point. It shines energy so if you want it to affect things it needs to shine on them - like the sun does, in the sky.
True, a ground burst isn't the most efficient for direct damage. In exchange, it means lots of fallout, since it throws radioactive material in the air, spreading effect around a larger area, and making sure the area is contaminated for a long time. Since we aren't exactly prepared to keep large areas of citizens in shelters for days, that's bad.
Airburst detonation, even 30 m above ground as in New Mexico, will distribute the explosion energy much more evenly and the epicenter will have much less impact.
Ground devices deliver a shitload of energy into the ground below.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/politics/2013/10/new-york-ci...
The US has bunkers of nuclear weapons in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey.
Apparently the US had nuclear weapons in Japan until 1972.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...
EDIT: An interesting point about the history of extended deterrence is that the US put nukes in Turkey and that precipitated the Cuban Missile crisis as the Soviets felt they needed parity. Turkey is in the same ballpark range from Moscow as Cuba is from Washington D.C. This history is not often told to make it seem as though Washington was responding to some kind of unprovoked aggression.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-rea...
It would be a constant threat not to the US (they don't know it is there) but to the Russia or China who at anytime could be found out and the response will not be what they want.
Only in the case that you want to set it off is it a net benefit, and even if you did it anonymously... the response still could be what Russia and or China wouldn't want.
There is really no good reason to do it, particularly since they could deliver one anytime fairly quickly if they needed to.
Much less risky to play politics remotely. ...
But what would they have to gain by having a nuclear weapon in the wild, which is essentially controlled by whoever happens to have possession of it. There are a lot of checks and balances before a normal nuclear weapon can be armed and detonated, most of which you wouldn't be able to have in a backpack nuke. There's no political gain to be had by one of those weapons, if it was detonated it would be fairly obvious who's weapon it was. Conventional weapons have deniability.
The problem of reliably getting nuclear weapons onto a target has been largely solved. Between the nuclear triad and MIRV [2] warheads, mutually assured destruction has never been more assured.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Atomic_Demolition_Muni...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...
https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gadget.html?id=DrMOA...
When a terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in the U.S., the bomb is likely to have been made on American soil by Americans.
> A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies.
(Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/200...)