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Comment by blakesterz | Hacker News Reader

Interesting story.

There's also one missing off the coast of GA:

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=185876...

"On Feb. 5, 1958, a B-47 bomber dropped a 7,000-pound nuclear bomb into the waters off Tybee Island, Ga., after it collided with another Air Force jet. Fifty years later, the bomb -- which has unknown quantities of radioactive material -- has never been found."

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There's also the Damascus incident, where a Titan II missile silo exploded during a fuelling accident and sent a 9 megaton thermonuclear warhead out of the silo and several hundred meters away. They don't officially say whether or not the core was inside the weapon, or if it was armed at the time... Either way, it's terrifying. Humans don't deserve these weapons.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Damascus_Titan_missile_ex...

Humans don't deserve these weapons.

> You sure? Nuclear weapons are guaranteed to bite you eventually, being stupid enough to have them sorta implies you deserve your eventual reward.

We're going to need a lot worse if we're ever planning to deflect/mine asteroids. Sometimes there are good reasons to invent abusable techonology.

And well, of all the ways the millennia old weapons race could have ended, it could have been worse.

If we're going to colonize the Solar System, nuclear weapons are going to feel like child's play. Any propulsion system capable of interplanetary travel in reasonable time frames (weeks to months) is also a weapon of mass destruction, just due to energies involved.

Colonizing the Solar system is slightly more attainable than mining asteroids, but yeah the energies involved are pretty massive.

You going to blow up your enemies with a solar sail?

No, just with the lasers that propel that sail.

(I did mention reasonable durations of travel.)

A big asteroid, a rocket to get there and a whole bunch of paint would already be a weapon of mass destruction.

Where does the paint come into it?

If you paint the asteroid red racing stripes, it gets faster.

If you can change the reflectance/albedo of the asteroid the pressure of sunlight will push it into a slightly different orbit. That different orbit is one where it hits what you want it to hit.

I'm going to guess it's a reference to the most recent season / one of the later books in Expanse series. Spoiler (rot13):

Fbzr Orygref fgbyr ohpxrgf bs fgrnygu cnvag sebz Znef zvyvgnel, hfrq gurz gb znxr n srj nfgrebvqf zhpu uneqre gb qrgrpg, naq gura chg gur ebpxf n pbyyvfvba pbhefr jvgu Rnegu sebz nsne.

I'm not sure about The Expanse, but barry-cotter is right. If you can change the color of the asteroid then through the change in radiation pressure you can change the orbit of the asteroid. This can have a fairly substantial effect over a long period of time.

Problem: Giant asteroid heading for Earth

Solution: Nuke it

Problem: 15 medium-sized radioactive asteroids heading for Earth

Solution: 15 more nukes!

Problem: 225 radioactive asteroids heading for Earth

We've both played asteroids, right? We know asteroids only sub divide twice. Now we just need to get those next 225 nukes off before the alien spaceship passes through and starts shooting.

(Of course, then another 4 big asteroids appear...)

Better solution: land a bulldozer against it, powered by a nuclear engine.

Outcome: a giant asteroid parked in Earth orbit, ready to mine for all its worth.

(Hell, if you're lucky, the bulldozer may only need the fuel to get there, and then can use bits of target asteroid for reaction mass. A nuclear-thermal nozzle will eat anything.)

Also Bruce Willis funeral.

You just reminded me that most of the wars in the fictional Ace Combat universe are fueled by the abuse of giant megaweapons designed to protect the earth from asteroid impacts. Gave me a good chuckle.

What makes you think it has ended?

Once someone else has them, it may be a rational choice to get some yourself.

this line of thinking is a race to the bottom

Yes, it is. Unfortunately, especially under conditions of uncertainty, rational decisions don't always produce the best results.

Another scary event off the coast of Spain: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash

Two of the four bombs exploded due to conventional fuses detonating, spreading radioactive material over land.

And case not closed still today.

Dimitri Khalezov says the Kursk was loaded with P-700 Granit mini-nukes when it sank during 2000: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kursk_submarine_disaster

Makes me curious if the radioactive material eventually gets exposed by corrosion or erosion.

I couldn’t explode. You’d need the detonator to do that. However the radioactive content could still pollute if the shielding were to corrode away.

The main ways it would be harmful is if you touched it or ate fish that touched it. The corrosion would probably just spread it out in the ocean and it'll soon become unnoticeable. After all, the radioactive materials mostly exist in nature anyway.

"unknown quantities" - sure!!

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