NASA: Tonga blast was 10 megatons, more powerful than a nuclear bomb
npr.org
npr.org
"“This cavern stretches under the island as far as the volcano, and is only separated from its central shaft by the wall which terminates it. Now, this wall is seamed with fissures and clefts which already allow the sulphurous gases generated in the interior of the volcano to escape.”
“Well?” said Pencroft, his brow suddenly contracting.
“Well, then, I saw that these fissures widen under the internal pressure from within, that the wall of basalt is gradually giving way and that after a longer or shorter period it will afford a passage to the waters of the lake which fill the cavern.”
“Good!” replied Pencroft, with an attempt at pleasantry. “The sea will extinguish the volcano, and there will be an end of the matter!”
“Not so!” said Cyrus Harding, “should a day arrive when the sea, rushing through the wall of the cavern, penetrates by the central shaft into the interior of the island to the boiling lava, Lincoln Island will that day be blown into the air<...>"
1. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1268/1268-h/1268-h.htm#link2...
Wikipedia: "The sound was claimed to be heard in 50 different locations around the world and the sound wave is recorded to have travelled the globe seven times."
“Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883” by Simon Winchester went into this point.
Also, this write up from 2016 at Nautilus after the Papua New Guinea Volcano eruption. https://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/the-sound-so-loud-that-it-c...
[0] https://twitter.com/NWSPortland/status/1482639604540854275
In Fiji it sounded like thunder rumbling. In Alaska it was nearly infrasound.
Also since 1945, had there been just a single size of nukes? I may not have a sense of how big a Hiroshima nuke was as compared to a 1975 nuke vs a 2022 nuke. Just saying ... a better comparison (which I don't know as I am not a subject expert) could be developed.
Maybe "enough energy to melt 1980 Antarctica" or some other similar scary comparison. Maybe "10 times the energy of hurricane Katrina"
Edited the last 3 words
- Tonga eruption was 1e7 tons
- Hurricane Katrina was 1e10 tons
- Melting Antarctica is 1e12 tons (afaict)
But when I see "comparable to a nuke" at least I know immediately that this is a major event. A hurricane, powerful as it may be, is harder to grasp for a comparison.
As a non-American, I do.
I agree comparable to a nuke is better, I was just commenting that Katrina for a large number of people is quite different than the other examples and does convey an intuitive understanding.
While noting that intuitive understandings are imprecise.
Katrina did squat to the city except tear up some roofs and windows. The water deposited just so happened to breach some flood control stuff and then all the damage was a result of everything being immersed in floodwater. A storm releases energy in the form of find and droplets of liquid being accelerated by gravity and flung around by said wind. An explosion releases a pressure wave.
Comparing energy released in storms to explosions is like saying a leafblower can push harder than a dude with a sledge because it has more horsepower. Neither comparison serves any useful purpose.
It doesn’t make much sense to compare the energy released by Katrina to that of the Tonga eruption.
I’m personally a huge fan that the most destructive device in human history can can be thrown around in conversation simply, as a four letter word, and as simply as one would refer to a “book” as being a good source inspiration, or “coke” as being a delicious beverage. Yes, a “nuke” can be inspirationally delicious comparison for destruction.
Perhaps comparisons to “nukes” should be reserved to their “human impact”, and not simply their “big boom” factor. I’m sure victims of nuclear weapons, and unfortunate locals of nuclear test sites would agree.
Say, it’s likely more accurate to say “That TikTok went nuclear”, than any comparisons of an explosion or eruption to a “nuke”.
https://www.quora.com/How-does-the-energy-of-a-thunderstorm-...
If that's correct than that comparison doesn't initially sound as cool as a nuclear blast... :). But I guess that that's related to the duration of a blast vs. thunderstorm...?
So nuclear weapons are still worse.
* Create EMP blasts potentially disabling electronics over larger areas.
* Start fires in every direction for miles beyond the blast zone.
* Delegitimize nuclear energy. Sort of indirect but fear of nukes is why we don't invest heavily in safe fission alternatives with no weapons path.
* Have no real theoretical limit. 50MT has been donated. Designs have been shown up to 10GT.
Lightning causes EMPs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning#Transient_currents_d...) , so there were EMPs. I think/guess each one was a lot less powerful than that of a nuclear explosion, though.
But something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer would be devastating, if I read it right - Tonga might have been related too (there was a "mystery eruption" somewhere in the pacific).
This is important because "in theory" no one is allowed to explicitly target civilians, which don't require much accuracy, per the laws of war. Military targets are often in reinforced concrete or buried and so require a precise high pressure hit to crack. In practice, aiming points are chosen of military targets that are quite close to civilians.
You’ll do way more damage way more reliably with 20 1MT warheads than with a single 20MT bomb.
But it required reliable ballistic missiles and M(I)RV. If your delivery mechanism is bombers, then at equiv-tech you have to account for high attrition rates, and thus need large payloads to ensure even low success rates will do the necessary damage to the target.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo
The larger than expected yield caused a lot of problems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Muniti...
Signing a treaty when you would just be ignoring it is typically not a diplomatically smart move. Better to not sign the treaty if at all possible.
There's a non zero chance each year that we trigger Armageddon. Given enough years it will happen with certainty. Yet nothing is done about it. I think our first mistake in thinking about the possibilities of other intelligent civilizations in the universe is to assume we are an example of one...
We live pretending we are rational, intelligent beings but in the end we aren't very far from nature and its processes which created us.
So yes, humans are obviously part of nature. That's of course where we get our primordial emotions from. But it's misleading to say we're just like other parts of nature, when that's clearly not the case. Our problem is technological progress greatly outpaces emotional development, which may or may not even be progressing. In many ways, technological progress degrades emotional development.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targeta...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jan/28/us-nuclear-wea...
This treaty has been in effect since January 22 last year and has been ratified by 59 countries and signed by 17 more including big and powerful states such as Mexico, Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, Ireland, the Philippines and Malaysia.
Armies of nation states are responsible for the greatest of all human tragedies. None of us are safe as long as these weapons belong in the arsenal of some of the biggest and most dangerous armies in the world.
The safest option of avoiding a terrible attack or a major accidents involving these weapons is a total elimination, and currently our best hope is with international agreements such as these. International agreements have proven to be effective in other comprehensive prohibitions of dangerous materials and it is time we act to eliminate the most dangerous weapons of them all.
Yes. So why advocate for a return to the pre-nuclear status quo: major powers use their large armies to influence each other, with millions dead. The threat of MAD between the world's powers is why global casualties from warfare have been in steady decline since the end of WW2.
>>>The safest option of avoiding a terrible attack or a major accidents involving these weapons is a total elimination
What is the contingency plan for when every country except ONE agrees, and then the last country, as the only nuclear-armed state, then has free reign to impose its will on the world with now-overwhelming force?
First, history of the past 80 years casts doubts on your claims:
The USSR-Afghanistan left an estimated 2 million dead. Nigerian Civil War between 1 and 3 million. France-Algeria War about 1 million. Korean War between 1.5 and 4.5 million dead. Vietnam between 1.3 and 4.5 million. I could go on really.
MAD doesn't stop wars from happening. It only stops nuclear powers from using nuclear weapons. And it stops major powers from targeting each other directly. That's the extent of MAD. Even that's a contentious claim to make: Pakistan vs. India over Kashmir comes to mind.
Even more so, MAD isn't the only incentive for not going to War. After World War II, the World got profoundly reshaped with new economic and geo-strategic treaties and alliances. Bretton Woods, United Nations, NATO, European Union,... come to mind. In fact, after 1945, European integration was considered as an antidote against extreme nationalism in Europe and was heavily advocated for by Churchill.
Second, "global casualties from warfare being in decline" doesn't imply that no casualties of war, or atrocities, have been committed since 1945. Neither does it imply that things can take a turn for the worst without resorting to nuclear weaponry. For instance, the Syrian Civil War sits at about .5 million dead currently, and it has essentially been a proxy war between regional as well as global powers. And let's not forget the Ukraine situation that's currently playing out.
Third, the "lack of a contingency plan" is essentially part of the Prisoner's dilemma which the arms race during the Cold War was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma#Internati... But that doesn't render the argument moot: objectively, casting nuclear weapons out of this world is the best outcome for everyone involved. But rationally, that's not possible as you end up in a situation where owning nuclear weapons while everyone doesn't is the better option from the perspective of a single nation. Albert Einstein was well aware of this dilemma and said he wouldn't have participated in the Manhattan Project if he had known that the German bomb was a figment of imagination.
The main reason why MAD has become a thing is because a chunk of humanity just wants to see the rest of the world burn. No matter how rational and bent on peace between nations you are yourself, you can't possibly predict whether the other side has equally rational leaders or, as it turns, absolute mad men behind the buttons who are very much willing to use them when push comes to shove. And that's absolutely not a great outlook for humanity in the long term. We're extremely lucky to not have had a war between major powers over the past 80 years; it's been a close shave a few times as well (e.g. Cuban Missile Crisis).
That's peanuts, really. WW2 killed 70-85 million people, WW3 is projected from killing some 7 billion folks. No war between highly industrialised countries is a big win.
Factually? No discussion there. A dozen million is less then 70-85 million. That's how numbers work.
Morally? We are talking about the lives of human individuals. Concluding that a dozen million dead is "peanuts" and therefor a justifiable argument to defend the purported useful nature of nuclear weapons is reprehensible.
It's the exact same consideration made by military leadership when it comes to going to war or deploying nuclear weapons. It's a manner of thinking which should send shivers through anyone's spine. Why? Because it's a way of thinking that reduces the value of anyone's life to either "friend" or "foe" / "strategically valuable" or "without value".
Whether it's the sterile press of a button, or hand-to-hand combat, the end result is the always same: suffering.
> No war is a big win.
Fixed that for you.
If no one can produce a tangible, actionable, PLAN that gets us from "nukes in the hands of sociopaths with itchy trigger fingers" to "no nukes", then yes, the argument is rendered moot. A bunch of plebs signing petitions amounts to nothing but hot air if there is no realistic way to convince a head of state to throw hundreds (or thousands, in US/Russia's case) of the world's most powerful weapons into the dumpster.
>>> But rationally, that's not possible as you end up in a situation where owning nuclear weapons while everyone doesn't is the better option from the perspective of a single nation.
So you identify right here the crux of the matter: a rational nationstate will retain its nuclear arsenal.
The rest of your post is a bad case of shifting the goalposts.
>>>First, history of the past 80 years casts doubts on your claims: >>>The USSR-Afghanistan left an estimated 2 million dead. Nigerian Civil War between 1 and 3 million. France-Algeria War about 1 million. Korean War between 1.5 and 4.5 million dead. Vietnam between 1.3 and 4.5 million.
Let's take the maximal estimates for all of those: 15 million dead. That's a selection of some of the deadliest conflicts post-WW2.......which doesn't even match the casualties of the Eastern Front alone: ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Front_(World_War_II) ), which lasted for a mere ~4 years during WW2. Whether viewed in absolute terms of lives lost or per-capita losses over time (as a % of global human population), the data supports my assertion, not yours.
>>>In fact, after 1945, European integration was considered as an antidote against extreme nationalism in Europe and was heavily advocated for by Churchill.
The Brits have always played one (or more) continental powers against whoever was strongest. When Napoleon ran France, the UK allied with Russia and the Prussians. When Germany was ascendant, they allied with the French and the Russians. After WW2, with the Soviet Union dominating the Eurasian landmass, the only way to counter the Warsaw Pact was to coagulate the devastated West European democracies into a super-state. This was business as usual for the Brits.
>>>Second, "global casualties from warfare being in decline" doesn't imply that no casualties of war, or atrocities, have been committed since 1945.
Nor has anyone in this thread ever made such an assertion (that casualties = 0). Conflict casualties will never fall to 0, for the same reasons homicides will never fall to 0:
1. Human beings exist on a spectrum of morality.
2. Human beings exist on a spectrum of willingness to commit violence.
When opposing value sets overlap with violent inclinations, people die. We can significantly tamper the violence via material abundance, but First World-levels of wealth are climatologically unsustainable for a population of ~8 billion...
>>>The main reason why MAD has become a thing is because a chunk of humanity just wants to see the rest of the world burn.
I'd argue just the opposite. If anyone in a leadership position wanted to see the world burn....it would happen, because they only need to pass orders to one of the three legs of the nuclear triad (silos/strategic bombers/SSBNs) to trigger a response.
There are almost never "absolute mad men" running entire countries (Idi Amin was perhaps the closest IMO). It's just vapid propaganda. It is why it is so important to understand the adversary's problem set, and to place their actions within the correct context of what they are trying to achieve. Lunatics are exceedingly rare, and we still plan for those edge cases with Counter-WMD Quick-Reaction Forces from SOCOM, to mitigate risks of nuke employment:
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/37923/the-army-is-trai...
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/14535/this-obscure-dc-...
I don’t know what kind of a plan would be sufficient for you, but the point of this treaty is to come up with this plan and the signatories are intended to be all the nation’s states. Some very powerful governments (like Austria, Brazil, and Indonesia) have already signed it and it is already ratified by 59 nations. This is hardly a bunch of plebs signing a petition. What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.
I’m not gonna go into the philosophy of violence here. I’m just gonna leave my earlier appeal to authority as good enough of a justification. If the national governments of 86 nations think that total elimination is needed, as described by some of the world’s leading experts at the UN comity which called for this proposal, then perhaps arguments they have are good enough to overcome the problems proposed by the above conjectures of the philosophy of violence.
The preamble of the treaty it self might actually answer some of your concerns. Perhaps you should read it, it is really legible and straight forward. So I will simply refer to it and leave it at that.
Austria? Brazil? Indonesia? None of those are nuclear-armed states...which means that their "power" is effectively ZERO. It also costs them nothing to slap a signature on a document that has no material impact on their national security, because they have no capability to lose. You seem to have a very....idealistic view of international relations. Let me explain how nuclear disarmament would play out in the real world:
UN Signatories: We don't think anyone should have nuclear weapons.
US/Russia/China/etc: Nah, keeping these "just in case" is an important part of our international influence.
UN Signatories: I guess we will have to forcibly disarm you?
Nuke States: You can try. Invade me, and I'll burn your entire population to cinders, and make your lands glow in the dark for the next 10,000 years. ( https://geopolitics.news/euroasia/russia-adopts-nuclear-firs... )
UN Signatories: Ok on second thought we'll just send you another sternly-worded letter....
And that's how the conversation ends. Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.
>>>What I’m pitching here is for you to contact your national government and encourage them to sign it if they haven’t done so already.
I'm a citizen of not only a nuclear-armed state, but arguably the world's most influential global hegemon: the USA. If any of my politicians even HINTED at supporting such a disarmament, I'd vote them out of office ASAP.
I read the entire treaty here: ( https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Prohibition_of_... ). The Preamble reads like it was drafted by a drum circle of hippies, stoned on a beach in California. It's not written in a manner that is in any way persuasive to the people who actually need to be convinced: the national security leadership.
If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives. Know your audience, or you will never talk them into an alternative course of action.
That's essentially an unveiled admission of a want to hold the rest of the world hostage and establish domination. There's little rational nor justifiable about such a want from the perspective of anyone who isn't a U.S. citizen.
> Because sovereign states that are unable to enforce their will on others have no real power.
Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they? I'd say the implicit signal here was: "We don't listen to a hegemony who isn't willing to listen to the rest of the world." What they did was take a moral high ground, and condemn anyone who didn't sign.
Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement. The U.S. may have nuclear weapons, but it's still very much a part of the rest of the planet.
The same is true for all the COP conferences from Rio to Glasgow, and climate protocols, over the past 30 years.
> If this is a policy you seriously want to advance, I recommend taking a hard look at how national security professionals establish values and objectives, assess problems, and work through cost-benefit analyses in pursuit of said objectives.
Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?
The U.S. is in a tentative spot of taking an exclusive role in determining what is or isn't a moral high ground. Whether that's nuclear disarmament, or reducing CO2 / curbing climate change, or social equity.
This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.
We've already been holding the world hostage, arguably since we ended Breton Woods in favor of the Petrodollar, and definitely since the Soviet Union collapsed. This might be rational or justifiable to non-US citizens if we better communicated how Pax Americana is to their benefit. But we suck at soft power, and have squandered much of our goodwill with our devastation of the Middle East. So I fully understand and appreciate, for example, Russia and China doing everything in their power to break the back of our supremacy.
>>>Well, they signed the treaty anyway, did they?....Call it virtue signaling, but in international diplomacy, it's a pretty powerful statement.
It cost the signatories nothing substantive, and it changed nothing substantive. I will absolutely call it virtue signaling.
>>>Which objectives? To who's benefit? Yours? The U.S.? The rest of the world?
Which objectives? The objectives of the nations that employ said security professionals, as typically laid out in a "National Security Strategy" or similar document. So my point here is that in order to convince the people who control nuclear assets to change, one needs to understand them. You can't persuade them if you are not communicating with language that resonates with them in the first place.
>>>This is used as an argument for new, upcoming powers like India or China to forge their own path forward, for better or worse. If the U.S. wants to keep playing a role of significance in the 21st and 22nd centuries, it will have to relinquish its hegemonic stance.
This is actually something I strongly agree with. I think it is folly for a mismanaged nation of 330 million to expect to continue to lord over 7+ billion people that are rapidly closing the gap of technical and/or institutional competency across the board. The US is failing on several key fronts 1) failing to recognize the limitations of its hard (aka military) power 2) failing to make the necessary domestic investments in infrastructure and education to even keep it abreast of rising, high-population nations 3) failing to capitalize on existing soft power.
We should have begun to pivot away from the Petrodollar after the Soviet Union fell, should have kept the footprint in Afghanistan smaller, and never should have invaded Iraq. I would have cut the active-duty Army and Air Force to the bone outside of special operations forces, and relied on expeditionary Navy/Marine forces, sailing from the US itself. That's still an overwhelming amount of combat power for most global security threats. Spend the money saved on high-speed rail, thorium reactors, fusion research, and pre-collegiate education that doesn't suck.
This is a little bit moving the goal post, I was only arguing against your point that this treaty was just a bunch of plebs signing a petition. But I would just like to point out that South Africa is a previous nuclear state which is a party to this treaty. Disarmament has precedence.
History has examples of nuclear states cooperating. 6 of 9 nuclear states have signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty (China, France, Israel, Russia, UK, and USA) and 3 have ratified both annexes (France, Russia, and the UK). No signatory (including the USA) has conducted a nuclear test since 1997 and North Korea is the only country to conduct a test since 1998. This treaty has been a huge success even though we can still do better with respects to North Korea.
The Non-proloferation treaty is an even greater success. India, North Korea and Pakistan are the only nuclear states which haven’t ratified it. Since it came into effect in 1970 we’ve seen the worldwide stockpile decrease by more then half. But we can still do better.
At the risk of muddying this post with unnecessary geopolitics I’m gonna be equally speculative and come up with made up scenario which counters yours. The point of this exercise is not to make predictions—as they will probably not come true—but to demonstrate that fictional scenarios can back up either cause. You did yours, so here is mine:
* During this decade more and more countries will sign and become parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. At some point a NATO member will become a signatory (perhaps Germany or Norway from popular demand and favorable government; or Turkiye to assert their independence).
* At some point, seeing the world take the cause of total elimination, the UK might become the first nuclear country to sign the treaty. Perhaps after a Labour victory during a push from party members which oppose the nuclear weapons program.
* With most of Europe having signed the EU might pressure France into signing.
* Israel might go the way of South Africa, with a post apartheid government dismantling the program on their own volition.
* India and Pakistan might have an easing of relation and as a sign of good will they might sign this treaty jointly.
* Korea might unify, and the unified government might want to put it’s dark past behind it with a strong sign of cooperation.
* After most of the world has signed China might fear the optics and might sign in the hope to prove it’s moral superiority over the USA. But secretly sees their program as expensive and unrealistic so this treaty—if proven popular—might be a good excuse out.
* Russia might follow Europe if tensions around Ukraine ease and sign the treaty from popular demand both domestic and from other countries. Or it might cop out for similar reasons as China in this hypothetical scenario.
* This leaves only the USA. Maybe in a decade or two—if this treaty proves popular—and only the USA and a few microstates which depend on aid from the USA haven’t signed it. And maybe the democratic leadership shifts towards more progressive candidates which takes issues with the American exceptionalism which the current Democratic and the Republican parties share. Maybe then the USA will become the last nuclear state to sign.
Again don’t take this as a prediction, this won’t be this easy. This is only an exercise in speculation. My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other. My main point is that international treaties have proven effective in the past, and there is no reason to think they won’t this time.
I don't mind going down the rabbit hole on this word usage. I was trying to use plebs to communicate "not the people making impactful decisions in the halls of power". The governments of non-nuclear powers have no ability to force nuclear states to do anything, so for all practical purposes they are indistinguishable from the commoner folk.
I'll agree that digging deeper into the case of South Africa might yield some insights, but I think much of it boiled down to avoiding international pariah status, which was already a problem due to apartheid.
The Comprehensive Test Ban is one of those brilliant "pulling up the ladder after you've made it" moves. It's a tool to hang over the heads of anyone that needs to debug their nuclear weapons, such as up-and-coming nuclear powers (NKorea, Iran). It hurts the existing nuclear powers (who already have giant datasets and fine-tuned nuclear equations) less than it hurts potential newcomers. And even still, it's not enforced as most of the existing nuke powers haven't ratified it.
>>> My point is only to counter a hypothetical scenario which favors one outcome with another equally fictional that favors the other.
Our two scenarios are not in any way, shape, or form "equally" fictional. Anyone with even the most basic real-life work exposure to the national security establishments of Great Powers can attest to that. And often the populations themselves are cut from a similar cloth. My hypothetical, where the nuclear powers ignore the requests of the non-nuclear nations, isn't too far off from the long-standing refusal to modify the permanent membership/veto power of the UN Security Council. ( https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1758-5899.1... ) So we already have precedent for the Great Powers telling everyone else to pound sand.
In contrast, your hypothetical scenario that posits Russia would eliminate nukes due to "popular domestic demand" is completely out of touch with reality. Look at Figures 6 & 7 from this paper: ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/resrep29483.16 ) A whopping 68% of Russians support either maintaining or expanding the number of nuclear weapons. In the second chart, 52% say the government does "enough" to ward off external aggression via nukes and a further 23% responded the government doesn't do enough and should do more. Although what "the people" want is of limited concern as they don't run Russia anyway ( https://www.amacad.org/publication/russias-oligarchs-unlikel... ). Look at similar public perception survey results for China: ( https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/205316802110328... ). The population wants their government to retain nuclear weapons. Overwhelmingly. The Chinese don't "fear the optics" of nuke possession, or see the program as expensive and unrealistic. Their population, especially the younger generations, are quite hawkish ( https://uscet.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/How-Hawkish-Is-... ) As for India and Pakistan easing tensions and jointly signing an anti-nuke treaty?!?! These two nations don't even have an established back-channel for defusing nuclear escalation! ( https://www.iiss.org/blogs/research-paper/2021/05/nuclear-de... )
I'll bow out, I doubt we will reach any common ground, but I applaud you for maintaining a cordial conversation on a serious and difficult subject.
Nuclear weapons achieve something utterly unprecedented: they make the leaders afraid of the consequences of war. We're arguably better off with them. Disarmament is neither responsible nor realistically achievable.
Currently there are 9 states which control nuclear weapons. By far the majority of all active weapons belong to just two states. If USA and Russia would agree to at least lower their nuclear arsenal to that of the third state—China, you make the world at least that much safer.
But I want total elimination of these weapons of terror, and so does the governments of 86 countries (and growing). And the UN comity which is comprised of numbers of experts these issues has reached the same conclusion that total elimination is both necessary and feasible. I guess you can disagree with their findings, and who am I to argue with that.
WWI was different. Nothing like it had ever happened before because nothing like it was possible. Conversely, almost as soon as it became possible, it happened. Technology made WWI the "War to end all wars," at least until the next "War to end all wars" came along. We can't afford a third, and that's true with or without nukes. Whatever it takes to avoid WWIII is (very likely) worth it.
And as krasin suggests, the notion that the 19th century was characterized by international peace and goodwill is naïve at best.
I do tend to agree that the nuclear powers have a ridiculous quantity of weapons, and that this constitutes a hazard in itself. If the goal is to deter aggression rather than to initiate it, I don't see why something on the order of a dozen modern MIRV-capable strategic weapons wouldn't be plenty. Getting rid of all of them, though, on a worldwide basis? Not going to happen.
(One valid objection to my point is that various proxy wars between the superpowers have killed almost as many people over time as a good old fashioned world war used to, but that's a different debate.)
Anyway, none of this has much to do with volcanos or tsunamis.
You forgot the Napoleonic wars involving most of continental Europe (~6 million dead).
Instead of world wars, the 19th century was full of significant regional ones, e.g.: - Taiping Rebellion (20-50 million dead) - Crimean War - Russo-Turkish War(s) - US Civil War - Franco-Prussian War - First & Second Boer Wars - Multiple bloody revolts/rebellions in British India
It was not a "peaceful" century by any stretch of the imagination, and the powers involved in these conflicts were by no means "disarmed".
We have two periods of this relative peace. The 19th century and the current post world war II era. Both these periods have relatively low military spending in common. Could we do better? Yes! Should we do better? Also yes. Does nuclear weapons take us there. Probably not. Will the elimination of nuclear weapons take us there? Probably not. Should we get rid of nuclear weapons anyway? Yes!
There's going to be a failure in the "our leaders are afraid of nuclear war" plan. That isn't viable. Just because it has happened for a few decades doesn't mean it will continue to happen, everywhere, forever.
When it comes to preventing war, MAD works. Wishful thinking doesn't.
Why do you assume MAD will work on a long timescale? There are too many variables with different nations and leaders.
It would be great if we had more options, no argument there.
In a game of Russian roulette you might have a 100% success rate after 5 shots. But that doesn’t mean the 6th shot won’t be fatal.
In the MAD game, both the goal and the incentives are rationally aligned to avoid pulling the trigger at all. If MAD fails, it will happen because a mistake occurred. If the "Just let the UN take care of it" approach fails, it will fail for the same reason it has failed so many times before: because someone rationally calculated that the consequences were worth it. These scenarios don't really compare to a simple game of Russian roulette.
Logically speaking, it seems best to keep doing what we've been doing, but work as hard as we can to reduce the odds of a mistake.
That is the flaw in your logic. It is assuming a favorable distribution when the distribution is unknown.
That is for the UN to decide, and I’m sure they will come up with a plan. Options include sanctions, boycotts, shunning from international sports and cultural events, etc. Individual nations can go further and fund opposition groups etc. International disarmament treaties like these have worked in the past, there is no reason to think that nuclear weapons are any different. What is different is the scale of the potential damage.
> When it comes to preventing war, MAD works. Wishful thinking doesn't.
I’d argue that the assumption that nuclear weapons prevent wars are speculations at best. Hoping they won’t be used by nation states in future wars and hoping there won’t be a devastating accident involving them is not just wishful thinking but also an extremely dangerous belief.
How much do you know about the post-WWII history of the Korean peninsula?
Options include sanctions, boycotts, shunning from international sports and cultural events, etc. Individual nations can go further and fund opposition groups etc.
Same question.
Tell me again how giving up our weapons would leave us in a better position against the next Hitler. Would the same sort of people who failed to enforce the terms of Versailles be in charge of nuclear disarmament?
The second is a matter of opinion, one that's largely unjustified by history or morality. Setting aside the fact that rational opponents would have surrendered after having one city vaporized, would you have preferred that we learn the lessons of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Korea and China instead, with hundreds of bombs instead of two?
Truman would have had no incentive to deny MacArthur's request if we hadn't dropped the bombs in Japan and seen the results firsthand. What happened in Japan was horrific, but it was also a relatively cheap lesson for humanity, compared to how things could have played out.
Failing that, the answer is still "Yes." Having his bunker vaporized would have deterred him nicely.
Well, less powerful than several tested thermonuclear weapons, and maybe a very few that were deployed (largely to deal with low accuracy of early weapons and dealing with hard targets.) But more powerful than any currently known to be deployed (the biggest current is a ~5MT Russian strategic warhead.)
> "When you put a ton of seawater into a cubic kilometer of liquid rock, things are going to get bad fast," he says.
Seems like a catastrophic failure.
The Big Island of Hawaii constantly has lava and sea water mixing on small scales. Makes me wonder if it’s at risk of a subterranean breach as well.
It seems like this Tonga explosion took nearly everyone by surprise.
If there was forewarning I haven’t seen an article about it yet.
It's not an unusual cause of explosive eruptions, but Mt. St. Helens is ~50 miles from the ocean. Magma can build up pressure entirely independently of seawater-induced steam explosions.
Today the largest in the US arsenal is the B83 at 1.2 megaton.
edit: i realize now that the numbers floating around in cavity between my ears was in kilotons. that's why the megaton numbers seemd low to me.
Megaton bombs are really only useful in bombing civilian targets tbh. Military targets tend to be small, and spread out over a large area, and smaller bombs makes more sense for those targets.
Urban centers are secondary targets, and never because of their civil population per se, but because usually industrial installations are located in or very closely to the biggest urban centers. But then again, if you plan on conducting a land invasion and an occupation there's some reason to refrain bombing your enemy all the way down to the Paleolithic
Once the CEP got small enough, bunkers were no longer effective as you can't really make a bunker strong enough if the nuke can be delivered right on top of it. EPW nukes can burrow 100+ meters into the ground before detonating to deliver more of their energy to the target, which means a vastly smaller nuke.
[0]: A circle in which 50% of your shots will land, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_error_probable
They do not have public figures for any of the recent nuclear bunker busters, though its likely on the order of 100m based on the depths that various countries have claimed to have made bunkers. The main limiting factor for depth is what speed the materials can handle before vaporizing, how dense you can make the nose and how much mass your delivery system can handle.
Like you have said, nuclear busters are moot as putting 14000kg on someones dining table will still ruin their day without the political issues that nukes cause.
It's what led to the development of the smart bomb - they figured out that it's a losing game to increase the power of a bomb - that cube root is painful. So instead they made small, but more accurate, bombs.
It's also why the nuclear bomb is not as useful as people think: It's strong, but a large number of accurate, small, smart bombs works better to destroy your target (as opposed to digging holes in the ground).
https://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/
Pick a spot, the yield of the weapon, and it will draw radius circles for the fireball, ionizing radiation, 3 degrees of blast damage, and finally, the broad thermal radiation damage. I imagine there's others with things like fallout, etc.
In principle, we can design weapons horrendous enough to crack this entire planet apart forever. Four billion years of life up in smoke (or out in debris, I should say).
The question of whether humans are the most intelligent life form on the planet is still under active consideration. :)
[1] The Pentagon's Brain by Annie Jacobsen
The largest confirmed explosion on earth was on the order of 1 teraton (1,000,000 megatons) caused by the Vredefort asteroid impact and that certainly left a crater but did not come close to cracking the planet forever. It left a crater 40km deep and 300km wide, which is absolutely enormous and mind boggling and if it happened today would certainly cause a mass extinction event, but the Earth would recover.
The point isn't the exact number, it's the fact that it's so reasonable to attain no matter the number.
The earth recovered its collision with the asteroid that eventually gave us the moon, yet the earth has actually been “taken apart forever” (since a significant fraction of its former mass now belongs to the moon).
That's a bit bigger than Chicxulub. Someone estimated the heat from the re-entry of debris at 20kw/m2 for 7+ minutes, not close up, but far away. A random study on firefighting I just skimmed said that heat flux will destroy clothing in about 20 seconds and produce 3rd degree burns in another 20 or so. So, uh...ten times 40 seconds over practically the whole world would probably not be good.
The collision that produced the Moon is speculated to have left the surface of the Earth approximately as bright as the Sun for a while, so it could be worse, but there's hardly any difference for the forms of life we can relate to.
Anerobic organisms deep in the crust would have an easier time of it.
He had a large book which contained the list of the numerous races throughout the galaxies that had developed intelligence, and the much smaller book that listed those races that had reached maturity and had qualified for the Galactic Federation.
In the first book, a number of those listed were crossed out; those that, for one reason or another, had failed. Misfortune, biochemical or biophysical shortcomings, social maladjustment took their toll. In the smaller book, however, no member listed had yet blanked out.
And now Naron, large and incredibly ancient, looked up as a messenger approached.
“Naron,” said the messenger. “Great One!”
“Well, well, what is it? Less ceremony.”
“Another group of organisms has attained maturity.”
“Excellent. Excellent. They are coming up quickly now. Scarcely a year passes without a new one. And who are these?”
The messenger gave the code number of the galaxy and the coordinates of the world within it.
“Ah, yes,” said Naron. “I know the world.” And in flowing script he noted it in the first book and transferred its name into the second, using, as was customary, the name by which the planet was known to the largest fraction of its populace. He wrote: Earth.
He said, “These new creatures have set a record. No other group has passed from intelligence to maturity so quickly. No mistake, I hope.”
“None, sir,” said the messenger.
“They have attained to thermonuclear power, have they?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well, thats the criterion.” Naron chuckled. “And soon their ships will probe out and contact the Federation.”
“Actually, Great One,” said the messenger, reluctantly, “the Observers tell us they have not yet penetrated space.”
Naron was astonished. “Not at all? Not even a space station?”
“Not yet, sir.”
“But if they have thermonuclear power, where do they conduct the tests and detonations?”
“On their own planet, sir.”
Naron rose to his full twenty feet of height and thundered, “On their own planet?”
“Yes, sir.”
Slowly Naron drew out his stylus and passed a line through the latest addition in the small book.
It was an unprecedented act, but, then, Naron was very wise and could see the inevitable as well as anyone in the galaxy.
“Silly asses,” he muttered.
Isaac Asimov − Silly Asses (1958)
The ending (after the second war) referred to "half-stooping, naked things whose twisted heredity could have been traced to mankind." and said something about how, since they could be frightened, they were definitely not human any more.
The total physical work done MW (and thus energy) by the quake was 4.0×10^22 joules (40 ZJ),[31] the vast majority underground, which is over 360,000 times more than its ME, equivalent to 9,600 gigatons of TNT equivalent (550 million times that of Hiroshima)
It's warmer than the same date last year where I am.
Comparing with the maximum temperatures of last year.
- January 13th 2022, the day of the explosion was 6.4 C warmer
- January 14th 11.6 C warmer
- January 15th 6.7 C warmer
- January 16th 9.1 C warmer
- January 17th 1.4 C warmer
- January 18th 2.2 C warmer
The difference is even more extreme if I compare the minimum temperatures.
There has been more rain, but that is to be expected when the weather is warmer (in my region).
AKA it's cooler than the "normal" temperature, where "normal" is something like mean / median for that day over the past 10/20/50 years or whatever.
Almost everyone got marked wrong. A simple difference, lacking context, is not a useful measure. What we should have calculated was a ratio.
It seemed arbitrary, but the entire class was a crash course towards scientific writing and everything was graded as if up for review. Picking the right metrics, assumptions, and descriptive language was crucial.
how does it remind you of that? i don't follow in the slightest
> 500 times as powerful as the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, at the end of World War II.
Vc - Vr < 0 <=> 1 < Vr / Vc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status-6_Oceanic_Multipurpose_...
The power of the blast itself is not powerful enough to have any real damage.
Volcano Blaster, Sponsored by BP.
There's some recent pushback against it, too. https://www.ids.ac.uk/news/scientists-call-for-international...
Honest Q: in geological standards, was this even a big blast?
Edit: It's not any kind of estimate but the before and after pictures of the first thermonuclear weapon test site look quite a bit like the images from Tonga:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Mike#Detonation
That was coincidentally (and somewhat accidentally), a 10 megaton explosion.
Edit: the Mount St. Helens eruption was about 25 MT total energy released.
What I find most curious about this event is that nobody seems to really care about... the Tongans. No charity drives. No on the ground footage and interviews of news crews rushed to the scene. 100,000 people just had their lives destroyed and everyone is "cool! how big was it? this is great for science!"
Source: https://www.9news.com.au/national/tonga-volcano-tsunami-upda...
The New Zealand government is doing likewise.
They are not being left to fend for themselves.
As it is a tiny country, there are no permanent BBC or CNN offices there with satellite equipment.
As it was a volcanic eruption, air travel was severely restricted due to the ash both in the atmosphere as well as in the single airstrip that serves the nation's main island. Help is being dispatched both by The Australian and New Zealand governments (the closest nations to Tonga) by ship.
There's also the complication that Tonga was basically spared from COVID, and thus has a population immunologically naive other than from the current vaccines which are not that great against the current dominant variants in circulation, so, there's a great level of care that needs to be taken to ensure that the relief effort doesn't backfire by triggering an outbreak.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/2022/01/to...
Thanks!
You can also see it in the satellite footage; the mushroom cloud spreads many miles within minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TB0tuaZ9imk
This was more Mt. St. Helens-style sudden explosive than Hawaii-style fountains.
So yes, it was real violent.
I guess it would be an estimate on the order of the estimate that the eruption was 10MT
But, in this case, who did this test that none of the five major nuclear powers wouldnt cry out foul?