10 Years of Nukemap
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
blog.nuclearsecrecy.com
Having a visualization of one target site is useful but if it was a full nuclear strike lots of targets would be hit by smaller yielded weapons (I am not an expert).
Industry, Military Bases, Infrastructure and Communications
AFAIK population centers are secondary targets in a first strike, however in a MAD (mutually assured destruction scenario) everything would be a target, right?
example targets for UK
https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2014/06/06/article-2650518-1...
Pretty sure the target to the North West of Edinburgh is the Pitreavie Castle site that was closed in '96 and is now housing.
The UK also hasn't had strategic bombers for a long time either!
Nuclear armed nations are back to increasing and modernizing stockpiles rather than diminishing them. New delivery mechanisms that are impossible to track and counter. Proliferation of nuclear weapons is becoming an issue too. Everybody's getting in on the party.
Nuclear weapons are a type of great filter if there ever was one.
https://cco.ndu.edu/Portals/96/Documents/prism/prism_4-4/Str...
As we speak, there are submarines from multiple countries lying in wait with enough nukes to take out most of humanity; they are (were?) instructed to launch if central command is taken out, like a world-ending dead man's switch. These go on 3-6 month missions, their only limit being food for the crew, and they will survive all out nuclear war just to pop up and finish the job if needs be.
I think that fears of all countries using nuclear weapons on each other at the same time is frequently inflated with the fear governments will just become kill everyone for no reason or will behave madly.
There is plenty to fear even when we keep everybody rational, let's stick to that
Now I wouldn't do it, but nobody is going to let me near that kind of position.
Soviets had two notable examples: Submarine captain refusing to launch a nuclear torpedo despite clear orders to do so: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/you-and-a...
And then one man has saved us all by refusing the launch nuclear strike on US despite Soviet satellites confirming multiple launches from US heading to CCCP. He decided to wait for radar confirmation first despite everyone above him(and next to him) approving the counterstrike. If he followed his training we'd all be dead now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alar...
Or in the case of the UK, if Radio 4 Today programme goes off air....
A disease capable of coming close to ending civilization would need to have properties far beyond any disease observed so far. Either it needs to infect massive populations before we detect it, or it has to transmit over long distances (miles) despite e.g. moderate precautions like masking, air filtering. I think there's good reason to doubt such a pathogen could exist. The closest I could imagine would be an HIV-like immunodeficiency virus that can be transmitted via aerosol - but even that would have to cause disease much more severe than HIV without resistance among even .01% of the population.
More crucially, neither is preventing warfare. After WWII, the victors believed that another large war could destroy humanity - not necessarily because of nuclear weapons, but due to the incredible damage their WWII technology did, and considering future improvements. The UN and (the predecessor of) the EU were founded especially to prevent another major war.
Also, they knew, after WWI and WWII (and all the prior wars) that without serious effort and dedication, warfare can happen whether or not anyone really wants it.
Nowadays, mechanization and automation make large-scale nuclear first strikes pretty much pointless. Add to that the improvements in missile defense and the result is a different scenario. If we ever see nuclear weapons used in anger again it will probably take the form of artillery used against armored formations, fleets, and satellites.
This might turn a particular theater into a nuclear wasteland and throw global economy back into the 70s, but it wouldn't cause the kind of mass fires needed for nuclear winter.
I don't think BMD has really improved enough in the last 40 years to make "limited nuclear war" (at least between the US and Russia or maybe China) a real possibility. I also can't find, in my 30 minutes of research, anything supporting the idea that the US/NATO has any small tactical nuclear devices hanging around anymore.
From there on to B61 Mod 12. Tactical enough?
And thank God for that! Fear of nuclear war is a terrible scourge, and reduces quality of life. And I'm not convinced that the fear did anything to reduce risk - so it was all cost, and no benefit. Good riddance to "The Day After" style fear, and do not return!
It seems more likely these days that we'll have a bad nuclear accident, or a terrorist attack, than a world-ending event. TBH I'm fine with that, as it's nothing compared to the Cold War MAD doctrine.
Indeed, if we're on the brink of a Venus style runaway hothouse, a nuclear war would be the better alternative. The reduction in population and thus carbon emission combined with the increased atmospheric dust would most likely arrest warming altogether, if not even undo some of the damage.
For the record no I'm not a psycho and I don't endorse nuclear war, I just doubt it would be an human extinction event.
(Books title is Restricted Data)
At http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/02/25/the-secret-song/ we can see the author quoting from the first of these.
A look at Hewlett & Holl finds:
> The far-flung complex of mines, ore-processing mills, feed material plants, gaseous-diffusion plants, production reactors, chemical separation plants, metal fabrication plants, and weapon component and assembly plants was still largely concealed behind the security barriers established by the Atomic Energy Act ...
> Of the 3,700 tons of uranium concentrates (U308) that the Commission received in 1953, only about one-quarter (1,100 tons) came from mines in the United States; the rest was produced in the Belgian Congo (1,600 tons), South Africa (500 tons), Canada (400 tons), and Portugal (100 tons). ...
> As for foreign sources, the leveling off of production from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Belgian Congo would be more than offset by projections of rapidly increasing deliveries later in the decade from the Union of South Africa and Canada. ...
Hewlett was (quoting the author) "the first official historian of the Atomic Energy Commission ... [whose] volumes on AEC history are extremely useful resources."
Edit: I think I found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29037556
> Fallout: Your choice of burst height is too high to produce significant local fallout. The minimum burst height to produce appreciable fallout for a yield of 100 megaton is 5.49 km.
Its really helpful. Guess, I should retry it with recommended value.
First, watch "Trinity And Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie" [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114728/]. It gives a great overview of the nuclear weapons program history and his incredible video footage of tests.
Next watch "Threads" [https://archive.org/details/threads_202007]. Be warned, it's depressing, but it does a great job dramatizing what a nuclear attack might look like, including its generational impacts.
Finally, read "Command and Control" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_and_Control_(book)]. The book discusses how nuclear weapons are actually secured and designed to prevent accidental use. A movie was created if you prefer to watch that [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5598206/].
When you get through these three pieces of material, you'll have a much better understanding of the history behind this weapons, how destructive they are, and hopefully think critically about whether or not they're worth the risk.
The thing I worry the most about is unintentional or accidental use of a nuclear weapon quickly snowballing into something that ends humanity within 30 minutes. That's what's at stake.
My house would be pushed over, then burn, no doubt.
I can see no way that a strike does not lead to escalation.
Our world is so specialized, that even if we have the ability to keep growing crops locally, most of us simply might not have access to the information to how get access to water, grow food, and build shelter in the time we need to survive until we can reestablish society.
"In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric. But the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable."
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20190925-was-threads-the...