Nuclear weapons are not as destructive as you think
datasecretslox.com
datasecretslox.com
There are a lot of scientists here. Imagine what a hundred million volts and hundreds of thousands of bare energized light ion coulombs will do to household wiring. Think electrical fires for thousands of miles. Anything with Romex is going to glow red hot and light the walls on fire. This has never been openly discussed before. I thought you might like to know before civilization is burned to the ground.
Edit: Sandia Labs paper on Starfish Prime and the streetlights in Hawaii: http://ece-research.unm.edu/summa/notes/SDAN/0031.pdf
The second piece of the puzzle is starfish prime, which was entirely unexpected. It caused transformers hundreds of miles away to burn up and of course satellites to cease to transmit near the area of the blast. Scientists are clever and they could find simple ways to greatly amplify the effect. The discussion about grids going down is good enough to get people to talk. But there is more to the story than what they led us to believe.
If you were to take a high yield weapon and encase it in something like high density polystyrene it has a high hydrogen to carbon ratio making it's ions faster. Protons are many times more massive than electrons so electrons will be stripped off very quickly and travel very far leaving two very large opposite charge bodies flowing at relativistic speeds above the victim civilization. Bare charges are notoriously hard to keep together and they expand very quickly in all directions. This causes a great deal of current above us from the negative charges and the positive charges. A single coulomb is a massive amount of charge to try to keep together. If you had a single coulomb bound and then released, the explosive effect would be enormous.
Amplifying the effect with tons of this material means hundreds of terajoules of energy converted directly into electrical current which is a very fast moving wave, much much faster than a cme. This means that it will affect short wires even only a few feet long.
There is not just one of these weapons but dozens or hundreds. With a blanket dispersal it would affect huge areas.
Unlike conventional nuclear war thinking where blast effects are considered, this tactic is based on fire damage. The result is the destruction of a civilization with moderate amounts of nuclear fallout.
I really hope these fears of mine are unfounded but electricity is not easy to argue with. When man decided to apply its knowledge of nuclear energy into weapons research it took upon it's mortal hands instruments of it's own annihilation. Please read Rev 6. And Rev 17-18. For a bonus read Dan 5. Then you will know what to do when the time comes. Peace be to you and may your flight to safety be sure.
Other than that, this is a great writeup in how it dissects the technical details of a nuclear war and puts them into perspective.
In other words, perverse as it seems, some things are worse than a remote chance of a nuclear war.
Talk about monetary constipation.
What Russians are doing - rapes, massacres, destroying children hospitals on purpose and so much more - in Ukraine isn't new for us, it is the same old. Pick a random nation between Germany and Russia and they likely went through this in the last 100 years.
Russians are always going to be dangerous as long as their way of thinking of Imperial Russian superiority lasts, but they are less dangerous with their planes shot down, tanks blown up, ships on the bottom of the sea and soldiers dead.
I don't see how it is probably not the best idea at this point, since Russia will continue its rape and murder spree otherwise.
> Russia would not launch nukes against the US
But still can lunch few against Ukraine.
Even if USA is safe in open war - Europe is not.
As for Europe being safe - we are not. There is currently a war going on.
They have been hell bent on using Ukraine situation as a starter on their plan of destroying Russia since the same sinister figures were in the Obama administration.
They are the Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheneys of our time, and to compound the tragedy they found in Putin, the Putin of our time.
Between they and Wladimir they form the coalition of the eager with the willing.
And nobody seems to care that Victoria Nuland and their ilk are happily leading us to the abyss of nuclear war.
As always they need a war for economic reason, but that's just one aspect, there are also:
- China need of food who bring them to South America, the nearest and richest reserve for USA, and to reach their goal China need to expand on the seas where USA and UK base their dominance to a point some call them talassocracies;
- both USA and UK (and Canada, even if demographically can't do much and it's still under UK umbrella) are on the brink of a civil war due to neoliberst squeeze of prosperity. A war historically unite their populations accepting no matter what just to "help the Nation", typically against their own Citizens interests as a community, so "the nation against their Demos";
- EU was about to ditch from the anglosphere accepting one of the nth proposal from Russia fed. for a partnership with mutual benefits instead of the unfair one we have with USA and UK, again the war act as an effective excuse to stop such move;
- the war hide the covid scandal, at least postponed it and lowering it possibly to a level of the equal scandals from the recent past (see the press, just after H2N2 (1957), H3N2 (1968), SARS-CoV (2003), H5N1 (2004), H1N1 (2009), MERS-CoV (2012) to read them and the pattern of the "while" part);
- Russia itself is growing and aspiring to be back as an old empire, a very fragile but very resourceful, a thing both USA and UK can't accept, China is doomed by it's location and demography, Russia is not.
The neoliberist west actually live on "monetary constipation" entirely, Europe included, and in an era of scarce resources overthrown the table (Great Reset) hoping it suffice to gain a chance does dot work much. It might work against small and poor opponents, not against growing superpowers. That's is.
Oh, BTW that's a not much accepted topic on HN but since the recent opening to not HN-proper topics like politics: many USA and UK people fail to understand what socialists also from UK and USA have well understood in the past, witch means that their ruling class is not their country and actually it's acting against them, so try to be "patriotic" is the exact opposite of what most do, witch is supporting their clepocratic rulers, acting patriotically would be for them demanding the annihilation of neoliberist institutes, private-public cancers that devour their countries not only others ones. They fear if they are not united under their ruler they'll be lost not considering that actually is the exact contrary because no matter what people in the world suffer similar pain caused by similar criminals so others have no interests against them but against their rulers, witch means others have a common enemy.
Today fuel loads in major cities are much lower than they were from the 60s to 80s and that makes it more unlikely for firestorms to start from cities.
There are a huge caveats to this thinking though.
1) Fuel loads from above-ground oil, natural gas, and coal storage areas are big enough to start a massive firestorm. Cushing, Oklahoma alone has enough fuel to cause severe cooling.
2) Nuclear strikes to some specific areas, California during a fire season, might create a firestorm that covers a large percentage of the state and burns everything down in just few hours.
That is pretty impressive on the satellite map...all the white dots are oil tanks.
How would this be different from California burning by itself every year? Is this a difference of speed of burn or something?
In a firestorm spotfires interact. This interaction will increase the burning rates (forests and bushes burn more thoroughly, there is more heat and higher flames. It creates whole new local climate that throws shoot into the atmosphere.
2009 Black Saturday bushfires in Australia had some firestorms.
We all know there are a lot of vested interests itching for WW3. So the question is...why?