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Comment by iamdann | Hacker News Reader

It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives.

As someone who has only cursory knowledge of atomic explosions and radiation damage, I was always under the impression that standing under an explosion such as this would almost guarantee a death during or shortly after.

I suppose it's a lot like HIV. Unprotected sex with an HIV positive person doesn't * guarantee* disease contraction, which is the impression I was always get. Not worth the risk, by any means, but still different than I had always been taught.

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If you read up on the history of the era and combine that with a study of the real effects of nuclear bombs, it becomes evident that there was an uncoordinated, but nevertheless systematic, effort to grossly overstate the dangers of nuclear war. A game of "Telephone" [1] was played, where at each step the nukes got more dangerous. If nukes were as dangerous to the world as popular culture today imagines, there would be no popular culture; most people grossly underestimate the number of test explosions that were set off at various times. Once again, Wikipedia to the rescue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_weapons_tests :

"The United States conducted around 1,054 nuclear tests (by official count) between 1945 and 1992.... The Soviet Union conducted 715 nuclear tests (by official count)[3] between 1949 and 1990... France conducted 210 nuclear tests between February 13, 1960 and January 27, 1996..."

Fallout isn't as dangerous as it is commonly portrayed, the bomb's effects are often overstated on every dimension, etc.

But of course, who really wants to go out of their way to correct the record? A number of people reading this will find a strong emotional inclination to leap to the conclusion that this post is pro-nuclear-war advocacy or something. But the truth is that while nukes can't destroy the world or destroy the entire ecosystem (even "nuclear winter" is highly questionable, especially in light of subsequent experiences with high-atmosphere particles, such as in the Kuwait oil fires), they still can kill millions directly and effectively destroy civilization as we know it by wiping out potentially every major city in the world (and get a good bit of damage on the medium-sized ones, too), killing billions more. Perhaps it isn't so bad that the dangers are played up a bit. The real dangers they pose are much harder to understand than the Hollywood B-grade movie version in popular culture, but still quite bad.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_whispers

As a former nuclear submarine officer, and current complete pacifist, I completely agree that the threat of nukes is WAY overblown. For example, much bigger threats to the modern world exist in the forms of uncontrolled small arms trading.

and so, in fact, you see: this toxic sludge is actually quite good for you.

No. Stop it. There are degrees of badness, and degrees of risk; decapitation is worse than getting a scraped knee, and car accidents are more common than cases of people being devoured by sharks. If we want to do right by everyone, and prevent horrible things from happening, but we have limited resources, then we've got to focus on things that are bad, common, and at least partially preventable.

If you understate some risks and overstate others, then you misallocate resources -- and if those resources are substantial enough to make a difference, this means that people get hurt and die because you were wrong about the severity and probability of risks. This is something where you can and should try to be right.

whatever: nukes /are/ bad, all too common, and entirely preventable. given "they still can kill millions directly and effectively destroy civilization as we know it by wiping out potentially every major city in the world" -- what more do we want before this unacceptable risk gets adequate focus? certainly, so far, there's little risk that any resources have been 'misallocated' I'm pretty sure no-one's gonna get hurt and die because we rid the world of these weapons of mass destruction.

Compared to, let's say illegal small arms, nukes are not that common. And the catastrophic destruction that they can cause is extremely uncommon. There are only a few nuclear incidents of any kind that have caused direct human casualties. From this perspective, dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA would be a huge allocation of resources to remove a small threat.

risk analysis: low likelihood x unacceptable impact is still an unacceptable risk. anyhoo, I won't be satisfied with "dismantling the whole nuclear arsenal of the USA" : I want total global elimination. perhaps we can begin by agreeing that ending the development of new nuclear weapons should not represent a huge allocation of resources. In fact, that kind of no-cost leadership by example could be the most important step towards convincing other actors to move beyond the nuclear error.

You can't really use unacceptable impact in risk analysis, it is too subjective. In my opinion illegal fire arms have a (high likelihood * unacceptable impact) risk. Would this risk be greater than the (low likelihood * unacceptable impact)?

Yes, no-new-nukes would be a major step forward. Unfortunately it seems that the Cold War is still on, with the USA building missile defense systems in the eastern Europe and the Russia responding with more missiles near its western borders.

when comparing unacceptable impacts, we might try: http://mapw.org.au/download/nuclear-famine-findings 'Nuclear Famine: A Billion People at Risk − Global Impacts of Limited Nuclear War on Agriculture, Food Supplies, and Human Nutrition', from the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, describes how A nuclear war using as few as 100 weapons would disrupt the global climate and agricultural production so severely that the lives of more than a billion people would be at risk.

War Games like visualization

http://www.visualnews.com/2011/05/06/visualized-nuclear-expl...

I suggest submitting that as a front-page link.

There is also the Defcon game that uses a rather funky Wargames style retro interface:

http://www.introversion.co.uk/defcon/

Note that a great deal of those tests were underground - the Limited Test Ban Treaty banned all atmospheric tests and was signed in 1963. This was primarily because of the risk posed by fallout.

Needless to say, wartime use of nuclear weapons would not be underground.

Fallout is of course dangerous. It just isn't as dangerous as it is commonly thought. We actually had a recent demonstration of this fact courtesy of Fukushima, and people in California being worried about the fallout. These worries were many, many orders of magnitude away from being well-founded.

The Fukushima accident demonstrates nothing at all about the use of nuclear weapons. High yield thermonuclear weapons detonated above ground turn large quantities of soil and dust radioactive and throw it up into the atmosphere. Nothing in any way comparable to this happened at Fukushima.

It is instructive that the US, UK and USSR were able to agree, at the height of the Cold War (this was less than a year after the Cuban Missile Crisis), to ban atmospheric tests.

You seem to keep thinking I'm talking about the real effects, when I'm talking about perception. The perception is flawed. No amount of pointing out that the dangers are non-zero will change the fact that the dangers are generally badly overstated; you need to show that fallout really is as dangerous as people think, which I gotta tell you, is going to be quite a challenge.

This is sort of what I'm getting at when I said people will have a hard time reading my post as being something other than pro-nuclear advocacy. justinatjustat is also providing a vivid demonstration. People simply can not help but collapse "It's not as dangerous as you think" to a claim that "It's not dangerous", no matter how obviously illogical that is once plainly stated. Even here on HN, talking about it rationally is a challenge. There's something deep, deep inside of us that is just utterly freaked out by radiation. I wonder if it's part of our disgust instinct (which is, evolutionarily, a relatively recent development and nearly isolated to humans, almost nothing else on Earth can be "disgusted" as we can).

I don't think you can quantify how dangerous people think it is. Certainly I don't believe you know how dangerous I think it is.

My points are simply that: you cannot derive a conclusion about the danger of fallout from the large number of nuclear tests that have occured, since the majority of those tests were underground and many of those that weren't were of relatively modest yield; and that the real danger of fallout was significant enough to bring arch foes to the negotiating table during the height of the Cold War. I'm sure their respective nuclear scientists were well aware of the real dangers.

ok, I'll bite (sorry for inexpertly juggling two accounts): Fair enough, and no in fact I didn't read your post as pro-nuclear advocacy. I am just particularly keen to underscore the fact that, any overblown perceptions aside, nuclear weapons are definitely bad enough to be worth a bit more effort to halt their development and then eliminate them from our world. I just came back here after reading: http://mapw.org.au/download/nuclear-famine-findings

No, it's nothing like HIV. HIV is a statistical thing: It's random chance if an infective particle travels.

A nuclear bomb like this is deterministic. Based on the distance, altitude, size (power), and type (fission, fusion, specifics of the design - especially the tamper) of the bomb you can calculate exactly what and how dangerous the effects will be.

The military was trying to show that they are able to make these calculations correctly, and that used appropriately, this type of bomb an be used without undesired damage.

It didn't work for them though, because people have an irrational fear of anything nuclear and are not interesting in hearing about any calculations.

It's one of those paradoxes similar to how people are completely unable to correctly calculate how risky an action will be. For example people are scared of flying but not crossing the street (a common event comes to be seen as less risky) or driving a car (if you are in control it seems less risky).

> It's amazing how these men have went on to live such long lives.

No, actually it was completely expected. If you can manage to internalize this, and actually believe inside your head that these men were quite safe then you will have gone a long way toward conquering an irrational fear.

PS. You may be thinking of Cancer when comparing to HIV which is indeed a random thing.

Well, it's deterministic, until you get surprised:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Flat#Baneberry

and then perhaps you wish you had not shelved your "irrational" fear.

There's a lot less that can go wrong when you're trying to contain an explosion by distance, then when you're trying to contain it with dirt in the way.

Here was another oops moment, from an airborne test:

"Shot Harry was detonated on a 300-foot tower. The 32-kiloton explosion heaved a vast amount of earth into the air, much of it vaporized, most of it as a fine powder, all of it radioactive..."

From http://www.kcsg.com/view/full_story/19217952/article-SOUTHER...

My point is simply that it's hard to stay safe when within a couple miles of an energy release of that size, no matter what your model tells you. Downvote if you like; this seems pretty non-controversial.

You can calculate some effects, like intensity of radiation and pressure waves, but others, like lethality, and trickier. Within a certain range of radii, your chances of survival depend strongly on where you are and what you're doing. Are you in a building sturdy enough to not collapse on you? Is there anything heavy that might fall on you? Are you near a window? Will the building catch fire?

A lot of this stuff made its way into building codes, after some nuclear tests to figure out what worked.

From the article: The thing is, in that particular explosion, those guys would have been in a pretty safe position. The bomb itself was a small one (by nuclear standards — 2 kilotons) and it was way, way above their heads. They weren't in a zone to be too affected by the immediate radiation. The bomb was small enough and high enough that it wouldn't have sucked up dust to produce much fallout. The remaining cloud would have been full of (nasty) fission products, but it would have been extremely hot and most of it would have stayed aloft until it cooled down, by which point it probably would have been spread more diffusely.

Exactly. That's the part I learned from.

I'm remembering visiting the Nike Missile site just over the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.

http://www.nps.gov/goga/nike-missile-site.htm http://nikemissile.org/site_sf88.shtml

It's both wonderful and creepy. They've restored some beautiful old mechanical computers which are works of art in my eyes, but they also point out that the missiles were capable of carrying nuclear warheads, "but they neither confirm nor deny" whether the missiles at this facility ever had them installed. They _do_ however point out that not only were the missiles capable of taking down incoming aircraft heading towards San Francisco, but they were also pre-targetted at Sacramento… "Just in case" (I'm sure the guys who run the tours are pretty good at setting just the right tone with their stories, but they certainly left me with some interesting impressions).

I _highly_ recommend the tour of SF88 to anybody who's got an afternoon spare in San Francisco.

Why would you pre-target them at Sacramento?

> also pre-targetted at Sacramento… "Just in case"

I'm at bit of a loss. Just in case what? Sacramento declares secession? Berkeley radicals march on the capitol? Taken over by Russians? Austrians?

The distinct impression the tour story gave me was "in case of Russian invasion". There was even some explanation about which versions of the Nike missile had sufficient range to get to Sacramento.

Like I said, there's some distinctly creepy bits about that whole thing.

Far safer. You have to remember that they're over three and a half miles from the explosion. They're just in a dramatic direction.

In fact, the entire point of this test was to demonstrate that it was safe to stand under it. While some of the early tests were very unsafe, by the time of this test (1957), the dangers of radiation were well-known, so it wasn't a cowboy-type experiment like the early ones, and the planning would've computed the expected radiation dose and ensured it was safe.

The military did it as a publicity stunt to assuage public fears of nuclear-tipped air-to-air missiles by showing that even if they were used in a dogfight directly over a city, they wouldn't pose any risk to those on the ground. The volunteers were even supposed to not wear a helmet or hat to show that it was fine for normal people. If I recall correctly from having seen this discussed previously, they measured radiation doses received, and found that the highest doses (but still not at dangerous levels) were received by the pilots involved in the test, not the ground volunteers.

This was from the relatively short-lived era when several militaries were hoping to make a distinction between "strategic" nuclear weapons, the kind that blow up cities and would only be used in doomsday scenarios, and "tactical" nuclear weapons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tactical_nuclear_weapon), small-yield varieties that would just be like very big regular weapons and could conceivably be used in a non-apocalyptic war. Due to a mixture of public opposition and fears of international chain reactions that might result from "going nuclear", though, that initiative failed, which is why you saw a transition back into really-gigantic conventional weapons in the 1990s, e.g. the MOAB (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-43/B_Massive_Ordnance_Air_B...).

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