A Deeply Unsettling Time Lapse Of Every Nuclear Explosion On Earth | Hacker News Reader

A Deeply Unsettling Time Lapse Of Every Nuclear Explosion On Earth

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37 pointshiroaki47 comments

I, for one, am not deeply unsettled by nuclear weapons.

As weapons of peace, they have made war a strongly negative sum game between advanced nations. The only way to win is not to play.

The drawback of nuclear weapons isn't the actual threat or consequences of war, but using the nature of the game by a government to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt amongst its own people to consolidate power. That, in itself, is not a problem with the weapon, but with the lack of enlightenment amongst the people and their government.

In addition, a lot of people have completely warped, fantastical and exaggerated perceptions of how powerful nuclear weapons are.

Would you mind expanding on that? What exaggerated perceptions do a lot of people have and in what way do they not match reality?

I'm not the guy you're replying to, but I've seen a lot of misconceptions that make them seem much worse than they are (although they are still quite terrible).

Common myth: any nuclear explosion causes total destruction for miles in every direction. Because of this, old drills like "duck and cover" were foolishness at best and cold-blooded ways to placate the populace at worse.

Fact: the area of total destruction is fairly small. Most injuries and deaths by most bombs would be caused by flying debris. Duck and cover is a great way to increase people's chances of survival. If you're right at ground zero then you're still screwed, but there are potentially millions of people living at distances where structures would overall survive but taking cover would greatly help their chances of survival. I blame this on pictures of Hiroshima from after the bombing there, where nearly everything is just wiped clean. People don't realize that this is because most of the buildings in the city were practically built out of paper.

Common myth: following a nuclear explosion, the area will be too contaminated to live in for centuries or millennia.

Fact: the really nasty stuff decays in days or weeks. It may not be the healthiest place to be long-term, but months or years after the event, it's not generally going to be a big deal. Witness the distinct lack of widespread contamination and abandonment in modern-day Hiroshima and Nagasaki for example.

Common myth: a full-scale nuclear war would destroy all life on the planet. OK, all complex life. Well, all human life.

Fact: while it would be an event without precedent in both its size and speed, lots of people would still survive. It would pretty thoroughly wreck civilization and easily kill hundreds of millions or even billions of people, but life would, overall, go on. Many countries would escape the devastation and, while their economics would have extreme trouble due to the devastation of global trade, they would not revert to a pre-industrial state or anything like it. Expect a future with technological advances slowed down greatly and dominated by Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa, and possibly Australia, not a future filled with radioactive wastelands and handfuls of survivors waiting for death in underground bunkers.

Common myth: the electromagnetic pulse from a nuclear explosion will wipe out electronics in the region.

Fact: most nuclear explosions don't produce EMP. You only get it when they're set off in the upper atmosphere, as the EMP comes from the interaction of gamma rays with sparse gasses and the Earth's magnetic field. An attacker with the capability would be wise to set such a thing off over the US, but, for example, a terrorist nuke in New Jersey isn't going to wipe the computers on Wall Street.

Common myth: despite all of the above misconceptions, nuclear weapons are still tremendously frightening and we're all extremely lucky that the Cold War never went hot.

Fact: no, this one is definitely right.

> I blame this on pictures of Hiroshima from after the bombing there, where nearly everything is just wiped clean. People don't realize that this is because most of the buildings in the city were practically built out of paper.

But then, you do realize that today's nukes are orders of magnitude stronger, right?

Bigger nukes increase the area of total destruction but they also increase the area of partial destruction. Furthermore, the area of total destruction is still not going to be big enough to cover an entire metropolitan area unless you're talking about something along the lines of Tsar Bomba. The point remains that civil defense procedures like "duck and cover" would save many lives.

As would "run for underground shelters", admittedly.

But then you're assuming reasonable and conscious plebes. Personally, I'd readily picture rednecks going "Meh, they won't finance these shelters on my dime lest it turn into yet another .gov fiasco, and I wouldn't budge anyway because .gov is just scaremongering us into living in rabit holes! I'm ME and I'm invincible. [Roar!]"

Plus, your story doesn't say if whoever goes for a subterranean shelter or ducks eventually digs her way back out. (I'd hope we never know if it does.)

I'm not sure I understand your point here. It doesn't take a whole lot of reasonableness to take cover when you know you're about to be hit by a massive blast wave. As for digging out, many of the survivors will just be able to climb out from the rubble. Escaping death by fallout then becomes interesting for many, but that won't affect many others.

Well, so Hiroshima/Nagasaki were 15-20kT weapons. While there was a while were the US and Russia were routinely plopping 5MT+ weapons on strategic platforms, these days its more down to 100-400kT range, so we're already sitting at ~one order of magnitude for most common nuclear device that'll go off near you. Granted, there will be a lot of them, but still.

Ok, so outside of the immediate fireball, the majority of immediate damage is going to be caused by overpressure, which will obey square distance law. So you're 20x weapon will only cause ~4.5x the overpressure at some distance.

So now its civil engineering of modern buildings vs whatever they had at Nagasaki/Hiroshima. I honestly cannot answer this, but I suspect that they could probably sustain twice the overpressure at least. So you're actual lethality (from building collapse) at set distance is only about ~2x despite the ~10x increase in weapon power.

Now, it's all kinda moot cause there's not going to be 'just one nuke'.

For your enjoyment and horror, http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/ you can watch how dead you'll be.

Thank you for the sane and argumented response.

>months or years after the event, it's not generally going to be a big deal

Strontium-90 [1] has a half-life of 28.79 years and gets concentrated in bones causing bone cancers and leukemia.

Caesium-137 [2] has a half-life of 30.17 years and concentrates in soft tissues.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strontium-90

[2]: http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2012/ph241/wessells1/

Can you cite sources for these claims? I've found it's very hard to find good scientific sources for the effects, but all of the research I've done on the topic suggests that you are grossly underestimating the effects.

Here is an example: http://www.amazon.com/Earth-Abolition-Stanford-Nuclear-Serie...

And here is another terrifying account of the effects of a nuclear explosion:

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/environm/no_nukes/tenw/nuke_...

And another good source which shows just how destructive a bomb would be on a major metropolitan area:

http://www.nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/

I'm not sure what your first link says, but the other two generally seem to agree with me. The second one gets EMP wrong, as everyone does, but Wikipedia covers it well enough:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_electromagnetic_pulse

I'm rather confused as to why you think that map suggests that I'm grossly underestimating the effects. It lines up perfectly. For example, select a Topol and put it over downtown Manhattan. You see that the fireball covers a few blocks, the death-by-radiation zone covers most of downtown, as does the destroy-all-buildings zone, the destroy-residential-buildings zone reaches up to Central Park, parts of Brooklyn, and into New Jersey, and severe burns for exposed people and random fires started by the flash goes out to most of Manhattan, much of Brooklyn, and big chunks of New Jersey. The zone in which "duck and cover" would save lives (outside the death-by-radiation area, inside the death-by-collapsing-residential-buildings-and-flying-glass area) covers almost 100km^2 and probably a couple of million people.

Drop 60 kg of knives on a city then see how many people you kill versus dropping 60 kg of uranium with technology surrounding it.

You are clearly someone who has never even been mugged much less dealt with war and violence in any real sense.

Your post reflects an incredible naivety about what true death and destruction means. A weapon doesn't have to be able to break the planet apart in order for it to be terrifying.

Sure, maybe media depictions of nuclear weapons are sensational, but that is hardly a reason to doubt their destructive power.

You are clearly the type of person who describes the ignorance of another person as a way to obviate all meaningful dialog.

</sarcasm>

Your tactic is so terrible that it renders your argument idle. Seriously, your brain is running, but you are moving no newtons. Please reevaluate your attempt at discussion.

I think you might have an interesting point somewhere in there, but your opening gambit is a shart. Nobody want to stick around for it when you open up insulting everyone who disagrees with you.

I'd be curious know how you'll revisit your opinion of "weapons of peace" when a nuclear nation is on the receiving end of a nuclear storm sent by some religious nut job.

I was referring to exactly this sort of FUD. If there are conflicts between the nations and cultures of the world, the casualties can rest no blame on technologies or weapons, but on the ignorant attitudes and behaviors of people.

'nuclear storm' and 'religious nut job' are meaningless phrases designed to illicit fear and agreement with your viewpoint, not legitimate arguments.

Err? Did I miss something, or has the US actually been waging a war against terrorists for the past 12 years, where "terrorist" is euphemism for "extremist muslim nut job"?

As for nuclear storm, it's hardly meaningless FUD phrase. It's a tactic that basically stands for: "flatten the area". It's tried and tested, too. Think Dresden.

Else yeah. It depends on ignorant attitudes and behaviors. Of which one people in particular (the US) seems to have plenty.

The point is that it hasn't happened and probably never will. No nuclear armed country has ever been invaded. Despite all predictions to the contrary, there was never a World War III and it doesn't seem like there ever will be.

In theory, yes, MAD and Nash Equilibrium and all that.

In practice, people and government are irrational and make mistakes (most notably in 1983 when we almost destroyed the world due to a false alarm) -- and the cost of policing this theoretical balance of power costs a hell of a lot of resources that could be better spent doing more productive things.

> and the cost of policing this theoretical balance of power costs a hell of a lot of resources that could be better spent doing more productive things.

I don't think there's more productive use of resources than maintaining peace between big nations.

It's not productive if it's a facade. The reality is that a nation-state will eventually go for broke and play the card. Just a matter of time and, as stated, irrational players.

You only need one mistake or rogue agent and nukes don't look so pretty

The vast majority of these detonations occurred after the US, UK and USSR signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty in 1963, which permitted only underground detonations. Ideally, underground detonations don't release radioactive material into the wider environment, but there were of course failures to contain along the way.

My favorite example of an underground nuclear explosion was project gasbuggy, near where I grew up. They thought it might be useful if they could perform nuclear fracking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gasbuggy

Where they performed the test is a very beautiful area.

Part of a larger project to actually perform nuclear terra-forming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Plowshare

http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,899941,...

> Someone shouted: "We did it! We did it!" Hand shakes were exchanged all around. The U.S. had successfully set off the first nuclear explosion sponsored jointly by the Government and industry.

Previously on HN...

Nuclear Explosions since 1942 (map) (datavis.tumblr.com) 3 points by transburgh 4 years ago | 1 comments | cached

Animated History of Nuclear Explosions (ctbto.org) 2 points by brianmckenzie 3 years ago | 0 comments | cached

Animated map of nuclear explosions, 1945-1998 (pinktentacle.com) 58 points by gnosis 3 years ago | 26 comments | cached

If you want to contribute to the thread, link to the comments on the previous posts. Otherwise, the fact that this has been posted before (apparently 3 years ago..) doesn't make it less interesting now.

> Animated map of nuclear explosions, 1945-1998 (pinktentacle.com) 58 points by gnosis 3 years ago | 26 comments | cached

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1586544

Site appears to be down. Here is the Google Cache link:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Nt4zfUy...

The animation is a youtube video. Here is the direct link.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U8CZAKSsNA

The number of tests is not what bothers me. The number of times we have had accidents is what does. Thankfully, none has ever resulted in accidental detonation- but this involved a lot of luck.

Eric Schlosser's book Command and Control, which just came out this year is a pretty comprehensive treatment of every accident the US has ever had, from decades of filing Freedom of Information reports. I'm halfway through it right now, it's pretty chilling.

Book: http://www.amazon.com/Command-Control-Damascus-Accident-Illu...

NYT review: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/books/review/command-and-c...

the number of tests should bother you, especially the atmospheric ones. People do epidemiological studies of industrial chemicals and their effects on cancer rates. Nobody does the epidemiological study of how the atmospheric tests affect cancer rates. Because there is no negative control.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9U8CZAKSsNA

Why am i not suprised america has the most explosions, and still they try to ban other countries from producing nuclear fuel. The future generations will probably like the fallout on us soil. Congrats, this is a wondefull vid.

It's been 50 years since the US did a non-underground test. What do you think we use all these supercomputers for? Nuclear testing.

Yup. The test partial test ban treaty was signed in 1963 by all the nuclear powers at the time - everything after then, US or otherwise, has been underground, with the exception of, I believe, India, who was not a nuclear power when the treaty was drawn up - india set of a series of undersea tests late in the century.

This was done specifically because they realized they would collectively make the planet uninhabitable if they continued.

France didn't sign, and went on with atmospheric testing until 1974, and the same is true of China (although they didn't start testing until 1964, so they weren't technically part of "all the nuclear powers at the time").

> india set of a series of undersea tests late in the century.

underground. [1] [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pokhran-II

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smiling_Buddha

The concern isn't that they are producing nuclear fuel. It's that the plutonium needed for nuclear weapons is a by-product of those reactors. Plutonium isn't naturally occurring on earth - the only place to get it is from a reactor - either yours, or buy it from someone else who has one.

Deeply unsettling? Because they did 2k tests over a period of half a century?

I think it is difficult for most people to conceptualize how short a time period that is since they haven't even lived that long.

Description of artist and the video http://www.ctbto.org/specials/1945-1998-by-isao-hashimoto/

Reminds me of "Rise Of The HFT Machine":

http://imgur.com/DxWer

"Error establishing a database connection" :(

The brits tested a bomb on U.S. soil?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julin_Bristol

Yep: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julin_Bristol http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_US%E2%80%93UK_Mutual_Defen...

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