Nukes of Hazard (2013)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
This is why numbers shouldn't be reported with too many significant figures. I doubt the engineers thought the reports could be %99.9 certain, given that they're extrapolated from noisy sensors, networked across huge distances and that the opponent is adversarial (actively trying to avoid detection).
Percentages can cause a false sense of certainty too; as Leonard Mlodinow points out in The Drunkard's Walk about changing wine ratings from out-of-10 to percentages. We might be quite sure that an 8/10 compares favourably to a 7/10 but not to a 9/10; we can't say the same about an %82 with an %83 and an %81.
If you're forced to report percentages, or tenths of a percent, write the estimated error alongside. Raw numbers like "%99.9" have an implied "+/- %0.05" afterwards.
And that, ladies and gentlement, is why Die Hard 4.0 contains too many many significant figures.
I think probabilities can either be well calibrated or not. (Which then of course begs the question of how you define being well calibrated for probabilities of events that happen very rarely). An error interval does not seem to make too much sense.
Does not make it any less ridiculous.
I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct.
[Edit 1]
Actually, if you consider the indirect effects of the use of such a weapon - particularly the large number of refugees fleeing contaminated areas, huge numbers of injured etc. while such a detonation wouldn't destroy an entire state it would probably reduce it to complete chaos.
e.g. The UK government estimated in the 1950s that three H-bombs would be all it would take to destroy the UK as a functioning society - the UK ambassador in Moscow even had a drunken debate with Kruschev on this point - suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill...
[Edit 2]
The UK government was always pretty gloomy/realistic about the likely impact of a nuclear war on the UK - basically even in fairly optimistic scenarios such as the Square Leg exercise used as the basis for Threads were absolutely awful. A real attack would have been far worse that the one shown in Threads, if anyone can conceive of that.
As Schlosser says in his book - because of the lack of coordination between the Air Force, Army, US Navy and Missile Forces, at one point there was something like 400(sorry if I remembered the number wrong,but it was in hundreds) nuclear rockets aimed at Moscow, many of them with multi-megaton payload. If they were launched, Moscow wouldn't be just destroyed - the entire area would be turned into the biggest crater on earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprint_%28missile%29
Now picture the skies over Moscow with ~400 warheads coming in, most of them having been launched in a coordinated wave by Minuteman, Titan, or MX missiles within the space of a few minutes: it turns out that the prompt neutron pulse, blast, EMP, or thermal effects from one incoming warhead can disrupt another if it arrives within 10 seconds of the first. This is termed nuclear fratricide:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fratricide
... And there were enough weapons in play during the Cold War that this was a thing war planners worried about.
Apparently, the US military were tasked with destroying 50% of the socialist world's industrial capacity - which you could do by destroying 50% of the factories completely or 100% of the factories by at least 50%. However, if you attack say a shoe factory (the example given) with an H-bomb aiming to achieve at least 50% destruction you do actually get 100% destruction. So all factories were targeted.
NB I used the phrase "socialist world" as, at least until well into the 60s, the SIOP aimed to destroy everyone even vaguely left of center whether they were actually allies of the Soviets or not (e.g. China, Albania, Yugoslavia etc.).
Pretty sure I read this in "The Bomb - A Life" by Gerard DeGroot, but I could well be wrong!
Air defence systems back them were really pretty poor - e.g. the infamous case where the entire US air defence system couldn't stop UK strategic bombers taking out major us cities in an exercise (which was kept quiet for decades due to the embarrassment it caused).
"It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least 10 s apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than 1 min or more than 1 h apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects."
Anyone for Missile Defense with a 50-100Mt Tsar bomba?
If you can land a nuke, or even a conventional warhead, directly on whatever it is you're trying to make a was, your required explosive yield falls dramatically.
Blast radius and damage increases with the cube of yield, so if you're half as accurate, you need 8x the blast, generally, for effective damage.
Turns out that with extremely high precision warhead delivery, the US can dispense with nuclear weapons even for tasks such as destroying deeply buried and reinforced bunkers (command and control, or missile launch).
On the one hand this makes nuclear Armageddon that much less likely. On the other it makes use of highly advanced weaponry less objectionable.
Which way the risk needle ultimately swings given that calculus is an interesting question.
NB An interesting article by Charlie Stross on the relationship between the US and the UK's "independent" deterrent:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/04/on-the-u...
My (wild) guess is that you'd get a blob of extremely hot rock melting its way down through the crust and enough fallout to sterilise the Northern hemisphere.
So kind of a dumb idea from a strategic point of view.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Integrated_Operational_P...
So, although it is possible for the fire to ignite the conventional explosives, it would almost certainly have not done so in precisely the way needed to activate the atomic components of the bomb -- at least that is what I have read somewhere. (Sorry, I do not remember where -- maybe Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ.)
The worst thing that could realistically have happened is that the fire and a conventional explosion would have spread the radioactive components of the bomb (particularly, plutonium) into the environment, in the manner of a dirty bomb.
Suppose the trigger device providing the precise timing could misbehave at high temperatures. Or, in the same source I mentioned earlier, it was disclosed that there were wiring paths which could have melted together in a fire and cause the weapon to fire.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Castle [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo [3] https://goo.gl/maps/thGe6
Bikini Atoll was also worse than this hypothetical Arkansas scenario in two ways:
1) The soil there is potassium poor, causing local plants to more readily take in radioactive cesium.
2) It was also hit by 22 additional bombs.
Here's a link with the numbers plugged in: http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
Arkansas would not be "wiped out".
edit: for starters consider that in a state of three million people, 725k are in Little Rock, which is only 116 square miles. Then read the specs on that bomb you linked to again.
The Wikipedia number is not correct, because even a single blast has long term consequences, and in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant than the initial damage.
Even if the blast was just one a of a handful, survivors would have to contend with fallout from other detonations, followed by nuclear winter, followed by years of famine, mutation, cancer, and other diseases.
In a full scale war, nukes are targeted at nuke power plants, so there would be even more fallout - enough to sterilise many parts of the US.
Initial casualties would be a small percentage of the eventual total.
Even a limited exchange in a distant part of the world would have global consequences. See e.g.
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nuclear-war-civilization-famine...
The specific point being discussed was a local disaster -- a 9 megaton bomb which was damaged by somebody dropping a tool on it -- not an all-out war scenario.
Which is why I responded the way I did. In that scenario, I don't see any realistic case in which the entire state of Arkansas would be "wiped out". Possibly fallout would have rendered a fraction of the state uninhabitable for several weeks, and possibly some long-term effects would render a smaller fraction of the state uninhabitable for much longer, but the whole state "wiped out" is just sloppy journalism.
http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/?&kt=9000&lat=34.7464809&l...
Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fallout from an airburst.
Thus, I am unconvinced by the argument that the longer-range fallout would "wipe out" something the size of Arkansas.
Disappointing to read needless hyperbole in the New Yorker.
Are there people that know how big a Cub is, but don't know how big a Cessna is?
It seems quite possible that we'll blow ourselves up by accident.
If one puted that in a movie plot I think few would believe it.
The launch code for US nukes was 00000000 for 20 years:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/launch-code-for-u...
First it was changed to include one capital letter, one numerical digit and an asterisk.
Now it's correcthorsebatterystaple.
edit - we also used to rely on the AA's radio network - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/in-the-eve...
Are you sure you're not confusing that with nuclear submarine commanders checking that BBC Radio 4's still broadcasting as part of their "is the country still there" checks?
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort :
According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes... establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting
I've always understood "dead man's switch" to literally mean something operating without human intervention. Probably explains the confusion!
That said, the options available to the commander do leave some room for interpretation:
- retaliate with nuclear weapons;
- not retaliate with nuclear weapons;
- use his own judgement; or
- place the submarine under allied country command - if possible
Yeah, hence my gutless hedging with "sort of".
Maybe "failsafe" would be a better term, like in the film of that name, where the bombers are instructed to ignore any order to abort once they pass a particular point. (Actually, "fail-deadly" would be more accurate: why wasn't the film called that?)
But I presume that there is also a more active communication method as well. If the Prime Minister wanted to launch the nukes then he would be able to send a message to the subs and launch immediately.
The book's chapters alternate between two narratives. The first is a real-time account of a bomb-gone-haywire scare in Arkansas, and the people called in to deal with it. The second is a history of nuclear arms, escalation, and near-misses during the Cold War.
I could have done without the first narrative. It is awkwardly written, repetitive, and slow. (No doubt Schlosser does this to draw out the scenario across N chapters. The tactic actually makes things worse, sapping the story of its immediacy and urgency). But the main, historical narrative is fantastic.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm...
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83
- http://rbth.com/defence/2014/04/03/ultimate_deterrent_how_th...
- http://archive.wired.com/politics/security/magazine/17-10/mf...
This had so many ways to end in tears and it still does.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letters_of_last_resort
It's terrifying that nuclear war was considered likely enough to do this.
[1] i.e. the human race
The history of nuclear accidents is not a good indicator for the risk of nuclear war due to survivorship bias.
The fact that we haven't observed a nuclear war in history might have less to do with the likelihood of nuclear war and more with the fact that fewer people would be able to observe that history.
I am also not to sure, if they (the remnants) would survive for long with global climate change and radioactive fallout everywhere.
If civilization were to collapse now, it may never rise again.
Also, there's plenty more available energy on this planet, many times the amount we've used so far in building this civilization. Methane Hydrate, Thorium to name a couple. We're just drunk on oil right now, but don't confuse that with 'using up all the energy.'
Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, has noted that adding technology to his models does very little to shift the ultimate outcome.
And information absent energy isn't worth much at all. The world as a whole has effectively equal access to information. What's it's got unequal access to are raw material resources, most particularly energy.
And what do you mean, absent energy? There's plenty of energy around. Methane Hydrate reserves are estimated at 6X all the oil we ever found for instance.
We've also probably evened out the geographic availability (so for example you can scrape together a few hundred pounds of copper pretty much anywhere there is a little bit of settlement).
I agree that coal/energy would likely be a problem.
I wonder if the story itself is as fucked-up as my memory of it is.
This is because it confuses two very different things: ease of production of natural resources and cost effectiveness of production of natural resources. In the early stages of industrialization ease of production is paramount, but in later stages quality, production volume, and per unit cost is paramount. Early resources can be very much more expensive to produce and very much lower quality (as they were historically) and yet still be viable. Take coal for example. A small coal mine near the surface can be a quite viable source of coal in early industry, but such coal mines would not be economical in the modern era. Because modern coal is higher quality, much higher volume production, and mined out of areas where it is generally most amenable to industrialized production. There is an old abandoned coal mine within walking distance of me right now, I've been there and picked up coal off the surface of the ground. There's still literally tons of coal there that could be mined quite easily by hand. But compared to other sources of coal in the 21st century it's simply not economical to bother worrying about trying to extract it to depletion.
And the same exact principles apply to essentially every other natural resource. For example, we no longer mine bog iron because it's a very manual labor intensive work compared to, say, shoveling hematite sand into rail cars.
Additionally, this argument ignores the fact that vast amounts of resources will exist in the form of remnants of our present civilization (only the tiniest fraction of which will be vaporized by nuclear explosions). Huge amounts of iron, aluminum, glass, etc. will be left over, short-cutting the normal production process as for pre-industrial processes.
Re-industrialization after a collapse will be different than past industrialization but I see no indications that it will be very much more difficult and certainly not impossible.
Very likely we would return to subsistence farming. There would be little or no remaining industry, and not enough resources to support it. Generations would go by with little technological progress. Metal would rust away, buildings collapse, forests regrow, and after awhile there wouldn't be much left of our civilization. (This is of course assuming a worst case scenario where the whole world is bombed or a nuclear winter happens.)
When we did finally get around to trying to rebuild civilization, sure there would be some scattered resource deposits around the world, but not enough to do anything with. You can't build steam engines without perfecting metallurgy and abundance of cheap, strong, metal. You need to produce many tons of cheap coal, not just scattered surface deposits. The industrial revolution started when deep underground mining became possible by pumping out water, and those mines are exhausted or lost.
Some aspects of modern, industrialized civilization are tenuous (like worldwide inter-continental freight shipping), others are simply insights or knowledge gained through hard work that doesn't need to be repeated. Such as even the general idea of the movable type printing press, or literacy, or the germ theory of disease, or food preservation via canning, and so on. A modern person with a little bit of knowledge transported back 2 or even 3 thousand years could change the way people live their lives at a fundamental level. Boiling water and pasteurizing milk before drinking it are things that have been possible since antiquity. As would be canning of various foods, enabling preservation of fruits, vegetables, and meats harvested in the summer through the winter or through several years. That sort of thing transforms the basic subsistence equation enormously and massively accelerates the amount of time it would take to return to some degree of modernity and industrialization. Not to mention the huge transformation due merely to the ideas of rewarding individuals for their labor and their inventions, the idea of the scientific method, and the process of advancing knowledge and technology in general. All of which were stunted historically because people didn't know any better, just as people didn't know to wash their hands or boil their water.
Over the generations, more and more of the knowledge we've accumulated will be lost. The culture will change further and further from the one that led to our civilization.
It all depends, how the survivors will behave. I think it is much likely, that living together will change its form very much -- up to the possibility that people will fight for the last resources or a return to Middle Ages state (but, when I see what is happening in our democracies, they might also do without nuclear destruction).
That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.
And supposedly, the original design was for 100 megatons, but they dialed it back because of fallout concerns.
I don't know, what you are referring to here, but to my opinion, given the distances of a relatively wide area with very limited population, the results where grave enough. Generations of the inhabitants where contaminated and had babies with many defects or deaths born. I guess the descendants of these poor people still struggle with the effects of this bomb.
Given such an event in or near a city of the US, I guess not only one city might get wiped out but the effects would be very real and destructive in a very big part of the US.
I didn't like 2001, maybe because in 2014 its harder to appreciate, and it has a very slow pace. Dr. Strangelove a much easier watch.
Machiavelli's blueprint smothers the benevolence of the Ghandis, the Tutus and the Mandelas. A populace too absorbed in day-to-day survival is in no position to change the status quo. Depressing.
Utter craziness - all of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Day_in_the_Life_of_Ivan_De...
That's not to excuse or downplay these country's mistakes. Let's just not forget our own.
It was between maintaining the capability of such a nuclear war to deter aggression, and not maintaining it and surely having been invaded by the Soviets.
For the madness that MAD was, for all intents and purposes, it actually worked.
Of course, deterrence based on MAD is the least worst idea - but once shooting actually started, what is the rational thing to do?
Modern warhead design has the idea of the "strong link" and "weak link". The strong link is a critical part of the detonation path, and is not ordinarily in place. It can only be put in place by arming the warhead, or by a severe accident. But any accident severe enough to put the strong link in place should be more than enough to destroy the weak link, which is also a critical part of the detonation path.
A warhead accident could still leave an awful lot of radioactive contamination, of course...
"The plane split in two, the base was evacuated, and the fire burned for two and a half hours. But the explosives in the warhead didn’t detonate; that would have set off a chain reaction."
This statement seems to imply the bomb would have went off, which is just not true. The physics just do not work that way.
You can get a lump of C-4, and use it as fuel for a fire to cook over without any danger, and in fact soldiers certainly used to do this. You can also hit it with a hammer - the shock wave caused by this isn't strong enough to cause a detonation.
In terms of a nuke, you need to detonate a set of independent lumps of explosive with very precise timing, in order to get a compression lens that will squash the fissile core sufficiently to get a nuclear explosion. Heat is unlikely to cause this to happen with a sensibly-designed bomb.
So I think that this fire would probably not have caused a nuclear explosion.
Nuclear bombs require absurd - something on the order of microseconds (I suspect nanoseconds probably come into play) detonation precision in order to reach super-criticality.
Not much has changed.
sigh
Just today Russia launched three new nuclear submarines, capable of deploying ballistic missiles: http://www.janes.com/article/41339/russia-lays-keels-for-thr...
Unfortunately since journalists rely so heavily on controlled leaks and targeted propaganda it just doesn't make headlines, but these events are hardly secret.
I suspect we have a 50% chance of a nuclear weapon incident in the next 5 years. North Korea is run by a guy whose view of the world has almost no basis in reality. Pakistan-India, who knows what could happen. The US is pushing hard against Russia but I suspect both parties remain sane (though the point of the article is accidents.)
Get to Mars fast.
I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMDs. Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it.
I fully accept a lot of mistakes were made during the cold war, and I also deplore the expensive, ineffective and unnecessary overreach by western intelligence agencies, but the threats they were and are purporting to defend us from are very real. Some of our responses to those threats have been mistaken and unnecessary, but it certainly does not follow that those threats don't exist and don't need to be responded to.
Seriously?
There ought to be something analogously to Godwin’s law to declare discussions lost after this class of arguments.
To answer in kind: "I'd like to ask how you would explain the proportionality of the respond to the families of the tens to hundreds of thousand civilian casualties[1] in the Irak war." OR "[…] explain the justice and civility of the 'war against terror' to the hundreds (?) of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo bay." OR even "[…] explain the trillion dollar [2] that were spent on the military instead on fighting aids, cancer, malaria, diabetes,… to those suffering or those who have lost friends or family."
Emotional arguments quickly become ridiculous if you leave out the greater effects to society and the relative danger of the threat.
No, but numerical arguments quickly become ridiculous when you ignore the fact that the emotional reaction of the nation to 3,000 Americans killed in a terrorist act is itself a physically cognizable phenomenon that must be given due weight in the analysis.
"Today America mourns. Today we were attacked. Today terrorists tried to destroy our way of life. They tried to rob us of our sense of security, our liberty, our democracy. And yet today we stand united! We will not let them take away our values our freedom! We will find and persecute those that are responsible. But we will not fall for the cycle of hate and violence the terrorists have laid in front of us."
This path would have been harder to defend against those crying for revenge. But it could have used the same patriotism and stubbornness that was used for war mongering in the alternative world we live in. And in hindsight we see how bad the results of that fear and violence politics were for America and for the world.
This is how: in that year alone, 2001, over 10000 people were killed by gun homicides in the US --over three times as many random, pointless deaths as 9/11. Last year, there were over 15000: an increase of nearly twice as many families mourning the senseless death of their loved ones as the 9/11 families, but every year.
And twice as many people every year die of car accidents --sudden, random, untimely deaths. Every year.
These are inconceivable amounts of suffering, of mourning families and communities rent apart: almost as if the population of an entire mid-sized town got randomly obliterated every year.
And then consider that, in their name, hundreds of thousands of other innocent families around the globe have gone through --and still go through-- their very same suffering on that day: losing their loved ones to unimaginably violent attacks out of nowhere, absurdly justified by some abstract, foreign notion --collateral damage, preventive strike, what not.
The numbers don't lie. As a society, sooner or later we will have to come to terms precisely with the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism, and the grotesque price we have inflicted the world (and ourselves) with.
Shark attacks are statistically rare. Lightning strikes (of a human) are statistically rare. Adrenocortical carcinoma is statistically rare. Having to explain this to the family of a victim doesn't change that fact.
In 2001, a banner year for terrorism, America lost more people to heart disease than terrorism. This should surprise no one. What's a little more surprising is the scale of the difference - not just more people, but 200 times as many people. To put it another way, if something on the scale of 9/11 happened every other day we'd still be losing more people to heart disease than to terrorism. Sure, there are criticisms to be had (e.g. we should be comparing years lost or quality of life not simply lives lost) but none of these come close to overcoming that 200 fold difference - one year lost by a 70 yo would have to translate to 200 years lost by a younger person, and those lost in 9/11 weren't especially young (average age was 40). Car accidents disproportionately kill the young, and also killed more Americans than terrorism that year. And of course those (and still other causes - many of them!) continue to kill many times more people than terrorism did in 2001 - terrorism does not.
There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks.
Since you obviously don't mean the heart attacks are worse, and we obviously don't agree, please support this rather than just asserting it. If it simplifies matters, first support that losing one person to deliberate attack is significantly worse than losing one person to illness. Then we can look at whether "significant" is significant enough.
One thing we can quickly agree on is that deterrence (or lack thereof) is more relevant in the case of an attack. But deterrence is only one kind of prevention. I don't see that the actual badness is greater in the case of the attack-caused death.
The second reason is justice. A person dying from a heart attack is a "natural" death, nobody (except possibly the victim themselves) contributed to the death.
Using the logic of the grandparent, the world should have said "Let's ignore the Rwandan genocide because more babies die of diarrheal diseases."
This is very true. We've spent over a trillion dollars combatting terrorism with little progress (and more American lives lost than in 9/11, let alone Iraqi/Afghan lives). Spending that trillion on heart attack prevention and treatment would've been far more effective at saving lives.
One assumption is that spending 1 trillion dollars over the last 13 years on heart attack prevention and treatment would have made a significant difference in the number of lives saved. How do we quantify this?
A second assumption on the other side of the argument is that spending 0 to fight terrorism would have netted 0 new casualties, anywhere. If we did nothing we would have been better off. But how do we quantify this? We can see the results of our actions, but we cannot see the results of our inactions. If we did not invade Iraq, would more or less people be alive today in that country, and what would their quality of life be? Would Afghanistan be completely ruled by extremist Muslims and be ruled under a brutal Sharia law if we had not invaded and tried to put a partly democratic and citizen based government in place? Who knows? If that did happen, would more people be suffering due to extreme oppression and sectarian violence than what our invasions has caused? How do we quantify all of these factors?
Making big sweeping statements with huge numbers that dwarf anything we're used to talking about is sensationalism. The fact of the matter is that the people making these decisions, by and large, are not doing it because they are trying to get rich or build some fiefdom. Dem or Repub, Liberal or Conservative, I think that generally speaking, most politicians and government officials are in their positions to do good. They see themselves as agents of change and sometimes have to make incredibly hard decisions in the times in which they live (not 10 years later). They are trying to give this country and others around the world their best shot at living a life of freedom and liberty. We're not always going to agree with decisions, and some are truly mistakes, but few that we look at are simply because of some crazy conspiracy agenda.
I think it's hard to argue that a trillion dollars to the NIH, CDC, preventative medicine for the poor, etc. wouldn't result in at least 3k lives saved during the period.
I also think it's impossible to rationally argue that the Iraq war did anything to reduce terrorism, given that the pretext for invasion was WMD, not terrorism, and that extremists now control large swaths of the country where they had minimal power under Hussein.
We've lost more people in the Iraq/Afghan wars than were lost in 9/11, for little progress - Iraq's splitting into pieces and much occupied by folks hardcore enough that Al Qaeda goes "hang on, you're making us look bad!" What's your explanation to their families?
> What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?
The statistical ridiculousness of terrorism is explained by this https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ more than anything. Try to explain that to Iraqi families as well (among others). So called "terrorism" is more like a sane reaction to this shit.
> I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMD
yes, and their population was also kept in constant fear of the western WMDs that were actually aimed at them. All that also served similar ends in their governments's own little empires.
Source: museum of communism, Prague. https://www.flickr.com/photos/strawberryfrog/8233554/in/phot...
Logical fallacy: Appeal to emotion.
Also, this is the first time I can remember that I've ever seen a correction in a New Yorker article.
There are roughly 400 nuclear power plants in the world today. If disrupted for several weeks, they would eventually lose cooling capabilities, as grid, backup fuel, and ultimately cooking water, were exhausted. You'd see a few hundred core melt events scattered over the globe, and moreover, no real capability to address those -- Chernobyl was encased in a large concrete sarcophagus (and is in the process of being re-entombed). Fukushima has still not been contained and requires ongoing interventions to slow, not halt, leaking of radioactive material from four cores.
S.G. Collins, the guy who put together the "No, we couldn't have faked the moon landings" video, has a very good one on nuclear power which addresses a number of the systemic and very long-range issues involved in nuclear risks:
http://fixyt.com/watch?v=KOBEloymLQA
The requirement for civilization to continue operating in a sane and predictable manner for a very, very, very long time is particularly concerning.
First of all, Chernobyl Exclusion zone is about 1000 mile^2. [3] Life is not doing just fine there. And the effect of Fukushima meltdown are not going to be known for the next few years, but there are indications that it may not be as harmless as we are led to believe.[4]
There are currently 62 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 100 nuclear reactors in 31 states in the United States. [1]
A recent study led by European researchers found Fukushima is not alone, as 22 other plants around the world may be similarly susceptible to destructive tsunami waves, with most of them in east and southeast regions of Asia. [2]
The World Nuclear Association estimates that 20 percent of nuclear reactors worldwide operate in areas vulnerable to earthquakes.[5]
[1] http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=207&t=3 [2] http://news.discovery.com/earth/plants/nuclear-plants-at-tsu... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_... [4]http://fukushima-diary.com/2014/07/nuclear-expert-fukushima-... [5]http://www.frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/how-many-us-nucle...
"Some claim that the populations of traditional Polesian animals (such as wolves, badger, wild boar, roe deer, white-tailed eagle, black stork, Western marsh harrier, short-eared owl, red deer, moose, great egret, whooper swan, least weasel, common kestrel and beaver) have multiplied enormously and begun expanding outside the zone. These claims, however, are not substantiated by any systematic census of any animal taxon."[41] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_... [41] Møller, A P; T A Mousseau; F de Lope; N Saino (2008). "Anecdotes and empirical research in Chernobyl". Biology Letters 4 (1): 65–66. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2007.0528. ISSN 1744-957X. PMC 2412943. Retrieved 2012-02-07.
" All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material."[1]
"Accordingly, the worst case scenario at Fukushima will not make the northern hemisphere uninhabitable and the total doom/ death of life on earth predicted by some is impossible. The most likely outcome would be catastrophic contamination of northern Japan forcing total evacuation of the population. The main global consequence will be serious contamination of the Pacific which may catastrophically affect Pacific biota." [2]
If "catastrophically affecting Pacific biota" would not cause the whole ecosystem to collapse,and make life impossible, I'm not sure what would.
If few nuclear plant meltdowns occurred at the same time, and there would be a problem with the cleanup effort (i.e EMP in the States) we could expect spent fuel explosions to release massive amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
[1]http://www.dcbureau.org/20110314781/natural-resources-news-s...