Five Times the US Almost Nuked Itself 384
kdawson writes "io9 has a scary outline of five times the US came close to accidental nuclear disasters. Quoting: 'In August of 1950, ten B-29 Superfortress bombers took off from what was then called Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California, headed for Guam. Each was carrying a Mark IV atom bomb, which was about twice as powerful as the bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II. Shortly after takeoff, one of the B-29s had engine trouble. On board was General Robert Travis. He commanded the plane to turn back to the base when the landing gear refused to retract. Sensing the plane was going down, the pilot tried to avoid some base housing before crashing at the northwest corner of the base. The initial impact killed 12 of the 20 people aboard, including General Travis. The resulting fire eventually detonated the 5,000 pounds of conventional explosives that were part of the Mark IV. That massive explosion killed seven people on the ground. Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.'"
Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Interesting)
It strikes me that Tybee Island and Travis Air Force Base belong more on a "times safety systems stopped a disaster effectively exactly as they were designed to" list.
Fermi 1 could also fall in that catagory.
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule" could be replaced with "had the bomb contained a black hole or killer vampire ghost" and be about as scary. it wasn't armed for exactly that kind of situation.
Tybee Island strikes me in a similar manner.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Funny)
"Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule" could be replaced with "had the bomb contained a black hole or killer vampire ghost" and be about as scary. it wasn't armed for exactly that kind of situation.
Wait, wait, wait.... So you're saying that the US has bombs with vampire ghost payloads now? AND black holes?!!
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Pretty much.
This article could be summarized as: "Five times during the cold war, dead people almost turned into zombies and reeked havoc. But fortunately, they stayed dead." - It's nonsense and worthless fear mongering. I can't believe this was even approved by /.
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Well the NORAD one was valid.
but then there's certainly a lot about that they're leaving out to make it more dramatic.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Funny)
Actually, had the bomb been self aware we would have been in a bit more trouble.
Sentient beings that are locked away in seclusion often develop depression. In fact, given that most people would rather not carry on a conversation with a sentient nuclear weapon this would have been doubly bad. I suspect at some point our self aware nuclear being would have turned suicidal at some point. Unfortunately, in this case he really could have taken them all with him.
If you ask me... that is something to be really afraid of... if it happened.
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Yep (Score:5, Insightful)
Pretty much all this shows is that, at least when it comes to nukes, the safety systems are pretty good. Almost nuking yourself means something like "The bomb was going to detonate, but a technician was able to defuse it in time." Not "A bomb was in a perfectly safe condition when the airplane it was on crashed and the bomb did not go off."
Even the NORAD incident. It wasn't a case of one lone guy staving off a nuclear strike while his superiors yelled for launch (as happened in the Soviet Union). It looked like an attack was happening, so things went to high alert. Everyone was ready. What did they do? They WAITED FOR CONFIRMATION. When it turned out that it was a false alarm, they stood down. That is precisely how things should happen. They didn't ignore ti and go "Eh, probably just a bug," but they didn't go full out WW3 for no reason. On the warning, everything got ready to go, but confirmation was needed. For that matter, even had there been confirmation an order would still have been needed.
To me, looks like the US has pretty damn good nuclear safeguards. If the best "almosts" they can find were things when nothing even came close to actually going wrong that is good.
Hell look on the civilian side, at Three Mile Island. The "Worst nuclear disaster in US history." Even with a rather major screwup making the problem so much worse, something the NRC discovered, it still didn't release any significant amount of radiation, not enough to cause any adverse health effects (and it has been studied for decades now). That's pretty fucking good, if the worst it gets is a case of "Nobody got hurt."
Nonono! (Score:4, Funny)
You are not pushing the people's anti-nuke agenda! More fear mongering! More misinformation! MORE MORE MORE!
"It nearly turned the Earth into another Sun!" has a much NICER ring to it!
Now conform or your opinions are invalid! ;-)
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I understand why you have been modded up for your comment but reinforcing a belief system is a poor substitute for examining the facts, so let's do that now.
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Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
In a word, yes.
A nuke without a pit is like a gun with neither a firing pin nor a bullet in it. Just because it's long, thin, and you can still point it at someone and say "Bang!", doesn't mean it's anything more than a metal tube.
This article is FUD.
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And this post makes me think of Freud.
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Even if it had its core inside, you can't start a runaway fission reaction by throwing the thing into a fire. They needed high-performance switching electronics to even achieve the kind of precision necessary to start a successful detonation. An atomic bomb is just a normal bomb unless the fissile material is held at critical mass for some time.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if it had its core inside, you can't start a runaway fission reaction by throwing the thing into a fire. They needed high-performance switching electronics to even achieve the kind of precision necessary to start a successful detonation. An atomic bomb is just a normal bomb unless the fissile material is held at critical mass for some time.
Yes. They're actually damn tricky things to detonate, that is, if you want any sort of useful yield. And they pulled it off back in 1945: the state of the art in military electronics was a far cry from what it is today.
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So what you're saying is that this bomb is perfectly safe?
Given that the Guam bomb was designed to blow up and destroy stuff, I don't think "perfectly safe" makes sense as a criteria. An analogy are guns. Guns rarely injure people while used properly. The problems are that either guns are used improperly (I gather virtually all accidental shootings are of this form) or used intentionally to kill people.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Funny)
Guns rarely injure people while used properly.
Uh. I'm not sure what kind of guns you've been using, but if they're not injuring people you need to go ask for your money back.
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Uh. I'm not sure what kind of guns you've been using, but if they're not injuring people you need to go ask for your money back.
I meant guns rarely harm the user. How many cool points did I lose there?
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I am not sure you can take something away from nothing and still have something. I thought I figured out a way once, but I woke up the next morning with a wicked hangover and had forgotten how.
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Guns rarely injure people while used properly.
Uh. I'm not sure what kind of guns you've been using, but if they're not injuring people you need to go ask for your money back.
Just like with axes, eh?
-- Lizzie
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When it's fitted with the dummy pit? Still not absolutely safe since it contains RDX, but it's no worse than conventional munitions at that point.
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Correction: It IS conventional munitions at that point.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Funny)
Funny you should mention "anti-nuke" people and make me recall one of my fav' Pete Townsend quotes
"I'm really for nuclear energy, but I haven't told anyone because I'm still hoping to fuck Jane Fonda" -P.T. circa 1980
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
The basic principle of a nuke is that a mass of fissionable material is put in a sufficiently small volume to create a runaway chain reaction. What makes it a bomb is that the material is "compressed" quickly enough that the beginning chain reaction does not cause most of the material to vaporize and leave the containment early. It's like the difference between a firecracker and a small amount of black powder on a piece of paper. One goes boom, the other fizzles.
Even though a nuclear bomb will not detonate without the proper application of force through conventional explosives, it still contains plenty radioactive and highly toxic material. I would not call that "inert" at all. One "broken arrow" [wikipedia.org] incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
One "broken arrow" incident still affects an area in Spain more than 40 years later.
From the wiki article you linked to:
Despite the cost and number of personnel involved in the cleanup, forty years later there remain traces of the contamination. Snails have been observed with unusual levels of radioactivity.[22] Additional tracts of land have also been appropriated for testing and further cleanup. However, no indication of health issues has been discovered among the local population in Palomares.
This is not even remotely as bad as what would have happened had even one of the bombs been armed and gone off on impact. There would have been an actual (probably large) death toll, in that case, and considerably more contamination. There are many more much more contaminated and dangerous sites around the world, many not even having anything to do with nuclear weapons, fuel, or byproducts.
SB
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With the newer designs, yeah, that's how it works. Some of the older designs were a lot easier to detonate, though. The gun-type would be particularly easy to set off.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Agree - I used to work on nukes - they are designed to disperse, not detonate, on anything other than a properly sequenced detonation.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
And it is kinda that way just by necessity. Turns out that a nuclear bomb isn't the easiest thing in the world to build. If it were, well then probably every asshat dictator would have a few. After all Uranium isn't all that hard to get. However you have to properly make the nuclear materials and then build a device that can detonate them. It isn't like a conventional bomb where you just use heat or electric current or something. It requires precise operation because you more or less crush the radioactive material. Timing is critical, dimensions are critical, etc. So even presuming you know how to build one, it isn't so easy to actually make it work.
The flip side of that is they only go off if detonated properly. If you just set fire to some of the conventional explosives to cause them to go off, then it is almost impossible for it to cause the right kind of reaction to set off the nuclear bomb. Even if you don't really take any special design safe guards, it is still pretty hard to set off the nuclear explosion without meaning it.
Of course as you noted the ones that the military actually builds are taken steps further and actually designed NOT to blow up unless special conditions are met. They make deliberate choices making it even harder for the bomb to go off unless it is on purpose. Makes sense, no military wants to nuke their own country.
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
Nuclear weapons area very easy to make IFF you have the materials for them. The most difficult part is either getting the enriched uranium OR plutonium (even more difficult).. After you have the materials, it's very easy to make a bomb. So please, stop speaking out of your ass.
A working nuclear weapon is not easy to make. Seriously, do you think the entire Manhattan project was solely about obtaining the requisite amount of fuel?..
Merely pushing two pieces of nuclear fuel together to form critical mass are not sufficient to set off the explosion. If you do it slow, they'll just heat up and start melting. If you do it kinda fast, they will start exploding, but the force of that explosion will blow the bomb into pieces before most of fuel reacts, so you'll just have a moderate-size conventional explosion. The problem with making a working weapon is putting the critical mass together really fast, and also making it stay there for as long as it is needed to get the substantial part of the fuel to react. This is not easy by any means.
Gun-type assembly is relatively easy, but 1) it does not work with plutonium, 2) you therefore need much more uranium since its critical mass is higher, and 3) still only a minor part of that uranium actually produces the explosion, the rest is wasted when it's blown up into pieces. It's not completely trivial because criticality is actually achieved before the bullet runs into the rest of uranium (neutrons can travel between two pieces), and it may blow the bullet off the path, preventing a full-scale explosion. So it's not your common gun.
So, basically, yeah, it's not that hard from an engineering perspective to build a gun-type assembly (but still not something you can do without some specialized knowledge), but it's prohibitively expensive due to the sheer amount of uranium that needs to be obtained, and its efficiency is rather low - it won't wipe out a whole city.
Implosion design, which lets you achieve significant yields even with pure fission weapons, allows the use of plutonium, and is much more efficient. But from an engineering perspective, the thing is much harder to make due to precision requirements to get everything just right; even a slight misalignment results in a fizzle. This requires both significant technical expertise, and advanced equipment - it's not something you can make in your garage.
Plus Nuke Plants... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Um, not quite.... (Score:5, Informative)
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This might be silly but there was no such thing as Russian Federation in 1983.
You're incorrect. One of the 15 constituent republics of the USSR was Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), which was occasionally shortened to Russian Federation (or further to Russia).
There is ample documentary evidence for that - e.g. when Crimea was reassigned from Russia to Ukraine, in the protocol of the meeting, the very first phrase is:
Comrades, the issue of transfer of the Crimean region of the Russian Federation to the Ukrainian SSR is brought to the Presidium of the Supreme Sovie
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Even if the core had been loaded, HE-implosion based nuclear bombs require incredibly precise timing of the explosives to compress the core to criticality. You could never get a nuclear detonation from a bomb in a fire. It is essentially impossible to detonate one of these unless you do it on purpose. It would have been a dirty bomb, yes, and dangerous. But 6 figure immediate death toll? Only if you have no concept of how these bombs work.
Insulting to real nuke victims at worst... (Score:5, Insightful)
>> Had the bomb been armed with its fissile capsule, the immediate death toll may have reached six figures.
So now we see why the bomb wasn't "armed with its fissile capsule", don't we?
Seriously, sad about the lives lost at the time an all, but to describe this as "almost nuked America" is facetious at best. This being the example chosen to represent the articles contents (and so probably the "best" of the incidents) I see no reason to read any further.
This is no more "nearly nuked" than the making of the movie "Broken Arrow". After all, they had props that looked like nukes in that. What if there's been a mix-up somewhere along the line? OMG! Nearly nuked America again!
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Right, so you are trying to say that we need to stop Hollywood? I am all for it!
Unfortunately, I think most people will think you are being sarcastic and I am just going for a "funny" mod. I am quite serious, but I will take the funny since people may actually get to see my post about how hollywood has gone too far and we need more exposure of indie films, but now I fear I am off topic.
If, if and more if (Score:4, Insightful)
And maybe that's the reason the fissile material wasn't inserted into the bomb? And in any event I'd be very surprised if the fire caused the explosives to detonate sufficently simoultaneously to actually cause anything more than a fizzle.
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I was going to say that, too, but some of the early bombs were gun-type devices, which are a tad more forgiving on the explosives, at a cost of being frickin' expensive to obtain the materials for, and I don't think the article specified which it was.
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nukes do not work that way (Score:5, Informative)
Re:nukes do not work that way (Score:5, Informative)
That's generally true, and the only weapon ever deployed that was prone to going off in an crash was probably Little Boy (that later went off on purpose over Hiroshima). The Mark IV, however, was probably somewhat more prone to accidental detonation that any of the others, which is why the core was inserted in-flight. Later, preventing accidental detonation became a serious issue and a lot of the later tests were negative tests to ensure that the safety features worked correctly.
Full details of each type of bomb and the underlying design can be found at : http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/ [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
Brett
curious (Score:5, Funny)
Re:curious (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this Xenu guy tried that once, though I believe it was a different model of airplane.
Wew, thank god. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wew, thank god. (Score:5, Informative)
This reminds me of the time the US was almost attacked by giant killer terrorist robots. Luckily, Osama didn't invent and deploy them, otherwise the death toll could have been in the 9 figures.
Ironically, that's kind of what happened with both the recent Times Square Bomber and the London nightclub carbomb back in 2007 - neither of the bombers built anything particularly dangerous. In both cases the bombs lacked oxidizers (and other things too) - which meant that at best they might blow the windows out of the car the bomb was in. But all the politicians were eager to make hay and said exactly the same sort of thing, "if the bomb had exploded it could have killed thousands!"
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An alternate scenario where the two bombers are not total retards and actually manage to blow some shit up seems pretty plausible. On the other hand, there's absolutely no way that an Air Force plane would be attempting a landing with an armed nuke on board. So no, not quite the same thing.
I am surprised this does list the Spanish one (Score:2, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash [wikipedia.org]
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Re:I am surprised this does list the Spanish one (Score:5, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966_Palomares_B-52_crash [wikipedia.org]
Not one, 4 hydrogen bombs. 2 of them actually detonated on impact. Probably the worst USA nuclear weapons incident in history.
Only the conventional portions detonated, that's a pretty important omission there.
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To further elaborate, unless the conventional explosives detonate in the correct sequence, the chance that a nuclear explosion will occur is effectively 0. Just smashing into the ground and detonating because of the shock is NOT how you trigger an atomic bomb.
Plutonium doesn't even make a half-way decent dirty bomb. You'd be better off with Cobalt 60 or something along those lines.
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It's called modern journalism ...
...or the Greenland one (Score:5, Informative)
B-52 crash at Thule, Greenland, 1968.
4 hydrogen bombs aboard, contamination of a large area. The secondary of one the 4 bombs were never found.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Thule_Air_Base_B-52_crash [wikipedia.org]
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_Arrow_(1996_film) [wikipedia.org]
A documentary about how a bunch of guys actually stole a couple of nukes.
it's difficult to set off a nuke (Score:5, Informative)
If the fission capsule were in there, it most likely would not have gone off. With a implosion bomb (fat man style, as the Mark IV was), all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds). If some goes off first, it just blows the core apart instead of pushing it to supercriticality.That is, if the core weren't scattered in the crash before the fire set off the explosives anyway.
Basically, you would have had a dirty bomb, no more.
Now, a little boy (uranium gun-type) bomb can go off by accidentally more easily, but getting the material for those is so difficult that few are made.
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With a implosion bomb [...], all the explosive has to go off at the same time, to very close accurate (picoseconds)
Citation needed. A good one.
True, the timing has to be very accurate, but I'm pretty sure
microsecond accuracy is enough, or a million times less accurate than
your claim. I don't think detonating a chemical explosive to the
picosecond is even possible, chemical reactions are slower than that.
Are you maybe confusing this with the timescale of the nuclear reactions themselves?
Re:it's difficult to set off a nuke (Score:5, Informative)
True, the timing has to be very accurate, but I'm pretty sure
microsecond accuracy is enough, or a million times less accurate than
your claim.
http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq4-1.html#Nfaq4.1.6.2 [nuclearweaponarchive.org]
4.1.6.2.2.6:
'Creating a symmetric implosion wave requires close synchronization in firing the detonators. Tolerances on the order of 100 nanoseconds are required.'
So I wouldn't go with accuracies on the order of microseconds if I were you, you're going to need nanoseconds. Looks like picoseconds is not needed though.
I don't think detonating a chemical explosive to the
picosecond is even possible, chemical reactions are slower than that.
The rate of the reaction is a component of latency. Latencies, as long as they are consistent, do not alter accuracy. Even if it took 10 minues for the chemical reactions to take place, starting them with 100ns accuracy may be necessary if they must finish coincidentally to an accuracy of 100ns.
Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:5, Informative)
So none of these times did we almost nuked our self... ,people that will not bother to read, and those that are already full of fear mindless fear. Move on nothing to see here.
The first on in 1950 at Travis the bomb wasn't armed. AKA it had no nuclear material in it.
So there was zero chance that we would get nuked.
The second at Fermi 1. A reactor problem that was contained and couldn't have caused a nuclear explosion as in a bomb going off. It could have been bad but the systems worked.
The third was another un armed bomb.
The forth another reactor problem and again the emergency systems worked and no chance of a bomb like blast.
The last was a when a training tap was played on real systems. Yes air craft where launched and that mistake was never made again but the the safety systems and procedures worked.
What is this a piece of FUD? Good at scaring children
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:5, Informative)
Hah, notice the submitter - kdawson! When he isn't posting complete crap, he's submitting it :)
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Nope I missed it. Can we moderate down submitters? He is an anti-nuclear crack pot of the first order.
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Yeah, I agree.
There are other sites with half-decent systems and reasonably intelligent commenters (Gizmodo for example) but what sets Slashdot apart from most of them is that the editors don't regularly apply holier-than-thou moderation/banning/etc to posts/posters they don't approve of. If we want to complain about stupid stories or editors, we can do so freely, and only when other readers are more tired of the complaints than the editors do you get moderated down.
Slashdot leaves it up to the readers to
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
It is FUD. There is no doubt. As you said not a single incident in here was a potential "nuking" of the US by itself. Reactor accidents are not nuclear explosions, not by any measuring stick in the world. Anyone that says they can be equivalent to a nuclear bomb either simply doesn't understand a meltdown or is spreading FUD deliberately. The other examples are really great examples of the safety procedures that were used and why accidents didn't happen but at no time did either case represent a potential n
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually everything I said makes perfect sense.
That bomb was just the shell. It had no core. For the longest time the cores where locked away and under the control of the NRC.
The Air Force didn't have control over them and in 1950 only trained with the shells.
And yes they did assemble them in flight. As a safety system the core was not installed in the bomb until they where well on the way to the target.
From the wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_4_nuclear_bomb [wikipedia.org]
" In addition to being easier to manufacture, the Mark 4 introduced the concept of in flight insertion or IFI, a weapons safety concept which was used for a number of years. An IFI bomb has either manual or mechanical assembly which keeps the nuclear core stored outside the bomb until close to the point that it may be dropped. To arm the bomb, the fissile nuclear materials are inserted into the bomb core through a removable segment of the explosive lens assembly, which is then replaced and the weapon closed and armed."
So as you can see not armed == no nuclear material in it and yes they can and did put it together in mid-flight.
.
Re:Wow this is a terrible piece of work. (Score:4, Insightful)
5 times ... that we know of (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder how many other times good risk management and fail-safes prevented a nuclear disaster?
To err is human, to err without planning for eventual mistakes can be criminally negligent homicide.
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How about reading classes?
not to mention the US is the most nuked country (Score:2, Interesting)
Or at least one of the top two.
It has nuked itself on quite a number of occasions, often in Nevada. It hasn't done this for a long time now, but it used to.
Scary scary oooh nuclear we're all gonna die! But somehow, against all odds, life on the planet survived the repeated nuking of Nevada. It was a slim chance! How we made it through, god only knows. Good thing luck was on our side.
Captcha: TARGET.
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US is the most nuked country.
1,054 tests by official count (involving at least 1,151 devices, 331 atmospheric tests), most at Nevada Test Site and the Pacific Proving Grounds in the Marshall Islands, with ten other tests taking place at various locations in the United States, including Amchitka Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, and New Mexico.
928 at Nevada Test Site, 105 atmospheric at Pacific Proving Ground, two underwater at Pacific Proving Ground, one underwater 500 miles from California.
715 for the Soviet
Fear mongering? (Score:5, Informative)
A an accidental detonation from a bomb twice the size dropped on Japan would not result in " immediate death toll" that " may have reached six figures".
In 1950, the population of Fairfield was around 3000. I don't know the size of the air force base, but I don't think it was close to the 6 figure range (today it has 15K military and civilian workers, it may have been higher during the cold war). Suisun City today has a fraction of the population of Fairfield.
Just 3km from the hypocenter of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki, most structures withstood the blast and most people that were indoors survived the initial blast.
And that bomb detonated at an altitude of 500m to maximize destruction. An accidental surface detonation in an airplane crash is going to have a much smaller destructive zone, even though the bomb is twice as powerful. So even if that bomb had detonated in the crash, there would be survivors even on the airbase itself.
Even in a 1 megaton blast (50 times as powerful as the bomb dropped on Nagasaki) , there's a 75% survival rate just 7.5 miles from the blast.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/bomb/sfeature/1mtblast.html [pbs.org]
So even if a a 1 Megaton accidental detonation occurred in the NW corner of the base today, it wouldn't cause an immediate 6 figure death toll.
This, of course, this ignores the long term deaths and illness caused by radiation exposure.
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Any theorizing about the possible results of a nuclear detonation ignores the basic fact that the military wasn't incredibly stupid. The bomb wasn't armed and therefore there was no possiblity of it going off.
Now in the bad old days "arming" the bomb did not consist of throwing a switch but actually putting the uranium or plutonium into the bomb. So there was no dependency on any sort of fail-safe mechanism. It was impossible for a crash to detonate the bomb. These things were shipped and transported ta
Godzilla (Score:5, Funny)
I was nearly incinerated by Godzilla yesterday! I remember it well. The only thing that saved me is that there was no fire and Godzilla wasn't actually there!
Man, what a relief that was!
Communicate from government if anything happened (Score:2)
Bullshit. (Score:2)
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons... (Score:4, Informative)
The irony of the total cost of nuclear weapons by the USA is that it is about enough money (by one estimate I read) to tear down and rebuild every building in the USA twice...
California has money problems right now -- a shortfall of, what, US$20 billion? According to here:
http://www.statemaster.com/graph/mil_cos_of_nuc_wea-military-cost-of-nuclear-weapons [statemaster.com]
a total of US$2,139,150,000.00 has been spent on just California's behalf on nuclear weapons in the past.
What are we really defending here?
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm [lexrex.com]
That sure would come in handy for CA right now, to have an extra two trillion dollars in their budget reserve (not to mention interest).
As Albert Einstein said, with the advent of understanding the power of the atom, everything has changed but our way of thinking. Thus my sig below about the irony of such advanced ultra-powerful tools of abundance in the hands of those obsessed with fighting over perceived scarcity.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html [pdfernhout.net]
Re:The good news (Score:5, Informative)
Not really. Unlike the UK, almost all doctors in America are private practice doctors and not on government salary. The same with hospitals, a mix of private and local/state public hospitals. The health care reform legislation passed is mainly for insurance; the government won't change its control of doctors or which private plans people choose. So the government really isn't in charge of health care, although they've taken a more regulatory role in insurance.
Re:The good news (Score:5, Funny)
While factual, your post goes against the narrative we're trying to push here. Expect to be modded into oblivion.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I see a lot of comments like this immediately following things modded to +5. It seems the Slashdot Groupthink is less powerful than some might imagine.
Re:The good news (Score:5, Insightful)
It's got nothing to do with group-think. Apparently some people have a persecution-complex, even though their views match the popular opinion. Not sure how that happens, but it seems to be quite common.
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Re:The good news (Score:4, Informative)
He who regulates something, runs it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As far as medical insurance goes, it really hasn't been handled well by private industry. Ideally, we all pool, and all receive care. The private insurance industry has caused a health class divide to develop; on one side, we have people who get medical care, and on the other, those who don't. Like education, healthcare is a basic need.
Sadly, the legislature really didn't do what those who elected them wanted them to do, which was get the insurance companies out of
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except we've had more and more government involvement over the last 50 years, and healthcare, in many ways, gets worse and worse. The real problem is we encourage third party payment. Imagine if employers gave out food insurance because the government gave them tax breaks for doing so, we'd eventually have the same situation, and everyone would blame the insurance companies then.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Given that we've had several approved drugs recently kill & maim a whole lot of people, how do you propose to make the current system both easier (and thus cheaper) and safer?
Because your state has different regulations tha
Re:The good news (Score:4, Informative)
Kind of like Canada. The government pays doctors, builds and run hospitals, chooses what procedures are covered, but has no say in which doctor you use. I can use whatever doctor, at whatever clinic, at whatever hospital I want. The doctor doesn't have to worry about a "pre-existing" condition invalidating my insurance, or about caps, or co-pays.
Still not happy, and have lots of money? nothing stopping you form flying to the states, and there are private clinics up here too.
Re:The good news (Score:4, Informative)
One big thing that has happend - the control over what is and is not insured has pretty much been ceded to the goverment now. It was previously in the hands of the state Board of Insurance in each of the 50 states. This has a huge effect on costs.
How does it effect costs? Well, let's say you are part of a group that believes that Fibromyalgia is a serious condition that must be covered by insurance plans. Previously, your group would have to lobby in each of the 50 states to get coverage approved and mandated. Now all you have to do is stop at one federal agency and if they agree, it is mandated for all 50 states.
Copy this for acupuncture, massage therapy, sex disfunction treatments involving use of a surrogate, etc. You get the idea. It has now become about 50 times easier to get coverage for the malady of the week covered by insurance.
Why is health insurance more expensive in California than in, say, Wyoming? Well, California mandates coverage for a lot of things that aren't required to be covered anywhere else.
When people say costs are going to triple in 2014, I'd listen to them. They stand an awfully good chance of being right.
Re:The good news (Score:5, Insightful)
These people will soon be in charge of health care.
This statement brought to you by the people who brought you the quote, "The government better keep its hands off my Medicare!"
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Liberals don't think government has no problems. They just think the solution is to fix them.
Problem: Inadequate response to Katrina/Gulf oil spill.
Liberal proposal: Better funding and training so next disaster gets a better response.
Conservative proposal: Disband FEMA and cut taxes.
Only one of these proposals is actually a solution.
Re:The good news (Score:4, Funny)
I think the simplest way to describe the difference between liberals and conservatives and this pretty much is true irregardless of what your speaking of, BTW
Liberals are whores...but well paid whores...we don't just give our vote away without being paid handsomely for it in the way of Government Action.
Conservatives ARE NOT whores...simply sluts...they will simply give their vote to anyone who makes them feel all cuddly inside irregardless of the truth.
Make no mistake, whichever side you're on, you're going to get f$%ked...no question about it. The only choice you have is whether you actually get something out of the deal.
With that said...Democrat for life, thank you very much.
Re:Medicare (Score:4, Funny)
Why the fuck are you so angry?
Maybe he really craved for the fries all along, and not the hamburger itself?
Re:The good news (Score:4, Insightful)
You mean the people who through prudent safety protocols managed to not have a single accidental detonation of the most dangerous weapons ever made? It's too bad they won't actually be in charge.
Instead, we've left health care in the hands of the civilian sector which HAS had actual accidental radiation leakage from time to time (though to be fair it wasn't that much) and isn't trusted with the weapons.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Which people? The ones who died? The ones who survived?
Or maybe you mean the ones whose nuclear handling procedures successfully prevented an accidental detonation in the even of an airplane crash?
Sensationalist story with absurd summary is absurd. Trying to twist that story into a 'government is incompetent' narrative is like wearing your shoes on the wrong feet. The incident in the summary is a prime example of government properly instituting and following critical safety protocols--or are you going t
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Hopefully. The VA system actually has proper electronic medical records shared between hospitals.
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So the safety features worked as designed.
Bombs were not armed. The critical igniter capsule which was designed to be installed just prior to attack was not in the bombs, as per design and regulations, yet you are handing out Darwin awards?
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The US spends over $1 trillion on defense. More than the rest of the world combined. It needs to be increased by a large percentage.
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