I've given myself a sig and posted this link to commemorate North Korea testing inter-continetal ballistic missiles potentially capable of reaching Australia with a nuclear strike.
To give some idea of the power of nuclear weapons these photos are of the first 1/10,000,000 of a second of a FISSION weapon from 8 miles distance. The "legs" of the blast are the tremendous energy travelling down the guy cables used to anchor the tower the bomb detonated on.
This is a TINY nuclear blast.
I gather China has stopped sending food and fuel aid to NK not because of the missile tests, but because NK stole the trains the last aid shipment was sent on. They sent the crew back over the border without the trains.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1660166/posts
edit: that's not quite what the link I provided says- I found something a couple of days ago and googled "north korea train theft china" to get this one. Take with a grain of salt. It looks likely NK have been stealing aid trains, and China has kept on sending them.
You can find more photos at http://simplethinking.com/home/rapatronic_photographs.htm
and here http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=456 with some tidbits
quote:
Before long a professor of electrical engineering from MIT named Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton invented the rapatronic camera, a device capable of capturing images from the fleeting instant directly following a nuclear explosion. These single-use cameras were able to snap a photo one ten-millionth of a second after detonation from about seven miles away, with an exposure time of as little as ten nanoseconds. At that instant, a typical fireball had already reached about 100 feet in diameter, with temperatures three times hotter than the surface of the sun.
Thanks to atomicforum.org here are a bunch more still. Colour photos (I don't think they were made with a raptronic). The 2nd and last in particular are f**cking scary.
http://img455.imageshack.us/img455/8116/bombah18testno62et.jpg
http://img455.imageshack.us/img455/4149/procyonbreakaway8gd.jpg
http://img480.imageshack.us/img480/701/tsar449fj.jpg
Theres actually a brilliant BBC show specially about this, with some tremendous live footage of fusion tests from both US and Russia - some 180 odd air tests, before they decided they should prolly be doing it underground. The Russian one was the freakiest, it was the supposedly largest ever above surface test ever done, and the plane that dropped it barely escaped the blast (was apparently quite busted when it got back to base). I'll see if I can find the vid.. really quite unbeleivable - esp putting so much radioactive material into our atmosphere.. way to go big thinkers..
Not BBC.. was this one. If you want a serious scare.. you gotta see that 58 Megaton mother going off.. its a little unnerving to think these are 'old' weapons.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00000IML5/002-7381387-3757617?v=glanc…
The bomb that took out Hiroshima was around 1 kiloton (equivalent to a million tons of TNT- except that all the energy is released in the first few microseconds, making it far worse).
58 Megatons is 58 000 times worse... And although a larger bomb has never been made all they have to do is keep pumping in more hydrogen isotopes to get more yield.
Here's the wikipedia writeup of this russian monster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
Apparently the mushroom cloud was over 60 kilometers high, and this bomb would have caused people 100kms distant third degree burns.
People like Caroo are lucky- you guys/girls have grown up without anything like the threat of total anihilation that us oldies remember. Sting put it well:
quote:
But what could just save us me and you is if the Russians love their children too.
I hope the North Koreans do.
There was a great quote a man said once.. can't remember who it was. but it's a valid quote.
"Every generation of the human race past 1900 beleaved for a time that they would be the last generation to be alive on this world."
And it is true. But guess what... They havn't been. And this event will stand testiment to it.
North Korea will not nuke anyone. The concept of total annhilation, while maybe appealing to the dictator, would be the last thing wanted by all the generals around him. And the people as a whole in North Korea wouldn't exacaly find the idea of being the worlds undoing an appealing title ether.
victory through total devastation has only been done once. And it changed the world for the better, Including the country it was thrust upon.
I think the Americans are more likely to nuke someone (again! the US is the only nation to have used WMDs in war). Only a few months ago the worlds top 1000 physicists felt they had to remind Stupid George that using nukes is suicidally insane- he'd been making noises about wanting to use bunker-busting "tactical" nukes.
That doesn't make this OK at all though.
I think my generation (I'm firmly in X, heading up to 34 all too soon) has alwas hoped we wouldn't be the last alive. We are probably more aware of how close things came than generation Y though.
I think its actually the opposite, but we dont have the constant percieved threat (like the 70's and 80's), but the threat is alot more likely. There was an excellent documentary about the Russian security problems with their nuclear arsenal (an ex-nuclear scientist even took the reporter into a nuclear research facility, through a hole in the fence out the back!). The real problem is the US though - they produce threats to maintian their control of their free-thinking population. And they have shown in the past how happy they are to use nuclear weapons even when it was unnecessary (Nagasaki and Hiroshima were scientific tests - the Japanesse ambassaor had already given the US a peace offer). Way to go, to kill 70,000 people on the premise of science.. eh. More interesting is straight after those tests the Japanesse allowed many hundereds of US 'personel' to go and inspect the sites and take samples.... sad really.
Just a thought.. do you think it interesting/odd that there be a suddenely huge threat created to the US, just 4 months before their elections? Do you think it a little odd that NK suddenly not decide to launch one test missile.. but a whole flurry of them (apparently a good portion of their long range stock)? Seems very convienient .. especially if it escalates and requires a 'strong president' to take action... :)
.. Roosevelt was the only president to have a more than 2 terms in office.. do you know why :)
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists maintains [url="http://www.thebulletin.org/doomsday_clock/current_time.htm"]The Doomsday clock[/url]
1991 : seventeen minutes to midnight
Today : seven minutes to midnight
1980 : seven minutes to midnight
1981 : four minutes to midnight
1984 : three minutes to midnight
and in 1953: two minutes to midnight is as low as it has yet been.
Another freaky stat - 330 total atmospheric 'acknowledged' nuclear tests by US and Russia combined (with US having the 180 odd on their own). Alot of researchers put this total at only half of the actual tests though - since there were a massive number of 'secret' tests that violated the treaties both the US and Russia signed (as well as other non signees like China). Just a single megaton atmospheric test was shown to have dropped radioactive fallout around the entire circumference of the earth (at about 11 degrees latittude from where the test was done in the pacific). Makes you wonder - with many of the fallout isotopes having half-life's measuring thousands of years.... and most are deadly if inhaled.... how silly we are...
Here's another example of how silly we are
http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=167
quote:
the Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha had decided that these locks might interfere with any wartime launch orders; so in order to circumvent this safeguard, they pre-set the launch code on all Minuteman silos to the same eight digits: 00000000.
For seventeen years, during the height of the nuclear crises of the Cold War, the code remained all zeros, and was even printed in each silo's launch checklist for all to see. The codes remained this way up until 1977, when the service was pressed into activating the McNamara locks with real launch codes in place. Before that time, the the lack of safeguards would have made it relatively easy for a small group of rogue silo officers or visitors to implement an unauthorized nuclear missile launch.
God Bless America...
Edit: seems to be some contaversy over this- people calling each other liars and such. HOWEVER I can't imagine the Amercian military being overly enthusiastic about this coming out, and one of the sources cited in the link is very reputable indeed.
As one of the comments says "For some reason the words 'Military Intelligence' are coming to me, in a rather sarcastic tone."
Painting found in a minuteman launch control facility
From http://www.geocities.com/minuteman_missile/index.html (site now down for bandwidth over utilisation)
[img]http://www.sumea.com.au/forum/attached/lorien/200671082821_minuteman_pi…]
you know with all this talk about nukes..and the power of a nuke.. i think it would good to put things in perspective..
watch this.. then your nukes arn't all that scary:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2002996851503214453&q=meteor
and remember. We have NO defence against meteors X3
Amen - the doco on Russias deteriorating arsenal of nuclear warheads, was far scarrier than even Trinity. The fact that the gov often doesnt have enough money to pay the guards maintaining security at storage sites is insane. They even showed how easy it was to get inside these places. Id also take an asteroid anyday... death by radiation sickness .. or by vapourisation, or a tun of rock / water landing on you. :)
Also.. nuclear arms are just another example of how utterly infinitely stupid we are as a collective. You cant blame a rock for stupidity - really would be doing the galaxy a bit of a favour I think :) It always make me laugh how important we think we are, in the grand scheme of things we are a blip in the evolutionary tree.
You think that?s scary, then try looking up [url="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_oil"]Peak Oil[/url]
There are a lot of sites around now describing very scary outlooks on the future, like [url="http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/"]this one[/url] for example.
Apparently civilisation as we know it is about to end.[:0]
Fission weapons these days are mostly used to set off fusion weapons.
This sort of bomb is a detonator now.