Former Crypto-Analyst Analyzes the Danger of Nuclear Weapon Stockpiles 142
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that noted encryption pioneer Prof. Martin Hellman has a new passion; estimating the risk of our current nuclear weapons policies. His web site, Defusing the Nuclear Threat, asks the question, 'How risky are nuclear weapons? Amazingly, no one seems to know.' Hellman therefore did a preliminary analysis and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.' The web site and a related statement therefore urgently call for more detailed studies to either confirm or correct his startling conclusion. The statement has been signed by seven notable individuals including former NSA Director Adm. Bobby R. Inman and two Nobel Laureates."
Thousands of nuclear plants... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Thousands of nuclear plants... (Score:5, Interesting)
You might find this [wikipedia.org] refreshing then.
Quite frankly, I reckon even if these (carefully screened) individuals who control the nuclear arsenal were trigger-happy, they'd quickly rethink their situation when they realize they have the destiny of the world in their hands. Yes, even the chief monkey in the White House.
Re:Thousands of nuclear plants... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Let me guess. You are distressed because they have stolen your red Swingline stapler.
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A dozen automobiles are far more dangerous than "thousands" of nuclear power plants. How about one meth lab? Or even one anthracite-powered power plant?
Re:Thousands of nuclear plants... (Score:4, Insightful)
misleading summary (Score:5, Interesting)
I find the summary misleading. I thought the risk analysis was about incidents with nuclear weapons when at peace, but he only calculates the risks of all out nuclear war.
While it's an interseting number it's not a useful one to take a decision, since one of the sad premise of today's war strategy is that, since others have the nuclear weapon, you must have it too. No one is going to dump his nuke stocks because he might have to use them some days.
It's like doing an article summary saying "having a gun in your room is dangerous", when it really means "a gunfight is something that might happen".
I would have been more interested by numbers about the effects of an all out nuclear war. The only ones I can remember are that a US president was told (during the cold war) that scenarios predicted 300 million american death *at best* in a *winned* nuclear war against Russia. The second one ( which I'm not sure about) is that, at the peak of the number of nukes between US and Russia, they could have "destroyed the earth 52 times" (killed everything on it? phisically shatter?).
Does anyone have more details concerning these numbers?
Re:misleading summary (Score:5, Funny)
United States -- Population: 301,139,947 (July 2007 est.)
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My source is a TV documentary on a missile crisis during the cold war; very serious as far as I could tell. (It was about a time when reflection of sunlight on some clouds had caused the "missile incoming" alarm in Russia to go off).
Since I obvoiously misremembered the number, I can only say that it was huge (I'm sure about the act it was millions, and ny second guess is it was 100 mil or so). The president, who had received that analysis just after he was elected, d
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Re:misleading summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:misleading summary (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
If Elbonia possesses a single nuclear weapon strong enough to destroy the entire planet, other countries would assume that they could molest Elbonia quite a bit before pushing them far enough to employ their nuclear 'arsenal'. Even small-scale nuclear attacks may go unresponded.
But, if Elbonia possesses a large selection of tiny nukes that could target arbitrary targets globally with minimal side effects, that would be a reasonable deterrent to keep other nations from harassing Elbonia . Nations would refrain from nuking Elbonia for fear that Elbonia would actually respond in kind.
Basically, you have to be able to convince the world that you *could* use your arsenal and *would* use your arsenal if you had to. It's a disgusting situation, but it's reality for now.
And, the stockpile isn't *just* to have a deterrent. It's mainly for use as a deterrent and, gods-willing, it will never be needed for anything else. But, if we were nuked, it would become a horrible but possibly necessary actual selection of weaponry... If we were to ever set some idiotic policy such as "we would never deploy nuclear weapons for any reason", we would no longer have a deterrent and would be inviting attack.
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If we were to ever set some idiotic policy such as "we would never deploy nuclear weapons for any reason", we would no longer have a deterrent and would be inviting attack.
I remember in college in a politics class the question was posed "if we were wiped out with nuclear weapons in a surprise first strike, would you not retaliate since it would just be more senseless killing?" And to my shock, all the girls in the class agreed! I thought right then and there that a woman should never be president. But I imagine Hillary would pull the trigger, or Thatcher would have.
The problem with deterrents (Score:2)
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You don't ever want a nuclear weapon to go off where you don't want it to go off. If it blows up in the factory, or gets launched and blows up over the enemy you didn't actually have yet, it's very bad for you. i.e. you want it to have an extremely low false-positive rate. So you optimize the design for failure.
But when you do need
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I often saw on article about meteors that it wouldn't take much to fill the atmosphere with enough dust (for years) to kill most plants thus most life.
Actually some weeks ago I searched for some time on wikipedia for the effect of nukes and weather their combined power could physically destroy earth. But I quit after having to go on the page about sugar to get an idea of how much energy was in 10^10...
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If you count "killing everyone on earth" as destroying it, then it's probably accurate.
Even then, it's a gross overstatement. "Destroy the world X times over" is a phrase used by "peace activist" types when talking to the media. It's pure hyperbole. The earth is a pretty darned big place. Nuclear weapons are large on a human scale, but on the scale of the entire planet, they are hardly pinpricks. Even if you accept the widely discredited "nuclear winter" scenario, it wouldn't even come close to killing even HALF of the world's population.
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Depending on how long you run the stats for it is not impossible that that percentage of the US would have been wiped out in a full-scal
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There's some speculation that nuclear winter wouldn't have happened -- the models that predicted it are relatively simplistic, especially by modern standards, and considering that the majority of the bombs will be airbursts.
OTOH, who is going to argue that a nuclear war is safe? It's like the statistics that there are enough weapons to destroy the earth x times over. Bullshit. The dinokiller astroid was 100 million megatons. At the peak, the nuclear weapon stockpile was .02 million megatons. At the
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If you mean that by if your gun misfires and then an automated system kicks in putting all your guns into auto-sentry mode shooting everything that moves which also causes your neighbors sentry guns to start shooting causing a chain reaction with your neighbors then by what you mean... Yes.
The key thing about a nuclear weapon mishap is that there is the chance
Re:misleading summary (Score:5, Insightful)
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Useful analysis of the effects of a nuclear war.
Overkill is a myth.
Biggest problem is nuclear winter (Score:2)
After the 60s pretty much everyone predicted (maybe they now predict, if they didn't factor in the dust problem, but calculated with nuclear stockpiles ready somewhere around the 1960s) the end of life as we know it if there was a nuclear war.
The reason is pretty simple. Because of the large detonations a lot of dust would be thrown into the air. It would be so much and would b
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The reason is pretty simple. Because of the large detonations a lot of dust would be thrown into the air. It would be so much and would be thrown so high that it would turn the earth dark shutting out the sun. That is called nuclear winter. It would kill all live that depends in some way on the sun.
The theory of "Nuclear Winter" is crap. Krakatoa injected orders of magnitude more dust and smoke into the stratosphere in 1883 than all the nuclear weapons in the world could. This resulted in a 0.5degC reduction in temperature for approximately 2 years.
RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't put the link there for fun. Here is an interesting part:
2007 study on global nuclear war
A study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in July 2007[3], Nuclear winter revisited with a modern climate model and current nuclear arsenals: Still catastrophic consequences[4], used current climate models to look at the consequences of a global nuclear war involving most or all of the world's current nuclear arsenals (which the authors described as being
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They couldn't decide on 1000 or 1024, so they split the difference?
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During the cold war the US did not have 300 million citizens so that figure is very exaggerated.
There isn't and never was enough nukes on the planet to kill everything and physically destroy it. Theres an interesting website out there that talks about what it would take to physically destroy the planet. The conclusion was that we can't do it with our current technology.
As for killing everything on it... the numbers don't add up. If theres 6 billion people, we're talking 99.99999999... woul
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Having the gun does makes the 'gunfight' (i.e. someone entering with a gun) more dangerous, significantly raising the chances of you getting killed. Unlike the nuclear missile scenario, there is no MAD at work here - shooting first really does pay, and that goes for the other guy too.
Re:misleading summary (Score:5, Interesting)
An optimistic view of MAD would be that countries accessing to nukes are forced to act in a "mature" way: to preserve the statu-quo and limit the power struggles to cold wars (through proxy states like Viet-nam, or through economical, and now "cyber" warfare).
A pesimistic view would be that with thechnology ever rising (*), it becomes easier and easier to get the nuke; and once an unstabble country gets it, any coup can land a nuke to some weirdo. We already had one country (Pakistan?) selling nuclear tech to pretty much anybody (they blamed it on one guy when it got known).
(*): For example, the missile itself is an important part of the potential danger (think Cuba), and right now for smaller bazooka like missiles, a PS2 is enough do the guidance system.
As for the forcefield: the US are supposely building an anti-missile shield (hit-to-kill missiles), but it's really not working that well. And at the beggining of the cold war it would have been a _very_ risked bet.
(btw, thanks for commenting on the sig! You inserted some code in your comment, but I was thinking more along the line of a grammar tree to hide the instructions in some normal-looking text ^^ )
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You don't even need anything close to a PS2 to guide a missile. Look at the space shuttle, it fly's between hearth and satellites and requires significantly less computer then a PS2.
As for the forcefield: the US are supposely building an anti-missile shield (hit-to-kill missiles), but it's really not working that well.
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Back to the nukes. To comment on your point, what's even worse is that the US official foriegn policy is MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction [wikipedia.org]). Not only does this contradict our species effort to surive, but it's like saying, since you punched me, I will punch you back just as hard.
Removing the 'Mutual' from Mutually Assured Destruction greatly increases the chances of nuclear war. If your enemy has no defense against your nukes, then the temptation for you to use your nukes increases dramatically. Meanwhile, your enemy isn't stupid and realizes that he will be at your mercy once your defense is implemented.
You need to open your mind and think about it from the enemy's point of view. Your enemy can:
a) build his own missile shield before you finish yours
b) figure out how to defeat
And he is qualified how? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:And he is qualified how? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:And he is qualified how? (Score:4, Interesting)
During peacetime, things would be much cleaner in my environment.
And, if the missiles ever really start flying, I would be assured of a quick ticket outta here, before having to live in a screwed up world full of nuclear winter.
Besides - power plants used to be targeted anyway, I'd bet - *regardless* of what source/type of fuel they used.
Mod story "boring and pointless fearmongering (again)"...
Here's how he's qualified (Score:4, Informative)
(But that is a reasonable question -- you get points for skepticism.)
This teaches 2 related lessons about journalism and science:
(1) There are 2 kinds of publications in the world -- those that check their facts and those that don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. This is why some obscure guy publishing a blog can be more reliable than most major newspapers and TV stations. (Or in this case, why IEEE Spectrum is more reliable than most daily newspapers.)
(2) There are 2 kinds of scientists in the world -- those who gather a consensus of experts before going public, and those who don't. The first are reliable; the second aren't. (This is why that story recently about cell phones causing brain cancer by an Australian neurologist was complete bullshit.) Hellman is competent enough in science to know that.
According to TFA http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/apr08/6099 [ieee.org]
Robert N. Charette, who runs the risk-management consultancy ITABHI and is a regular contributor to IEEE Spectrum, agrees with Hines. However, he says Hellman should have also turned the analysis on its head. "The other side of the risk equation is, suppose you get rid of nuclear weapons. Does that increase the probability of war? Pretending there aren't any nukes, how many wars would we have had?"
Prof. Kenneth Arrow, Stanford University, 1972 Nobel Laureate in Economics; see also Nobel Announcement
Mr. D. James Bidzos, Chairman of the Board, Verisign Inc.
Dr. Richard Garwin, IBM Fellow Emeritus, former member President's Science Advisory Committee and Defense Science Board; see also NY Times article
Adm. Bobby R. Inman, USN (Ret.), University of Texas at Austin, former Director NSA and Deputy Director CIA
Prof. William Kays, former Dean of Engineering, Stanford University
Prof. Donald Kennedy, President Emeritus of Stanford University, former head of FDA
Prof. Martin Perl, Stanford University, 1995 Nobel Laureate in Physics; see also Nobel Announcement
(BTW, here's a tip for any student. You used to be able to get a student membership in the IEEE, which includes a subscription to Spectrum and another (expensive) IEEE magazine of your choice, for some ridiculously low amount like $12 a year. It's a great deal for the magazines alone, although IEEE membership has even better benefits that most students don't even know about.)
And, he's mostly right (Score:2, Interesting)
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Cost and danger of nukes is far less than most people would think for the U.S. Don't take it personally but just making that statement shows you don't have a lot of knowledge about the subject. Size and cost of nuke programs are far less than most people think. MAD and nuke arms race were passe
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In the case "the general public" means everyone except Weapons scientists who designed the things in the first place.
I am unclear whether you know who Hellman was (clue: Diffie-Hellman key exchanges). Believe me, he is a clever guy. The things is that from the cryptography side, we can design the best system in the world, but if not used properly, it will be compromised.
Examples of stupid usage with nuclear weapons have already happened, for example the time when the code on the PAL on Minutemen was 'fixe
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Richard Garwin is, uh, WHO? (Score:2, Insightful)
I am quite annoyed at the incredible sloppiness at the IEEE site.
I quote from their site thus:
"Hellman has set up a Web site related to his nuclear deterrence work. From there you can download the Bent article. You can also view a statement signed by Richard L. Garwin, who came up with the design for the first hydrogen bomb;..."
Where IEEE dreamed this
it's a very long way from encryption algorithms (Score:3, Insightful)
While he may have "woken up" to the threat of nuclear weapons, and can use his established reputation to help reduce the threat they pose, he is certainly not an expert and his opinions (for that is all they are) carry no greater weight than yours or mine.
Beware of celebreties with a cause.
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Re:it's a very long way from encryption algorithms (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because this guy invented an encryption technique, doesn't mean he less capable of studying the risks than some nuclear expert. At a first glance, he doesn't seem to claim anything outrageous.
Beware of "celebrities" with a cause, but not necessarily more or less then "experts" with a cause
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Which "established reputation" is that? Fact is, 99.9% of America has never heard of him, and will never hear of him without wondering "who the hell is this guy?".
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
Re:it's a very long way from encryption algorithms (Score:5, Interesting)
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
Bernstein was accused of left-wing sympathies during the days of the blacklist, and as a result, the Times busted him down to the obituary page. Back in those days, we had a social contract that, if you committed yourself to a corporation, they would give you a job for life, so instead of firing people who were drunk or incompetent, the Times would just assign them to the obituary page. Unlike everyone else, Bernstein revolutionized the obituary page by writing serious obituaries.
Bernstein also wrote a textbook about copy-editing called Headlines and Deadlines, which is still used in journalism schools. The main point of that book, BTW, was that copy editors should check the facts of a story, and make sure it gets all sides. If the Times had followed that advice, they would have avoided some recent humiliations. So Bernstein got the last laugh again.
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What is the point to argument on the guy rather than on the rational? Should we understand you have no more arguments than doing a personal attack?
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thousands of nuclear plants (Score:5, Funny)
That's reassuring, because it seems unlikely that my home will ever be surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.
"Thousands of nuclear plants"? (Score:2)
Oh, whoops, I'm in Houston, it probably is.
Re:"Thousands of nuclear plants"? (Score:4, Funny)
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April 2008 Sci Am article (Score:2)
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But there is a small factual point I don't understand: how would the KGB using polonium was a warning? Everyone knows that Russia has nukes! (and polonium).
Apart from that, you seem to say that the author of that article was on the no-fly list. How did he get off it? Judging from what I heard of this list, that was no small feat.
You assume it was the "KGB" (Score:2)
Re:April 2008 Sci Am article (Score:4, Interesting)
The counter point to this is that while, indeed, the system is far from secure, things seem to be going alright.
I find this is the key difference between Real World security and computer security. In computer security, weaknesses, once known, _will_ be exploited on a massive scale. In the Real World, things are often far less grave. This explains both why so few people get computer security right (applying a Real World "it will be ok" attitude to computer security is a mistake), and why I think people should just relax and not worry so much about, for example, terrorists blowing up airplanes.
Security should, at least in my opinion, always be a cost-benefit trade-off. More severe security measures can reduce the risk of a disastrous security breach, but security measures incur their own cost, which you pay every day, even if no security breach is even attempted. The trick is finding the right balance.
Of course, it isn't a very comfortable idea that you or your friends might be blown up anytime, or get ruined by identity fraud, but I'd honestly rather live with that idea than to spend my life locked up in my house, afraid to go out because the bus might be blown up, and afraid to order anything online because my credit card data could be stolen...and _still_ run the risk to get killed in an earthquake.
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The US has used this knowledge to great advantage using propaganda at various times in its history. The anti communist-propaganda in the fifties was a great example. So was the weapons of mass destruction campaign just a few years ago. In both cases the aim was to
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I have posted on this before but for the record - I drive a truck, 18 wheeler, hgv, whatever you like to call it where-ever you are. I regularly collect shipping containers from major ports around the UK (which is part of the EU). I have been pulled to one side while leaving the port before (last year sometime) because I had set off the *radiation detectors*. The stated contents of the container were toilets shipped from China. The officials used a higher spec ma
Junk Science (Score:2, Informative)
Real scientists should shun these kinds of people. This guy has a completely unverifiable model and feeds garbage information into it. He's trying to predict the likelihood of deterrence failing. But it's never failed, so he has no data to go off of. Not only has it never failed, when we think deterrence has been close to failing, we have no way of knowing how close. There's simply no way to assign probabilities to complex chains of events involving humans.
There's nothing to be learned from a model li
Re:Junk Science (Score:4, Insightful)
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They weren't warning of a "shuttle failure", they were warning specifically of an "O-ring failure".
I saw a TV show on this, which had interviews with the chief engineer who had been warning about this problem for a long time. When they didn't scrub the mission, when he got home he told his wife that they had just killed the astronauts.
The data on O-ring failure at low temperature is quite extensive.
There was evidence of failure on previous missions but it wasn't catastrophic -- leading to a false sense of safety. There has also been lots of evidence of near-failures with nuclear war. It's rather foolish to ignore these warnings signs and wait around before nuclea
The new Library of Congress-like unit for danger (Score:4, Funny)
and found the risk to be 'equivalent to having your home surrounded by thousands of nuclear power plants.'
So if one of these nuclear power plants exploded (that's the risk being talked about here?), how large would the crater be, expressed in Libraries of Congress? Also, how likely would such an event be, expressed in chances of successfully dropping a penny from the top of the Empire State Building into someone's pocket?
Re:The new Library of Congress-like unit for dange (Score:3, Informative)
The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse - the fissionables have zero chance of exploding.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....
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The only way to make a nuclear power plant explode is to fill it with dynamite and light the fuse
The Chernobyl plant exploded, and the biggest fear during the TMI incident was of an explosion. Explosions can include chemical and/or pressure driven events, not just fission chain reactions.
The only threat from surrounding your house with thousands of nuclear power plants is that the cooling towers would affect the wind patterns around your house....
That's patently false, especially if you consider the risks of sabotage or terrorist attacks, which are probably higher than the risk of technical failure. Shit happens.
Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Ch
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Of course, after shit happens, you'll still probably claim that nuclear plants are perfectly safe because the incident was an anomaly, just like Chernobyl didn't count because it was "stupid design run by idiots" and TMI didn't count because it was due to problems in the nuclear industry that "have since been fixed". Well, life includes anomalies, and they will happen.
People make those claims because they're good arguments. When you find a problem in something you've built, do you fix it, or give up and scrap the whole project? By your logic, we shouldn't be building houses, much less anything more complex. Chernobyl *was* poorly-designed and (at the time of the accident) run by a skeleton screw of incompetents. TMI *was* due to fixable problems, and injured, let's see, *nobody*.
The Bhopal chemical plant accident has killed 20,000 people and injured over 120,000. Chemic
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If nuclear power is so dangerous, why do the same two (bad) examples keep getting talked about over and over?
The reason is the effects of an accident: ruining the real estate values of the area of a small US state for almost a century. It doesn't matter that the radiation effects wouldn't actually be all that dangerous or that not all that many people would be killed. The way people perceive the accident would cause a huge disruption to a large area, and it would have negative affects hugely disproportionate to the actual damages.
Chernobyl was a big factor in the disintegration of the Soviet Union, a country
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Personally, I rank the real damage caused by coal plants as bigger threat than imaginary damage caused by lowered property values. Actually, I would love a nuclear plant in my back yard -- it would make it that much cheaper to buy a hous
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So, how many nuclear reactors in this country have been sabotaged or the object of terrorist attacks? Zero? There is little basis for the assumption that they are especially vulnerable (I'd worry more about being in the local Mall when someone with a dynamite vest decided to REALLY terrorize us).
Re:The new Library of Congress-like unit for dange (Score:2)
I'm old enough to remember being told it would never happen and not be smug about it like the earlier poster. The risk is pretty low but a relatively minor accident in the Ukrane (steam explosion in only one of several units) had major consequences.
They are different issues anyway. Extreme secrecy combined with declining resources to look after existing weapons and people chosen for reasons other than competance cr
Well then I feel pretty safe.... (Score:2, Informative)
But I doubt this is where Mr Hellman was coming from. Instead, he was using the hype of the nuclear power plants being bad and dange
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Pro nuclear power, opponent to nuclear weapons.
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Sure, a wind farm gets spread of a big area while a power plant is just a big building. But that big building is generally located far from where the energy is actually used for safety, aesthetic, land cost, fuel transport, or other reasons. That distance leads to inefficiency with resistive losses over the power lines. The greater the distance, the bigger the loss. And the more cu
Begetting another question (Score:2)
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The antinuke protest people flooding your neighborhood would make it very hard for you to go to work in the morning.
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The antinuke protest people flooding your neighborhood would make it very hard for you to go to work in the morning.
Seriously, I would love for a lot of nuke plants to spring up around here. I think making more would lower the cost in the long run, and provide far cleaner energy.
My subscription finally pays off (Score:2)
The Bent usually has great cover articles. Sometimes you get an article of the multi-cnetury history of global position determination, sometimes an explaination of the LIGO project. On rare occasion, you get a Libertarian discussing how things could be changed for the better in modern Am
Oh no! (Score:4, Funny)
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Mister President, I can't buy this malarkey... (Score:2)
It was to have been announced at the party congress next week. I did not know the fools would make it operational until then.
GENERAL TURGEDSON:
Well, what the hell is a Doomsday Machine?
AMBASSADOR DE SADE:
Well, it has been explained to me that, if you add a thick Cobalt-Thorium-G jacket to a nuclear device, the radioactivity resulting from such a nuclear explosion will retain its lethal power for a hundred years.
Our scientists calculated that the detonation of fifty of o
'Crypto-analyst'? Come on, editors (Score:3, Insightful)
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Doomsday near (Score:2)
http://www.thebulletin.org/minutes-to-midnight/ [thebulletin.org]
They also mention the main non-nuclear threats like global warming and the other WMDs.
Assumptions (Score:2)
Reliability of nukes (Score:2)
People underestimate the risk of nuclear war (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because the cold war is over people tend to assume nuclear war isn't much of a risk anymore. I think the risk of a nuclear war is high and increasing, and believe that nuclear weapons are still the number one threat to the survival of the human race.
More countries have nukes than at the height of the cold war, some of those (india and pakistan for example) with pretty belligerent attitudes towards each other. The US is increasing its already massive arsenal, and working on a missile defense system tha
He means well, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
security is in the mind of the reader of such (Score:2)
To give you a furinstance, I was out riding on my motorcycle one Sunday afternoon, basically touring the areas back roads to see what might be around over the next hill. I won't name the area although it can be found on google maps if you know where to look. Anyway, I came a
John McPhee (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly? (Score:2)