Gigantic, Mysterious Radiation Leak Traced To Facility in Russia (newscientist.com) 139
The source of a gigantic, mysterious leak of radioactive material that swept across Europe in 2017 has been traced to a Russian nuclear facility, which appears to have been preparing materials for experiments in Italy. From a report: The leak released up to 100 times the amount of radiation into the atmosphere that the Fukushima disaster did. Italian scientists were the first to raise the alarm on 2 October, when they noticed a burst of the radioactive ruthenium-106 in the atmosphere. This was quickly corroborated by other monitoring laboratories across Europe. Georg Steinhauser at Leibniz University Hannover in Germany says he was "stunned" when he first noticed the event. Routine surveillance detects several radiation leaks each year, mostly of extremely low levels of radionuclides used in medicine. But this event was different. "The ruthenium-106 was one of a kind. We had never measured anything like this before," says Steinhauser. Even so, the radiation level wasn't high enough to impact human health in Europe, although exposure closer to the site of release would have been far greater.
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He doesn't have one. With a half life of 138 days, you would need a fairly constant source inserting it into the environment for it to be available to be taken up by tobacco.
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And yet, the knowledge that smoking leads to cancer, emphysyma, or other serious health issues doesn't scare a lot of smokers. Say the word "radiation" and maybe of them perk up?
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What's really sad is that most of them will probably believe that "radiation" is a MUCH bigger killer than cancer, emphysyma, etc.
As for the people panicking here on /., when we reach 1000 deaths as a direct result of nuclear radiation from nuclear power plants, get back to me about the dangers of same. BTW, based on assorted gove
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Quick bit of research and it appears that there are small amounts of uranium in apatite, not radium as radium has a relatively short (on a geological time scale) half life of 1600 years. Uranium 235 doesn't include polonium 210 in its decay chain, only polonium 215 and 211, both of which are have stupidly short half lives. Uranium 238 does have polonium 210 in its decay chain, but uranium 238 decays so slowly that I wouldn't be particularly worried about any build up of other radioactive elements worth th
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lmgtfy >>> Indeed, the lung tissues of smokers who have died of lung cancer have absorbed about 80-100 rads of radiation. Some tobacco plants are grown using fertilisers that contain a mineral called apatite. Apatite contains a radioactive element called radium, which can eventually decay into polonium-210.
Scare tactic? Sure. Scary? Yes.
And other plants are grown with potassium fertilizers which is also radioactive. Potassium is a radioactive element which is found naturally in rocks and soil. It's all around us.
Re:If you smoke, you don't care (Score:4, Informative)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... [nih.gov]
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"The (210)Po activity concentration in smoke was estimated on the basis of its activity in fresh tobacco and wrapping paper, fresh filter, ash and post-smoking filters. The percentages of (210)Po activity concentrations that were recovered from the cigarette tobacco to ash, post-smoking filters, and smokes were assessed. The results of this work indicate that the average (range) activity concentration of (210)Po in cigarette tobacco was 16.6 (9.7-22.5) mBq/cigarette. The average percentages of (210)Po conte
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Also perhaps point out the units being used. A Bq is a single particle of ionizing radiation being released. And 200mSv / year is about 1/400th of the normal background radiation in a place like CA that has extremely low background radiation. A single sunburn would be several times worse than a lifetime of smoking according to the provided information above.
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Also perhaps point out the units being used. A Bq is a single particle of ionizing radiation being released. And 200mSv / year is about 1/400th of the normal background radiation in a place like CA that has extremely low background radiation.
I assume your 200mSv was supposed to mean 200 micro-sieverts as 200 milli-sieverts/year is probably 50 times a typical dose from normal background radiation.
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It's the third Google search result for "cigarettes polonium". If it's TLDR for you, they estimate that about 1600 lung cancer deaths in the United States and around 13,000 worldwide are attributable to alpha radiation from polonium-210 in cigarette smoke. The source is believed to be the phosphate fertilizer used on tobacco plants to improve flavor, which contains some radium-226 that decays into polonium-210.
If you want to scare everyone, talk about Bananas. (Score:2)
The potassium in a Banana has more radioactivity than all other sources for your average Human.
And if you don't eat it, you'll die. :)
I was amazed to find that 99% of Argon in the environment is from potassium decay.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Russian tea contains the highest amount of Polonium out of most consumable goods.
So how bad was Fukushima really? (Score:5, Insightful)
The leak released 100 times the amount of radiation that the Fukushima disaster did yet the radiation level wasn't high enough to impact human health.
Nuclear power is pretty darn safe it sounds like that even "the worst nuclear disaster" has no impact on human health.
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The two leaks are completely incomparable. Fukushima continues to leak fission products with long half-lives and is an active problem that will take decades to bring under control (and at least 200 billion US dollars). This leak is short(ish) half life radionuclides and is not an active leak. The comparison between the two is designed to trap the intellectually unwary.
But this is Slashdot, so downplaying the effects of Fukushima is standard practice, as the only metric that matters is "how many died?".
Re:So how bad was Fukushima really? (Score:4, Insightful)
It should be noted, for those who don't understand radioactivity or radiation, that "long half-lives" is another way of saying "not terribly radioactive". The longer the half-life, the less radiation emitted.
It also should be noted that TFS/A used the words "radiation" and "radioactivity" incorrectly. A ruthenium leak is "radioactivity". The betas emitted when it decays is "radiation.
Oh, and beta decays (what would have been emitted by this ruthenium leak) is something that is almost as harmless as an alpha decay - your clothes will generally protect you quite well, but wrap it in toilet tissue if you're really worried....
Note that gamma decay is about the only kind of radiation that actually emits something with any ability to penetrate beyond the outer layers of your skin.
Re:So how bad was Fukushima really? (Score:5, Informative)
It may be useful to note that gamma radiation is ionizing, which is to say that it can turn a stable isotope into an unstable, and radioactive, one.
No.
Gamma radiation is ionizing, which means that it can strip away electrons from atoms. That makes said atoms chemically more reactive, which can cause all sorts of fun, but it does not affect the nucleus at all and therefore it does not make anything radioactive.
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It may be useful to note that gamma radiation is ionizing, which is to say that it can turn a stable isotope into an unstable, and radioactive, one.
That's only true for the 4th rarely mentioned type of ionizing radiation, fast neutrons which generally only exist inside of nuclear reactors. Unstable isotopes don't make them, only fission and particle accelerators (by bouncing the proton beam off of lead) make them. Its not true for alpha, beta or gamma radiation which are emitted by radioactive isotopes. Also, Calcium fission products are very rare and its isotopes don't have a half life that allows them to stay around long enough to cause issues. C
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It should be noted, for those who don't understand radioactivity or radiation, that "long half-lives" is another way of saying "not terribly radioactive". The longer the half-life, the less radiation emitted.
It should be noted, for those who don't understand radioactivity or radiation, that this is an attempt to mislead the reader into thinking it's less bad. It's not.
The problem with these longer lived fission products is that they bioaccumulate and end up inside the bodies of animals and human beings. Inside the body there is nothing to protect organs from the radiation emitted (no skin or clothing barriers), and although the rate of emission is lower it has an entire lifetime to damage DNA.
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Re: So how bad was Fukushima really? (Score:1)
It's a shame really. I was really hoping for another HBO miniseries with a full blown epic meltdown.
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Nuclear power is pretty darn safe it sounds like that even "the worst nuclear disaster" has no impact on human health.
Yeah, sure, two metro areas rendered unlivable in the last 40 years, millions of people displaced and homeless, multi-billion-dollar cleanups, and millennia of waste storage issues. Let's double down on nuclear! No effect on human health!
Fuck right off.
There's a place for nuclear, but humans suck at running nuclear programs. Don't pretend that there aren't major tradeoffs.
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First of all, "millions of people displaced and homeless"?
That is factually wrong. 120,000 people lived in what is now the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant Zone of Alienation, in two cities and 187 smaller communities. There are now 180 permanent residents plus a regular cycling of temporary state workers. That's a net displacement of 119,820 permanent residents. 170,000-200,000 residents of Fukushima Prefecture were originally impacted by evacuation orders. Evacuation orders have since been rescinded for some
Re:So how bad was Fukushima really? (Score:5, Informative)
This just seems bad reporting. The actual statement this is based on seems to be that they measured 100 times the amount of radiation in the air in Europe than for Fukushima. So this is not the total amount released. If you then look further (following two links) you find an actutal number here: https://www.irsn.fr/EN/newsroo... [www.irsn.fr] It stated "For the most plausible zone of release, the quantity of Ruthenium 106 released estimated by IRSN simulations is very important, between 100 and 300 teraBecquerels." which is considered substantial. According to Wikipedia, the amount of radiation released into the atmosphere by the Fukushima disaster is about 500 pBq. So 1000x more.
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You are right of course!
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The leak released 100 times the amount of radiation that the Fukushima disaster did
This is NOT what the summary nor TFA say.
It released 100 times the amount that Fukushima released INTO THE ATMOSPHERE.
Nearly all the radiation released from Fukushima when into the ground and ocean, not the atmosphere.
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The leak released 100 times the amount of radiation that the Fukushima disaster did yet the radiation level wasn't high enough to impact human health.
Nuclear power is pretty darn safe it sounds like that even "the worst nuclear disaster" has no impact on human health.
No no no, stop saying that! You'll break the whole economic system built on FUD.
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Radiation has impact on human health. It's too hard and too early to say what the consequences of this (if any) are. That's the problem with this - you cannot make a statement and be sure that you're right.
If you don't agree, well
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People live and tour (https://www.chernobyl-tour.com/english/) there every day.
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Ooooh i love a good conspiracy theory!
Then here you go [forbes.com]. From Forbes no less. And by a former Greenpeace employee.
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Then here you go. From Forbes no less. And by a former Greenpeace employee.
You misspelled "nukie-loon anti-environmentalist" there.
Dude is a pro-nuclear lobbyist. [wikipedia.org]
To the point that he "as a lifelong peace activist and pro-nuclear environmentalist" calls nuclear weapons a "peace-making feature". [theecologist.org]
"Nuclear energy, without a doubt, is spreading and will continue to spread around the world, largely with national security as a motivation.
The question is whether the nuclear industry will, alongside anti-nuclear activists, persist in stigmatizing weapons latency as a nuclear power "bug" rather than tout it as the epochal, peace-making feature it is."
Maybe he should tag along with Dumpy for the next rimjob session in North Korea?
I'm sure Kimchi would love to hear how his nukes are a feature of peace, not of war.
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It might damage your world view, but exactly how many world wars have we had since the major power obtained nuclear weapons?
None, zero, zip, zilch
The primary reason that Iran, North Korea, etc... want nuclear weapons is to prevent any other country from considering invading them with conventional weapons
You misspelled "nukie-loon anti-environmentalist" (Score:2)
Then here you go. From Forbes no less. And by a former Greenpeace employee.
As I was saying before some nukie-loon decided to try to downmod the truth about Michael Shellenberger's nuclear lunacy and promotion of nuclear weapons FOR EVERYONE...
You misspelled "nukie-loon anti-environmentalist" there.
Dude is a pro-nuclear lobbyist. [wikipedia.org]
To the point that he "as a lifelong peace activist and pro-nuclear environmentalist" calls nuclear weapons a "peace-making feature". [theecologist.org]
"Nuclear energy, without a doubt, is spreading and will continue to spread around the world, largely with national security as a motivation.
The question is whether the nuclear industry will, alongside anti-nuclear activists, persist in stigmatizing weapons latency as a nuclear power "bug" rather than tout it as the epochal, peace-making feature it is."
Maybe he should tag along with Dumpy for the next rimjob session in North Korea?
I'm sure Kimchi would love to hear how his n
Re: So how bad was Fukushima really? (Score:2, Insightful)
Wait, what? Your concern is that an asteroid hits Earth. An asteroid big enough to kill every nuclear power plant worker capable of shutting them down...
And you think the big risk is radiation? Not the moon sized bullet that goes in one side of the planet's crust and cones out the other? Not the shockwave that blows off most of the atmosphere? Not the firestorm that accompanies it?
Shit man, think ahead. How hard it is going to be to get a decent milkshake in that event? That's the real risk.
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That's not the scenario I gave. If things are bad but not immediately fatal, many of the workers will not come into work even if alive.
Do you think everyone that works at a nuclear plant is Homer Simpson? If they work there, then their families live in relatively close proximity to the plant. Do you think enough people are going to abandon all of the nuclear plants on the planet and they are all going to go full melt down? And that is going to release enough radioactive material to wipe out the planetary population? Your original scenario:
However, suppose an asteroid hit Earth that was severe enough that most nuclear plant workers don't or can't bother to follow proper shut-down procedures. The cumulative effect of all the plants spewing forth may be enough to end humanity. An event that would normally leave a small population of humans alive would then kill them all.
If an asteroid big enough to cause everyone on the planet to abandon every mission critical post at
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If the roads are covered in ash such that cars don't work, perhaps enough of them will. Plant workers will prioritize family food and survival over stopping a plant meltdown unless they live right next to it. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.
And I did NOT say "every".
Granted, I don't know how easy/hard it is to shut down a plant safely and whether enough workers have the necessary p
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Nuclear power plants are passively safe. If every nuclear power plant worker on Earth walked off the job right now, the power plants would all see a slow loss of power production followed by an automatic reactor shutdown. There's a combination of automated control systems and basic physics at play. What happened at Fukushima was the result of lax government oversight enabling a negligent operator to run an old reactor with known, serious design issues. Not every plant shares those issues. In fact, virtually
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And we found out about that the hard way. If "stress tested" in reality the others may just have their own snafus and shortcuts waiting to play out. I hope I'm wrong, but Murphy's Law and Dilbert Law seem to show up too often for comfort.
Sadly, not surprising (Score:1)
Kind of sad that nobody is even remotely surprised that the leak was traced to Russia. It's almost as if they have a track record of this kind of thing.
Re:Sadly, not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
The sad part is that there was no real reason to lie about it if it was due to an order of materials destined for an Italian laboratory.
Unfortunately it appears that Russia's default position when caught with something embarrassing is to lie about it.
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That's Putin's default position to lie about something embarrassing. He's not the only world "leader" with this kind of behavior, is he?
Re:Sadly, not surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately it appears that Russia's default position when caught with something embarrassing is to lie about it.
Who would have ever guessed? It's not like they lied about invading Afghanistan, shooting down a civilian airliner over the Pacific, poisoning people, killing people who reveal the endemic corruption in Russia, shooting down a civilian aircraft over Ukraine, invading and occupying the Crimea under the pretense of "protecting Russians" or "they took a vote", attacking Ukraine, or interfering in the 2016 elections by working for the con artist.
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Basically lying fills the short term goal to dodge the current crises, but is unsustainable long term, though the jury is still out on what long term means.
The long term goal is having a corrupt and authoritarian region, which is kept achieving by using force thanks to corrupt military.
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It's notable, but essentially harmless. (Score:3, Informative)
Information: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2019/07/25/1907571116
For reference, humans emit on average 100000 Bq/m^3.
Just what is it (Score:1)
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Trying to create their own MegaGodzilla?
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This ingenuous shit again. Russia or more accurately Moscow was the central nervous system of the Marxists and then Stalinists. Stop blaming all the other body parts for what they were practically forced to do by "the brain".
No one is blaming the Ukraine. Just noting that its Marxism (and Stalinism) that f'd over the region. Clue: Not all Russians were Marxists, many were merely forced to live under Marxism like many of the other Soviet and "Warsaw Pact" states. That does not make them believers.
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So what? Not all Germans were Nazis. Many were merely forced to live under Nazism like many other of the 3rd Reich states. But at the end of the day the Nazis in Germany still carry the main responsibility for what happened all over the 3rd Reich.
Actually only high ranking Nazis were sometimes held responsible. Lower ranking or mere party members were not, there needed to be some overt criminal act on their individual part for them to be held responsible. Being a party member alone was almost always insufficient, for the very reason that membership was often compulsory.
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You mean legally held responsible. How many people responsible for the Soviet Union are being held legally responsible again?
Irrelevant. (1) My point is that its Marxists that were responsible for various things, not Russians in general. (2) The poor analogy to the Nazis is yours not mine.
Colloquially speaking when it comes to putting blame ...
Colloquially as in inacurrately, which is my point.
... where the Bolsheviks rose to power under Lenin, who had somewhat respectable ideals in my opinion ...
And the Nazis supported labor unions, supported the sciences, had neat and tidy homes and villages, liked dogs, etc. They were about as respectable as the Bolsheviks when you ignore the mass murder, the totalitarianism, the bigotry, their respective "new superior man" ideologies, etc. Same piec
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Your sentiment appears to be that 'the Russians' totally didn't do anything.
No. It was the Russian Marxists, the Ukrainian Marxists, the Georgian Marxists, the Belarusian Marxists, the Lithuanian Marxists, etc.
It was all Marxists all over the Soviet Union of which Russia was such a minor and insignificant part that we shouldn't look in particular on the events that happened there.
I have not attached significance or insignificance to any particular subset of Marxists, merely pointing out that Marxist is the more accurate label. It wasn't "Russian" values that led to the Chernobyl f'up, it was "Marxist" values. In other words the problems were political in nature not ethnic in nature.
And that is where the Nazi analogy becomes quite relevant. Most Germans accepted what happened and moved on. Most Americans accepted the genocides of the native American people, slavery and moved on.
I think many Russians recognize that Marxists and Stalinists killed mi
2017? (Score:3)
HBO was starting to work on Chernobyl about then. They were probably just trying to be as historically accurate as possible.
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That was a great show, although it was terribly inaccurate.
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The things that are not true:
- the strong woman scientist not afraid to say what needed to be said, though they did say she was a stand in character for a group of scientists
- Legasov being a nuclear expert and instrumental in building solutions to the problem, he was just a chemist and mostly incompetent
- The helicopter incident
- The general dramatization of things, e.g. needing "all the liquid nitrogen in the soviet union"
fess up, (Score:2)
who farted?
This is pretty interesting. (Score:5, Informative)
Both Ce-144 and Ru-106 are in Spent reactor fuel.
They were trying to recover the Cerium, for a Sterile Neutrino Experiment, at the Italian Neutrino detector facility.
Here a PDF file of the process; I think from the dates, it took a little longer to get this done:
irfu.cea.fr/Phocea/file.php?class=astimg&file=3442/CeSOX-Paris2014-Production.pdf
This is 2014, but the done date was to be 2015 late, if they signed everything immediately.
Since Ruthenium boils at 4150 ÂC, someone overcooked the batch, lol.
That seems to be what these guys are saying:
https://www.sciencemag.org/new... [sciencemag.org]
This also aligns with the reported "Couldn't hit the required radioactivity level" if the fuel was pulled from the reactor in 2014.
Wow, first the "Eastern Urals Radioactive Trace", now this; that's two major fuckups going off site in 50 years.
Way to go Myak!
The Shared Resource Problem (Score:2)
At some point - IMHO sooner rather than later - we are going to need nations to step up and own the collective responsibility to look after this planet. We do not (yet) appear to be acting in a way that indicates any awareness of that shared respnsibility.
In terms of nuclear accidents it doesn't matter whether we are considering this event, Chernobyl, or Three Mile Island. We had a major scare when w
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There's no leak (Score:2)
Re: does not make sense (Score:2)
It can because different types of radiation act differently (atmospheric vs water, long vs short half life, etc.). This is why "news" articles about radiation are all alarmist spin. You can talk about the numbers in any way you want, so they turn all stories into click bait.
Don't feed the trolls.
Why is Russia such a poor global citizen? (Score:2)
The right thing to do would have been to immediately 'fess up to the radionuclide accident, so other countries could take any appropriate precautions.
This coverup just extents a perfect track record of being an abysmal global citizen: instigating violence in the Donbass that has killed thousands; propping up brutal dictator Assad; meddling in other countries' elections; shooting down flight MH17 [bbc.com]; extorting Europe by encouraging dependence on Russian natural gas, then threatening to cut them off; violating t [brookings.edu]
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The Americans are much better at being jerks. They have or are doing pretty much the exact same things.
The treaty you are talking about is a waste of time when most ICBMs are unstoppable anyway.
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From the point of view of someone who is neither a US American nor a Russian: the American (government and institutions) being much better at being jerks doesn't really make the Russian (government and institutions) being lesser assholes.
In the grand picture you're both pretty awful and it's not a binary choice with whom you side on these issues. I'm from the EU and you know what, the EU government and institutions are asshole jerks as well.
I don't like the Russian foreign politics for pretty much the reaso
Re:Why is Russia such a poor global citizen? (Score:4, Insightful)
The Americans are much better at being jerks. They have or are doing pretty much the exact same things
True or not, it's irrelevant to Russia's standing as a global citizen. Whataboutism. [wikipedia.org]
The treaty you are talking about is a waste of time when most ICBMs are unstoppable anyway.
The issue with intermediate-range nuclear weapons is unrelated to do with how hard/easy they are to stop. They make everyone anxious because they can reach their targets in a few minutes, compared to 20-30 for an ICBM. It increases the likelihood that a decision made in the heat of the moment causes an accidental nuclear war. They also tend to drag third-party countries into the mix (Cuba, European nations).
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Never capitalize trump's name.
You find it endlessly rewarding.