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Science

WWII Allies Tested Tidal Wave Bomb 143

Posted by Hemos from the ka-blam-sploosh dept.
Bent Udder writes "According to todays' Independent, the US, Britain and New Zealand worked on plans for a bomb that could cause tsunamis during the latter part of the Second World War. The war ended before the device be put to use, but an Australian professor tested several small versions of the bombs in New Zealand in 1944. Weird, non? " I have visions of "Deep Impact" running thru my head right now.
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WWII Allies Tested Tidal Wave Bomb

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  • couldn't i just explode a nuke in the pacific ocean and do the same thing? (say i had a nuke)

    If you set off a big enough nuke, of course you will cause a tsunami. Said tsunami will then travel in all directions. I would imagine from what seems to be said here, that they were trying to focus the effect of several (relatively) small charges in a particular direction.

    If it had been successful, it would have been interesting to see how one could justify such a weapon as being other than indiscriminate and anti-civilian, which I believe the Geneva Conventions hold strong views about.

  • 1. The Germans did the same thing to London during the Blitz.
    2. It was just the Americans bombing Japan.
    3. The Brits and Americans firebombed Germany too (Hamburg, Dresden).

    While the firestorms in the Japanese cities did more damage and killed as many people as the atomic bombs in WW2, it took hundreds of planes every night for 2-3 days. The atomic bomb takes one plane.
  • When did Germany launch an ICBM? If you are talking about the V2...it was an SRBM - like a SCUD or Lance missile.
  • Yes they did. Becuase the British did the work for them in the Med.

    On November 12,1940, British torpedo bombers launched an attack on the Taranto harbor in Italy. It was studied by the Japanese and many of the same ideas were used against Pearl Harbor.
  • I read that book. If the physics depicted in the book are accurate, this is some serious shit. Basically, a renegade faction of a government used, I think, 8 nukes to create the soliton wave. Six to separate the Ross Ice Shelf from Antartica proper, one airburst above the shelf to "shove" the shelf causing the soliton wave and another higher airburst to knock out (EMP) anyone capable of reporting the wave, which was traveling (I think) at around 200 miles/hour. From the devestation described in the book, it would only be used by freaky insane people. Who live on high ground. Really high ground. The book explained (if I recall correctly) that the difference between a soliton wave and a normal tidal wave is that the energy of a tidal wave is carried by the movement of water across the surface of the ocean and thus dissapates, whereas the energy in the soliton is a pulse traveling through the water and loses energy much more slowly than a tidal wave. I don't know how acurate the science in the book is, but it was a good read.
  • Yeah, but would it pick up a bus and throw it back down?
  • This sounds like pyrkrete (sp) which was a mixture of ice and wood pulp. It was resistant to melting, very cheap to produce, extremely sturdy and floated in water. IIRC a few prototype ships were made out of the stuff and worked just great. It's still probably not a half-bad idea.
  • Wax up those surfboards, d00d!

    And you thought the "Point Break" wave was impressive...
  • A cylindrical bomb, rotatating on its axis, that's designed to fracture a dam. See "The Dam Busters."

  • ...like Iwo Jima and Okinawa where the first several waves of Marines took something on the order of 90% casualties.

    Beg to differ, AC. It was horrendous, but nowhere near 90%. In fact, it was lower than Omaha Beach or Tarawa were. (However, we kept losing Marines because the Japanese fought like hell for ever square inch of that island and refused to surrender.) The Marine Corps and Navy learned a hell of a lot about how NOT to storm a beach after reviewing the mistakes made at Tarawa (and God, were there ever some). Like paying attention when people who know the tidal and reef environment, having the UDTs (the ur-SEALs) perform a hydrographic survey and reconnaisance, plastering the beach right up to while the first wave's going in, having the correct equipment to get over a shallow reef and across the beach under fire the whole way, etc.

    Tarawa was expensive tuition, but the Japanese knew they were screwed when, as one of their Imperial Marine officers put it, "The dead Marine kept coming."

  • The paint schemes weren't silly; you just don't understand their true intent, which was to make visual ID and target ranging more difficult. The zebra pattern, when viewed from afar, was supposedly harder to focus on from periscopes and (optical) fire-control directors.

  • the PS is correct. Frank Whittle had had the idea up to a static-thrust-test proof of con

  • (sorry for not proofreading)The PS is correct. Frank Whittle had had the idea up to a static-thrust-test proof of concept, but the MOD considered the jet relatively unreliable (arguable) and a fuel hog (undeniable). V-1 buzz bombs and the advent of Luftwaffe rocket- and jet-propelled manned aircraft made these detractions less important.

  • The kamizake onslaughts against outlying destroyers on "picket duty" on the edges of carrier task forces grew so horrendous that some DD crews supposedly made giant signs out of bedsheets reading "CARRIERS THIS WAY."

  • Well, did you ever hear about the top-secret WWII antisubmarine-warfare program to teach seagulls to defecate on periscopes? And I bet you think I'm making this one up.

  • Picture ships rolling through the water like logs.

    Supposedly the USS Constellation, an Essex-class CV (carrier) about eight hundred feet long, can be seen blown skyward in one piece in one bit of footage of the Bikini test.

  • At the risk of pissing off any WW II Pacific vets on Slashdot, the Japanese really pulled off a beautiful number on Pearl Harbor. Worse luck for them.

  • Ummm, I guess if you're in the Navy at all, you're a skimmer, not a bubblehead. The real deal is that the US Navy will not publish nor admit to submarine speeds in excess of 30 knots or depths in excess of 200 feet. IOW, say what you wish; the US Navy is free to disavow anything you say, and they've got the last word on the subject. Now, unofficially, how does 45+ knots (just sprints, not sustained) and twelve hundred feet grab you?

  • Even in WWI, the U-boats had really bitchin' scopes courtesy of Zeiss. But without any effective passive sonar, ELINT, or spotter aircraft, the boats had a hard time attacking submerged from any respectable range. And so they didn't. They made most of their kills surfaced and at night. Submarines then were torpedo boats that had the added feature of submerging for a few hours; they weren't at all like submarines as we understand them now.

  • Try telling it to one hell of a lot of Gold Star mothers of Eighth Air Force crewmen, too.

    The Luftwaffe -- or more properly the half of it we Yanks and Brits fought while the other Russians withstood the other half on the Eastern Front -- didn't find their air superiority numerically challenged over Europe until late '43. As surviving RAF Bomber Command and US Eighth Army Air Force vets will tell you, the Germans were a looooooong way from losing the air war and would remain that way through early 1945.

    By 1942, the RAF and the Fleet Air Arm had pilots with combat stick time, but the Yanks didn't start arriving out of bomber and pursuit training for over half a year -- having been trained by personnel who themselves hadn't been in combat yet either and didn't know what would or wouldn't work. The US Army Air Force found itself up against German pilots who'd been flying combat missions for four years already. As I noted in an earlier post, when you learn in wartime, the tuition is expensive.

    Despite getting bombed flat, Germany put up some beautifully engineered warplanes. They were at the forefront of radar-intercept night fighters throughout the European air war, and until the Little Friends (P-47s and P-51s) got drop tanks that permitted them to escort daylight strikes all the way to Germany, the B-17s and B-24s were sitting ducks. Things were so bad that at one point, the probability of a US bomber crewman completing the minimum required 25 missions and going home alive and unhurt was under 50 percent. According to an old, very wise and very honest man I knew who survived 32 missions as a ball-turret gunner, the part in the movie Memphis Belle where the guy gets drunk, puking and crying because he's so terrified of going up the next day, wasn't all that far-fetched.

    (Did y'all know that US Senator George McGovern and former Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry were 8th AF bomber pilots?)

  • In fact, a tornado-producing storm front rolling across a Kansas plain has megatons of energy to it, too -- again, distributed entirely differently over time and space. Relative to Momma Nature, a nuke ain't a fart in a whirlwind.

  • We're all thinking "tsunami" like it's some monster cresting wave dozens or hundreds of meters high. But to devastate a port area, the event doesn't have to be more than the kind of storm surge usually associated with a typhoon. Force a measly five meters of seawater into Long Beach or Charleston, and you have a multi-billion-dollar mess -- a "mission kill" instead of a "hard kill."

    Obviously there's the water damage you'd get when everything gets flooded for a mile or two inland, but the worst aspect of storm surges is the way the water current pushes and pulls at things. Imagine a dockside crane getting pulled right off the pier.

  • Yeah. A CEP (circular error probable) of what, several *kilometers* across?

  • Also, by late 1941 the IJN was waaaaay ahead of the USN PacFlt in quality and quality, particularly in naval air warfare. We were just plumb lucky the carriers were out to sea. We were even luckier at Midway.

  • I'd like to see some documentation to the effect that anybody was worried beforehand about the ethical considerations of A-bombing Japan at the time. By Hiroshima, we'd been at war with Japan for three and a half years. The Pearl Harbor revenge factor was still a prime motivator, as was, to a provable degree, basic ethnic hatred. (Ever see some of those wartime propaganda cartoons shown to motivate US troops? In case not, the Japanese are portrayed as grinning, sadistic little bucktoothed, bandy-legged yellow devils in thick glasses.) Nobody had yet seen what a nuke would do to Japanese cities and Japanese flesh, so no haunting involved. We hadn't shown the least compunction about firebombing Osaka, certainly.

  • Well, not necessarily 'coastal' areas (I didn't realize the implication of salt water), but with some ingenuity there are some rather large rivers, estuaries, lakes, and other freshwater bodies of water in which this may be of practical use?
  • Now, couldn't there be some positive applications for this technology? How about a device that can counter a tsunami or a potential tsunami?

    Or maybe a wavemaker device to help flood coastal farming areas that require it or whatnot? We have something here that can move a lot of water, why not put it to practical use?
  • Remember Wing Commander, anybody?

    hehe..... destroying the planet wasn't the way I thought that game would end though.

  • Without the use of such a devastating weapon, the world at large would not know the true consequences of a nuclear war.

    Had the nuclear arms race occurred before the first wartime use of a nuclear weapon, I doubt humanity would have survived the ensuing nuclear firefight.

    This is why I would've chosen to use the bomb directly, rather than try to induce a tidal wave... even if we could induce a tidal wave.

    The world was on a precipice at that time, and few people outside the scientific community really understood the magnitude of the problems we would face with this new technology prior to the example set in these bombings.
  • I'm surprised no one has thought of this before...
    all you would need is a series of not so large explosives set to go off right as the concussion wave of the first explosion goes past them, adding to the force of the wave, add to it as many explosives as you want until you have a wave of the force you want....you just need to find out the spacing and timing that would work best...and that's just some math...

    this has all the local distruction of a nuclear device, but none of the global nuclear problems fallout problems, and you're only safe if you are a sizable distance inland.

    the threat of some terrorist group with scuba gear trying to do this is frightenning.
  • Well using a nuke in a war is a very political decision - it'll make you hated all over the world. Not to mention it would certainly escalate almost every conflict. It'd work if you have any kind of nuclear war at your hands already, but then you could just drop the nuke on the target in the first place. In other situations, nukes are a big no-no.

    Besides, there's nothing like fallout and mutated seamonsters to screw up your day.
  • The main point behind those tidal wave bombs probably would have been to clear beaches and coasts. Remember, they were still planning to invade Japan until they found a "better" solution, and those tidal wave bombs probably would've made setting up a beachhead much easier.
  • I seriously doubt that governments willing to fire-bomb much of two enemy countries would've been concerned at all for some sort of animal.

    How much would underwater nuclear explosions affect whales, anyway?
  • Reminds me of the very cool introduction paragraph of the Twilight:2000 role playing game. I'm at work so can't type it in, but it was about how the fact that democracies would make the world peaceful because afterall democracies never make war is a lot of crap... Democracies are about the will of the people, and the will of the people is very often FOR war...

    That said, I think the only reason why they didn't push the development of tsunami bombs and whatnot is that they found the "ultimate" weapon in the atomic bomb.

    As for using these weapons, it'd be a very cold calcuation - I can easily imagine the US or some other country use a nuclear weapon if the spoils of war are great enough.

  • I have a hard time seeing either working out well. Underwater nukes make a big ol' cloud of radioactive steam, and even the atol tests back in the 50s barely made a wave large enough to wiggle those battleships around... woe unto the coral or anything in a fragile underwater ecosystem. One o' these would put a serious crimp in the lifestyle of your typical lobster.

    There's a big difference between the Crossroads shallow explosions and the deeper ones. The shallow ones do indeed create huge amounts of radioactive fallout. It's actually one of the most destructive things one could do to an enemy navy if you could find a large collection of their ships in one place. Most of the Crossroads ships were originally only loaned out for the test. But in the end most of them were found to be complete write offs thanks to the fallout.

    However, everything changes when you set off a nuclear device at great depth. You end up with almost no radioactive release in this case. The shock wave created does serious damage to any ships in the area, though.

    For a tidal wave, though, you'd probably set the device off either next to or inside the side of an underwater cliff. Current studies suggest that natural tidal waves are caused by underwater landslides. So you'd use the nuke to trigger the land slide. The hard part would be finding a properly aimed cliff....

  • OK. I'll bite. What's a bouncing bomb?

    You've never watched Dam Busters??

    It was a bomb designed to take out the Germans' hydroelectric(?) dams. Basically it was a round bomb, dropped from a Lancaster. The bomber would fly towards the damn (at a set height/altitude/whatnot), drop the bomb, the bomb would bounce (hence the name) and hit the dam.

    Very effective considering the other option was just to drop bombs and hope they'd hit. Although it was more dangerous, as it required lower level flight etc.

    And for those who prefer pictures.

    key o = bomb
    ~ = water level
    * = impact
    . = formatting kluge

    .o..........[air]...............___
    ....o......o......o.......o....|...|
    .......o......o.......o.......*....|
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~/.....|
    ............................/.[dam]|
    ........[water]............/.......|

    My ascii art sucks, and you can fill in your own plane. And if anyone wishes to correct me, feel free as my memories a tad vague, the jist of it's there though.

  • If a small A-bomb detonated on the oceans surface can produce a thirty foot wall of water five miles from zero, imagine the devastating effect of a H-bomb several powers of magnitude larger.

    Nope. Wouldn't work.

    ` "You can't confine the energy. Once the explosion gets big enough, all of its energy goes into the atmosphere and not into the water. But one of the things we discovered was if you had a series of explosions in the same place, it's much more effective and can produce much bigger waves." '

    - NZ Herald [nzherald.co.nz] : Devastating tsunami bomb viable, say experts [nzherald.co.nz]

    I read this is Saturdays' paper, both the web articles are a bit of a hack job. If only I'd kept the paper. Had a few more details.

  • Actualy, the allies did a lot of research on a lot of odd weapons towards the end of the war. The A-bomb is the most well known, and probably the most 'effecient' of the superweapons, but they researched others such as:

    -Special bombers filled with bats, with small timed charges. The theory was to drop the bats of Japanese cities, and the bats would rest in the mostly paper and wood houses when the bombs went off.
    -A special bomb to drop on the Mt. Fuji to paint it blue and red, to strike at the moral of the Japanese.
    -Another bomb, designed to penitrate Mt. Fuji and cause it to go volcanic.
    -A special device that would send out harmonic waves right on the fault lines near Japan, causing a earthquake.

    -Japan had its program, such as the human torpedoe, which would be filled with explosives, and ridden into ships by underwater kamakazi pilots.

    -Germany had its own superweapon programs. For example, a sound cannon that was actualy produced, that would be so loud and at such a pitch that it would kill enemy soldiers.
    -An 'OS' that would crash all the time and be the mon...er, wait, thats today. Sorry.

  • ...but I'm thinking that maybe an atomic/thermo could so such a thing if shaped. Dunno. We have any physics majors in the house?

    My .02
    Quux26
  • I also noticed that it didn't go very far in explaining precisely the destruction that such a device would convey, or even any casualty projections.

    My .02
    Quux26

  • Vapor (Score:1)

    by quux26 ( 27287 )
    A thermonuclear explosion would just vaporize water. Make a big wave, sure. But not destructive in of itself.

    My .02
    Quux26
  • This would be completely feasible. (at least in terms of being able to trigger a tsunami) Detonation of a high yield device near the sea floor could cause enough disruption to trigger such a wave. The unfortunate side considerations include such things as
    • How do you trigger a directed wave?
    • How do I stop a wave that is going where I don't want one?
    and a whole host of others.

    You see the problem: some bozo general/admiral/whatever triggers a tsunami to wipe out the Japanese and doesn't consider the fact that that same detonation has put the Hawaiian islands in direct danger. Wipes out his target, then two days later his own family gets it too.

    D. Keith Higgs
    CWRU. Kelvin Smith Library

  • Wasn't that the plot of a james bond movie, where some jerk was trying to create a chip shortage by setting off bombs in some fault line in california, breaking open an aquifer, and flooding silicon valley, all to make his chip business more profitable?
  • I don't think it would crimp the lobster's lifestyle at all. You would end up with a 300-foot tall lobster that would ravage Tokyo. Sounds like an improvement from the lobster's point of view.

    (Or didn't you watch Godzilla movies?)
  • That large invasion fleet would be the Mongols under the leadership of Kublai Khan. They amassed a HUGE (even by modern day standards) invasion fleet and attacked Japan arround 1260 (I can't remember, sorry). I believe something arround 800 ships... the attack was initally successful, but the Mongol commander decided to bring his troops back on board to make them easier to defend. Turns out the night after he did that a typhoon came by and whiped out most of his fleet. Doh !
  • Judith and Garfield Reeves-Stevens proposed something similar in their thriller "Icefire".
    Six nuclear warheads were used by a rouge Chinese faction to collapse the Ross Ice Sheet in Antarctica, and at the same time a high yeild nuke was detonated above the ice sheet, driving it into the Ross Sea at high velocity. The resulting wave was initially 1400 ft high and travelled outward at around 500 mph. The wave threatens to put the entire LA basin under a minimum of 20 feet of water.
    Scary...

  • Re:funny (Score:1)

    by mpe ( 36238 )

    Although my memory's a bit vague on this, I think I remember reading that Barnes-Wallis (inventor of the bouncing bomb) had a not-dissimilar idea that he eventually abandoned in favour of the bouncing bomb.

    More likely he couldn't get the support for it, many of his ideas were never taken up.

  • Re:Vapor (Score:1)

    by mpe ( 36238 )

    The problem with using a nuke is that most of its energy is expended in the form of Electromagnetic Energy (ie light, heat)

    Sea water is quite good at absorbing electromagnetic energy. Thus most of this energy
    will contribute to steam generation.

  • couldn't i just explode a nuke in the pacific ocean and do the same thing? (say i had a nuke)

    Well it worked in a novel, "Dragon" by Clive Cussler...

  • I had thought about the possibility of using it against the Imperial Navy's carrier groups

    Wouldn't work tsunami have little effect mid ocean, since the energy is distributed through out the depth of the sea. You only get huge waves once they reach shallow water. IIRC there are cases of fishing boats returning to discover the scene on a disater, where the crews never noticed. (Since from their POV it was simply a wave arround 2 metres.)
  • The optics were good, but they didn't have any image enhancement. That means that they were sharp, but they don't have the sensitivity of a modern scope.
  • correct analogy would be a flat stone skipping across the water surface...same principle. BTW, in iceland they have 800HP dune racer type vehicles that can drive across water (as long as they run faster than 70mph..if they dont..they sink)...cost $50K each and burn methanol type racing fuel.
  • 1200 feet ? bah. how does this >1800 ft depth sub (http://popularmechanics.com/popmech/sci/9812STMIM .html) grab you ?

  • There were a number of tests of water-burst nuclear devices. The effect on a fleet of ships was astonishing. (They tested it on captured Japanese war ships after the war). Picture ships rolling through the water like logs.

    Presumably that's the level of force that would be required to generate a tsunami - and I know that the USN does posess nuclear mines.


    --
  • "Neil Kirton, a former colleague of Professor Leech, told the New Zealand Herald that the experiments involved laying a pattern of explosives underwater to create a tidal wave"



    It wasn't a nuke but conventional bombs that they were using to make the title wave. Although it says in the article that they were going to send him to the Bikini islands to watch the nuclear tests to see if it was praticle to their wave bomb.



    This does't seem very suprising to me, alot of weapons and ideas on how to make mass destruction of an enemy that were far sillier then this came out of WW2 and the Cold War. Doesn't even seem that stupid, causing a small one could wipe out a island or clear a beachead.. somthing that cost many many lives when fighting for islands around Japan.

  • Actually the Japanese did not exactly follow the Geneva convention rules. Thats ok though we werent the ones getting Nuked in the end
  • >Now, couldn't there be some positive >applications for this technology? How about a >device that can counter a tsunami or a potential >tsunami?



    While that's a noble idea, don't forget, waves propogate in all directions from one point. Like the ripples in a pond when you toss a pebble in.
    With precise timing, and positioning, you'd be able to stop the offending tsunami. However, you'd have another tsunami that has to be equal in size to the original (out of phase waves cancel eachother out completely, if both equal in amplitude and are out of phase by 180 degrees) if I remember correctly.



    Then again, maybe a tsunami barrier of sorts could be developed, or a damper. A series of small waves just out of phase enough with the original, but with less amplitude, would dampen the tsunami to a mere lap at the shore. But then you'd have a series of progessively smaller tsunamis instead of one.




    >Or maybe a wavemaker device to help flood >coastal farming areas that require it or whatnot?



    Once again, a good idea, but some crops don't like salty water. In fact, pretty much most plants can't tolerate salty water.



    >We have something here that can move a lot of >water, why not put it to practical use?



    Something that moves alot of water in all directions in massive amounts and anything else not bolted down with gigantic steel rods.

  • If a nuclear bomb was detonated just below ("below" being a relative term - dependant on the size of the fireball) a ship in the ocean, could the steam resulting from the fireball lower the density of the surrounding water enough to sink a large ship in one fell swoop?
  • Second, you seem to believe that nuclear reactors can have a supercritical explosion. Here you are wrong as well.
    I don't think one has to be worried about exploding reactors casuing earthquakes to the worried about earthquakes causing a reactor breach.

    Whatever the risks and benefits of fusion reactors are, building one on top of a fault line is just plain dumb.

  • Yeah, the French quaked Taiwan so their germinating silicon-based chip-producing industry can take over the world market....and stuff...
  • Yes we did some silly things during WWII.

    Like painting our battleships neon pink with zebra stripes (!!) to "psyche-out" the enemy (whuh??).

    Or shooting bats with incindiary chemicals attached to them to the Japanese islands, hoping they would set fire to all the wood houses.

    The scary thing is, some of our best modern weapons originated from wwii german technology (i have no doubt that we won by an absolute fluke, and that if hitler hadn't invaded russia we'd all be living in a very different world). Jet engine, the first intercontinental ballistic missile, some pretty damn mean tanks, the Z3, the /first/ general-purpose digital computer.

    Trivia from PBS: Both Japanes kamikazes and Nazi stormtroopers were loaded up on methamphetimine.
  • Well the army seems to be using macs now, so you'd probably be seeing a bomb icon...
    --
  • How do you trigger a directed wave?

    By laying the charges (shaped, I hope) in a specific direction. Think of how demolition experts use shaped charges to topple skyscrapers while hardly scratching the buildings next to them.

    How do I stop a wave that is going where I don't want one?

    ...With an equal but oppositely-directed charge (or a good approximation thereof).

    By the way, how hard is it for people to spell "tidal" right? You'd think a word already in the news header would at least get spelled right. Sheesh.
  • (inventor of the bouncing bomb)

    OK. I'll bite. What's a bouncing bomb?
  • This type of weapon poses an interesting dilema. It is as devastating as a nuclear device, which is good from a war-winning perspective, and it won't irradiate the planet in a nuclear winter which will wipe out the planet, which is very good.

    However that last point is probably about the only thing that stopped MAD during the Cuban Missile crisis. Paradoxically, having our devastating weapons destroy the planet may be a good thing.

  • The wave would be directed. It's kind of like Fourier analysis( synthesis ) where you add a series of sinusoids to produce different shapes. In this case, you would want all sinusoids to be at their peek at a single point ( just in front of the ocean shore ). Because the amplitudes of the sinusoids would be decaying over distance, they would only ever be devistating at that one point ( a non-decaying wave would produce periodic peeks all around the world ). In addition to this 1'st order mathematical analysis, you have to consider that the explosions will be directed ( most likely in a line ), thus the compounding effect will only be towards the target. It will not, therefore, produce a radially expanding wave ( as in a point disturbance like a single explosion ). In fact, you should even be able to safely station your ship or sub not too far behind the starting point of the wave.
  • The only problem with your comment about the Missiles is that they were first engineered and designed by Goddard (an american) it was just that the US Forces laughed at his ideas. Something like 90% of the German designs were Goddard's designs. After the war when some of the german scientists were interrogated as to how they came up with the designs, they told the allies to go talk to Goddard. Goddard was also very disturbed when he finally got his hands on a V1 and saw some of his designs being used. Being a true scientist, before the war he was always willing to give info about his rocket designs and it just so happened that the only ones interested were the Germans. In fact I think his basic designs and theories are still in use today and the Saturn V is a modification on a design of his which is why we have the Goddard Space Center
  • I believe that Japan (and maybe China) both have defenses against moderate sized Tsunamis. I would guess that man made tsunamis wouldn't be large compared to some natural ones, so this makes me ask the question, will this work anymore?

    That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
    JM
  • funny i never heard of such a thing as a tidal bomb before, i wonder what other thinges they keep hidden from us
  • Somehow, I doubt you want to see a Blue Screen of Death on a nuke... "SAFETY.dll caused a General Protection Fault at xxxxxxxx:xx." *clicks OK* "Safety disabled. Beginning countdown sequence."

  • > The US, or its allies, would never use one.

    What a joke! I know that's always been the official U.S. propaganda line, that in contrast to the recklessness of foreign totalitarians, the U.S. only has reasonable, peaceful intentions, but still I can scarcely believe that there's anyone who is so credulous as to take that propaganda at face value.

    The U.S.A. is the only country in the world to have used a nuclear bomb as a weapon of war. And in 1962 John Kennedy put seven thousand megatons in the air, over the issue of the Russians basing IRBMs in Cuba the same way the U.S.A. based their IRBMs in Turkey. The hemisphere-destroying nuclear catastrophe was only averted at the last moment thanks to Khrushchev's superior intelligence and sanity.

    Don't take my word for it. For documentation, please refer to In Retrospect by Robert Strange McNamara (the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban Missile Crisis), and Dark Sun by Richard Rhodes.

    Yours WDK - WKiernan@concentric.net

  • The name of the book escapes me, something like "Icefire".

    It had an interesting twist on the tactics for actually creating the wave. It involves setting off two or three nukes to shear off a section of the ice shelf around the McMurdo station in antartica, then detonating an airburst nuke to drive the broken piece into the seabed. This would create the concussive force necessary to drive the wave. It was a neat theory, going beyond the usual technotrash research.

    I have no idea about the physics behind it, but it did sound fairly logical.

  • In WWII, even the Allies were willing to flash-fry hundreds of thousands of _people_. I really can't see them being overly concerned about sea life.

  • Reference Literature (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See the text: "Water Waves Generated by Underwater Explosions" by LeMehaute and Wang (1996) published by World Scientific. During the period 1950-1990 much theretical and experimental work was conducted regarding tactical uses of nukes to inundate harbors and capsize submarines. The theory and capability to predict with reasonable accuracy the effects of near surface and subsurface explosions is well established (and overviewed in the above cited text). The bottom line is that it is rarely practical because the energy transferred into wave motion decreases very rapidly as the wave propagates outward in all directions from the blast center. The exception might be when the bathymetry is such that the wave front is diffracted toward a convergence point. Steve Hughes, PhD Coastal and Hydraulics Laboratory Waterways Experiment Station
  • Exactly two (2) of the ships sunk that morning did not see action during the war, the Arizona, which remains down, and another whose name I don't recall that was floated but used only for artillery practice.

    Two major mistakes by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor:

    1) You can't sink big ships in shallow water. They're easy to recover.

    2) They *grossly* underestimated our reaction. The point was to keep us *out* of the war by smashing our pacific presence. But it's in our nature that we get *really* steamed about being dragged into things. Only very few of the Japanese comprehended what our reaction would be (such as Yakimoto (sp?) and the "I fear we've awakened a sleeping giant).
  • They don't say much in the article as to WHY they decided to play with this. The only reason why that I can think of is that they were going to do it in order to have either a larger impact on near-shore targets (more 'bang for your buck'... or maybe more 'drowning for your dime'? ;) or as some sort of attempt to limit fallout.

    I have a hard time seeing either working out well. Underwater nukes make a big ol' cloud of radioactive steam, and even the atol tests back in the 50s barely made a wave large enough to wiggle those battleships around... woe unto the coral or anything in a fragile underwater ecosystem. One o' these would put a serious crimp in the lifestyle of your typical lobster.

    Hmmm... Maybe these were some of the guys who took Teller's idea to nuke-to-order a deep water harbour for Alaska completely to heart. ;)

    --
    rickf@transpect.SPAM-B-GONE.net (remove the SPAM-B-GONE bit)

  • A conventional depth chage just vaporizes water, too. But both a nuke and a conventional charge generate pressure waves -- and they're far more efficent at it than explosions in air. Pressure waves against surface and submerged hulls are a Bad Thing(tm).

    As an example, a Mk 48 torpedo doesn't kill surface ships by actually hitting them like in WW II submarine movies. Instead, it detonates directly beneath them at a shallow depth. The resulting pressure bubble hoists the ship and breaks its keel.

  • By the short 'n' curlies, definitely. How does > 2100 ft depth grab YOU? That's what a titanium-hulled Alfa could do (still can, if there are any left). If you're citing Popular Mechanics as a source on submarine performance data, you may awe some Penguinheads around here, but I remain unimpressed. Tell ya what: Why don't you try a Jane's All the World's Ships annual review and see what it says? (Although to be fair, I bet Jane's doesn't have cool articles on how to wire your house for a home network.)

    BTW: Concrete submarines my @$$. That article got laughed to death on sci.military.naval. I know because I posted it there to watch the fun. Steel doesn't have a "crush depth" (more properly, a test depth); submarine hulls do. Submarines, like balloons, tend to compress at greater depths. A concrete hull is less compressible, but that's precisely because it's also less plastic. Would you like to be in one when rapidly changing depths or when getting hammered by a shock wave, even at relatively shallow depths? You bet you wouldn't.

  • Did I miss something? The 'why' of it seems obvious.

    Japan. We were at war, but taking obvious credit for nuking Japan would haunt us after the fact.. It has. If there had been a way to send tactical 'natural' disasters at Japan, we would have jumped on it.

    I'd be curious to learn how the gov wanted to cover up the evidence of the detonation though.
  • My thoughts on the tidal nukes were that:
    Why do it in the first place, if not to make the itdal wave appear natural in origin? If a nuke could create a tidal wave (or it was seen a worthy of study) then it itself would be devastating.

    We had no problem dropping the bamb on Hiroshima. But, if we didn't want to be blatant, or wanted to appear able to control/influence the weather.. A tidal wave or earthquake induced by a nuclear weapon would probably be a good way to achieve the goal.

    In retrospect, I suppose the 'tell-tale' signs of a nuke were not well known, and difficult to test for - so covering up our handiwork would not have been a high priority.

    The whole concept stinks of Lex Luthor.
  • First of all, not all the French nuke tests were underground; you may want to ask the residents of certain Polynesian islands about that one.

    Second, France was hardly alone in conducting underground nuke tests. The US and USSR moved to underground testing in the sixties; the decision to end atmospheric tests was one of the first agreements between the two countries. France never signed (claiming they wanted a disarmament treaty).

    http://www.greenpeace.org/~comms/nukes/ctbt/read 8.html

    As for testing on fault lines, no, the Kerguelen islands (where the drill-bore tests were conducted) aren't really on fault lines; they're actually well within the Indian plate.
  • The tide had turned in the Pacific War, and the Japanese were demonstrating that they would fight to the last man to hold any island. The first Kamikaze units were deployed in 1944. The plans were being drawn up for an invasion of the Japanese mainland, and everyone expected massive Allied casualties in the process. The Atomic Bomb was a secret project whose outcome was uncertain (the first test would not be until April 1945).

    World War II saw unprecedented technological innovation in the means of war; some of these ideas were crazy, some of them were impractical, some of them were unethical.

    What is more important to remember is that this was never used. Although a future society may not be so prissy ... certainly the "asteroid drop" will be a weapon of choice in any interplanetary wars!
  • I'm not positive that the earth is flat ;-)

    Seriously, salt is BAD for crops. If anyone even considers the idea of "Tsunami Irrigation" then I hope for their sake they are simply extremely ignorant. Besides the obvious saftey risk, structural damage and, or course, massive erosion, salt is BAD for most plants. Certainly for crops. A high concentration of salt in the soil around the roots of a plant prevent the root from absorbing water - the low concentrations of salt in the cells would force the water back into the soil to balance salt concentraions.

    As for Florida, the "non-military" reason is that the Everglades are one huge Estuary (area where fresh river water and salty seawater are mixed) and most of the state is just a couple feet above sea level.

    --
    grappler
  • Makes one wonder about the French nuclear bombs. I mean, they were all tested underground, so what's to say that they wern't looking at contriving earthquakes by detonating nukes on fault lines (ironically, the only fault line in the whole of New Brunswick, Canada, has a CANDU reactor built right on it.)

    And then, one must ask, how would the French use this technology? Well, all the conspiracy theorists out there are glancing at Taiwan ... 35% of the world's silicon. That's as close to a weak link that you can get, now isn't it!

    We'll omit, of course, the whole Pacific ring of fire status.

  • No Nukes (Score:2)

    by JJ ( 29711 )
    Detonating a Nuke would not have the same effect. A tsunami needs a line of disturbances to become cumulative and reach destructive size. Keep in mind any attempt to use this device would probably kill as many whales as people. The explosive sound would a) jam their prefered communication and navigation frequencies b) sound like that destructive noise used on Star Trek to knock out the crew, c) create a concussion wave that would be all they could sense for quite awhile.
    Of course, a string of nuclear detonations would work. But then again, the cumulative affect on sealife.
  • I had a wrestling coach in college who asked his class who the three participants in a match are.

    Three?! There's only two, dangit -- the two wrestlers. But there are three he insist. Ok, I guess, the two wrestlers and the referee? No, the ref is just a scorekeeper.

    Finally, we all give up. The answer...the two wrestlers and the MAT. The mat can be friend or foe depending upon which wrestler is smart enough to use it to their advantage.

    I've taken that lesson to heart in recent years. In any battle there are three participants, one being the environment in which the battle occurs. Native americans fought invading settlers much more effectively than their numbers because they used the environment to their advantage. The settlers did the same against the English in the Revolutionary war.

    These experiments were nothing more than an attempt to turn the sea into a destructive force to use against the Japanese. Nothing really spectacular.

    For the people all concerned about giving whales headaches, BWHAHAAAHAAA... Think about it. We were at war. The intent in war is to KILL the enemy (or at least severly wound them so that they are a burden and help demoralize their compatriats (sp?)), so that you don't get killed yourself. If a few whales (hell, a lot of whales) must be sacrificed in that goal, then so be it.

    "Let the other guy [and his whale] die for his country." General George F. Patton.

  • Like painting our battleships neon pink with zebra stripes (!!) to "psyche-out" the enemy (whuh??).

    Actually, Dazzle paint was from the first world war, not the second. Here [aracnet.net] is an example of the Olympic, Titanic's sister, in Dazzle paint. The reason was nothing to do with psyching out the enemy, but to make it hard for the U boats to count the number of ships in a conviy, or identify the the individual ships.

    As far as I can tell, it was quite an effective technique in the pre-radar times, both the above picture, and the ones referenced on this page [teamanarchy.com] do make it hard to tell how many ships are in the picture. I can certainly imagine that with primative optics through a WW1 periscope it made a difference.

  • Some of the scientists on the Manhattan project didn't want to see the bomb used on Japanese cities; by that time they felt it was clear that Japan would soon surrender and they felt using the weapon was unnecessary. I think one actually quit his job, others simply wrote letters to the President.

    This wasn't an entirely pointless position. Nobody doubted that a U-238 bomb would go critical, but U-238 is *extremely* expensive to obtain. (It's something like 0.5% of all uranium, and you can't separate it by usual chemical processes.) In military terms, a few U-238 bombs were worthless because of the "what happens if we use them all and Japan still doesn't surrender?" factor. That's why Tokyo was 3rd or 4th on the list - if it was taken out first the surviving military commanders might not have felt they had the authority to surrender. But if the government refused to react to the first few bombings, it would seem unlikely that their position would change.

    Plutonium was easy to produce and extract in a reactor, but nobody knew if they could make a plutonium bomb go critical. Trinity was a test of a plutonium bomb, and when it denotated the US knew that it could drop a few bombs a week on Japan for as long as it took to force them to surrender.

    But had trinity failed, nuclear weapons would be remembered as a historical oddity - something that worked but was so expensive all you really did was get a *really* motivated enemy. Until some graduate student ran a good simulation on his computer.... (A lot of the value in the superpower 'codes' is being able to make a big bang with little plutonium, to make it easy to fit several of them on top of an ICBM. But if you don't mind using 10 pounds of flour for a cupcake...)

    BTW, I know that many more people died in the firebomb attacks than in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, but did you know that a senior US officer (can't remember his name) demanded that Kyoto be removed from the initial target list? He had spent time there before the war and understood that destroying it would be a grievous harm to the Japanese spirit. He won the argument, it was moved into the second wave with Tokyo.
  • Underwater nukes... barely made a wave large enough to wiggle those battleships...

    Don't confuse shallow- and deep-water waves. In shallow water the "wave" actually extends to the bottom and the excess energy is manifested as water piling up on the surface. In deep water the energy is held in moving hundreds or thousands of feet of water up a few feet.

    As I recall those underwater nukes were in deep water. (Many pacific atolls are actually the top of very high, very steep underwater mountains and act like "deep water".) And at least some of those tests were used to evaluate submarine survivability to nuclear torpedoes. Those surface ships only survived because there's very poor energy transfer across the water-air boundary.

    As for this idea... it was a very different time. Americans today tend to remember Pearl Harbor but not Nanking or the Korean occupation, nor the mothers jumping off of cliffs with their small children because the American forces were approaching. Anything to help reduce the inevitable (at least to the planners) million+ Allied deaths from the invasion would be welcomed.
  • Although my memory's a bit vague on this, I think I remember reading that Barnes-Wallis (inventor of the bouncing bomb) had a not-dissimilar idea that he eventually abandoned in favour of the bouncing bomb.

    Among the strangest WWII ideas I've heard of is the iceberg-carrier. (An article on which appeared in a UK paper about 6 months ago) Designed to provide air cover to the Atlantic Convoys it was a chunk of iceberg with a flattened top for use as an airbase (can't remember how it was going to be powered sadly).

    The thinking behind it was that it would be almost unsinkable as a couple of torpedos are not going to make much difference to a couple of million tons of ice. Apparently some small prototypes were built by a scientist working in London, but the project never got any further.

  • A covert Tsunami weapon is useless.

    The use, or threat of use, of a weapon of mass destruction is used primarily for its political impact, not its wanton ability to destroy. Observe the United States bringing imperial Japan to its knees with 2 nuclear devices, or India and Pakistan more recently seeking greater respect on the world stage with nuclear testing. The idea of a covert WMD is pointless, even for terrorist organizations, which would require state backing (and a consequent static target for reprisals) for such a large undertaking.

    The US, or its allies, would never use one.

    The United States (and the West in general), as the current leader atop the world economy and international politics, has the most to lose from the use of an indiscriminate weapon such as a Tsunami-causing weapon, even covertly, as global trade would be curtailed, not to mention the loss of international backing and support if the culprit was known.

    Given the alternative of a much less costly set of precision airstrikes, which could achieve the same effect to a given infrastructure in a short period of time, it's easy to see why there's zero interest in the Tsunami weapon currently.
  • ...during a war in which many, MANY military research projects ranging from the odd (siege engines), the truly bizarre (incendiary-carrying bats), to the occasionally practical (computers, radar, rockets, etc) were conducted.

    Presumably the target would have been the Japanese archipelago?

    That's gotta take a lot of energy, 'tho, to move that much water. And, if you only want the wave to go one way, say, rather than as an ever-growing circular wall of water...
  • Sounds 'bout right. I had thought about the possibility of using it against the Imperial Navy's carrier groups, but given the distances versus the speed of the waves it doesn't seem as much of an anti-fleet weapon as anti-coastline. 'sides, that late in the war, IIRC (could easily be wrong 'bout this; dates were never my strong point) the Imperial Navy had already sustained severe losses and forced on the defensive...

    I'd suspect WWII Japan had a significant part of its population at near sea-level on exposed coastlines. In addition, it was rather dependent upon its navy and associated facilities... They've also had losses due to tsunamis before, so the exact nature of an artificial tsunami might not have been immediately obvious.

    ...and in their history, legend has it that a large invasion fleet (don't recall whose; pity) sent against them was swept away by divine intervention through the weather. The "divine wind", or Kamikaze, had the (failed) purpose of keeping away a more modern invasion fleet; yes, were that to turn against them might have caused a shock...
  • Unfortunatly, with a nuclear device you have power to spare. The explosive power of even a smallish device quickly makes the argument of efficiency moot. Even if 90% of the energy from the explosion was wasted, you still have a HUGE amount going into the water. Assuming 90% loss, a 1M nuke would look like 100,000 tons of conventional explosive with 0% loss. That is far more explosive than could ever be practically placed.

    As for the 'wall of water' I mentioned; it was an actual test performed in the early days after WWII. They anchored a few captured Japanese ships and a pair of stipped Allied destroyers off Bikini Atoll, loaded with domestic animals as test subjects. The plane dropping the A-bomb missed its target by a huge margin, and only one of the ships was sunk because of the wave. (Another sank days later because of damage incurred).
  • This is not really news. In the 1950's, the US tested both submerged A-bombs and surface detonated H-bombs for efficacy against ships and submarines. If a small A-bomb detonated on the oceans surface can produce a thirty foot wall of water five miles from zero, imagine the devastating effect of a H-bomb several powers of magnitude larger. Thankfully, the experiments in New Zealand appear to have been conducted with conventional munition, and were just a 'proof-of-concept'.

    Just an observation: The world would be much safer if all nuclear weapons were required to run Win 95. If they even make it off the pad, they'll bluescreen before the target.
  • So a BIG tsunami could be created with just a modest amount of high explosives? And at a distance? The only way this could be done is for that small explosion to be placed at such a spot to create a secondary, much larger shock, which then creates the tsunami wave. Otherwise there is simply not enough energy. Also, the distance is crucial. A shock that creates a 20 m tsunami at 10 km from null will be only (at most) 1 dm high at 1000 km. If you set off the biggest hydrogen bomb there is (100 Mt) some kms below the sea you would get a substantial tsunami out to, say 1000 km, but coasts further away would hardly notice it. Only earthquakes and volcanic eruptions (and impacts) with energies far larger than the biggest nuke (100x - 1000x) produce tsunamis that are devastating across oceans. Of course lesser events, including nukes, can cause much destruction, albeit on a regional scale. There are two types of spots where you could, conceivably, produce substantial tsunamis with non-nukes. 1) Detonate in a submarine fault near the victim, precipitating an earthquake - and tsunami. Pro: Explosion signature may be cloaked by earthquake, avoiding suspicion of agression. Con: Unpredictable, level of stress in fault must be high to begin with. 2) Detonate in submarine scarp to create submarine landslide - and tsunami. Pro: Slopes are already unstable at many places. Con: Unpredictable, explosion signature harder to conceal. To sum it up, tsunamis could possibly be created using non-nuclear methods. They would however have to be effected relatively near the target, and are very unpredictable. /Dervak
  • Is this news for nerds?
    Or is it stuff that matters?

    Oh, wait, this calls for something new:

    Strikehot
    News for mercs. Stuff that shatters.

  • The reason the idea of a "tsunami bomb" was considered was basically because little was known about tsunamis in the 1940s. Tsunamis are generated by a vertical disturbance of the water column, with the chief perpetrators being undersea earthquakes (that cause vertical shifts in the sea floor), volcano eruptions and the recently popularized meteorite impact scenario.

    It would be extremely difficult to target such a thing since they are basically created by the equivalent of impulse or point sources and propagate in a circle around the point of origin. Those who think that shape charges could be used to target tsunamis should sit in a bathtub and attempt to target a surface gravity wave by poking their finger or dropping their rubber ducky in the water. You can push a whole lot of water in one direction, but that would be an advective process that would propagate not nearly as far as a wave.

    The damage done by tsunamis is due to their kinetic energy being transformed into potential energy when they near land. After generation, they travel at tremendous speeds through the ocean. The speed of propagation is basically SQRT(G*H) where G is the gravitational constant and H the depth of the water, i.e. hundreds of miles an hour in the deep ocean. Their surface signature, on the other hand, is lost in the noise of the other waves on the ocean surface.

    When they near land and the seafloor shallows, the hundreds of miles an hour worth of kinetic energy is transformed into a huge wall of water that, while moving much more slowly than before, still packs a hell of a wallop. Another key factor is the general variation of the seafloor topography as it shallows. Refraction and reflection processes can focus energy such that what would be a 5-10 foot wave on a flatly sloping beach could be several times higher. This is basically the same process that makes some beaches much better for surfing since the offshore topography focuses the wave energy.

    You could probably use an explosion to effectively generate a tsunami if the situation were just right, i.e. you have a seafloor configuration near your target favorable for refraction processes significantly increasing the size of your generated wave. Otherwise it would take one hell of a huge explosion to impart the same sort of energy you get from a massive seafloor shift or a large bolide impact, and that could end up doing as much damage to you as to your target.

    As to the suggestion that additional waves can be generated to cancel out a tsunami, ponder (for just a second, Pinky) how you can cancel out a tsunami that has reached the shore and become a huge wall of water. At that point it's no longer a wave since nonlinear processes have turned turned the tsunami into an advective process. And if you attempt to cancel it out while its still a wave in the deep sea the counter-wave and the original will certainly sum to zero at some point, and then continue on in opposite directions to wreak havoc.

    I'd recommend checking out the University of Washington's Tsunami [washington.edu] site for further theoretical and historical information. On a side note, many of the foundations of modern oceanography were laid by the research performed by Walter Munk and others during WWII. Most of the work involved wave forecasting such that the wave environment during certain invasions could be predicted sufficiently accurately to avoid overly large surf conditions.

  • Re:Thankfully obsolete (Score:3)

    by Demona ( 7994 ) on Monday September 27, 1999 @06:20AM (#1657523) Homepage
    I really wish people would stop using the terms "united states" or other country names as if these artificial nation-state creations were actual living, breathing, thinking entities. To say that so-and-so would never do something is A) false because people will do anything if pushed hard enough or given the proper motivation, and B) inaccurate because it is people who make decisions, not nation-states. All it takes is one flake in a position of power over others to push the button.

  • Think about it. . . . (Score:3)

    by Salgak1 ( 20136 ) <salgak@speakea s y .net> on Monday September 27, 1999 @04:21AM (#1657524) Homepage
    It's been said that amateurs study tactics and strategy, but professionals study logistics. This would be a case in point: a weapon aimed at a primary logistical target.

    A "tidal wave bomb", whether conventional or nuclear, could be used to devastate harbors. Why Harbors ??? Naval vessels, cargo vessels, warehouses, and trans-shipment points to road and rail routes. Often, as a bonus, you also get Petroleum refineries and/or Storage areas (known in the military as POL: Petroleum, Oil, and Lubricants) All your big logistical targets, covieniently placed in one large area. Until the advent of nuclear weapons, you couldn't take out an entire harbor area in one blow. Whereas a Tidal Wave COULD devastate an entire harbor area.

    Furthermore, if deployed by submarine, it could even be done covertly: after all, who's to say it wasn't a natural tsumami ??? AND, if used against the Japanese in WWII, could have been used for psychological operations as well: i.e. the ALLIES controlling the "Divine Wind". . .

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