Nukes, Nukes and More Nukes!

reply to post by Oneolddude

Well,FYI to all you young people.

Nukes have been detonated in FIVE U.S. states.

New Mexico,Nevada,Alaska,Colorado and Mississippi.

Think about that now.

I'm not the youngest, but I've thought about it. Now I'd like to ask you what you think about it. Maybe we came to the same conclusion.

So...basically, the "Cold War" was actually a hot nuclear war that went on for over 50 years. 40 nukes/year average.

In other words, even if 40 cities were nuked in 1 year, we could all go about our daily lives as if nothing ever happened?

We've all been living in the nuclear war they always scare us about. It's actually been going on under our noses but somehow, have given us all the popular impression that only a few bombs have been tested over the years.

Where are all the pro nuke guys?

I was being 'stoned' by them in this thread here on the very same forum, which contested the need to use atomic bombs on japan at the end of WWII.

Thread Here

Im going to see if the ATS avataars match up in these threads.. Makes for an interesting exercise

I don't mean to be a optimist in this situation here, but if more extensive testing (and demonstration) avoided the use of the bombs on Japan, I would've been all for it. Of course there is a limit to that as well in terms of long term ecological damage, but human lives saved is an important measure.

Extending on that logic.. Here's another way of looking at it..
Did all these tests actually prevent the powers from using these weapons on each other? Was this better than the human race finding out about the true destructive power a la Hiroshima/Nagasaki? Especially those MT yield bombs.. I shudder to think them being used in a live scenario..

If testing prevented actual use.. then the lesser evil is better?

Now one might argue... why even test? just lock it up in a closet and not touch it.
But then that would be inhuman.. note the difference.. not inhumane.. inhuman as 'human nature = curiosity'
Why do we test? Because we can and we want to know what happens.

Originally posted by harrytuttle
So...basically, the "Cold War" was actually a hot nuclear war that went on for over 50 years. 40 nukes/year average.

In other words, even if 40 cities were nuked in 1 year, we could all go about our daily lives as if nothing ever happened?

We've all been living in the nuclear war they always scare us about. It's actually been going on under our noses but somehow, have given us all the popular impression that only a few bombs have been tested over the years.

Human Lives?

well you can count on it that every detonation of an nuke will leave his traces in deep space
there strong radio signals are now at least visible in an circle of 65 lightyears of earth....
possible futher away if there are waves faster than light came free..
waves we are not able to detect now...

that means an potential danger for the future...:-(

aliens might think we are communicating with nucluair blasts and perhaps they send an message back....

[edit on 11-7-2010 by ressiv]

[edit on 11-7-2010 by ressiv]

This doesnt look good.. i hope that everything is all a dream.... who knows how humain will react to the truth............ cant believe more then 2000 nuke bomb was blasted on a little part of America only.

Originally posted by ConsciousTruth
Well at the risk of sounding ignorant I am going to say no freaking way. This is a lame video game conception with no credentials on the HD website link.

To me it seems unreal that this much display or stupidity with such a deadly weapon is used/tested this much.

Why would they test something this much?

No, it's quite real.

The issue with testing is pretty complex.

First point is that a lot of people have a sort of weird scaling problem with visualizing the size/power of a nuke compared to the Earth and the biosphere. Generally the direction it goes (due mostly to media) is that somehow a nuke will crack the crust, destroy the planet or whatnot. To scale, a nuke is squat compared to a planet. Hell, you can't even do real damage to the crust, and compared to the planet the crust is less than the skin on an apple. So popping a lot of nukes off isn't going to rupture the planet or throw it out of orbit or whatever.

Another facet of that is that things don't stay hideously radioactive forever as you are generally given to believe - you can stroll around ground zero at Trinity twice a year (you should go - it's worth doing). And the Japanese live in Hiroshima and Nagasaki - the residual radiation from the bombs is undetectable from background. Actually, that was true within about 5 years post-drop.

Something else is that there is no such thing as no radiation. If nuclear weapons and reactors had never been invented by man, you'd still get a minimum dose per year, some more, some less, depending on altitude and locale. You can't eat a banana without eating radioisotopes. You're designed to deal with some level of radiation. In fact, if you are challenged with a dose of low level radiation, your body will react by activating a lot of DNA repair enzymes and your immune system will go on the hunt for cancer. If you look at statistics from, say, the Taiwanese building fiasco, the inhabitants of the building had something like a 96% less incidence of cancer than the population, but there are a lot of confounders in the data that prevent you from really getting a lot of good info from it.

Then, of course, you've got the weapon design facet of it. The design of a nuke is pretty damned complex. It evolved a lot between Nagasaki and the late '60s. The simulation tools are only so good - you can know that you have a pretty decent chance to get a yield, but you're not really sure. The only way to know if a design will work is to test the thing, more than once.

On top of which, besides just having basic strategic nukes, you likely want a collection of variants you can use as tactical weapons. The more oddball the design, the more you're going to have to test it since your simulation tools, shaky as they are, are going to be more likely to diverge from correct solutions the more wonky your design goals are.

Thus if you want, say, a sub kT weapon that you can wag around in an ALICE, you'll likely want to test it. Same for a torp warhead - they can only be so big and the aspect ratio is bad since a torpedo is long and thin, so that's a testing. Same for a howitzer shell design, same for enhanced radiation weapons, same for nuclear shaped charges, same for those odd-arse Navy designs with oblate primaries, on and on. Any big deviation from the few designs you have good data on, and you are in uncharted territory. Now multiply that by France, Great Britain, the USSR, the US, India etc and you've got a lot of shots. Actually, I'm really surprised there were as few as there were.

There were also a lot of changing requirements in the early days for just your basic strategic weapons. The first half-dozen designs were pretty basic. They didn't give a rat's arse for efficiency, maintainability, nor for safety, nor security. They just wanted to churn out warheads for numbers. After that phase was over, there was a lot of 'wow, this sucks to maintain and it takes a lot of material that's just contaminating the downwind area something awful', and so you got designs with better explosives, better initiators, and boost systems. You have to test all that crap - it was a BIG divergence from the original weapon. Then they had a hard requirement for weapons that were resistant to fratricide, and that got rid of a number of simpler designs. Then you had a hard requirement for weapons with inherently secure designs, that was mostly a change in arming and firing so it probably wasn't tested.

Sandia is designing a new set of weapons that are 'no maintenance' that are a very large design change, basically the whole thing is new, so there is a real need to test somehow, our simulators are better but still imperfect, thus do you have NIF and ORION trying to garner data on the secondary side. Sandia and LANL do dummy load tests on the primary side, they're pretty accurate. Basically, you build a device primary with depleted uranium and shoot it in a special test fixture that can do high speed x-ray imaging - it takes tens of thousands of "pictures" during the few milliseconds of the shot, and the depleted uranium acts enough like the 'real thing' that you can get a really good idea of how it's working in terms of compression and those pesky Munroe jet failures. But the thing still needs testing as a unit when they get done, and badly.

So, yes, there is a need for a lot of testing.

[edit on 11-7-2010 by Bedlam]

Originally posted by Exuberant1

Originally posted by blackrabbit1

How does all this work with predictions of nuclear winters etc?

It shows it to be a load of hype.

Nuclear winter is just propaganda.

Interestingly enough, if you look at the temperature graphs, you see a definite cooling effect during the years that aboveground testing was going on. It may have obscured the effects of 'global warming' during that period.

It's been kicked around that all we need to do to slow or temporarily reverse warming is to go back to doing aboveground testing.

I can't think of anything that represents the total opposite of what nature stands for than what I've just seen in the vid.


No wonder the planet is dying. Didn't they want to nuke the moon as well?
No way Jose that humans are responsible for these decisions.

You and I would never do this. We would find a much better place to spend those trillions. Maybe creating something instead of destroying would help bring the balance back. "Bring it back!"

Who are they flexing for? Each other or something more sinister. And remember all the incidents of ufo's tampering with the 'readiness' of various nuclear armaments? Are we but a bunch of kids behind a fence watching others play a strange game?

I can think of many different sentences with the words mushroom and cloud that don't involve death.

May their ultimate path be illuminated by a nice lime green glow.

reply to post by Bedlam


There is no need for testing whatsoever.

The idea was that the A bomb was used as a source of fear to maintain peace.
Ironically the one to set this rule has been the one that used them and is the aggressor in several conflicts. Conflicts that would not even exist if it wasn't for their own meddling in the past.

There is no good reason for anyone not to condemn this behavior, let alone be okey with it. These weapons kill innocent people and producing them should be punishable by death.

A murderer is put in jail or even executed, but a mass murdering country gets away with it.

Mankind does not deserved to be here with that attitude. We should end it.

I suggest to fire all the nukes that exist and end the pathetic excuse that that is called human. An estimate of around 3 billion people think they will go to heaven and the other 3 billion live in a living hell anyway.

The earth will recover with the upside that it finally is free of the cancer that is man.

Originally posted by Sinter Klaas

Mankind does not deserved to be here with that attitude. We should end it.

I suggest to fire all the nukes that exist and end the pathetic excuse that that is called human. An estimate of around 3 billion people think they will go to heaven and the other 3 billion live in a living hell anyway.

The earth will recover with the upside that it finally is free of the cancer that is man.

So...emo.

Pain, pain, all is pain. I think I'll go sing "I am a Rock" in the closet in a little sad voice.

and a rock feels no pain...and an island...never cries (sniff)

reply to post by Bedlam


Ohh....

I 'm not in pain. I'm actually a very happy guy.

I just think to many people do things they should not do.

Some things are an inevitability.

Somewhere in the late '30s to early '40s it got to be nuclear power time. At that point, it came down to who was going to have it first.

Personally, I'd prefer us to, say, Stalin's USSR, or at least a parity sort of thing. But it's not like it was going to go away. Once you've discovered balrogs, sooner or later someone's gonna dig 'em up.

reply to post by Bedlam


I think I agree on your preference. You are also very right. Pandora's box has been opened. Lets hope, hope will turn enough people so the box can be closed some day.

Wow this video makes it a lot more believable that we have created enough nukes to destroy the human race 9x over.

Did anyone notice that almost all the ones in the US was in California? Makes me wonder if all that nuking has something to do with all thoes earth quakes. Hmmmmm Any thoughts?

Originally posted by Ghrwilson
Did anyone notice that almost all the ones in the US was in California? Makes me wonder if all that nuking has something to do with all thoes earth quakes. Hmmmmm Any thoughts?

LANL, Sandia, desert.

That's why a lot of stuff goes on out west. All your nuke wizards are there (for the most part) and you've got a lot of land the gubmint owns that is pretty much worthless, and a low population density down wind.

And no, I don't think it's got squat to do with it. How many earthquakes were there in that area prior to the 1940's? What causes earthquakes are geoseismic faults.

Wow, just wow.
I had no idea that there had been so many tests worldwide. Over 2000 and half of those were American.

S&F for you. It's a refreshing change to read something on ATS lately that is actually informative and interesting instead of the usual daily EOTWAWKI prediction or the daily "alien disclosure" prediction.

Good post OP.

This gives me a good idea why they detionated them where they were.

If you calculate where they were set off, along with ongoing wind currents, you can actually tell that the US was more careful of the population being exposed to the radiation levels than Russia. They blew some off in the center of their country. Doesn't seem very safe.

One question to the OP: Does this account for the "Nuclear" explosion at the Ruskies Plant? There was more that just one bomb inside their country.

[edit on 11-7-2010 by Benchwarmer]

This makes me wonder where all these nukes are kept. Makes you want to know whats under your back yard.