Nukes in 1626? Beijing explosion created mushroom cloud, stripped everyone naked

Wow Op. Incredible story! I'm so in love with the dynastic era of China and it's many emperors and the myths and legends that have risen out of their rule, so many intriguing rulers. This story peaked my interest so high I had wiki running in the next tab searching up the names as they came up. Very interested in his son's backstory as well. All in all, I honestly can't help as I have next to no knowledge of nuclear explosives, but good luck on the discussion, somewhat liking it so far.

According to This Site
conventional explosives are used to initiate the nuclear reaction in an atom bomb.
So maybe they were playing with gun powder and uranium.......

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


Not knowledgeable to this topic. Just posting to say thanks for information and entertainment(yes learning is fun). One hell of a post! Sorry to be it. Keep it up!



Eta I like your idea Wrabbit. Doesn't explain the possible contamination from the "plague" though. Did they have a description of the symptoms of this "plague" OP?

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


cool story even cooler if they had nukes. but i hardly doubt it, i would lean more towards them using gun powder and maybe other materials, were talking about a society that is know for making some of the best fireworks, so it not like they are Unaccustomed to mixing weird powders together... someone probably found some "yellow cake" and said hey this wil make for pretty color and waahlaah bamo


ps i dont actually know if you can find yellow cake in nature but i know you can find the rocks to make it so they may have used some by accident or on purpose for a new effect / stregnth

ok i went and looked it up its totally possible

"Uranium is a naturally occurring, very heavy metal. One of the heaviest elements on the periodic table, it holds the symbol “U.” Natural uranium (U3O8) occurs in the earth’s crust as commonly as tin or zinc. The sandy, yellowish substance called yellowcake, the commodity uranium-mining companies produce, is the form natural uranium takes when extracted from ore."

reply to post by ~widowmaker~


first of all to obtain yellowcake you must first extract it from the ore..... as it states in your post
then you have to enrich that uranium further for it to become fissile (capable of sustaining a chain reaction)
its possible though unlikely that they were capable of extracting uranium from ore however it is utterly impossible that they were able to enrich uranium to a level capable of a sustained chain reaction
and though conventional explosives are used to initiate the chain reaction gunpowder is not nearly powerful enough to do so(as well as many other problems associated with using something like gunpowder)

www.livescience.com...
this will help explain the enrichment process

so no.....it is absolutely not possible
and it boggles the mind that people think creating a nuclear weapon could be so simple

reply to post by Flavian


Got a star from me, the OP clearly does not understand the complexity of creating the simplest nuclear explosion (not a dirty bomb). The part about melting uranium caused a nuclear explosion is laughable. It goes well beyond getting uranium, it has to go into processing as you indicate and it does not stop there there is a need for a good trigger explosive that simple TNT can't handle and used in a specific geometry and that only to get a simple nuclear blast, the technology for that clearly wasn't present in our past (I still dream in people finding lost advanced civilizations but there is no chance that humans entered into the nuclear field before Einstein).

For those interested on nuclear history take a look on the effort made by Argentina under the military dictatorship. A very interesting, even comic affair. Argentina and weapons of mass destruction. This also reminds me of the case that someone posted on ATS about the two dead men found in Basil wearing lead garments sometime ago, could there have been some link...

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


I think it's good you put so much effort into this thread. I applaud you for that. But I think you got so excited thinking about the nuke angle, that you jumped to conclusions that are not based on facts.

I am in fact an explosives expert.

1. What would lead you to believe that gunpowder can not generate a mushroom cloud?
The mushroom cloud is just the hot, low density gases rising quickly. It expands as it reaches higher altitudes, with cooler air rushing in to fill the space at the bottom. Creating the mushroom effect. This can be accomplished by virtually any type of conventional explosive. Including black powder.

2. A 13 ft. crater is nothing impressive.
It greatly depends on the composition of the ground. I have made craters bigger than that with less than 100 lbs. TNT equivalent of explosives.

3. The fireball.
Detonations have 3 phases or effects.
1. The thermal phase which is the fireball, is just super-heated gases
2. The overpressure phase, which is the "shock-wave' you see in videos of explosions.
3. The negative overpressure phase, which is the strongest, is the air rushing in to fill the void caused by the preceding phases, and would account for the clothing being stripped from people.
I assure you, black powder makes spectacular fireballs.

4. Eyewitnesses are the least reliable form of evidence for anything, as any detective can tell you. Being that this occurred 400 years ago, you can see the problem here.

My opinion, for what it's worth:

The simplest explanation is usually the correct one for a reason, because it usually is. A black powder explosion in a black powder factory could have easily caused this incident.

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


Awesome thread, thanks for telling the story so well, I was riveted. First thought I had going in was that it probably had something to do with explosives and alchemy. It was a really pleasant surprise to read your conclusion. I agree.

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


Lots of very interesting stuff. I still think it was a meteorite. I happened to be watching the side of a mountain in 1958 when there was a big boom and a tall mushroom cloud appeared. This one wasn't more than 200 feet tall, though. I thought for years it was a meteorite until 35 years later I lugged up into this extremely rocky mountain to take a look. The rocks there are 100-200 feet tall, vertical slabs that extend out from the mountain. You can walk outward on the tops of these slabs that are only about 10-15 feet wide, going straight down on each side.

This time I struggled along the base of these huge pillars of stone, realizing that the area was far too big to be finding any meteorites, but then the reason for the explosion became obvious. There are large colonies of bats that nest on the sides of these immense pillars. The bat manure runs down the sides of the cliffs and accumulates near the bottom. The explosion was surely due to a large amount of ammonium nitrate and/or methane that had ignited. So, mystery solved.

But this thing that blew up in China... did you know that meteorites reach speeds of 15,000-20,000 mph, and at that speed it doesn't take a very large mass to unleash incomprehensible quantities of energy. So, I stick to the meteorite theory. But thanks for the great info.

Originally posted by RavenSpeaks
According to This Site
conventional explosives are used to initiate the nuclear reaction in an atom bomb.
So maybe they were playing with gun powder and uranium.......

Except that uranium is enriched in gas centrifuges and gaseous diffusion, I don't think they had that back then. They were close weren't they?

science.jrank.org...

But cigar?

Enriched uranium is a type of uranium in which the percent composition of uranium-235 has been increased through the process of isotope separation. Natural uranium is 99.284% 238U isotope, with 235U only constituting about 0.711% of its weight. 235U is the only nuclide existing in nature (in any appreciable amount) that is fissile with thermal neutrons.[1]

....

There are currently two generic commercial methods employed internationally for enrichment: gaseous diffusion (referred to as first generation) and gas centrifuge (second generation) which consumes only 6% as much energy as gaseous diffusion. Later generation methods will become established because they will be more efficient in terms of the energy input for the same degree of enrichment and the next method of enrichment to be commercialized will be referred to as third generation. Some work is being done that would use nuclear resonance; however there is no reliable evidence that any nuclear resonance processes have been scaled up to production.
[edit]Diffusion techniques

en.wikipedia.org...

Fantastic post, thank you very much, great analysis too.

Chinese weapons of war were very advanced.

One small thing i would add, about meteors.

Small meteors can cause large areas of damage because of a sort of airburst effect, they explode before they hit the ground.

But it still doesn't mean a meteor was the culprit because, as you say, the crater i wrong.


QV.

Really nice read, but I would still go for gunpowder.

Thanks for the replies, everyone, particularly the ones that disagreed. I'll try to read all the replies.

RE they didn't have enough technical ability to make an atomic bomb: They could have got the technology from somewhere else. Could be extraterretsrials or Atlantis or whatever. The Ming Dynasty produced a lot of new inventions - 60% of the major inventions during that time period were Chinese - so they could have gone a tad even further, but in secret.

Now to get into reading!

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


It was an interesting thread. Wrong in its premise but interesting nevertheless.

How could Atlantis have assisted with technology? Given that Atlantis was most probably an allegorical entity (rather than a real place)......however, just suppose there was an Atlantis.......how did they help China with technology in 1626? That would mean that somehow the fabled / legendary place had somehow avoided all contact with the world at large for thousands of years (including being spotted by travellers) - a pretty nifty trick i am sure you will agree!

The factory exploded and created a mushroom cloud. As simple as that.

Every explosion does create a mushroom formed cloud, it's the law of physics.

Originally posted by RavenSpeaks
According to This Site
conventional explosives are used to initiate the nuclear reaction in an atom bomb.
So maybe they were playing with gun powder and uranium.......

There's a LOT more to it than just piling some black powder up around some chunks of uranium ore.

This is like saying - hey they made rockets, so maybe they had this really big firework that carried the guy to the Moon and back, after all, it's a rocket, right?

Originally posted by diqiushiwojia
Could be extraterretsrials or Atlantis or whatever.

Other than a total lack of materials, material science, power, proper tooling and pretty much an entire infrastructure that you'd need to do this, I could totally buy into secret knowledge from Mu.

There's too big a gap. If it happened at all, it was likely black powder all the way.

If there was a nuclear explosion in China 450 years ago, the question is: WHO DID THEY STEAL THE TECHNOLOGY FROM??

reply to post by diqiushiwojia


There was rumbling in one of the vids before that meteor strike in Russia! I remember hearing it!

Apparently you never saw this:

reply to post by PsykoOps


Apparently, the Internet doesn't have a lot of good sources about the battle, and to dig further, the library will be helpful.

reply to post by Wrabbit2000


reply to post by Foundryman


What if it was a 17-century version of the neutron bomb? (That would make more holes in the theory than it plugs, though it's worth thinking over.)

reply to post by Hijinx


Thanks for the interesting info! The area affected by the 1807 incident would have been 3.7% of the 1626 incident, but the weight of the gunpowder would be 2.8% (if my calculations are right). I don't know how the amount of gunpowder and the area affected are related, but that seems reasonable enough. However, you do need to consider the weird phenomena (rumbling earth, naked people etc.) that came with the incident.