
This Is What a Nuclear Bomb Looks Like - johnny313
https://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/what-a-nuclear-attack-in-new-york-would-look-like.html
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toomanybeersies
From my observation, most of the USA is woefully unprepared for major
disasters, natural or man made. Apart from a certain segment of the population
with large gun caches and a year's worth of food stockpiled, most people don't
have any contingency plan or emergency supplies.

Every time there is a hurricane, it seems that it catches everyone unaware.
Same for snowstorms. When California gets hit by a big earthquake (Magnitude 8
level), I can guarantee it's going to be complete chaos, despite the fact that
we know it's going to happen.

Everybody should have at _minimum_ 3 days of sealed food and water at home.
That's how long it will take emergency services to reach you in case of a
major disaster.

Back on to the topic of nuclear explosions. Most people have the misconception
that they sound like a low rumbling that goes on for some time. In reality,
they are a sharp crack, not unlike a conventional explosion, just a lot
louder, as this video demonstrates:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwkTYeukE4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YKwkTYeukE4)

~~~
twblalock
I remember the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in California. It was not chaotic. The
TV news was still on, emergency services were doing their jobs, the tap water
never stopped working, the power was back on the next morning, and there was
not much if any of looting or similar crimes. Fewer than 100 people died, in
an area with a population of more than 6 million people at the time.

It's also worth noting that a magnitude 8 earthquake in one part of California
will have little effect in other parts. It's a pretty big place. LA could be
totally destroyed and we would barely feel it here in San Jose.

I don't take your prediction of "complete chaos" very seriously.

~~~
nostrademons
To be fair, Loma Prieta was only a 6.9 on the Richter scale. A magnitude 8.0
quake would be > 10x stronger, slightly bigger than the 1906 SF earthquake.

I think you're right that the effect on California would be pretty ho-hum,
though. California prepares for earthquakes; most of the building codes are
designed for > magnitude 8 quakes, major companies headquartered here have
earthquake drills to maintain continuity of business, schools teach kids what
to do in an earthquake, and I'd bet that first responders and hospitals all
drill for what to do. The electricity & Internet would likely go down, because
PG&E and Comcast seemingly can't keep them running even in the absence of
natural disasters. And transportation would be a problem - even the mudslides
last winter managed to take out all the roads over the mountain and large
sections of highway 1. But I don't think you'd see large-scale chaos or civil
disorder, at least in Northern California.

No idea whether you'd see the same in SoCal; aside from them expecting a
larger quake, sooner, than the Bay Area, they haven't had one since before
urbanization. I suspect their building codes are the same, though, so unless
it's Santa Ana wind season they'll probably do okay.

~~~
rwh86
s/Richter scale/moment magnitude scale/

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moment_magnitude_scale)

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Pfhreak
What value is there in an article like this? To make me more afraid? To
indulge an author who always wanted to write a spy thriller?

~~~
mikeash
I think it's valuable to make you and everyone else more afraid. I'm
constantly astounded at how little people care about the very real possibility
of nuclear war. It was on everyone's mind when I was growing up in the 80s,
but when the USSR collapsed, the concern evaporated even though the arsenals
very much did not.

Avoiding nuclear war should be one of our top priorities (and was one of the
major factors deciding my 2016 vote), yet it's hardly ever discussed. It's a
bit crazy.

~~~
nostrademons
What can you actually do to avoid a nuclear war, though? I mean, aside from
not giving the big red button to a guy who brags about the size of his big red
button, there's not much. And I doubt your vote did any more good in that
regard than my vote did. (There's probably a sizable fraction of America who
actively _wants_ nuclear war because we have more nukes than anyone else. The
idea that your loss might not actually be my gain doesn't seem to compute for
a lot of people.)

~~~
acjohnson55
> [...] not giving the big red button to a guy who brags about the size of his
> big red button [...]

That's your answer. By no means are Trump voters illiterate rubes. Their
median income exceeded Hillary voters. People need to be reminded the stakes.

~~~
LyndsySimon
MAD is premised upon both actors believing that the other would respond in
kind. In that light, Trump's boasting is... well, logical.

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ruytlm
If you want to play around with locations and yields to see the levels of
damage somewhere else, try NUKEMAP:
[http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/](http://nuclearsecrecy.com/nukemap/)

Scary stuff.

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Latteland
Good refresher on how horrible and pointless these are. We have so much
nuclear capabilities in the US, with submarines especially, but also airbases
around the world and missiles too that we can easily withstand an attack. For
that reason, we should make it our policy that we will never launch a first
strike. The reason is that there have been many many near misses. We know that
China and Russia also have lots of capabilities for return strikes - yet even
with this knowledge of mutual assured destruction we have had near accidents
and they must have also. By saying we won't make a first strike we really lose
nothing, but this should reduce that chance that a mistake could lead to
launches. Russia and China should do the same.

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jonhendry18
"Winds of 40 mph would shatter windows facing the blast and _send construction
cranes careening into the streets below._ "

Construction cranes falling in NYC, otherwise known as "Tuesday"

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clircle
I am reading _Command and Control_ right now, a book partly about a nuclear
accident on American soil, but mostly about nuclear strategy and history up to
2000s. The writing style is not exactly beautiful, but I highly recommend to
anyone interested in the theory and history of nuclear warfare. I am certainly
learning a lot about the Cold War.

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dingaling
What a misleading title. I was expecting something like:

[http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/04/22/bomb-
silhouettes/](http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2016/04/22/bomb-silhouettes/)

As in, how the physics packages of the weapons actually look.

We actually know very little about that.

~~~
LyndsySimon
There was quite a bit of discussion about this photo[0] when it was released
by North Korea. If I recall, the general consensus was that it wasn't possible
to determine if the device was real (or a mockup of a real device), but it was
apparent that the design was reasonable and that it wasn't an obvious fake.

0: [https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-
static/static/2016-03/8/22...](https://img.buzzfeed.com/buzzfeed-
static/static/2016-03/8/22/enhanced/webdr01/enhanced-17456-1457494753-2.jpg?downsize=715:*&output-
format=auto&output-quality=auto)

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duxup
>About half of potential radiation exposure occurs within the first hour, and
80 percent occurs within the first day.

I was not aware of that, interesting.

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jadedhacker
I suddenly feel like I'm back in the Bush administration. Can we get our
permanent code orange alerts back?

The biggest threats to nuclear peace at the moment are India/Pakistan, Israel,
the United States, and Russia. I'd like to emphasize that the US is the
biggest threat to world peace of all of the above, though a general nuclear
exchange between Pakistan and India isn't implausible.

Don't let the media distract you from the real story. It is the ambitions of
nation states and their imperial capitalist backers that are the threat to
civilized life on Earth.

You can watch Noam Chomsky and Daniel Ellsburg discuss the prospect of Nuclear
War here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imXAiv53_o8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imXAiv53_o8)

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themagician
What’s scary about this is that it’s probably just a matter of time.

~~~
booleandilemma
The part that saddens me the most is that real security checks, not the
security theater which we have now (cops rummaging through backpacks), will
only be implemented after something really devastating happens.

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RantyDave
What a load of bollocks. You don't just go to the shop and pick up a few kilos
of Uranium. Why do you think everyone made such a big deal about Iran refining
their own?

Second, atomic weapons fired at ground level are missing the point. It
_shines_ energy so if you want it to affect things it needs to shine on them -
like the sun does, in the sky.

~~~
detaro
> _Second, atomic weapons fired at ground level are missing the point._

True, a ground burst isn't the most efficient for direct damage. In exchange,
it means lots of fallout, since it throws radioactive material in the air,
spreading effect around a larger area, and making sure the area is
contaminated for a long time. Since we aren't exactly prepared to keep large
areas of citizens in shelters for days, that's bad.

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mgarfias
How does a 10kt weapon in nyc make a deeper crater (50’ according to the
article) than a 22kt weapon in New Mexico (5’).

~~~
zaarn
Airburst vs Ground Device.

Airburst detonation, even 30 m above ground as in New Mexico, will distribute
the explosion energy much more evenly and the epicenter will have much less
impact.

Ground devices deliver a shitload of energy into the ground below.

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njarboe
One might wonder if the US, Russia, and China don't already have nuclear
weapons under their control on foreign soil. Seems physically easy and only
politically difficult. Would the US announce the discovery of such a hidden
weapon if they found one in the US? I doubt it.

~~~
jonhendry18
I assume you mean "without permission or knowledge of the host country".

The US has bunkers of nuclear weapons in Belgium, Netherlands, Germany, Italy,
and Turkey.

Apparently the US had nuclear weapons in Japan until 1972.

~~~
jadedhacker
This is called our "Extended Deterrence". We also had nukes in South Korea for
some time. Some of our NATO allies of course have their own weapons (UK,
France).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea_and_weapons_of_mas...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Korea_and_weapons_of_mass_destruction)

EDIT: An interesting point about the history of extended deterrence is that
the US put nukes in Turkey and that precipitated the Cuban Missile crisis as
the Soviets felt they needed parity. Turkey is in the same ballpark range from
Moscow as Cuba is from Washington D.C. This history is not often told to make
it seem as though Washington was responding to some kind of unprovoked
aggression.

[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-
rea...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/01/the-real-cuban-
missile-crisis/309190/)

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ggm
"gadget" by Nicholas Freeling. (1977)

[https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gadget.html?id=DrMOA...](https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gadget.html?id=DrMOAAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y&hl=en)

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valenciarose
Yeah, we were also told it’s what rape would look like. Instead, rape looks a
lot more like our teachers, bosses, or husbands.

When a terrorist detonates a nuclear weapon in the U.S., the bomb is likely to
have been made on American soil by Americans.

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petermcneeley
Why hasnt this happened? Meritocratic societies are immune. Anyone capable of
participating is not disenfranchised in society as they would need to have
high IQ and education to initiate such attack.

~~~
smacktoward
_> The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Mohamed Atta, was an architectural
engineer. Khalid Sheikh Mohamed got his degree in mechanical engineering. Two
of the three founders of Lashkar-e-Taibi, the group believed to be behind the
Mumbai attacks, were professors at the University of Engineering and
Technology in Lahore..._

 _> A paper (PDF) released this summer by two sociologists, Diego Gambetta and
Steffen Hertog, adds empirical evidence to this observation. The pair looked
at more than 400 radical Islamic terrorists from more than 30 nations in the
Middle East and Africa born mostly between the 1950s and 1970s. Earlier
studies had shown that terrorists tend to be wealthier and better-educated
than their countrymen, but Gambetta and Hertog found that engineers, in
particular, were three to four times more likely to become violent terrorists
than their peers in finance, medicine or the sciences. The next most
radicalizing graduate degree, in a distant second, was Islamic Studies._

(Source:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/200...](http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2009/12/buildabomber.html))

~~~
chopin
This may be related to the countries where these people come from. This was on
HN a while ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16411227).
On a broader scale less privileged people may pursue a career in STEM in these
countries.

