> In 1960, the computer at... NORAD... warned, with 99.9-per-cent certainty, that the Soviets had just launched a full-scale missile attack against North America... They later discovered that the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System at Thule Airbase, in Greenland, had interpreted the moon rising over Norway as a missile attack from Siberia.
This is why numbers shouldn't be reported with too many significant figures. I doubt the engineers thought the reports could be %99.9 certain, given that they're extrapolated from noisy sensors, networked across huge distances and that the opponent is adversarial (actively trying to avoid detection).
Percentages can cause a false sense of certainty too; as Leonard Mlodinow points out in The Drunkard's Walk about changing wine ratings from out-of-10 to percentages. We might be quite sure that an 8/10 compares favourably to a 7/10 but not to a 9/10; we can't say the same about an %82 with an %83 and an %81.
If you're forced to report percentages, or tenths of a percent, write the estimated error alongside. Raw numbers like "%99.9" have an implied "+/- %0.05" afterwards.
And that, ladies and gentlement, is why Die Hard 4.0 contains too many many significant figures.
In which case can you define what an error interval on a probability estimate means? :)
I think probabilities can either be well calibrated or not. (Which then of course begs the question of how you define being well calibrated for probabilities of events that happen very rarely). An error interval does not seem to make too much sense.
Put it that way and it sounds like 99.9999% is just an excessively precise version of 99%. Really it's the difference between .01 and .000001. It's just an expression of the order of magnitude: one in a hundred, a thousand, a million.
The article claims that a nine-megaton blast would wipe out "most of the state of Arkansas". Wikipedia claims the lethal radius on a bomb of that size is about 20 miles for thermal effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B53_nuclear_bomb#Effects ), which is around 2% of the area of Arkansas; other effects are described as having an even smaller radius.
I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct.
Fall-out effects from such a large & dirty H-bomb detonated at ground level would have been pretty bad - you wouldn't want to be downwind of such an event.
[Edit 1]
Actually, if you consider the indirect effects of the use of such a weapon - particularly the large number of refugees fleeing contaminated areas, huge numbers of injured etc. while such a detonation wouldn't destroy an entire state it would probably reduce it to complete chaos.
e.g. The UK government estimated in the 1950s that three H-bombs would be all it would take to destroy the UK as a functioning society - the UK ambassador in Moscow even had a drunken debate with Kruschev on this point - suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill...
[Edit 2]
The UK government was always pretty gloomy/realistic about the likely impact of a nuclear war on the UK - basically even in fairly optimistic scenarios such as the Square Leg exercise used as the basis for Threads were absolutely awful. A real attack would have been far worse that the one shown in Threads, if anyone can conceive of that.
>> suggesting that the hundreds of weapons the Soviets had pointing at the UK were complete overkill...
As Schlosser says in his book - because of the lack of coordination between the Air Force, Army, US Navy and Missile Forces, at one point there was something like 400(sorry if I remembered the number wrong,but it was in hundreds) nuclear rockets aimed at Moscow, many of them with multi-megaton payload. If they were launched, Moscow wouldn't be just destroyed - the entire area would be turned into the biggest crater on earth.
A point that bears repeating is that this level of overkill was actually counterproductive. One way of disabling a high efficiency nuclear device is to blast the thing with neutrons (causing a premature and incomplete fission reaction in the core of the weapon). This was actually how the Sprint ABM system was intended to destroy its targets:
Now picture the skies over Moscow with ~400 warheads coming in, most of them having been launched in a coordinated wave by Minuteman, Titan, or MX missiles within the space of a few minutes: it turns out that the prompt neutron pulse, blast, EMP, or thermal effects from one incoming warhead can disrupt another if it arrives within 10 seconds of the first. This is termed nuclear fratricide:
One explanation of the massive overkill that the US had for a lot of the Cold War came down, essentially, to badly stated requirements.
Apparently, the US military were tasked with destroying 50% of the socialist world's industrial capacity - which you could do by destroying 50% of the factories completely or 100% of the factories by at least 50%. However, if you attack say a shoe factory (the example given) with an H-bomb aiming to achieve at least 50% destruction you do actually get 100% destruction. So all factories were targeted.
NB I used the phrase "socialist world" as, at least until well into the 60s, the SIOP aimed to destroy everyone even vaguely left of center whether they were actually allies of the Soviets or not (e.g. China, Albania, Yugoslavia etc.).
Pretty sure I read this in "The Bomb - A Life" by Gerard DeGroot, but I could well be wrong!
Maybe, but another important reason for overkill is that you couldn't be sure that all payloads would actually reach their destination. In the nuclear-bomber era this was especially the case - IIRC the last book I read on LeMay suggested that planners assumed around 90% of the planes would be shot down far away from their intended targets. The missile era obliterated that particular dynamic, but replaced it with a threat against second-strike capability from your enemy's ICBMs.
Most of the politics at that time wildly overestimated the capabilities of the Soviets in public (hence the infamous bomber and missile gaps) while internally having pretty accurate and poor estimates of their capabilities - LeMay at one point expected that the SIOP could be implemented with pretty low levels of casualties.
Air defence systems back them were really pretty poor - e.g. the infamous case where the entire US air defence system couldn't stop UK strategic bombers taking out major us cities in an exercise (which was kept quiet for decades due to the embarrassment it caused).
"It appears that two weapons targeted on a silo must arrive at least 10 s apart to avoid fratricidal fireball effects, and less than 1 min or more than 1 h apart to avoid fratricidal nuclear dust cloud effects."
Anyone for Missile Defense with a 50-100Mt Tsar bomba?
A primary reason for the generally larger, and in some cases, insanely large throw-weights of Soviet nuclear missiles was their much less accurate targeting and guidance systems.
If you can land a nuke, or even a conventional warhead, directly on whatever it is you're trying to make a was, your required explosive yield falls dramatically.
Blast radius and damage increases with the cube of yield, so if you're half as accurate, you need 8x the blast, generally, for effective damage.
Turns out that with extremely high precision warhead delivery, the US can dispense with nuclear weapons even for tasks such as destroying deeply buried and reinforced bunkers (command and control, or missile launch).
On the one hand this makes nuclear Armageddon that much less likely. On the other it makes use of highly advanced weaponry less objectionable.
Which way the risk needle ultimately swings given that calculus is an interesting question.
I remember the figure of 400 as well - don't know if that included UK weapons as well (e.g. the Chevaline upgrade to Polaris was mainly about defeating the ABM defenses around Moscow).
NB An interesting article by Charlie Stross on the relationship between the US and the UK's "independent" deterrent:
I don't think anyone knows what would happen to an area after 400 detonations.
My (wild) guess is that you'd get a blob of extremely hot rock melting its way down through the crust and enough fallout to sterilise the Northern hemisphere.
So kind of a dumb idea from a strategic point of view.
It is, but that's the problem - Air Force, Army,Navy and SAC controlled their own missiles and apart from the fact that they would all launch theirs if they got an order from the president, they didn't coordinate when it came to which targets each one of them would hit. So the Air Force might have had a plan to hit 100 points around Moscow, and so did the Army,and so did the Navy,and so did the SAC. So at the moment of launch 400 rockets would be hitting the same spot,because the attack would not be coordinated.
The risks of having an uncoordinated attack were known pretty early on - e.g. having bombers blowing each other up, bombers destroyed by missile attacks etc. That's why there was the SIOP:
Another technical mistake in the New Yorker article: it implies that since the missle was armed, the fire could have produced a megaton-sized blast. Not true: the component that undergoes fission in all US nukes designed after 1945 is spherical, and for the component to release significant amounts of energy, the sphere has to be compressed by a very precisely-timed combination of about 20 explosions of conventional explosives (TNT or such). In fact, a new kind of electronic device needed to be invented by the Manhattan Project to meet the precise timing demands.
So, although it is possible for the fire to ignite the conventional explosives, it would almost certainly have not done so in precisely the way needed to activate the atomic components of the bomb -- at least that is what I have read somewhere. (Sorry, I do not remember where -- maybe Carey Sublette's Nuclear Weapons FAQ.)
The worst thing that could realistically have happened is that the fire and a conventional explosion would have spread the radioactive components of the bomb (particularly, plutonium) into the environment, in the manner of a dirty bomb.
Your comment assumes that the weapon was one-point safe, which was not true for all US devices. I cannot remember the source but apparently for many years (through at least the 80's, I believe) many US weapons could have produced a yield if subjected to a fire.
Suppose the trigger device providing the precise timing could misbehave at high temperatures. Or, in the same source I mentioned earlier, it was disclosed that there were wiring paths which could have melted together in a fire and cause the weapon to fire.
Castle Bravo [1], [2] was a 15Mt yield set off on Bikini Atoll, notable because it was predicted to be 6Mt but was almost 2.5x that. Considering how much of the Bikini Atoll is left ([3], with pin on the location of detonation) and that the command centre for Castle was on the Atoll, I'd say that Arkansas is ok.
You could live there, it just isn't a very good place to live anymore. You would need to fly in your own food and water, and you'll still be getting irradiated, but we're talking "probably get cancer one day" irradiated, not "die of radiation sickness" irradiated.
Bikini Atoll was also worse than this hypothetical Arkansas scenario in two ways:
1) The soil there is potassium poor, causing local plants to more readily take in radioactive cesium.
If by "wipe out" the author meant create a lot of casualties and do immense property damage and by "most of the state" the author was talking about population and infrastructure value and not surface area, it's a very defensible statement. The central part of the state is pretty densely populated and that bomb is large.
edit: for starters consider that in a state of three million people, 725k are in Little Rock, which is only 116 square miles. Then read the specs on that bomb you linked to again.
>I suspect, but cannot prove, the wikipedia number is more likely to be correct.
The Wikipedia number is not correct, because even a single blast has long term consequences, and in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant than the initial damage.
Even if the blast was just one a of a handful, survivors would have to contend with fallout from other detonations, followed by nuclear winter, followed by years of famine, mutation, cancer, and other diseases.
In a full scale war, nukes are targeted at nuke power plants, so there would be even more fallout - enough to sterilise many parts of the US.
Initial casualties would be a small percentage of the eventual total.
Even a limited exchange in a distant part of the world would have global consequences. See e.g.
> "in a full scale war, the consequences are more significant"
The specific point being discussed was a local disaster -- a 9 megaton bomb which was damaged by somebody dropping a tool on it -- not an all-out war scenario.
Which is why I responded the way I did. In that scenario, I don't see any realistic case in which the entire state of Arkansas would be "wiped out". Possibly fallout would have rendered a fraction of the state uninhabitable for several weeks, and possibly some long-term effects would render a smaller fraction of the state uninhabitable for much longer, but the whole state "wiped out" is just sloppy journalism.
No, see the answer from aeturnum: use the online calculator, enable falout. You'll have to zoom out the map: the area of the effects is approximately as big as the state.
I did in fact already run this scenario. The fallout area is large if you set the threshold low enough. But from what I understand, the largest rings do not render the area uninhabitable by any means. Perhaps the smallest inner ring does. Fallout is also generally a short-term effect -- weeks, not decades.
Also be aware that fallout from an underground blast (as in a silo) is going to spread much differently from fallout from an airburst.
Contrary to what you assume, the fallout increases in the underground burst compared to the burst in the air as the surface is reached see: http://fas.org/nuke/intro/nuke/effects.htm
I'm not trying to assume. I'm trying to research. I read that page, and several others. From what I understand, the local fallout (ie, within a few mile radius) is much higher in subsurface bursts, but the longer-range fallout is substantially less.
Thus, I am unconvinced by the argument that the longer-range fallout would "wipe out" something the size of Arkansas.
> Mathias Rust had flown a rented Cessna, an airplane about the size of a Piper Cub, from Helsinki to Moscow and landed it a hundred yards from Red Square
Are there people that know how big a Cub is, but don't know how big a Cessna is?
I had to look up what a Piper Cub was, whereas I believe almost everyone knows what a Cessna looks like. It's only the most common air plane ever built.
I read "Command and Control" on vacation this summer and I highly recommend it. It interweaves jaw-dropping nuclear weapon disasters from the whole nuclear age with a detailed account of one particular incident. It's astonishing how close we've come to accidental nuclear detonation (and then what happens?). That's really the point of the book: it's a matter of when, not if.
It makes a great read. The interleaving of the Titan accident and the rest of the story is leads to a disjointed structure though, making it a bit hard to follow.
It seems quite possible that we'll blow ourselves up by accident.
Nuclear bomb security may have be less advanced than we were lead on to believe. For example British nuclear bombs were armed by turning a bicycle lock key: "British nukes were protected by bike locks" - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7097101.stm .
If one puted that in a movie plot I think few would believe it.
Is much the same now, the UK doesn't have launch codes and operates the whole thing as a sort of dead-man's switch, apparently partly based on if the Today program has been broadcast on Radio 4.
Is much the same now, the UK doesn't have launch codes and operates the whole thing as a sort of dead-man's switch, apparently partly based on if the Today program has been broadcast on Radio 4.
Are you sure you're not confusing that with nuclear submarine commanders checking that BBC Radio 4's still broadcasting as part of their "is the country still there" checks?
According to Peter Hennessy's book The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War, 1945 to 1970, the process by which a Trident submarine commander would determine if the British government continues to function includes... establishing whether BBC Radio 4 continues broadcasting
Not really a confusion: if the letter of last resort (sealed orders to be opened in the event the Government is destroyed) says "launch the nukes", you do have a sort of dead man's switch, assuming the sub's captain follows the orders.
Not really a confusion: if the letter of last resort (sealed orders to be opened in the event the Government is destroyed) says "launch the nukes", you do have a sort of dead man's switch, assuming the sub's captain follows the orders
I've always understood "dead man's switch" to literally mean something operating without human intervention. Probably explains the confusion!
That said, the options available to the commander do leave some room for interpretation:
- retaliate with nuclear weapons;
- not retaliate with nuclear weapons;
- use his own judgement; or
- place the submarine under allied country command - if possible
"I've always understood "dead man's switch" to literally mean something operating without human intervention.... That said, the options available to the commander do leave some room for interpretation".
Yeah, hence my gutless hedging with "sort of".
Maybe "failsafe" would be a better term, like in the film of that name, where the bombers are instructed to ignore any order to abort once they pass a particular point. (Actually, "fail-deadly" would be more accurate: why wasn't the film called that?)
Those options were not given to the sub commander, they were options given to the Prime Minister to include in the letter. Which of them went into the letter, and under what circumstances the Prime Minister advised they be followed was a matter for the Prime Minister to decide.
I also find it interesting that the effectiveness of these orders rely purely on the captain's sense of duty, as (assuming the system has worked correctly) the only other person who knows what they say is dead.
It wouldn't be opened by the captain alone. I don't know about the US procedures, but in the Soviet army/navy the sealed orders would most likely be opened by a trio of the captain, deputy and the 'political officer'; and captain deciding to do otherwise would be a valid reason to remove him from command on the spot, if the other two disagree.
It's certainly true that the UK has a sort of dead-man's-switch (depending on exactly what the letter of last resort says).
But I presume that there is also a more active communication method as well. If the Prime Minister wanted to launch the nukes then he would be able to send a message to the subs and launch immediately.
Anyone who enjoyed this article, or at least the subject of it, should check out the book itself ("Command & Control" by Eric Schlosser). It's a great read.
The book's chapters alternate between two narratives. The first is a real-time account of a bomb-gone-haywire scare in Arkansas, and the people called in to deal with it. The second is a history of nuclear arms, escalation, and near-misses during the Cold War.
I could have done without the first narrative. It is awkwardly written, repetitive, and slow. (No doubt Schlosser does this to draw out the scenario across N chapters. The tactic actually makes things worse, sapping the story of its immediacy and urgency). But the main, historical narrative is fantastic.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention when in 1966 the US dropped 4 nuclear bombs off the Spanish coast. It was, of course, an accident but I've always felt it was pretty serious:
It sees they actually dropped some on Spain rather that off the coast. From Wikipedia: "Of the four Mk28-type hydrogen bombs the B-52G carried, three were found on land near the small fishing village of Palomares"
My understanding was they still do: I read somewhere (can't find the link now, sorry) that when the system was explained to Tony Blair on his second day in office, he went white.
Firing the nukes after the destruction of the government is 50% of the purpose of Trident. It's a second-strike deterrence weapon. It's not as if it could be practically used as a first-strike weapon independently of the US, there aren't enough warheads to obliterate Russia or China on our own.
From reading the article, I get the sense that the best thing working in our[1] favor was having a series of relatively steady, not crazy hands on the nuclear football, on both sides. It's still incredibly frightening that the annihilation of the human race was literally placed in the hands of two people at any given time, but a testament to the capability of the Soviet Politburo and the American political system to elect capable human beings.
That came up in a previous discussion of nuclear weapons (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6419056 ). To quote my wife (Dove), "There were several close calls during the Cold War, and while the powers involved always chose to respond (they had to, it was doctrine at the time), they always chose to respond cautiously. Both sides wanted to avoid a "hot" war at almost any cost." (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Able_Archer_83 ).
Realistically, human civilization would still have survived a full scaled thermonuclear exchange during the height of the Cold War. Things would not have been great, but humanity would still have survived.
But you're much more likely to be born into a world where this event didn't happen.
The history of nuclear accidents is not a good indicator for the risk of nuclear war due to survivorship bias.
The fact that we haven't observed a nuclear war in history might have less to do with the likelihood of nuclear war and more with the fact that fewer people would be able to observe that history.
Ah, interesting, a bit like a quantitative version of the anthropic principle. It presupposes that civilizations that have recovered from doomsday scenarios will never be as large as those that never had such an event occur. Perhaps on the timescale since the Cold War that holds.
This seems much sillier than the anthropic principle, however. (And I've had a professor thunder at me that the anthropic principle itself is silly, anyway.) It's not as though we know of any nuclear-capable civilizations besides our own.
In deference to my professor, I'll just observe why "The fact that we haven't observed a nuclear war in history might have less to do with the likelihood of nuclear war and more with the fact that fewer people would be able to observe that history," seems sillier than Carter's (not Tipler's!) anthropic principle. The anthropic principle considers only two classes of universe: one that will at some point host observers of any sort, and the other that will not. Clearly we find ourselves in a universe of the former class. Whereas your statement invokes any number of possible histories and events, and blithely assigns probability distributions to them. I value parsimony.
"Humans" as such would have still survived, but I don't know, if that what would have been left of it would be realistically to be called "civilization".
I am also not to sure, if they (the remnants) would survive for long with global climate change and radioactive fallout everywhere.
Almost certainly a Cold War maximum nuclear war would result in collapse of industrialized civilization as we know it, concomitant with an enormous reduction in worldwide population. Nevertheless, a lot of things would almost certainly remain: literacy, agriculture, metalworking, the ideas of science and industry, and so on. Human civilization would be in a very bad state for a good long time, but it would mostly be a setback to previous eras, not complete destruction of civilization.
That is far from certainty. Industrialization depended on having easy and abundant access to natural resources like coal, oil, and various metals. We've exhausted the easy deposits of these resources, the ones a preindustrial civilization could get to.
If civilization were to collapse now, it may never rise again.
Nah. We've got information, which is more valuable than energy and not likely to be lost in a collapse. Civilization doesn't require pissing away prodigious amounts of energy on every little thing - that's just the way we do it when we have lots of energy.
Also, there's plenty more available energy on this planet, many times the amount we've used so far in building this civilization. Methane Hydrate, Thorium to name a couple. We're just drunk on oil right now, but don't confuse that with 'using up all the energy.'
Neither of your premises have much to support them.
Dennis Meadows, of Limits to Growth fame, has noted that adding technology to his models does very little to shift the ultimate outcome.
And information absent energy isn't worth much at all. The world as a whole has effectively equal access to information. What's it's got unequal access to are raw material resources, most particularly energy.
What its got is different cultures, which makes all the difference. The Protestant work ethic has an entirely different outcome for a people than many other ethics for instance. Japan has little or no natural resource - look at what they accomplish.
And what do you mean, absent energy? There's plenty of energy around. Methane Hydrate reserves are estimated at 6X all the oil we ever found for instance.
It would be problematic for the rebuilders if we managed to vaporize everything we've built, but at the moment, pure metals are far more available than they've been in history.
We've also probably evened out the geographic availability (so for example you can scrape together a few hundred pounds of copper pretty much anywhere there is a little bit of settlement).
I agree that coal/energy would likely be a problem.
I'm not sure what book it was (I'm thinking it was something by OSC), but I've read a scifi story in which some mad scientists were intentionally "resetting" civilization to no-tech chapter one. They had no problems slaughtering billions of people, burning their possessions, and brainwashing their descendants. The major issue was removing all those convenient alloys from the reach of future metallurgists. They eventually settled on some nano-tech devices that melted everything into giant blobs and then sank the blobs thousands of feet into the Earth. There was a quip at the end about geology in future being doomed to failure, based as it would be on some harebrained explanation for the natural formation of convenient blobs of alloy.
I wonder if the story itself is as fucked-up as my memory of it is.
I've seen that argument made many times, to be frank it's not actually as well founded as it seems.
This is because it confuses two very different things: ease of production of natural resources and cost effectiveness of production of natural resources. In the early stages of industrialization ease of production is paramount, but in later stages quality, production volume, and per unit cost is paramount. Early resources can be very much more expensive to produce and very much lower quality (as they were historically) and yet still be viable. Take coal for example. A small coal mine near the surface can be a quite viable source of coal in early industry, but such coal mines would not be economical in the modern era. Because modern coal is higher quality, much higher volume production, and mined out of areas where it is generally most amenable to industrialized production. There is an old abandoned coal mine within walking distance of me right now, I've been there and picked up coal off the surface of the ground. There's still literally tons of coal there that could be mined quite easily by hand. But compared to other sources of coal in the 21st century it's simply not economical to bother worrying about trying to extract it to depletion.
And the same exact principles apply to essentially every other natural resource. For example, we no longer mine bog iron because it's a very manual labor intensive work compared to, say, shoveling hematite sand into rail cars.
Additionally, this argument ignores the fact that vast amounts of resources will exist in the form of remnants of our present civilization (only the tiniest fraction of which will be vaporized by nuclear explosions). Huge amounts of iron, aluminum, glass, etc. will be left over, short-cutting the normal production process as for pre-industrial processes.
Re-industrialization after a collapse will be different than past industrialization but I see no indications that it will be very much more difficult and certainly not impossible.
Civilizations have collapsed before from far less serious disasters. From Mayans to Mediterranean civilizations (several of them actually) to the 5 centuries of decline and stagnation of China, and probably countless more I haven't read about. And the industrial world is far less resilient. We depend on huge amounts of infrastructure and massively complex systems of trade and production.
Very likely we would return to subsistence farming. There would be little or no remaining industry, and not enough resources to support it. Generations would go by with little technological progress. Metal would rust away, buildings collapse, forests regrow, and after awhile there wouldn't be much left of our civilization. (This is of course assuming a worst case scenario where the whole world is bombed or a nuclear winter happens.)
When we did finally get around to trying to rebuild civilization, sure there would be some scattered resource deposits around the world, but not enough to do anything with. You can't build steam engines without perfecting metallurgy and abundance of cheap, strong, metal. You need to produce many tons of cheap coal, not just scattered surface deposits. The industrial revolution started when deep underground mining became possible by pumping out water, and those mines are exhausted or lost.
Even when the entire Mediterranean Bronze age civilization collapsed catastrophically with people starving to death, cities burning, widespread brutal and chaotic warfare, and obliteration of conventional social structures the civilizations still bounced back in a few centuries, sometimes in less than a single century. And that's without widespread literacy and widespread availability of printed knowledge (as we have today). Yet out of the ashes of those civilizations the Iron age arose, and an unprecedented flourishing of scientific inquiry occurred in greece, egypt, and elsewhere. All of that without a previous roadmap of knowledge, and struggling to rebuild the shattered pieces of civilization. Rebuilding civilization from a more modern collapse would almost certainly transpire differently. For one modern subsistence crops are superior to those of the Mediterranean bronze age. We have potatoes, corn, yams, high yield wheat and hybrids (like triticale), etc. We also know better techniques for farming like use of cover crops, crop rotation, etc.
Some aspects of modern, industrialized civilization are tenuous (like worldwide inter-continental freight shipping), others are simply insights or knowledge gained through hard work that doesn't need to be repeated. Such as even the general idea of the movable type printing press, or literacy, or the germ theory of disease, or food preservation via canning, and so on. A modern person with a little bit of knowledge transported back 2 or even 3 thousand years could change the way people live their lives at a fundamental level. Boiling water and pasteurizing milk before drinking it are things that have been possible since antiquity. As would be canning of various foods, enabling preservation of fruits, vegetables, and meats harvested in the summer through the winter or through several years. That sort of thing transforms the basic subsistence equation enormously and massively accelerates the amount of time it would take to return to some degree of modernity and industrialization. Not to mention the huge transformation due merely to the ideas of rewarding individuals for their labor and their inventions, the idea of the scientific method, and the process of advancing knowledge and technology in general. All of which were stunted historically because people didn't know any better, just as people didn't know to wash their hands or boil their water.
Yes civilizations bounced back in the past, but not industrialized ones. I have no doubt eventually people will build new cities and civilization. But they won't be industrialized. They won't have access to natural resources like we did when we industrialized. Some information might survive, but it will be mostly useless without the resources or established infrastructure to use it.
Over the generations, more and more of the knowledge we've accumulated will be lost. The culture will change further and further from the one that led to our civilization.
It is most likely, that the state systems as we know them today will break down in many areas of the world.
It all depends, how the survivors will behave. I think it is much likely, that living together will change its form very much -- up to the possibility that people will fight for the last resources or a return to Middle Ages state (but, when I see what is happening in our democracies, they might also do without nuclear destruction).
>And the missile was armed. Schlosser says that the explosive force of the warhead on a Titan II is nine megatons, which is three times the force of all the bombs dropped in the Second World War, including the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. If it had detonated, most of the state of Arkansas would have been wiped out.
That is the scariest thing I have read in a while. I always had the impression that there were a lot of active steps in a bomb actually exploding.
The largest nuclear detonation set off by the United States was Castle Bravo. It was fifteen megatons. It had serious fallout issues, but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon.
And the largest nuclear detonation of all time was the Russian Tsar Bomba, clocking in a 50 megatons, vice the 15 for Castle Bravo. The explosion broke windows over five hundred miles away. But even then, structures > 75 miles away mostly survived, so it still wouldn't have destroyed an entire state the size of Arkansas.
And supposedly, the original design was for 100 megatons, but they dialed it back because of fallout concerns.
>but it did not cause the kind of damage that is claimed for this weapon
I don't know, what you are referring to here, but to my opinion, given the distances of a relatively wide area with very limited population, the results where grave enough. Generations of the inhabitants where contaminated and had babies with many defects or deaths born. I guess the descendants of these poor people still struggle with the effects of this bomb.
Given such an event in or near a city of the US, I guess not only one city might get wiped out but the effects would be very real and destructive in a very big part of the US.
"Horrible effects" and "wiped out" mean very, very different things and can't be used interchangeably, especially if you're writing an article that pretends to be serious.
"Fail Safe" [1] is also an excellent movie. I believe it was based on the same book as Strangelove, but is a drama and not a dark comedy. Excellent movie and cast.
This is my problem with the American and Russian government - actually any government - they play games. Stupid, myopic and arrogant idiots who see life other than their own on this planet as a thing to be toyed with. Intellectually they're little better than teenagers.
Machiavelli's blueprint smothers the benevolence of the Ghandis, the Tutus and the Mandelas. A populace too absorbed in day-to-day survival is in no position to change the status quo. Depressing.
This attitude is part of 'better to be dead than a slave'. I think many people saw what the Nazis did in the occupied territories and their thinking was influenced by that (extending it to, what would happen if the Soviets invaded our lands).
By the 70s and 80s, people knew (or had the option to know - many chose not to know) what the Soviets did to people at home, so it wasn't totally out of whack to assume what would happen if they invaded.
People often forget how awful the west treated the bottom of its society at the time. For a black in the South, the soviet union (or more likely Cuba/communist latin country) probably looked pretty good.
That's not to excuse or downplay these country's mistakes. Let's just not forget our own.
Well, had it been my choice between a nuclear war where 90%-95% of the population of the UK would have died in optimistic scenarios and surrendering to the Soviets (and yes, I am fully aware of how badly they treated people in their own country and the countries they controlled) I know which one I would have chosen.
It was between maintaining the capability of such a nuclear war to deter aggression, and not maintaining it and surely having been invaded by the Soviets.
For the madness that MAD was, for all intents and purposes, it actually worked.
That's the point of deterrence. It didn't start. The moral thing to do if it started would have been to not fire the missiles. But any leak or hint of such an intent would have had disastrous effect on the deterrent, and is thus an extremely dangerous idea for any leader to actually entertain. One can hope that leaders would have privately decided against and that the letters of last resort were sealed and destroyed for that reason.
tl;dr: Modern nuclear warheads should not go off by accident, even in (almost) any conceivable accident.
Modern warhead design has the idea of the "strong link" and "weak link". The strong link is a critical part of the detonation path, and is not ordinarily in place. It can only be put in place by arming the warhead, or by a severe accident. But any accident severe enough to put the strong link in place should be more than enough to destroy the weak link, which is also a critical part of the detonation path.
A warhead accident could still leave an awful lot of radioactive contamination, of course...
I seem to recall hearing that, back in the 1960s, the US at least offered to the USSR that we would teach them how to improve their nuclear command and control. The thinking was that, yes, in event of war this would improve their ability to fight, but it was more important to reduce the possibility of accidentally starting such a war.
"The plane split in two, the base was evacuated, and the fire burned for two and a half hours. But the explosives in the warhead didn’t detonate; that would have set off a chain reaction."
This statement seems to imply the bomb would have went off, which is just not true. The physics just do not work that way.
Not true. The bomb had a design defect which meant it could be armed and fired by an extended period of heat. The book which this link is promoting covers this.
Depending on the design, isn't there some chance that the heat could detonate the conventional explosive used to force the nuclear material together? as far as I understand it, there is definitely a risk of detonation, though it's hopefully very low. Physics is not directly the reason for it being so low either, but more safeguards put in place to ensure detonation only happens when it's supposed to and is prevented otherwise.
Most high explosives will not detonate when burnt. They need to have a shock wave running through them for the detonation to occur. The initial shock wave is usually created using a detonator, which uses a very small amount of a much more risky explosive.
You can get a lump of C-4, and use it as fuel for a fire to cook over without any danger, and in fact soldiers certainly used to do this. You can also hit it with a hammer - the shock wave caused by this isn't strong enough to cause a detonation.
In terms of a nuke, you need to detonate a set of independent lumps of explosive with very precise timing, in order to get a compression lens that will squash the fissile core sufficiently to get a nuclear explosion. Heat is unlikely to cause this to happen with a sensibly-designed bomb.
It's still very dangerous if the high explosives go if in an uncoordinated way. And then you have kilograms of enriched radioactive material spread all over. Not as bad as a supercritical reaction, but enough to worry about.
Uranium isn't really that radioactive. U-235 has a half life on the order of 10^9 years. It is only when uranium is brought together into supercritical lumps that it becomes a problem from a radiation point of view. However, it is also a toxic heavy metal, like lead, and that is a problem. That hasn't stopped militaries firing lumps of it around warzones the world over.
If I understood this correctly, the main challenge in nuclear bomb design is to time the conventional explosions in such a way that the resulting blast will compress the nuclear material, achieving critical mass, and not simply tearing it all apart.
So I think that this fire would probably not have caused a nuclear explosion.
Years of testing have never yielded a nuclear detonation from the conventional explosives cooking off in a warhead - radioactive strewn desert in Australia is a testament to the British testing this directly.
Nuclear bombs require absurd - something on the order of microseconds (I suspect nanoseconds probably come into play) detonation precision in order to reach super-criticality.
We're afraid because they have nukes because they're afraid because we have nukes because we're afraid because they have nukes because they're afraid because we have nukes because...
9/11 the greatest tragedy? I can think of much worse - though it could be argued if it weren't for 9/11 the world wouldn't be in the state it is in now.
As others have stated, there was a heavy dose of sarcasm to my comment; I felt that HN would be the sort of place where "/s" weren't necessary but I guess not.
I wouldn't have thought how trumped up and ludicrous this all was. I was born in 1984, so I really started becoming aware in the bubble that existed after the wall fell and before 9/11. Sure, I read 1984 and Farenhiet 451 but the seemed like commentary about the future, what could become. Apparently they were just as relevant when they were written. Constant war with the "enemy". The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities. Build their bombs. Spend that sweet tax-payer money. Feel important. Lie to the government. The past seemed so legit and so ancient when I was growing up. After 9/11 I had no idea history was repeating itself. Now we have the ever present(statistically ridiculous) threat of "terrorism". The NSA needs more powers, more money; to protect us of course. They WOULD say that because that's how they get more money, more employees, more power. Still lying to the government of course(weapons of mass destruction in Iraq?). Now we have an ex-NSA head launching a venture charging companies 1 million a month to protect them! Of course they'll contract back to government. And the NSA will tell use all about how we don't need to worry about what they are doing, we just need to pay up.
The threat of a nuclear exchange is just as possible today as it was during the cold war. Both the US and Russia continue to build new nuclear weapons. This is far, far more serious than anything terrorists can do today. The Cold War de-escalated, but I would hardly call it over.
Unfortunately since journalists rely so heavily on controlled leaks and targeted propaganda it just doesn't make headlines, but these events are hardly secret.
I suspect we have a 50% chance of a nuclear weapon incident in the next 5 years. North Korea is run by a guy whose view of the world has almost no basis in reality. Pakistan-India, who knows what could happen. The US is pushing hard against Russia but I suspect both parties remain sane (though the point of the article is accidents.)
> The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities.
I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMDs. Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it.
I fully accept a lot of mistakes were made during the cold war, and I also deplore the expensive, ineffective and unnecessary overreach by western intelligence agencies, but the threats they were and are purporting to defend us from are very real. Some of our responses to those threats have been mistaken and unnecessary, but it certainly does not follow that those threats don't exist and don't need to be responded to.
> Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it.
Seriously?
There ought to be something analogously to Godwin’s law to declare discussions lost after this class of arguments.
To answer in kind: "I'd like to ask how you would explain the proportionality of the respond to the families of the tens to hundreds of thousand civilian casualties[1] in the Irak war." OR "[…] explain the justice and civility of the 'war against terror' to the hundreds (?) of innocent prisoners in Guantanamo bay." OR even "[…] explain the trillion dollar [2] that were spent on the military instead on fighting aids, cancer, malaria, diabetes,… to those suffering or those who have lost friends or family."
Emotional arguments quickly become ridiculous if you leave out the greater effects to society and the relative danger of the threat.
> Emotional arguments quickly become ridiculous if you leave out the greater effects to society and the relative danger of the threat.
No, but numerical arguments quickly become ridiculous when you ignore the fact that the emotional reaction of the nation to 3,000 Americans killed in a terrorist act is itself a physically cognizable phenomenon that must be given due weight in the analysis.
OK, but making irrational policy based on how people feel leads to bad policy. Let people feel what they feel. But don't make long-term policy based on peoples' emotional reactions to events.
I actually disagree, perhaps subtly. Emotional reactions are still reactions, are still a thing that exists in reality, and should be appropriately weighted. But emotional reaction should be weighted in terms of considering it as a consequence, and emotions should be consulted in determining which consequences we (collectively) care about. This is distinct from responding in the short term to a demand for vengeance simply because that's how people feel now (but not distinct from reacting with vengeance if the population will long-term approve of having done so, balancing emotional consequences with others).
People feel radically different things depending on framing and perspective. I agree that there is limited benefit to yelling "you should feel X," but I also think that everyone yelling "you should feel scared" has contributed to the problem.
True. But how you deal with it makes quite a difference. Imagine a greater president than Bush spinning it like this (I'm not good enough with rhetoric to make it a compelling speech though):
"Today America mourns. Today we were attacked. Today terrorists tried to destroy our way of life. They tried to rob us of our sense of security, our liberty, our democracy. And yet today we stand united! We will not let them take away our values our freedom! We will find and persecute those that are responsible. But we will not fall for the cycle of hate and violence the terrorists have laid in front of us."
This path would have been harder to defend against those crying for revenge. But it could have used the same patriotism and stubbornness that was used for war mongering in the alternative world we live in. And in hindsight we see how bad the results of that fear and violence politics were for America and for the world.
Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers.
This is how: in that year alone, 2001, over 10000 people were killed by gun homicides in the US --over three times as many random, pointless deaths as 9/11. Last year, there were over 15000: an increase of nearly twice as many families mourning the senseless death of their loved ones as the 9/11 families, but every year.
And twice as many people every year die of car accidents --sudden, random, untimely deaths. Every year.
These are inconceivable amounts of suffering, of mourning families and communities rent apart: almost as if the population of an entire mid-sized town got randomly obliterated every year.
And then consider that, in their name, hundreds of thousands of other innocent families around the globe have gone through --and still go through-- their very same suffering on that day: losing their loved ones to unimaginably violent attacks out of nowhere, absurdly justified by some abstract, foreign notion --collateral damage, preventive strike, what not.
The numbers don't lie. As a society, sooner or later we will have to come to terms precisely with the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism, and the grotesque price we have inflicted the world (and ourselves) with.
"I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it."
Shark attacks are statistically rare. Lightning strikes (of a human) are statistically rare. Adrenocortical carcinoma is statistically rare. Having to explain this to the family of a victim doesn't change that fact.
In 2001, a banner year for terrorism, America lost more people to heart disease than terrorism. This should surprise no one. What's a little more surprising is the scale of the difference - not just more people, but 200 times as many people. To put it another way, if something on the scale of 9/11 happened every other day we'd still be losing more people to heart disease than to terrorism. Sure, there are criticisms to be had (e.g. we should be comparing years lost or quality of life not simply lives lost) but none of these come close to overcoming that 200 fold difference - one year lost by a 70 yo would have to translate to 200 years lost by a younger person, and those lost in 9/11 weren't especially young (average age was 40). Car accidents disproportionately kill the young, and also killed more Americans than terrorism that year. And of course those (and still other causes - many of them!) continue to kill many times more people than terrorism did in 2001 - terrorism does not.
I think comparing 9/11 to events like heart attacks and car accidents is silly.
There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks.
"There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks."
Since you obviously don't mean the heart attacks are worse, and we obviously don't agree, please support this rather than just asserting it. If it simplifies matters, first support that losing one person to deliberate attack is significantly worse than losing one person to illness. Then we can look at whether "significant" is significant enough.
One thing we can quickly agree on is that deterrence (or lack thereof) is more relevant in the case of an attack. But deterrence is only one kind of prevention. I don't see that the actual badness is greater in the case of the attack-caused death.
One way to measure the impact of a death from illness vs. a deliberate attack is the impact on society. Since the goal of terrorism is to destabilize a society and instill fear, the ramifications reach far beyond the individual who died. Take a look at what happened to the stock market after 9/11. The resulting fear was widespread and very disruptive. The ramifications of doing nothing when someone dies of a heart attack are minor, doing nothing when an external force kills a citizen can be far reaching.
The second reason is justice. A person dying from a heart attack is a "natural" death, nobody (except possibly the victim themselves) contributed to the death.
Using the logic of the grandparent, the world should have said "Let's ignore the Rwandan genocide because more babies die of diarrheal diseases."
How would you have reacted to 9-11? Just shrugged your shoulders and said "it's only 3000 people?" Maybe the same for Pearl Harbor? If so, you'd likely be speaking German or Japanese now.
> There is a big difference between the loss of 3000 people due to a deliberate attack on your country and the loss of 300,000 people due to heart attacks.
This is very true. We've spent over a trillion dollars combatting terrorism with little progress (and more American lives lost than in 9/11, let alone Iraqi/Afghan lives). Spending that trillion on heart attack prevention and treatment would've been far more effective at saving lives.
One assumption is that spending 1 trillion dollars over the last 13 years on heart attack prevention and treatment would have made a significant difference in the number of lives saved. How do we quantify this?
A second assumption on the other side of the argument is that spending 0 to fight terrorism would have netted 0 new casualties, anywhere. If we did nothing we would have been better off. But how do we quantify this? We can see the results of our actions, but we cannot see the results of our inactions. If we did not invade Iraq, would more or less people be alive today in that country, and what would their quality of life be? Would Afghanistan be completely ruled by extremist Muslims and be ruled under a brutal Sharia law if we had not invaded and tried to put a partly democratic and citizen based government in place? Who knows? If that did happen, would more people be suffering due to extreme oppression and sectarian violence than what our invasions has caused? How do we quantify all of these factors?
Making big sweeping statements with huge numbers that dwarf anything we're used to talking about is sensationalism. The fact of the matter is that the people making these decisions, by and large, are not doing it because they are trying to get rich or build some fiefdom. Dem or Repub, Liberal or Conservative, I think that generally speaking, most politicians and government officials are in their positions to do good. They see themselves as agents of change and sometimes have to make incredibly hard decisions in the times in which they live (not 10 years later). They are trying to give this country and others around the world their best shot at living a life of freedom and liberty. We're not always going to agree with decisions, and some are truly mistakes, but few that we look at are simply because of some crazy conspiracy agenda.
I think it's hard to argue that a trillion dollars to the NIH, CDC, preventative medicine for the poor, etc. wouldn't result in at least 3k lives saved during the period.
I also think it's impossible to rationally argue that the Iraq war did anything to reduce terrorism, given that the pretext for invasion was WMD, not terrorism, and that extremists now control large swaths of the country where they had minimal power under Hussein.
> Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it.
We've lost more people in the Iraq/Afghan wars than were lost in 9/11, for little progress - Iraq's splitting into pieces and much occupied by folks hardcore enough that Al Qaeda goes "hang on, you're making us look bad!" What's your explanation to their families?
It's easy to be wise but I'm pretty sure no-one could have predicted the rise of ISIS. Saddam Hussein was a tyrannous dictator that ruled for too long.
Pretty much everyone predicted a power vacuum when the US pulled out. Hell, it was the stated reason by Dick Cheney for not going to Baghdad in 1991:
> What would happen to the government once U.S. forces withdrew? How many casualties should the United States accept in that effort to try to create clarity and stability in a situation that is inherently unstable?
You're right it seemed like most pundits predicted they'd call themselves SPECTRE or H.A.M.M.E.R. or something like that. You never can be too sure with these super-villains.
> I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMDs. Similarly, I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it.
The statistical ridiculousness of terrorism is explained by this https://www.iraqbodycount.org/ more than anything. Try to explain that to Iraqi families as well (among others). So called "terrorism" is more like a sane reaction to this shit.
> > The threat of attack at any time. Constant fear. All so people could build their little empires inside the military and intelligence communities.
> I'm pretty sure the Soviet Union did exist, and actually did have WMD
yes, and their population was also kept in constant fear of the western WMDs that were actually aimed at them. All that also served similar ends in their governments's own little empires.
> I'd like to ask how you would explain the statistical ridiculousness of terrorism to the families of the thousands of people that died in the twin towers. I'm sure they'd be fascinated to hear it.
If we're talking statistics, far more Americans die of diabetes and heart problems than terrorism. Better to spend trillions of dollars there, no, instead of bleeding that money in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Apart from the points other posters made in reply to your comment, please keep in mind that it is not obvious that fearing an attack, military intelligence or threats of retaliation would reduce the probability of an attack happening (especially if it's a terrorist attack).
Jesus Christ...what a thing to read if you needed to not fall asleep for awhile. I think this is a perfect real-life example of Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity"...the whole world has nearly been annihilated, several times over, due to most inexplicably benign human errors...and that's not even counting the errors of bureaucracy (such as the misreporting of Russian nuke capability, which let military officials press the need for an absurd number of excess warheads).
Also, this is the first time I can remember that I've ever seen a correction in a New Yorker article.
nah... we'll collapse our civilization slowly by turning into one big always connected ant colony hidden in concrete from the overheated unfriendly environment
All we need is a solar frame, pandemic, or string of larger earthquakes in some parts of the globe. That would cause some nuclear plants to meltdown. Life on Earth would become impossible. No need to worry about some accidental nuclear war. Damn, we're dumb.
Can you back that up with some numbers, or a source perhaps? Because that just sounds like fearmongering. We've already had two nuclear plant meltdowns, and life on earth is doing just fine.
The effects of widespread disruption on nuclear power plants is one of the elements addressed in Alan Weisman's The World Without Us.
There are roughly 400 nuclear power plants in the world today. If disrupted for several weeks, they would eventually lose cooling capabilities, as grid, backup fuel, and ultimately cooking water, were exhausted. You'd see a few hundred core melt events scattered over the globe, and moreover, no real capability to address those -- Chernobyl was encased in a large concrete sarcophagus (and is in the process of being re-entombed). Fukushima has still not been contained and requires ongoing interventions to slow, not halt, leaking of radioactive material from four cores.
S.G. Collins, the guy who put together the "No, we couldn't have faked the moon landings" video, has a very good one on nuclear power which addresses a number of the systemic and very long-range issues involved in nuclear risks:
First of all, Chernobyl Exclusion zone is about 1000 mile^2. [3] Life is not doing just fine there.
And the effect of Fukushima meltdown are not going to be known for the next few years, but there are indications that it may not be as harmless as we are led to believe.[4]
There are currently 62 commercially operating nuclear power plants with 100 nuclear reactors in 31 states in the United States. [1]
A recent study led by European researchers found Fukushima is not alone, as 22 other plants around the world may be similarly susceptible to destructive tsunami waves, with most of them in east and southeast regions of Asia. [2]
The World Nuclear Association estimates that 20 percent of nuclear reactors worldwide operate in areas vulnerable to earthquakes.[5]
Actually life is doing better in the Chernobyl zone than it was when there were humans there. Humans stay away because they don't like slight increases in cancer probability, not because life is impossible.
"Some claim that the populations of traditional Polesian animals (such as wolves, badger, wild boar, roe deer, white-tailed eagle, black stork, Western marsh harrier, short-eared owl, red deer, moose, great egret, whooper swan, least weasel, common kestrel and beaver) have multiplied enormously and begun expanding outside the zone. These claims, however, are not substantiated by any systematic census of any animal taxon."[41]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_Nuclear_Power_Plant_...
[41] Møller, A P; T A Mousseau; F de Lope; N Saino (2008). "Anecdotes and empirical research in Chernobyl". Biology Letters 4 (1): 65–66. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2007.0528. ISSN 1744-957X. PMC 2412943. Retrieved 2012-02-07.
I was more interested in your claim of "Life on Earth would become impossible". You've shown that there are reactors, and that there is a risk involved with having them. But the claim that a few earthquakes in some parts of the world would wipe out all life on earth seems so to me an exaggeration, and I consider that fear mongering.
Perhaps, you're forgetting about spent fuel pools, rods and other nuclear waste that is often kept at the plants.
" All the fuel in all the reactors and all the storage pools at this site (1760 tons of Uranium per slide #4) would be consumed in such a mega-explosion. In comparison, Fat Man and Little Boy weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained less than a hundred pounds each of fissile material."[1]
"Accordingly, the worst case scenario at Fukushima will not make the northern hemisphere uninhabitable and the total doom/ death of life on earth predicted by some is impossible. The most likely outcome would be catastrophic contamination of northern Japan forcing total evacuation of the population. The main global consequence will be serious
contamination of the Pacific which may catastrophically affect Pacific biota." [2]
If "catastrophically affecting Pacific biota" would not cause the whole ecosystem to collapse,and make life impossible, I'm not sure what would.
If few nuclear plant meltdowns occurred at the same time, and there would be a problem with the cleanup effort (i.e EMP in the States) we could expect spent fuel explosions to release massive amount of radioactive material into the atmosphere.
This is why numbers shouldn't be reported with too many significant figures. I doubt the engineers thought the reports could be %99.9 certain, given that they're extrapolated from noisy sensors, networked across huge distances and that the opponent is adversarial (actively trying to avoid detection).
Percentages can cause a false sense of certainty too; as Leonard Mlodinow points out in The Drunkard's Walk about changing wine ratings from out-of-10 to percentages. We might be quite sure that an 8/10 compares favourably to a 7/10 but not to a 9/10; we can't say the same about an %82 with an %83 and an %81.
If you're forced to report percentages, or tenths of a percent, write the estimated error alongside. Raw numbers like "%99.9" have an implied "+/- %0.05" afterwards.
And that, ladies and gentlement, is why Die Hard 4.0 contains too many many significant figures.