It is crazy to think what humans have done. Designing such a massive explosive device and detonating it underground just to see what happens seems like such an illogical thing to do from an individual perspective, but it is kinda cool in a "manmade earthquake" kind of way. I'm glad we're not wasting effort designing yet bigger bombs; looking back, it seems like such folly.
Not to see what would happen, but to check whether or not the X-ray tamping of the W71 completely fucked with the design's yield. Thus the full-scale test; the science had largely gotten to the point where smaller tests accomplished just as much. The W71 was designed to save you from this: That's an MX Missile fucking the shit out of Kwajeilein, by the way. The whole Nike thing was given up when it was conclusively proven it wouldn't work. You wanna see crazy?
The M65 could not fire more than 3 miles which was well within the lethal radiation area for those firing it. They might have as well just set it off where they were standing. M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction.
Always attack from upwind when firing nuclear artillery. Contrary to traditional hunting methods but in this case it makes sense.
Well, I do understand that the scientists who who were tasked with ensuring M.A.D. really was M.A.D. had to perform these tests out of more than mere curiosity, but like you point out, bigger and bigger bombs are only useful to a certain point, there are many more considerations beyond just yield. More generally, I've always been somewhat skeptical that M.A.D. makes us safer; I suppose one could say it prevented the cold war from becoming a hot war, but it certainly has done little to prevent conventional wars in general, and even if it might make angry despots or revenge-minded psychopathic leaders second-guess aggressive actions, it does so by risking the lives of thousand or millions of innocent civilians. I haven't seriously investigated what full-scale nuclear war would be expected to look like between Russia and the US, or India and Pakistan, or (theoretically) Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran, so perhaps most of my conception is based on antiquated mass-media fear mongering. I suppose it's a little like gun control. Does everyone owning and carrying a gun make us all safer on a personal level, any more than every sovereign nation having a nuclear arsenal make global politics safer?
I think the analogy is a little off, because any particular person with a gun might be expected to be irrational, psychotic, etc. However, MAD is based on the principle that states are rational actors, and that no rational actor would ever risk a sizable portion of their own population, economy, etc, for literally no gain other than like destruction in the adversary's country. No matter how terrible any given leader is (and the USSR had a few that were certainly that), the decision to use nukes would almost certainly be by committee, even if the choice to fire ultimately lay with one person.Does everyone owning and carrying a gun make us all safer on a personal level, any more than every sovereign nation having a nuclear arsenal make global politics safer?
Hmm, that is a good point. I would suppose a group of committee members could be expected to be more rational, judicious or cautious. States don't (or at least I hope they wouldn't) keep their nukes on their hip like some Zimmerman character. I think I would be willing to fire a gun at someone in self-defense, but if I were a political/military leader, would I be able to fire a nuke as a preemptive or retaliatory strike? I suppose MAD works because there is this assumption that nobody would fire that first nuke, where as personal safety in a society that advocates for individual gun ownership breaks down when people will begin shooting a varying degrees of provocation.
Here's a site about nuking places on the planet. You can choose different yields, surface or airburst, wind direction, and see all kinds of visual information on things like radiation, burns, and overpressure. There's also an option to launch multiple nukes.
Cannikin was a 5 megaton bomb. The Russian Tsar Bomba was a 50 megaton above ground test which was the largest ever test. Here is a video about it. It would apparently annihilate everything within a 15 mile radius and much beyond that obviously. I grew up thinking that nuclear war may be the end of the world but realistically I don't think that is a possibility anymore.
I was always kind of under the impression that full scale nuclear war wouldn't really be "The End of the World," other than for those in the targeted population centers, of course. The rest of us would just have to deal with some radiation and nuclear winter type effects, the degree of which would scale with just how "full-scale" of a war it was, much more like a bullet to the foot than to the head. I think the risks of global civilization collapse from nuclear war are easy to be overblown in popular imagination, when in reality, the more dangerous threats are much quieter, like the gradual collapse of ecosystems from climate change.
Watch Threads and get back to me.
Wow, that is positively horrifying. It just stuns me to think that we, collectively speaking, have equivalent of three billion tons of TNT theoretically aimed at population centers all over the globe. It's like a push-button holocaust that would make the Nazis look like amateurs. To think that a crisis over anything on this planet could justify such an escalation does not make sense to me. Like I said before, I don't really understand how MAD makes us safer; I get the idea that if we just make war so terrifically horrible enough nobody will wage war anymore, but that logic does not feel convincing or comforting given human history. It seems like there are people out there who would let the world burn if it would make them king of the ashes afterwards. That was an interesting link about Dead Hand as well, seems like even some Russians got a little nervous about too much automation. I guess you have to trust that groups with nuclear weapons are rational actors, because without that caveat, MAD goes from borderline nonsensical, to downright batshit insane.
Thing about the Nazis - they weren't interested in wiping out everyone, the were interested in wiping out everyone genetically inferior that happened to have resources they wanted. And that's the big hangup with nuclear weapons as "weapons" - they aren't selective, and they're pretty much area denial weapons. It's like Rome V. Carthage - you don't salt the soil if you plan on using it. The nice thing about MAD is we never really tested it. Did it work? Obviously! We're still here! Or was that something else? Obviously! "Mad" is in the title! Are you crazy? I'll say this - there isn't much evidence that any of the ideologically-driven organizations have ever pursued nukes. Iran is interested in nukes because, as their minister of defense pointed out, the United States has made exactly zero overtures of hostility towards the one country on the "axis of evil" with nukes. To the best of my knowledge, and to the best of my reading, there have been no credible examples of any terrorist organizations (other than Aum Shinrikyo) attempting to acquire or develop nuclear weapons. Even the most radical of islamist freakballs can't assume that the entire blast radius of a nuclear weapon is chockablock with nothing but infidels and kaffirs. Perimeter was driven more by a Soviet belief that the Americans were crazy more than anything else... and the fact that it would have taken the Soviets something like six hours to trigger a nuclear response. So... rational, in its own way. And I'll also point this out: Not even MacArthur wanted to use nukes and back then, the Soviets had mmmmmmmmmmmmaybe one nuke, and it wouldn't have been "mutually assured destruction" by any stretch of the imagination. Realistically speaking? Large-scale weapons (and weapons systems) are an economic and jobs project. Swords cost. Plowshares are more useful... but you know how many schools you need to build. You know how many roads you need? Strategic bombers? Well... can you ever truly have enough? Are you sure? (Do you hate freedom?)
Right, so the Nazi's used genetics as an excuse to wipe out millions, confiscating wealth and property in the process, certainly terrible to be sure, and in a theoretical US v. Russia full scale nuclear war, politics would be used as an excuse to wipe out millions, perhaps stemming from a crisis or disagreement over some resource, leaving a horribly stunted future for people all around the globe to endure for generations to come. It's hard to compare horrific tragedies like that but I think calling such a scenario a nuclear holocaust would be a very fitting term. I mean, in theory, if we're shooting nukes over there, we aren't interested in killing everyone, just the people who happen to live over there, right!? That is a good point, MAD hasn't failed so far, so that is a feather in its cap. Given that the nuclear weapon technology is already out there, we can't exactly just un-invent it, and I suppose perhaps the threat of a nuclear holocaust does discourage casual use of the technology. It sounds like from the MacArthur and Truman exchanges, when they were first developed, we didn't really have a good idea of how to treat them, or what to do with them, other than simply regard them as just really big bombs. Obviously now, they're revered as a kind of symbolic force which I can see as being better and safer for everyone. And point taken about military spending; it's a bipartisan money funnel with no bottom, held in place by some very powerful people who really seem to love that "freedom."
My discomfort with the use of Nazis in this discussion is the motives are different. The Nazis wanted "lebensraum." A nuclear holocaust is kind of the opposite of that. "Holocaust" is a term used regularly in discussing nuclear warfare, minus the Nazis; I think this is because the Nazis were so goddamn methodical about it while nuclear armageddon is pretty much a game of 52 pickup. Evil is as evil does and both moves are unspeakably evil, but at least the Nazis were evil and practical. "Hard to make a lampshade out of ashes," he said grimly. And the theory about limited death kinda went out the door the minute we had ICBMs. I'm not sure when, exactly, arsenals expanded to the point where total ecosystem destruction was a probability, but I reckon it was back in the '60s. Nobody seriously thought anyone would survive a negative outcome of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Which is an argument for MAD, crazy as it is. I'm going to guess you're younger than me.
Yeah, but above-ground tests were known to be all kindsa hinky. The Tsar Bomba in particular was a total stunt; the US did a thousand nuclear tests in 1961 to the Soviet's 700-odd. By setting off a 50MT bomb with an actual yield of 58MT the Soviets proved they were frontin', not testing. Right about the time of crafty's test, the world powers were figuring out that ridiculous yield nuclear weapons were far less useful than 1/2kT weapons that could be stacked in a missile. There was one Ivan. W76s? W88s?
And a Damn Interesting article about it which was my first introduction to the Tsar Bomba. They have a few more nuke articles that are... damn interesting. :D
I did not realize it was dropped in such close conjunction with the building of the Berlin Wall. Wow.