Comments on: Water bomb

By: joseph

joseph — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 11:23:27 +0000

Can someone provide a transcript for this? Yeah, I know, Google has “asstomatic captions.”

“Wall who handled all over the first to underwater shots was more amazing in some ways the rockets were set up that was a pan at the time he reached services erroll station…”

Yeah. Thanks, Youtube (it’s been what, two years now?)

By: Nick L

Nick L — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 19:48:12 +0000

Kaleberg Said: “I remember reading Vannevar Bush’s Modern Arms and Free Men in which he downplays the usefulness of atomic bombs as weapons. He felt they weren’t all that more powerful than conventional arms. (The bombing raid on Tokyo, using conventional ordinance. just prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000, more than the two nuclear weapons combined.) ”

You know, someone on CNN’s Cold War series had the perfect rebuttal for that sort of reasoning. (This was at the dawn of the MAD era though)

It went something like: “World War 2 killed 20 million people. However, it didn’t do it in one day.”

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 08:50:20 +0000

Kaleberg (31) said:

The bombing raid on Tokyo, using conventional ordinance. just prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000, more than the two nuclear weapons combined

But exposed significantly more American airmen to risk of being shot down.

By: Kaleberg

Kaleberg — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 00:58:31 +0000

I remember reading Vannevar Bush’s Modern Arms and Free Men in which he downplays the usefulness of atomic bombs as weapons. He felt they weren’t all that more powerful than conventional arms. (The bombing raid on Tokyo, using conventional ordinance. just prior to Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000, more than the two nuclear weapons combined.) Also, ICBMs hadn’t been developed yet, so he felt that conventional anti-aircraft and anti-ship weapons would more than keep America safe from atomic attack.

There was one exception that he did worry about, an atomic bomb detonated under water would create a radioactive water plume that he felt was extremely deadly. Vannevar Bush was the scientist and engineer who played a central role in building America’s WWII “arsenal of democracy”, so I assume he knew his weapons. His recommendation was to have a good anti-submarine defense.

I don’t all the details of how and why an underwater nuclear detonation would be so particularly deadly, but I’m guessing that this kind of test was part of the effort to find out.

By: Blathering Blathiscope

Blathering Blathiscope — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 18:40:42 +0000

Surfing to Jenny Winder’s site has given me the most interesting internet surfing I’ve done.

Go to her site. Surf.

https://plus.google.com/116017061364727182937/posts/LNp54HCBYez

Awesome!

By: Nigel Depledge

Nigel Depledge — Fri, 28 Sep 2012 12:36:49 +0000

David Weingart (24) said:

Technically, of course, 1 cubic meter of water is a tonne, not a ton

Perhaps, but if you’re going to get technical, it’s a cubic metre, not a cubic meter (after all, who cares what shape my measuring device is?).

Yes, in British English, metre and meter are homophones.

By: kat wagner

kat wagner — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:56:53 +0000

What Krylon #11 said. What the hell we gotta prove this stuff for? Yeah, we’re badass but so? Let’s clean up this place, feed hungry people, make it cold again.

By: Jura

Jura — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:35:44 +0000

“And mind you, the test shown was for a relatively small blast: about an 8 or 9 kiloton yield (the equivalent of 8-9 thousand tons of TNT), whereas big nukes are capable of 20 megatons, over a thousand times the explosive yield shown.”

And to think that even that is teeny tiny compared to a good volcanic blast, or the impact of a sizable asteroid. It is so hard to wrap one’s head around such energetic events.

By: scgvlmike

scgvlmike — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:21:31 +0000

#11 Krylon: I’d venture to say that the same amount of money that’s been spent on weaponry since WWII -has- been spent on eradicating diseases, to varying levels of success, and on feeding the hungry. We’ve eradicated smallpox in the wild, and made significant progress in addressing dyptheria, malaria, cancer, HIV infection rates, diabetes (artificial insulin, anyone?), hypertension, benign prostatic hyperplasia (of particular interest to us middle-aged men), physical deafness (as opposed to nerve deafness), etc, etc, etc. In addition, regarding feeding the hungry, the green revolution wasn’t done on the back of free research, but on by dedicating hundreds, if thousands, of researchers worldwide into tackling the inefficiencies and waste in farming and transportation of farm products.
In large part, the remaining hungry don’t go without because there’s not enough food, but because inefficient governments can’t move fast enough to get the food to the people in need– or are corrupt or evil enough to deliberately block the transportation of food to the starving, or are too weak to prevent warlords from highjacking or destroying the food.

There’s no reason a modern society can’t address multiple problems at the same time. It’s not we have a single scientist and can only address what that one person can do. We have many scientists, each with their own specialty, for good reason.

By: Vanessa

Vanessa — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 18:20:10 +0000

I thought you were going to post this video…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C6MnK2DxEp8