Nukes....good or bad..?

[The ALL-MIGHTY]

How to you regard nuclear weapons? Do you think of them as “cool massive explosion” or a “unnecessary form of slow and painful death”, that’s saying you survive the explosion and are effected by the radiation.

Personally I think of them in both ways, they are cool, in the form of a huge explosion and unimaginable power and destruction. But also there is the radiation, the cruel form of slow and painful death. I think as long as the nuke is detonated far from people and only used to destroy objects or to show people what a blast looks like, it is fine. But once you go to killing people in that manner then it is just wrong, and that is why we use C4 and dynamite and other various explosives. They also can kill you cruelly due to burns but that’s not the focus of this thread.

What do you think, regarding nukes?

[vulture]

The paradoxal thing about nukes is that they are a deterrant to their own deployment.

Nuclear weapons are fascinating because they release enormous amounts of energy, using processes and forces which act on a scale of nanometers.

Testing nukes will always cause hazardous fallout. Ofcourse atmospherical testing is much worse than underground testing, but underground testing makes deep craters which are sealed by glass/ceramic formed by the explosion heat. This prevents leaking of radioactive agent into the environment, but it might have other unwanted effects, such as disturbing water layers or underground water channels. I wonder if it could lead to seismic activity.

[danmcl2002]

that is an interesting concept as far as seismic activity goes, i suppose if you do apply that kind of massive force you will have an equal and opposite reaction on the land mass, which could, if the force was great enough move a plate, but i think that a single nuke would not be powerful enough to move much in terms of the earth, look at what we have been doing to it for the relatively short time that we have been here, weve actually done very little permanent damge, the hole in the ozone layer will regenerate over time, eons, but it will regenerate, not in our lifetime.

I think that the worst thing that we could do would be to destroy ourselves, on a global scale, but in the real significance of planet earth, we are just passengers.

On a different point, i think nukes have been one of our greatest triumphs and greatest mistakes at the same time. We have truly harnessed a massive power but it all depends on its use, the same as the explosives and science that we dream about.

well thats my two cents(eurocents)

[Hang-Man]

I'm not a fan of the nukes. I mean, if your goal is to kill everyone in a given area, use a bioagent, at least then you wont have the radioactive earth and mass destruction to deal with :)

[static_firefly]

If it wasnt for nukes, what was the chances that WWIII would have stared during the cold war? I personaly think nukes are good.

[Bert]

Like any technology, it's neither good or bad.

If you haven't allready, check out The Nuclear Weapons FAQ (http://nuketesting.enviroweb.org/hew/Nwfaq/Nfaq0.html) . All kinds of good info- Think critical mass is a classified secret? Our government does... But it's published here.

I'd guess in a hundred years that our descendants will think anyone who thought to fire a nuke on a habitable planet's surface totaly insane. These are weapons that are only suited for use in space.

Politicians have never really figured out what nukes are about. Any of their weapons scientists who were too forceful about telling them that truth ended up marginalized or unemployed, like Openheimer.

The assumption that we can't change the earth noticably is wrong, IMHO. There's no limit on how big a weapon can be built. The USSR asmosphericaly tested a 50 megaton weapon, air dropped. And the design would have yielded perhaps twice that if the caseing had been replaced with the unenriched Uranium originaly designed for the weapon. That's the kind of energy that a tectonic fault might notice. And I know JUST where I'd put one for the greatest effect... (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1513342.stm)

[zeocrash]

Originally posted by Hang-Man
I'm not a fan of the nukes. I mean, if your goal is to kill everyone in a given area, use a bioagent, at least then you wont have the radioactive earth and mass destruction to deal with :)
if i had to go i'd rather be incinerated by a nuke than die a slow and painful death at the hands of some bioagent

[Ahriman]

I think nuclear weapons arent really a viable option for use in a war, they are mostly just political weapons used by governments to threaten other countries, but not really intended to be used. Considering how nuclear weapons have grown in size and power since WW2, you would have to have a really insane government, or a country about to be conquered, to use them (Although, what government IS sane?)
Maybe there will be a nuclear weapon make that burns up the fallout in daughter-reactions, who knows? Would that make nuclear weapons more usable?

[Cyclonite]

Im pro-nukes, they are a great deterrent. The energy yield for the mass is impressive but threes lots of room for improvement. Great displays of power and destruction always fascinated me. There’s allot more suffering due to common explosive items than any nuke. Its just overrated because ITS A NUKE. There is also nukes that are very small that fit on GMs fired from fighters "super bunker busters" that wont cause significant harm to the environment. Look how many were tested above ground. I don’t see a nuclear winter, do you? The only nations that rival our nuclear power we wont fight in my lifetime. The japs had it coming to them anyways, besides more lives were saved.

As for alternatives...Neutron bombs don’t cause nearly the amount of long-term radiation. They just kill its like a “Nuclear Neutron claymore"

On another note, am I the only one who looks at everyday objects in terms of E=MC2. The amount of destruction my shoes could cause is great....:D

[chemwarrior]

On another note, am I the only one who looks at everyday objects in terms of E=MC2. The amount of destruction my shoes could cause is great....:)

Hehe, every day:D Hmm... I wonder how much damnage this ball of link in my pocket could do if I do this and this and this to it..... or hmm, look at this pencil... (hehe, remember NBK the screenplay anyone? where the guy, George, I think, stabs that girl to death in the court? :D)

E=MC2 is just a general term in my oppinion though. All things have power, but depending on how you harness it, it could be used to hurt or help. Take a firehose for example- VERY powerful. Can be used to stop a raging inferno in the hands of a firefighter, or it could be used to knock someone on their ass before stomping their skull into little pieces....

Also, Im very pro-nuke. They are the greatest deterrent from many countries attacking another. There is nothing available, with the exception of some bio/chem agents that would scare a country into NOT attacking. Im personally more afraid of the bio/chem agents, but thats because those are things you would never see comming.. strike silently, no warning (unless you live in a major hotspot and they have the chemical agent detectors set up... still doesnt do a damn bit of good against bio agents... {side note, does anyone know if the rumors about NY setting up chem detectors in the city are true??})

[nbk2000]

I believe they're testing using CW detectors for the subways in NYNY and D.C. But given the quality of employees that these public services tend to hire, I'm fully confident that the things wouldn't work. :)

That, and there's so many other chemicals that could be used that it wouldn't make any difference, since they wouldn't be detectable by a monitor intended for military CW detection.

And would it really help if an automated recording came on during rush hour in a crowded tube station saying "This is an alert! Chemical warfare agent detected! Evacuate the station! (repeat REALLY LOUD)"?

Nope.

If anything it'd be even worse because of the panic. And what could the authorities do to evacuate the station in time to prevent fatalities if it did detect Sarin or HCN? Nothing. It's just a "feel-good" measure to make the sheeple think that the government is doing something to protect. them. :p

[pyromaniac_guy]

Originally posted by Bert
Think critical mass is a classified secret? Our government does... But it's published here.
[/URL]

no they dont... estimating crittical mass is a very simple process, and has been common knowlege in the scientific community since the 40's

[YayItGoBoom!]

Lately I've been pondering the possibility of a "clean" thermonuke, one including a fusion reaction driven by electochemical means rather than a fission prereaction. It seems like the government would have thought of this already, but then again much is kept behind closed doors, especially with common sheeple paranoia about WMDs. My idea is that heavy hydrogen isotopes Deuterium and Tritium are stored in an insulated metal sphere. The sphere has two electode arrays connected to a very large capacitor bank, several hundred kVolts and very large capacitance (a half Farad would definitely do the trick but supposedly a capacitor that big would be the size of a house). Around the sphere would be a layer of Carbon Subnitride C4N2, supposedly the hottest burning substance. That would have some sort of exotic thermite starter flame most likely to get the temp needed. Around that would be a very high VoD explosive, I'm not the one to say, but perhaps astrolite or HMX. Heres how the whole thing works. Heavy hydrogen pressurized to as high a pressure as reasonable, before detonation the capacitors fire, arcing through the gas producing plasma at high temperatures, I would take a stab and say 10000 K. The carbon subnitride is rapidy oxidized, burning at approx 5000 K, while simultaneously being compressed by the explosives. I'll have to run some tests on this in my basement when I get a chance ;) .

[xyz]

One of the misconceptions that a lot of people have is that "Setting off a nuke makes places uninhabitable for hundreds of years" In actual fact, radiation in the area is down to fairly safe levels within 2 or 3 weeks.

The rule for nuclear blast radiation is that if you are in the area, you receive more radiation in the first hour, than you do in the rest of the first day, more in the first day than the rest of the first week, and more in the first week, than the rest of your lifetime spent living in the area.

[Flake2m]

I think one of the reasons that there has not been a major war in over 55 years has been because of Nuclear weapons and other highly destructive weapons, that are now avalible (you say commerically) to any country with the money.
100 years ago, Wars were longer and bloodier. The weapons we used in WWI and WWII were not efficient as they are today.
While you could argue that Wars are still just as bloody, the longer they rage means the generals of the armies are more likely to do more desperate things, this was the case of the Nuclear attacks on Hiroshima & Nagasaki in WWII and the use of poison gas in WWI.

Now world leaders are encouraged more to resolve problems through more diplomatic channels then with the use of tanks, guns 'n bombs. Nukes are just another option when desperate measures are required to be taken, just like poison gas and Biological agents.

In the end it just comes down to how hot-headed the world leaders of today are.I dont doubt that this world will experience another major conflict (WWIII) it is a question of when and for many of us, we hope that it dosen't occur while I friends + family are still on this planet.

The doomsday clock is still ticking...

[Desmikes]

Bert mentioned detonation of nukes in space and that got me thinking, if the main source of nuke’s pressure-wave is extreme heat and not production of gasses, what would a detonation of a thermonuclear device in space look like? Since there is noting around it that could be expanded during the release of thermal energy (other than the device itself) I would suspect that space detos wouldn’t be nearly as spectacular.
Hang-Man proposed using bioagents to kill people in order to eliminate radioactive fallout, wouldn’t neutron bomb be more suitable for that purpose. If I remember correctly, those babies kill everything that has living tissue, aren’t nearly as destructive as other nukes, are confined to relatively small area but will go through pretty much any type of shielding in that area, only leaves secondary (induced) radiation for mere 24-40hrs.

[xyz]

I have also wondered that about nukes in space...
A lot of the design done on neutron bombs is for taking out tanks because they are much more resistant to nuclear weapons than infantry (overpressure shielding, armor more than 80cm thick in some cases). Of course a tank will not survive close proximity to the epicentre of a nuclear blast but it will do much better than infantry would.

A neutron bomb however, will easily create a burst of intense radiation that will kill the crew of the tank.