"The Bunker"-who would you save?

[Coyote]

People assume the feminist, by dint of being a feminist, hates and will refuse sex. She's a feminist-rights scholar, not necessarily a castrating manhating militant bulldyke. She's smart enough to know that she's going to be needed to breed out some young'uns, but she's just going to want to make sure that the women in this new order don't end up getting treated like chattel.

And I'm fine with that. It's been stated that the opportunity exists to start a new religion of sorts. Cool! Make a religion where education and learning aboiut science and the environment are acts of goodness; and women & races are all equal, and where thinking ahead for disaster preparedness is a commandment.

[phred]

Keep the MD., and maybe the nurse.
Keep the mechanic.
Keep the farmers.
Toss the guy with HIV.
Not sure about the suicide watch guy, the fact that he came to the shelter shows some will to live.
Everyone else draw straws. we are pretty much screwed in the really long term so breeding ability isnt that much of a concern anyway. Im also not that concerned with challenges to my authority because I would hand over the reins to someone better qualified once we get out.

[PeZook]

People assume the feminist, by dint of being a feminist, hates and will refuse sex. She's a feminist-rights scholar, not necessarily a castrating manhating militant bulldyke. She's smart enough to know that she's going to be needed to breed out some young'uns, but she's just going to want to make sure that the women in this new order don't end up getting treated like chattel.

And I'm fine with that. It's been stated that the opportunity exists to start a new religion of sorts. Cool! Make a religion where education and learning aboiut science and the environment are acts of goodness; and women & races are all equal, and where thinking ahead for disaster preparedness is a commandment.

What I said was that she could stir up shit, and only if she's hardcore at that. Why? Because she may have a problem with the fact that women will have to be impregnated by all the men one after another, and spit out babies as fast as possible (and economical). Of course, it all depends on how it's presented - Stas had a great idea with the whole "Great Mothers Of Humanity" concept. It's essential that you sell your ideas to the commune rather than forcing people to do what you want, for reasons that were already explained.

[MKSheppard]

Another hang on. Radiation etc isn't a hangman's drop.

*snip explanation*

Do you have any idea why Radiation has become commonly accepted as a boogeyman which remains for 10,000 years? I mean beyond the obvious "we can't see it" part?

[K. A. Pital]

Do you have any idea why Radiation has become commonly accepted as a boogeyman which remains for 10,000 years?

Now that's freaking easy MK. Chernobyl. And prior to that, nuclear tests. The fallout radiation is extremely long-lasting, once something is irradiated it's fucked up quite much.

[Stuart]

[quote="Stas Bush]Now that's freaking easy MK. Chernobyl. And prior to that, nuclear tests. The fallout radiation is extremely long-lasting, once something is irradiated it's ruined quite much.[/quote]

I think its personification. When people saw what the fission devices did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they instinctively knew there was something terribly different about these weapons. Nuclear weapons aren't just big bombs, they're a totally different class of weapon and people saw the destroyed cities and knew it. Yet, they couldn't rationalize what was so differen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't destroyed to any greater extent than any German city or Japanese city. The casualties weren't actually any greater (you want to see what devastation means, look at what the B-29s did to Tokyo one night) . The casualties were seemed to die the same way, the burned were equally horribly burned, those killed by fragments were equally fragmented, those crushed by overpressure were equally squished. So, people knew they were looking at something different but couldn't work out why it was different.

Then came news of people dying of radiation sickness and that was the factor that grabbed people's mines. People knew that nobody had died of radiation sickness in the German or Japanese firebomb raids but they had when the Atomic Bomb was used. Aha! That must be why the Atmonic Bomb was different. It gave off radiation and so radiation became a code name for everything about nuclear weapons that people knew was different but they couldn't describe. Radiation leaks etc all added to the meme once it had become established.

In fact, radiation from a nuclear initiation needn't be too harmful. With an airburst, there's very little fallout and what there is mostly fades away within a week or so. After 24 hours, you'd be OK walking on ground zero (in fact some USAF people have stood on ground zero while an air-to-air nuke was initiated over their heads. No discernable increase in radiation. With fusion devices, the high-emission/short half-life products are blown so high, they've decayed before they come down.

With a ground burst, the situation is entirely different, the soil is sucked into the fireball and the contamination is horrible and long-lasting. That's why I don;t like having ICBMs on national territory.

[fgalkin]

People assume the feminist, by dint of being a feminist, hates and will refuse sex. She's a feminist-rights scholar, not necessarily a castrating manhating militant bulldyke. She's smart enough to know that she's going to be needed to breed out some young'uns, but she's just going to want to make sure that the women in this new order don't end up getting treated like chattel.

You have any recent experience with feminists in academia? Some of these people are fucking scary. Some aren't, but I tend to assume the worst.

Have a very nice day.
-fgalkin

[K. A. Pital]

Yeah, airbursts, especially for "clean" bombs are not contaminating much beyond the initial ionizing radiation which has a small radius of penetration (and less even with shelters).

The question is not about the ionizing radiation, as you correctly mentioned, the problem is the amount of radio-active materiel thrown out. In the Chernobyl explosion, lots of radio-active material escaped and went up into the clouds and the contaminating fallout - but the explosion itself was really minor.

So the question is, in an airburst, how much various debris and other particles will get contaminated to have a serious effect on fallout?

[Patrick Degan]

I think its personification. When people saw what the fission devices did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they instinctively knew there was something terribly different about these weapons. Nuclear weapons aren't just big bombs, they're a totally different class of weapon and people saw the destroyed cities and knew it. Yet, they couldn't rationalize what was so differen. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't destroyed to any greater extent than any German city or Japanese city. The casualties weren't actually any greater (you want to see what devastation means, look at what the B-29s did to Tokyo one night) . The casualties were seemed to die the same way, the burned were equally horribly burned, those killed by fragments were equally fragmented, those crushed by overpressure were equally squished. So, people knew they were looking at something different but couldn't work out why it was different.

Then came news of people dying of radiation sickness and that was the factor that grabbed people's mines. People knew that nobody had died of radiation sickness in the German or Japanese firebomb raids but they had when the Atomic Bomb was used. Aha! That must be why the Atmonic Bomb was different. It gave off radiation and so radiation became a code name for everything about nuclear weapons that people knew was different but they couldn't describe. Radiation leaks etc all added to the meme once it had become established.

I'd think it also came down to the fact that a single bomb dropped from one plane did the same work in seconds as a fleet of B-29s did in an evening. The radiation danger would have added a new dimension to the horror, but the fact that one bomb could do that was what informed people that the nature of warfare had just changed radically.