Exaagerated Threats

Guest · Post by **Guest** » 2003-09-01 12:39am

Great I'll just go and visit the library. Et,nt. Have a great night, this was fun. When the nukes start flying people start dying: a friend. It wont matter about nuclear winter, there won't be anyone left to test the theory. And if they are they really won't care. Moot topic. S.T.Read my books they are really nice.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-09-01 12:42am

Imperialist wrote:Great I'll just go and visit the library. Et,nt. Have a great night, this was fun. When the nukes start flying people start dying: a friend. It wont matter about nuclear winter, there won't be anyone left to test the theory. And if they are they really won't care. Moot topic. S.T.Read my books they are really nice.

Funny how even the discredited bullshit you posted only attempts to claim that 1/3 of the earth's population would die. Course idiots aren't known for consistency.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-09-01 12:43am

Imperialist wrote:Great I'll just go and visit the library.

It's actually an article rather than a book, so I suspect that you would need a more thorough citation to find it.

When the nukes start flying people start dying: a friend.

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. Of course people would die in a nuclear war!

It wont matter about nuclear winter, there won't be anyone left to test the theory.

Considering that worst-case estimates have approximately 30% of the world's population dying in a 1980s attack scenario, there should be plenty left to observe the effects.

And if they are they really won't care. Moot topic. S.T.Read my books they are really nice.

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Guest · Post by **Guest** » 2003-09-01 12:46am

Advertisment. No books exist thus the falsity is made. He is unleashed. Beware.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-09-01 12:49am

Imperialist wrote:Advertisment. No books exist thus the falsity is made. He is unleashed. Beware.

Look, an idiot newbie is trying to attack the credibility of a long-term poster!

Joe · Post by **Joe** » 2003-09-01 12:50am

He is unleashed. Beware.

*wipes a tear from eye*

This is just too good. Nobody ban this guy, this is the most fun I've had in a long time.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » 2003-09-01 12:51am

Long time poster you may be but the fun has just begun. Sleep tight, war is upon you.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-09-01 12:53am

Imperialist wrote:Long time poster you may be but the fun has just begun. Sleep tight, war is upon you.

Yup and its Victoria era Great Britain against Zanzibar. Guess which side you are.

The Duchess of Zeon · Post by **The Duchess of Zeon** » 2003-09-01 12:59am

Imperialist wrote:Long time poster you may be but the fun has just begun. Sleep tight, war is upon you.

Are you copying and pasting sections of Trash Metal lyrics together to make your posts? The alternative is unthinkable to consider for the future of the human race.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-09-01 01:01am

The Duchess of Zeon wrote:
Imperialist wrote:Long time poster you may be but the fun has just begun. Sleep tight, war is upon you.
Are you copying and pasting sections of Trash Metal lyrics together to make your posts?

So, is that the Internet equivilant of cutting-and-pasting magazine letters to make a document and then anonymously sending it off?

Post by **Edi** » 2003-09-01 03:25am

Imperialist is obviously a grade-A fuckwit, as evidenced by his own words and pathetic performance. Looks like we have a new popular chewtoy for the N&P forum.

Crown wrote:I wouldn't say bio-weapons are exaggerated. Small pox for example, I read somewhere that if the virus were to be released in say NY city, and 100 people were infected, you would need to surround them with 100,000 vaccinated people to stop the virus.

Anyone have any idea how many vaccines the CDC has on hand?

Having said that however, I seriously doubt that any terrorist organisation (using the term loosely) has small pox in a test tube.

It's worse than that, actually. Back when the anthrax scare was going on, there was an article in the Time magazine that addressed smallpox, and they cited a study made by CDC and some of the national security agencies about smallpox in America. Their model was one carrier getting into one of the big cities (Boston or NYC, I think) undetected and only diagnosed a week or so later. Projected casualties were 25 to 30 million dead on the Eastern Seaboard alone, because the virus would spread so quickly that it could not be contained and nobody has resistance to it. There was, iirc, something about it maybe being possible to contain the epidemic to the eastern US, but with all the cross-US air traffic, very unlikely. Those figures made me sit up and take notice, because they were so far beyond anything else I'd ever seen. I don't know how waterproof that scenario was and what the other assumptions were involved, but with something as noxious as smallpox, one might as well prepare for the worst. Better to be pleasantly surprised when things don't turn out as bad than to get caught with one's pants down.

Edi

Gil Hamilton · Post by **Gil Hamilton** » 2003-09-01 12:27pm

Nuclear winter is a crock. The Krakatoa explosion, which released more energy than the current US nuclear arsenal put together, only managed to lower overall temperatures a couple of degrees on average for a few years and by the very nature of a volcano put more shit into the atmosphere than a nuclear war would (ground bursts would kick up some particles, but mile high air bursts wouldn't really produce all that much). I'm willing to bet that there would be a slight drop in overall average temperature worldwide post a major nuclear war, but it wouldn't be enough to be worried about (we'd have much bigger things to worry about).

Post by **Coyote** » 2003-09-01 12:46pm

This Imperialist dude is outta control. Even I know that most dust and particles that are supposed to cause atmospheric blanketing and bring on a 'nuclear winter' would be a result of ground bursts-- the least efficient means of delivering a nuke's explosive potential.

Nukes are detonated in air bursts, thus spreading the destructive potential out over a far greater distance. It also creates far less fallout (irradiated particles). No competent military planner would be relying on ground bursts to destroy an enemy. And even if there were ground bursts, the volcanic eruptions provided as examples demonstrate pretty well some of the likely effects would be-- not near as much as the doomsayers would like to believe.

This is 1980's hysterics. Wake up, it's been a few years.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-09-01 12:53pm

Edi wrote:I don't know how waterproof that scenario was and what the other assumptions were involved, but with something as noxious as smallpox, one might as well prepare for the worst. Better to be pleasantly surprised when things don't turn out as bad than to get caught with one's pants down.

There have been some studies since then indicating that even after all this time anyone who got immunized way back when should have at least partial protection. Furthermore, they've also discovered different dosages and such which would greatly increase the supply of vaccine in the US.

TrailerParkJawa · Post by **TrailerParkJawa** » 2003-09-01 02:20pm

Coyote wrote:This Imperialist dude is outta control. Even I know that most dust and particles that are supposed to cause atmospheric blanketing and bring on a 'nuclear winter' would be a result of ground bursts-- the least efficient means of delivering a nuke's explosive potential.

Nukes are detonated in air bursts, thus spreading the destructive potential out over a far greater distance. It also creates far less fallout (irradiated particles). No competent military planner would be relying on ground bursts to destroy an enemy. And even if there were ground bursts, the volcanic eruptions provided as examples demonstrate pretty well some of the likely effects would be-- not near as much as the doomsayers would like to believe.

This is 1980's hysterics. Wake up, it's been a few years.

I thought part of the reasoning behind nuclear winter was not the dust kicked up by the bursts, but the massive fires that would result as hundreds of cities burn unheeded by human attention. The resulting soot and particle pollution would be immense. Although it is a good question. Would that still rival something like Krakatoa?

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-09-01 03:00pm

TrailerParkJawa wrote:I thought part of the reasoning behind nuclear winter was not the dust kicked up by the bursts, but the massive fires that would result as hundreds of cities burn unheeded by human attention. The resulting soot and particle pollution would be immense. Although it is a good question. Would that still rival something like Krakatoa?

No. In order to inject particulate debris into the stratosphere, you need to launch material upwards at several kilometres per second, at a bare minimum. Even the strict lower limit (disregarding atmospheric drag) is 1 km/s (easily calculated by computing the gravitational potential energy state at 50km altitude and substituting it into the kinetic energy formula).

Chemical combustion does not launch debris upwards at several kilometres per second. Ergo, it will not achieve stratospheric injection, which is necessary for global environmental effects. This is an almost childishly simple calculation to perform, and it is an observation easily verified in many ways (not least of which is the observation of real forest wildfires, which do not inject any material into the stratosphere).

Sagan may have been a great scientist, but it is widely agreed among the scientific community that he allowed ideology to pollute his objectivity when he created that study. He simply assumed that soot and ash from fires should eventually reach the stratosphere, and didn't bother verifying that assumption. He also greatly underestimated the atmosphere's ability to scrub particulate waste (real volcano eruptions in excess of his nuclear winter thresholds did not produce nuclear winter).

Let's put some numbers in perspective: the K-T extinction asteroid wiped out some 70% of life and caused the effects commonly attributed to nuclear winter. However, it was a 100 million megaton groundburst, whereas a nuclear war would be only a few thousand megatons, and it would be mostly composed of airbursts.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-09-01 03:14pm

By the way, the phrase "nuclear winter" generally refers to long-term cooling which lasts for months. A week-long darkening of the sky would not produce serious long-term global environmental effects.

In response to the virtual dismantling of the TTAPS study, some have tried to promote a strawman distortion of the current scientific position by arguing that it's been distorted by right-wing militarists and acting as though we are now saying that nuclear war would have almost no environmental effect whatsoever. That is a gross exaggeration of the argument.

PS. An example of the kind of rhetorical chicanery promoted by those still clinging to the nuclear winter argument can be seen in an interview with F. Sherwood Roland:

F. Sherwood Roland wrote:I would say - make it broader than just atmospheric concerns - the release of nuclear energy in a bomb produces a tremendous amount of blast and heat and radiation and then fallout. And over the time period since 1945 when the first bombs were set off, there has been immense concern about all of these effects. The initial bombs which were set off over Japan in 1945 were at the level of about 20 kilotons. Now one hears the bomb strength measured in megatons, which is a thousand - a megaton is a thousand kilotons - and the talk is about full exchange between two countries such as the United States and the Soviet Union. You're talking 5,000 to 10,000 megatons, each megaton being 50 times the effect of Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Enormous amounts of blast energy released over cities, or over military targets, and radioactive fallout coming downwind from this, and a typical calculation of what the effects would be from such a nuclear exchange are of the order of 750 million people killed immediately, and another several hundred million people who had been seriously maimed and affected by one or the other of these effects. Now, the nuclear winter is a further consideration that is added onto the top of this, and this has to do with longer term atmospheric effects, and longer term meaning that they might last weeks or several months.

Leaving aside the question of why a professor of chemistry is regarded as an expert on this matter or why he described nuclear weapon yield with the rather bizarre term "bomb strength", notice how he carefully implies (without coming out and saying it) that the radioactive fallout of a nuclear weapon is proportional to its yield, when in reality, higher-yield bombs are actually cleaner than low-yield bombs.

Also note elsewhere in the article that he is very vague about evidence for stratospheric injection of particulate matter, and consistently uses volcano eruptions as proof that fires will have this effect (even though the volcano eruptions he refers to are invariably megaton-class, and no chemical fire produces anywhere near that kind of intensity).

Axis Kast · Post by **Axis Kast** » 2003-09-01 03:55pm

Liklihood is too often associated with the impact of success. This is largely the result of a media feedback loop; print and electronic media criticize the rank unpreparedness of local and national government before a viewing population whose understanding of terrorist activity or scientific reality is drawn directly from the silver screen.

Sea Skimmer hit the nail on the head: any “serious” attack (i.e. one capable of distributing damage over a broad area or among a large population) demands state backing of some sort, or at least significant financial or educational resources, at which point the range of probable sources narrows considerably or is otherwise not so difficult to trace. What really doesn’t help is that most Americans view another act of domestic terrorism as inevitable; it’s simply that nobody’s prepared to say how, when, and where.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-09-01 04:49pm

TrailerParkJawa wrote:
I thought part of the reasoning behind nuclear winter was not the dust kicked up by the bursts, but the massive fires that would result as hundreds of cities burn unheeded by human attention. The resulting soot and particle pollution would be immense. Although it is a good question. Would that still rival something like Krakatoa?

The assumption seems to have been that every nuclear burst would create a firestorm, which would spread over a vast area and basically burn all the earths' forest to the ground. Now in reality of course that's simply not going to happen. Hiroshima did surfer from a limited firestorm, which actually caused more damage then the initial nuclear explosion. However Nagasaki which was the same kind of wood and paper city (far more flammable then a modern city) did not have one.

As noted it wouldn't be anything like Krakatoa because none of it would reach the stratosphere.

Post by **Sea Skimmer** » 2003-09-01 04:55pm

Gil Hamilton wrote:Nuclear winter is a crock. The Krakatoa explosion, which released more energy than the current US nuclear arsenal put together, only managed to lower overall temperatures a couple of degrees on average for a few years and by the very nature of a volcano put more shit into the atmosphere than a nuclear war would (ground bursts would kick up some particles, but mile high air bursts wouldn't really produce all that much). I'm willing to bet that there would be a slight drop in overall average temperature worldwide post a major nuclear war, but it wouldn't be enough to be worried about (we'd have much bigger things to worry about).

The islands finnal explosion unleashed over twenty gigatons of energy, but the volcano dumped out several gigatons more in other lesser explosions during the same eruption. The mean temperature drop was one point two degrees Celsius IIRC

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-09-01 08:35pm

Just in case anyone's curious, the current estimate for a mass-extinction event which wipes out all complex forms of life is roughly 1 billion megatons.

Death from the Sea · Post by **Death from the Sea** » 2003-09-02 02:03pm

Vympel wrote:
Sea Skimmer wrote:
Lets see a small canister in a paper bag which might have held two pounds of explosives killed eleven people and injured 5000
That sucks. Injured 11 people? Yawn. If it had been a guy with explosive strapped to him, he could've gotten a much higher death-count. Who cares about injured? Certainly not terrorists- it's deaths that get people going. And this is in practically optimum conditions we're talking about (confined crowded rail system)

*snip*

Um, correct me if I am wrong he said killed 11 and injured 5000. I would say that wounding or inuring 5000 is pretty impressive for an IED that small.