Do you know what Tsar Bomba was? It was the biggest nuclear bomb ever exploded. You don’t hear much about it, do you? It was 50 megatons. The Soviets dropped it from a plane in the Arctic Circle in 1961. Ever hear of Castle Bravo? That was the biggest bomb the United States ever exploded. We don’t hear to much about it, either. The bomb, which was set off in 1954 on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific, was 15 megatons due to a design flaw. It was supposed to be about 5 megatons. The increased power caused increased fallout:
The fallout spread traces of radioactive material as far as Australia, India and Japan, and even the US and parts of Europe. Though organized as a secret test, Castle Bravo quickly became an international incident, prompting calls for a ban on the atmospheric testing of thermonuclear devices.
In addition to the radiological accident, the unexpectedly high yield of the device severely damaged many of the permanent buildings on the control site island on the far side of the atoll. Little of the desired diagnostic data on the shot was collected; many instruments designed to transmit their data back before being destroyed by the blast were instead vaporized instantly, while most of the instruments that were expected to be recovered for data retrieval were destroyed by the blast.
As for the Tsar Bomba:
Since 50 Mt is 2.1×1017 joules, the average power produced during the entire fission-fusion process, lasting around 39 nanoseconds, was about 5.4×1024 watts or 5.4 yottawatts (5.4 septillion watts). This is equivalent to approximately 1.4% of the power output of the Sun
So, yeah, I support Obama’s efforts to eliminate these weapons. And scientists should not play around with making different designs, as there can be unpredictable consequences (as the Castle Bravo test demonstrated).
The cause of the high yield was a laboratory error made by designers of the device at Los Alamos National Laboratory. They considered only the lithium-6 isotope in the lithium deuteride secondary to be fissionable; the lithium-7 isotope, accounting for 60% of the lithium content, was assumed to be inert.
It was expected that lithium-6 isotope would absorb a neutron from the fissioning plutonium and emit an alpha particle and tritium in the process, of which the latter would then fuse with the deuterium and increase the yield in a predicted manner.
Contrary to expectations, when the lithium-7 isotope is bombarded with high-energy neutrons, it absorbs a neutron then decomposes to form an alpha particle, another neutron, and a tritium nucleus. This means that much more tritium was produced than expected, and the extra tritium in fusion with deuterium (as well as the extra neutron from lithium-7 decomposition) produced many more neutrons than expected, causing far more fissioning of the uranium tamper, thus increasing yield.This resultant extra fuel (both lithium-6 and lithium-7) contributed greatly to the fusion reactions and neutron production and in this manner greatly increased the device’s explosive output.
So, yes, I support all nuclear non-proliferation efforts.
Neat.
Including the Israelis? They’ve got an unregulated weapons program going on for a while now.
Of course I include the Israelis. But I include Iran and India and Pakistan and the United States and Brazil, Everything is not about the Israelis.
No one’s going to mention their weapons until they figure out how to stop an arms race in the region.
If you don’t include Israel’s 200 plus weapons, it’s all a big joke.
Would Iran even want them if Israel was not sitting on their stash as they continued their ethic cleansing of Arabs?
Yes. Iran wants control of the Gulf; Israel, the US and the rest of the world aren’t the only countries who want Iran to back off, you know. Saudi, Kuwait, UAE and the rest probably don’t want Iran to get weapons more so than Israel. Persian Gulf, mate, Persian…
Balance of power seems to work best.
AND, it’s NOT Saudis, Kuwaitis and UAE that have been advocating bombing Iran for over 4 years.
Interesting:
http://lynch.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/02/08/the_saudi_israeli_handshake
It’s like these things are right on queue.
See, they might not advocate directly that they want to bomb Iran, but they really have no problem with Israel doing it. The article outlines why they’re never open about it, and try and have it both ways.
And there have been plenty of articles quoting Saudi officials that another war would create even more instability in the ME.
Not one mention of bombing but plenty of this:
It’s a shame the Obama administration’s new budget calls for an increase in the money devoted to researching and developing an “improved,” “modern” generation of these weapons. Obama’s rhetoric so far on this issue has been wonderful; his administration’s actions, less so.
This is a key year for nuclear abolition. The Pentagon is set to deliver its periodic NPR (Nuclear Posture Review); Obama has said (though I doubt it’ll happen) he wants the Senate to ratify the CTBT treaty this spring; an agreement for renewing START II with the Russians, presumably with lower missile totals, is due any time now (it expired in December); and a major U.N. conference on nuclear disarmament is set for early May.
Without a major public push on this issue — and nukes are way, way down the list of public concerns in the US right now — don’t expect much. While a lot of the retired foreign policy establishment has gotten behind abolition lately, including cold warriors like Kissinger and Schulz, any disarmament talk from within the current Village is aimed solely at providing cover for pressuring Iran. There’s very little interest in challenging business as usual for our own (much, much larger) nuclear program. Or Israel’s.
Why is Israel important? So long as Israel has nukes, and routinely threatens to attack Iran, Iran will work to get them, too. And Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States won’t be far behind.
Who doesn’t support the nonproliferation treaty?
If ordinary doctors and surgeons can kill upwards of a hundred thousand medical patients each year through carelessness, why would anyone not expect physicists to also fuck up on occasion. Who needs them?
Uh, pretty much everything you can name needs physicists.
Well maybe that’s why my coffee sucks these last few years. They tinkered with it. Damned.
You neglect to mention: the Tsar Bomba was specifically fitted with a led shell and well, nerfed. It was supposed to be 100 MT. The ironic is that this led shell caught a lot of the worst radiation meaning MT for MT, Tsar Bomba was one of the cleanest nuclear bombs ever.
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For Sam Cohen, the neutron bomb is the ultimate sane weapon. It kills humans, or as he puts it “the bad guys,” but doesn’t produce tremendous collateral damage on civilian populations and the infrastructure a civilian population needs to survive.
This meant, in Cohen’s mind, that a conventional war could escalate without immediately leading to an all-out nuclear holocaust. If regular nuclear weapons were used across Europe, the radioactive fallout could turn the continent into a wasteland for decades. That wouldn’t be the case if neutron bombs were used.
Between 1958 and 1961 the neutron bomb idea was tested successfully, but the politicians in Washington nixed development and deployment of the weapon. Cohen persisted. As the Vietnam War began and festered in the 1960s, Cohen became an advocate of using neutron bombs there. To Cohen, his weapon was “a perfect fit” for dealing with the Viet Cong hidden in the jungles and rice paddies.
Again, the politicians had other ideas. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ruled that no nuclear weapons of any type would be used in the war. The use of the small neutron bombs would have brought the war to a quick end, Cohen still argues, and saved the loss of more than 50,000 American lives.
In 1969, Cohen was fired from the Rand Corp. for continuing to advocate the use of tactical neutron bombs to end the conflict. “I lost all my battles,” Cohen says today.
In 1979, he was in Paris helping the French build their own arsenal of neutron bombs when presidential candidate Ronald Reagan came through on a European tour. Cohen met with Reagan to brief him on the neutron bomb. Reagan grasped the idea of neutron weaponry immediately, and made a pledge to Cohen, and later a public pledge, that he would reverse Carter administration policy by building and deploying a large number of neutron bombs.
As president, Reagan fulfilled that pledge and approximately a thousand weapons were constructed. But criticism from European allies kept the weapons from being deployed across Europe.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."There is no better introduction to this subject than the first chapter of pro-nuclear weapon advocate Herman Kahn’s original edition of Thinking about the Unthinkable. It came out about the same time as the movie On the Beach and has a graphic description of the damage a 10 MT weapon could do. No better argument against nuclear weapons than the fact that they are mostly useless as deterrents once the assumed enemy also has them and can engage in a strategy of mutual assured destruction (MAD). The forty year standoff between the US and the Soviet Union was scary enough. Adding additional players soon gets you to the greater possibility that alliances and miscalculations can lead to their devastating use in a scenario much like the start of World War I, when the assassination of a empire’s archduke disintegrated within in days to a five-year-long world war.
The United States has a continuous program of modernization that aims at reliability and the reduction of the possibility of an accidental explosion. The funds for that are different from the PR insistence of Republicans that we build a new generation of nuclear weapons — whatever that means. Plutonium Page at Daily Kos has written extensively about this issue, nonproliferation, and Iran’s nuclear program.
There is only one nation, South Africa, that once started down the road to nuclear weapons changed course and renounced them voluntarily. And only one in which sanctions actually worked to shut down a nuclear program — Iraq.
Israel has never publicly admitted to having nuclear weapons, but the general consensus of opinion is that they do. But for purposes of international relations, it doesn’t matter just so long as any opponent has credible reasons to think one does. And Israel has exploited that ambiguity aggressively in crisis situations.