Russia sent a couple of nuclear-capable bombers to circle around Guam, forcing us to scramble intercepters. This makes me a little nervous on a day that a meteorite blew up in the Russian sky with more power than the bombs we dropped on Japan. Carl Sagan once did an episode of Cosmos dedicated to discussing The Tunguska Event. The Tunguska Event was a still not perfectly understood catastrophe that happened in Siberia in 1908. It was probably a comet, a fragment of a comet, or an asteroid that exploded in the air and caused non-radioactive damage equivalent to our first test with a thermonuclear hydrogen bomb. Dr. Sagan pointed out that a similar explosion in the nuclear age might have been interpreted as an attack which required full scale retaliation, thereby ending all intelligent life on Earth.
Watch it if you are interested.
We’re lucky that people have cameras and that Russia has sophisticated radar and the ability to quickly test radiation levels. Because fifty years ago, a meteorite like the one that hit in the Ural Mountains today might have caused World War Three and ended all our lives. Forever.
I remember when nuclear disarmament was a priority not only for progressives, but for Ronald Reagan. I am still astonished by how little progressives talk about it today, and how little the blogosphere seemed to care about the New START Treaty. We need to get rid of these weapons as quickly as we can. And we need to prevent large objects from striking our planet. We know how to do that, you know. We just have to care.
Progressives stopped caring about nuclear disarmament the moment Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts in the field.
Because they’re all dissent-y and stuff.
Yes, I’m still pissed off over that little performance.
He won that prize before Start and before he had accomplished anything regarding nuclear proliferation. The prize committee basically admitted they gave him the prize for what he had said and as encouragement for what he could do.
I don’t remember all that much dissent about him getting the peace other than from right-wingers.
Yes, the Nobel committee recognized the restarting nuclear reduction talks was, itself, the most significant part of the process, and they awarded it to him to give his efforts an assist. Why would you describe that as an “admission?” It’s what the Nobel Peace Prize is supposed to do.
I remember – heck, not “remember,” but can find examples up to the present day – of the term “Nobel Peace Prize Winner” being used a mocking epithet for him from left-wingers. Because drones, so who cares about nuclear reduction?
Did anyone notice anything at the end of the NBC News piece? That concerns me more than the Russians flying around Guam.
Sourcing from the Washington Beacon?
Yes. They were the first to report it, really? And if they really where, WTF?!? The Free Beacon is just another Breitbart-type operation, just centered in D.C.
Did they crib it from the BBC?
So Putin is provocative the same week that North Korea explodes its third nuclear weapons. For the neo-cons, the good times are back.
As for almost getting wiped out by a mistake, the US only had a couple of instances that it almost went to launch based on bogus data.
The Soviets had a couple of notable ones. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, the US Navy was dropping depth charges directly on top of a Soviet submarine armed with tactical nuclear weapon torpedoes. Of all people it was the Communist Party political officer on board that kept them from responding with a nuclear weapon.
The Soviets intercepted and shot down Korean Air Lines 007 with Congressman “Laetrile Larry” McDonald (R-GA) on board in 1983 at the height of Reagan’s belligerence. Both the US and the Soviet Union could have escalated (after all it was Soviet airspace that was invaded), but cooler heads prevailed.
What happened off Guam was pretty routine testing for both sides.
Republicans might not understand that foreign analysts who don’t understand the US system of government might think that the US is less willing to respond to threat with the controversy over US national security leadership confirmation going on.
Nuclear disarmament is a priority for this progressive, but you won’t get Iran to back down as long as the US is demanding to be the nation that gets to keep all of its nuclear weapons.
The planes training near Guam and the meteor hitting near Chelyabinsk were unrelated events.
A bigger worry than meteors and asteroids should be the tons of space junk from 55 years of both manned and unmanned space programs that we haven’t cleaned up. Most are small enough and light enough to ablate in the atmosphere. But there are some large military and communications satellites that might not. And no country is completely secure that other spacefaring countries — US, Russia, China,…are not developing space-based passive or active weapons.
State secrets are a big a risk as some of the weapons themselves.
Agree space junk is a problem, but I don’t think any of it constitutes a threat to destroy civilization should it reenter and impact the Earth as with asteroids.
This recent meteoroid event in Russia should be a wake-up call that we need to do more — preferably in joint ventures with other major countries, though I’m pessimistic that will happen given recent trends.
My sense of Russia is that they seem to be distancing themselves again from the US, under Putin’s harsh authoritarian regime, which does not bode well for prospects for a lasting world peace. I also think they’re getting ready to claim a major stake in the valuable oil resources being unthawed in the Arctic, and will take a hard, aggressive line to secure such resources against competing claims by the US, Canada and a Scandinavian country or two.
I wish the Obama admin had been more assertive and creative in seeking a restart in relations with Russia, and not just narrowly, though importantly, in the area of nuclear stockpile reductions. We should be much farther along by now in improving relations, more than 20 yrs after the end of the Cold War, and should have been engaged in all sorts of peaceful cooperative ventures by this point, nearly 50 years after JFK proposed and Khrushchev finally accepted Kennedy’s offer to go to the Moon together.
I think its fairly well established the Tunguska Event was the result of a meteor exploding above ground and not direct impact (from an asteroid or a meteor) on the surface.
Meteors are comprised of mostly ice and gas. Heat them fast enough -via a fast trip through the earth’s atmosphere- and they’ll explode.
Asteroids on the other hand are mostly rock. They tend to burn up thru the atmosphere and what’s left (assuming sufficient material) will impact the surface. Being mostly rock, they tend to not explode before impacting a solid surface.
Without being too technical, the relatively small size of the crater coupled with the large blast radius indicates the Tunguska Event resulted from an extraterrestrial objecting exploding above ground. 90% sure said explosion was from a meteor.
However, I do recall reading (70s? 80s?) that it might have been the result of a matter/antimatter explosion or possibly something having to do with a micro black hole. A bit more exotic than a superheated snowball.
Disagree with most of this, though as a mere nonscientist I’m just giving what I think is true.
Meteoroids, broken off from asteroids, aren’t mostly ice and gas — that would be a comet — but are composed, most of them, of iron and a little nickel.
One of the mysteries of Tunguska early on, when the first Soviet scientists arrived on scene yrs later, was the absence in the area of meteoric debris of the type described here. Nothing was found of that nature.
And no impact crater was found, last I checked on this story years ago. Quite a mystery. So I’m not sure what you refer to with your “small size of the crater” remark.
Given the absence of an impact crater and meteoroid debris, Sagan proposed that a small piece of comet — ice and gas — splintered off and exploded at several km above the ground. This would account for no impact crater and no debris as the explosion would have melted away cometary matter.
He also dismissed the anti-matter angle — radiation would be produced in the matter-anti-matter collision and no such radiation was found, as I believe he noted. He also dismissed the black hole theory,though I can’t recall why.
Regardless, I think it’s interesting, and a bit curious, that even a century later scientists can’t quite agree on what caused Tunguska.
They now think that Lake Cheko might be in the impact crater. As for the black hole theory, it would have exited in the North Atlantic, causing a similar disturbance. Since that didn’t happen, Sagan rejects the theory.
Early reports mentioned this rumor by locals in Russia, reminiscent of Soviet era. There was great consternation/confusion and some believed Russia was under attack or even “the end of the world.” Seems like a first reaction by Russian officials, we are in full control, we took care of it by a missile strike. We cannot be surprised by an attack from the sky. Astonishing event.