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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k597qqRl6rI Vaguely relevant SciFi channel commercial
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Jun 30, 2013 20:34
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Frozen Horse posted:^ These attacks, however, did not produce efficient transport of smoke into the stratosphere. A better model would be the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which did cause significant global effects on climate. Not really. Volcanic eruptions throw several orders of magnitude more debris into the atmosphere than any nuclear weapon is ever going to. Compare the size of the mountains that have gone missing following an eruption to the itty bitty potholes left by nuclear testing - which doesn't even begin to account for the difference. Even a comparatively small eruption like Pinatubo had an initial blast equivalent to 25 Megatons, about half of the Tsar bomb and larger than the largest actual deployed US/USSR city-busters. Except unlike the Tsar bomb or any other bomb it went off *inside* a goddamn mountain. More importantly AFTER that initial bang the volcano pushed an addition 10 BILLION tons of ejecta out over the course of several days in a huge superheated pillar of fine ash. And then burnt down a loving forest and a half in the process - which also benefited from said sustained pillar of superheated ash to carry it into the upper atmosphere. When they start making nukes to blow holes through the crust of the planet, then we can start comparing them to volcanoes. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 21:04 on Jun 30, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2013 20:56
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Warbadger posted:Not really. Volcanic eruptions throw an order of magnitude more debris into the atmosphere than any nuclear weapon is ever going to. Compare the size of the mountains that have gone missing following an eruption to the itty bitty potholes left by nuclear testing - which doesn't even begin to account for the difference. Even a comparatively small eruption like Pinatubo had an intial blast equivalent to 25 Megatons, about half of the Tsar bomb and larger than the largest actual deployed US/USSR city-busters. Except unlike the Tsar bomb or any other bomb it went off *inside* a goddamn mountain. More importantly AFTER that initial bang the volcano pushed an addition ten billion tons of ejecta out over the course of several days in a huge superheated pillar channeling heat and fine ash. I think I'm going to trust the scientists about this: quote:2007 study on global nuclear war
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Jun 30, 2013 21:03
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When Pakistan and India have a third of the world's nuclear arsenal to throw around in a "limited" nuclear exchange, then that might begin to be relevant. As it is they do not. They have around ~230 weapons combined out of the approximately 5,000 active or 17,000 current nuclear weapons total. Not to mention that given the size of most of India/Pakistan's weapons they're not throwing around a lot of potential tens-of-megatons cold war era city-busters. Coincidentally, when you start chucking around tens of thousands of nuclear weapons as they describe, many of them substantially more capable that India/Pakistan possess, you ARE several orders of magnitude above a single eruption! Edit: I'm also curious how they determined the amount of material moved into the atmosphere as it varies greatly depending on how the weapon is detonated. A ground burst will move more mass, but generally not as high/far as an air burst - which has substantially less dust/ash "fallout" but more residual radioactive material and it carries it higher. I'm pretty certain India/Pakistan wouldn't be attempting to crater out hardened missile silos with 20MT ground bursts as the US/USSR would have done. The point about the cities burning contributing greatly to the amount of fallout (at least the type relevant to climate change - that comprised of fine particles moved to the upper atmosphere) isn't something I can find a source to substantiate. The plume of superheated air that carries the material into the upper atmosphere isn't sustained for very long in the case of nuclear weapon as it can be for a volcanic eruption. A city burning would certainly distribute radioactive fallout and ash, but after the initial blast (and resulting temporary superhighway to the stratosphere) it carries material into the atmosphere just like any other ground fire. Edit: And as to why it matters that Pakistan and India aren't chucking around high-megaton bombs:  When it comes to leaving dust really high up so that it sticks around, size matters. Warbadger fucked around with this message at 22:27 on Jun 30, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2013 21:08
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iyaayas01 posted:e: This is only talking about U.S./Soviet nukes...the chances of India and/or Pakistan not starting something or Israel not using the opportunity to settle some scores seems infinitesimally small. And of course as has been pointed out the fallout would ruin everything for everyone else, and that's not getting into the climatic effects from that much dirt/dust getting thrown up into the atmosphere...I've seen studies (mostly from anti-nuke groups admittedly) that even a limited/localized nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan would toss up enough dirt to cause enough of a climatic shift that it would result in the death of around a billion people over a decade from starvation due to lower global food production. I thought this was based on Carl Sagan and his virtuous lying about Nuclear war IE Nuclear Winter.
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Jun 30, 2013 21:55
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Without looking at the models, it's worth noting that countervalue attacks are going to overwhelmingly be airbursts, which (I think) kick up a lot less crap. An India/Pak exchange will be almost entirely countervalue. It's US/USSR multimegaton ground strikes on ICBM bunkers that are going to make the biggest messes.
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Jun 30, 2013 22:08
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iyaayas01 posted:Everything out there open source about the SIOP pretty much indicates that China was getting hit by the U.S. just as hard as we were going to hit the Soviets... The withholds were already coming in around 1962 so who even knows. iyaayas01 posted:As far as truly "non-aligned" countries things would be a little less certain, for example I doubt India would get nuked by the Soviets just because they were a British colony, especially since by the '60s and definitely the '70s they were pretty adamant about their non-aligned status and not falling fully into either camp. Soviet-Indian relations were p. strong even during the late fifties  and they were an independent country before the USSR had exploded their first device Frozen Horse posted:There's a difference in atmospheric effects between a test over a lagoon versus bombing Mumbai. One is going to produce a lot of steam and some vaporized coral, the other is going to produce a lot more smoke. Apparently coral is very lovely stuff to have as fallout.
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Jun 30, 2013 22:36
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Nebakenezzer posted:I thought this was based on Carl Sagan and his virtuous lying about Nuclear war IE Nuclear Winter. Now I'm curious. Proceed.
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Jun 30, 2013 22:58
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Frozen Horse posted:^ These attacks, however, did not produce efficient transport of smoke into the stratosphere. A better model would be the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, which did cause significant global effects on climate. While Pinatubo was after the cold war, the sunsets that year were unlike I have seen since.
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Jun 30, 2013 23:04
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AlexanderCA posted:Now I'm curious. OK: I've heard that Nuclear Winter, where most or all life on earth is ended by World War three, was made up by Carl Sagan to make people more afraid of Nuclear war, and hopefully prevent one. He didn't have any facts, and just pulled some math out of the abstract as 'evidence' for this theory. Other scientists repeated this theory even knowing it was bullshit, because, honestly, who wants nuclear war? A couple things to note here: 1) the idea of lying to create a good result is weirdly one that the infamous Team B would have endorsed (now that I think of it, the idea that 'some threats are so big you don't need any evidence to act like they are real' was what the global warming people were saying in the '70s, and that's straight out of the Team B big book of bullshit.) Also, the idea that Nuclear War needs embellishment in any way to be more frightening is, well, wrong (I mean coming into this thread I thought I knew how bad it was but *jesus christ* it is so much worse than even I imagined.)
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Jul 1, 2013 01:02
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Nebakenezzer posted:OK: I've heard that Nuclear Winter, where most or all life on earth is ended by World War three, was made up by Carl Sagan to make people more afraid of Nuclear war, and hopefully prevent one. He didn't have any facts, and just pulled some math out of the abstract as 'evidence' for this theory. Other scientists repeated this theory even knowing it was bullshit, because, honestly, who wants nuclear war? It's disingenuous at best to say Sagan was lying. He didn't have access to the models that we have today, but he and his co-authors had real evidence that they published in Science. His article was the target of a very aggressive smear campaign by Falwell, Bill Buckley and others, but as I understand it their results were largely confirmed by the JGR study cited by hepatizon up the page.
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Jul 1, 2013 01:58
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Nebakenezzer posted:(now that I think of it, the idea that 'some threats are so big you don't need any evidence to act like they are real' was what the global warming people were saying in the '70s, and that's straight out of the Team B big book of bullshit.) 70's panic du jour was global cooling. We were all going to starve to death because the crops would freeze. I forget which mortal sin man was committing in his hubris that was hastening the new Ice Age. They didn't switch to panic over global warming until I think early 90s, with an intermediate 'ozone layer hole will exterminate life via radiation' phase. Your point stands.
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Jul 1, 2013 02:29
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Acebuckeye13 posted:Shame the P6M Seamaster was cancelled, otherwise we'd have the best of both worlds. Glenn Martin backed the losing side in the Revolt of the Admirals. It was pretty much the end of Martin-designed planes being purchased by the Air Force.
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Jul 1, 2013 03:25
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Frozen Horse posted:Given the effects of fallout and the likelihood that a country that has received a strategic nuclear strike will need massive humanitarian aid, is countervalue or surrender the better strategy? At the point where one is launching in response to an attack, deterrence has already failed. http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2009/01/the_letter_of_last_resort.single.html At least someone working for the British PM had qualms about authorizing retaliation after the excreta met the cooling device. That article also has interesting interpretation of talmudic law in regards to the use of nuclear weapons.
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Jul 1, 2013 03:54
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PhotoKirk posted:Glenn Martin backed the losing side in the Revolt of the Admirals. It was pretty much the end of Martin-designed planes being purchased by the Air Force. Martin wound up absorbed by a company that currently has the Air Force's balls in a procurement vice. I feel like Glenn Martin's ghost can claim revenge or something.
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Jul 1, 2013 04:27
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PhotoKirk posted:Glenn Martin backed the losing side in the Revolt of the Admirals. It was pretty much the end of Martin-designed planes being purchased by the Air Force. From what I understand the Seamaster was canceled 10 years after the Revolt, and it was less due to the Navy disliking the Glenn Martin company than it was budget cuts and ballistic missiles making the Seamaster obsolete six months before it was to have entered service.
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Jul 1, 2013 04:31
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Nostalgia4Infinity posted:Martin wound up absorbed by a company that currently has the Air Force's balls in a procurement vice. I feel like Glenn Martin's ghost can claim revenge or something. Yes, but given their track record with that Minuteman randomly exploding and that B-57 which only 9 of the 94 deployed to Vietnam were still flying and one blowing up taking out 10 other Canberras, 11 Douglas A-1 Skyraiders, and one Vought F-8 Crusader, at this point I believe Martin had their company picnics not only on a sacred Indian Burial ground but also ran over no less than 3 gypsy kids a year on the way there looking at that curse.
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Jul 1, 2013 04:38
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Warbadger posted:A city burning would certainly distribute radioactive fallout and ash, but after the initial blast (and resulting temporary superhighway to the stratosphere) it carries material into the atmosphere just like any other ground fire. That's the sticking point, and it's not true. Even large forest fires create enough sustained heat in one area to loft pyrocumulous clouds into the stratosphere. If you set basically every major city in North America and Europe and Russia and China and India and the Middle-East on fire and then those fires keep burning until they run out of fuel because there's no capacity to fight them, you're going to wind up with a shitload of smoke particles in the stratosphere. Then it's a question of how long they take to settle out, and what they'll do to temperatures while they're up there, and there's not really a great understanding of that. But this would not be like the Gulf War oil well fires, which weren't hot enough and long-lasting enough to inject much into the stratosphere and only caused local cooling.
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Jul 1, 2013 15:34
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Koesj posted:The withholds were already coming in around 1962 so who even knows. Yeah, a lot of it seems to come out of (and it's discussed on the link page) the issue of potentially a nuclear war with the USSR, not involving the Chinese. quote:Fred Kaplan's account of the Pentagon's initial review of the SIOP includes an especially memorable episode. During the briefings, Marine Corps commandant David Shoup (the service with the most marginal nuclear responsibilities) saw a chart that showed that the initial attack would kill tens of millions of Chinese. At the closing meeting, General Shoup asked General Power what would happen if Beijing was not fighting; was there an option to leave Chinese targets out of the attack plan? Power was reported to have said that he hoped no one would think of that "because it would really screw up the plan"--that is, the plan was supposed to be executed as a whole. Apparently Shoup then observed that "any plan that kills millions of Chinese when it isn't even their war is not a good plan. This is not the American way." (Note 26)] This leads me to another question, where there any nuclear weapons assigned to the Marines during the Cold War?
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Jul 1, 2013 16:17
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Strange loving day when a Marine Corps commandant tells you to hold your loving horses.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:05
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gfanikf posted:Yeah, a lot of it seems to come out of (and it's discussed on the link page) the issue of potentially a nuclear war with the USSR, not involving the Chinese. Maybe Davy Crockett's? Being that they are ostensibly part of the Navy it stands to reason that the Marines didn't have a nuclear force of their own. I'm sure that Marine aviation had nuclear capable aircraft and could have participated in naval nuclear strikes using the host aircraft carrier's arsenal, too.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:35
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Koesj posted:Soviet-Indian relations were p. strong even during the late fifties Yeah we're in agreement, I was responding to the dude that was asking if all the Commonwealth was going to get nuked just by virtue of being a member of the Commonwealth/former British colony...India just seemed like a particularly pertinent example that "Commonwealth" wasn't really a reliable indicator for political positions or leanings or whether someone would want to nuke you. Nebakenezzer posted:A couple things to note here: 1) the idea of lying to create a good result is weirdly one that the infamous Team B would have endorsed Endorsed? poo poo, that's basically their modus operandi. gfanikf posted:This leads me to another question, where there any nuclear weapons assigned to the Marines during the Cold War? Yes, Marine fighter units were generally certified to employ nukes from the '50s until the '70s (and maybe into the '80s, not 100% sure on that), as they were flying the same type of aircraft as the Navy, often from carriers just like the Navy. Regarding the Letter of Last Resort, all I know is what Thatcher's must've said: KILL 'EM ALL.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:38
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Phanatic posted:That's the sticking point, and it's not true. Even large forest fires create enough sustained heat in one area to loft pyrocumulous clouds into the stratosphere. If you set basically every major city in North America and Europe and Russia and China and India and the Middle-East on fire and then those fires keep burning until they run out of fuel because there's no capacity to fight them, you're going to wind up with a shitload of smoke particles in the stratosphere. Then it's a question of how long they take to settle out, and what they'll do to temperatures while they're up there, and there's not really a great understanding of that. But this would not be like the Gulf War oil well fires, which weren't hot enough and long-lasting enough to inject much into the stratosphere and only caused local cooling. What exactly do you not think is true about what I said? Your post here breaks down to "it carries material into the atmosphere just like any other ground fire." while noting that some ground fires can leave particles in the stratosphere if they burn hot enough - something that has gently caress all to do with nuclear weapons and won't be screwing up world temperatures in a limited Pakistan/India nuclear exchange as was being discussed.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:42
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Warbadger posted:What exactly do you not think is true about what I said? Your post here breaks down to "it carries material into the atmosphere just like any other ground fire." while noting that some ground fires can leave particles in the stratosphere if they burn hot enough - something that has gently caress all to do with nuclear weapons and won't be screwing up world temperatures in a limited Pakistan/India nuclear exchange as was being discussed. Your suggestion seemed to be that material from a nukefest would only be injected into the stratosphere by the blast itself: quote:A city burning would certainly distribute radioactive fallout and ash, but after the initial blast (and resulting temporary superhighway to the stratosphere) it carries material into the atmosphere just like any other ground fire. The superhighway to the stratosphere is not all that temporary; widespread burning will continue to inject material into the stratosphere long after the initial blast, which is not something that is true of any other ground fire.
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Jul 1, 2013 17:54
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Phanatic posted:Your suggestion seemed to be that material from a nukefest would only be injected into the stratosphere by the blast itself: That is true of any ground fire that gets hot enough (which takes one hell of a fire) and has little to do with the fact that the fire is initiated by a nuclear weapon. The temporary thermal plume caused by the weapon is absolutely a temporary thing and leaving a hot enough fire to continue to loft ash that high once it dissipates isn't guaranteed to happen by any means.
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Jul 1, 2013 19:12
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Isn't most nuclear doctrine based around air bursts? Of course silos and hardened targets get ground hits, but a lot of those targets aren't located in population centers. So if cities get popped by air bursts and large fires are created, wouldn't there be a limited amount of contamination put into the atmosphere by the fires created?
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Jul 1, 2013 20:08
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VikingSkull posted:Isn't most nuclear doctrine based around air bursts? Of course silos and hardened targets get ground hits, but a lot of those targets aren't located in population centers. So if cities get popped by air bursts and large fires are created, wouldn't there be a limited amount of contamination put into the atmosphere by the fires created? Nuclear winter specifically refers to soot blocking sunlight. The radioactivity of the soot is irrelevant.
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Jul 1, 2013 20:23
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My mistake, I thought some of that discussion revolved around fallout in addition to cooling temperatures. I should read harder.
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Jul 1, 2013 20:29
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VikingSkull posted:Isn't most nuclear doctrine based around air bursts? Detonation height is only a function of whatever effect on target is required, and the compound of all those effects and the way to get to them varies a lot in their scope and profile. We've been talking about the big oneTM but there's a whole gamut of sub-strategic stuff like theater level deep strike, Front/AG/Army/Corps-asset interdiction, tactical mission handoff to divisions, covering force/SF handling of demolition munitions and that's only on the land forces side! Scenarios and plans of which we'll probably never see because they're either locked away with the key thrown out or purged on a regular basis. (Sub-) surface, airburst, high atmospheric, exoatmospheric, their effect on whatever kind of target, killotonnage required, it's all there in nasty charts and tables. But you can't exactly claim that there's a single nuclear doctrine, and outside of what has been revealed here and there we'll quite possibly never find out except for some educated guessing.
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Jul 1, 2013 20:34
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The amount of poo poo thrown up by nuclear weapons just isn't comparable to the cubic miles of crap that volcanoes spew out. Yes, sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere will cool the planet. No, nukes aren't going to send enough up to plunge us into neverending winter. Multiple massive volcanic eruptions might.
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Jul 1, 2013 20:58
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ought ten posted:It's disingenuous at best to say Sagan was lying. He didn't have access to the models that we have today, but he and his co-authors had real evidence that they published in Science. His article was the target of a very aggressive smear campaign by Falwell, Bill Buckley and others, but as I understand it their results were largely confirmed by the JGR study cited by hepatizon up the page. Well, for the record I was not being disingenuous when I said Sagan and co were lying; I don't know the truth of the matter and have always wondered about it. For that matter, saying that the studies were 'conformed' doesn't really get at if Sagan was making stuff up in the first place and just though coincidence some of these statements got some evidence behind them ex post facto. For that matter, if everybody accepted what Sagan and company said initially, how do I know the 'conformation' isn't based on Sagan's made up evidence, and thus is just as faulty? It's possibly a tempest in a teapot, since it's not like nuclear war becomes really attractive or something without 20 years of darkness and cold. Maybe the whole thing was pushback against Regan, who said a 'limited nuclear war' was winnable at one point. (Then of course he saw
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Jul 1, 2013 21:03
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Nebakenezzer posted:Well, for the record I was not being disingenuous when I said Sagan and co were lying; I don't know the truth of the matter and have always wondered about it. For that matter, saying that the studies were 'conformed' doesn't really get at if Sagan was making stuff up in the first place and just though coincidence some of these statements got some evidence behind them ex post facto. For that matter, if everybody accepted what Sagan and company said initially, how do I know the 'conformation' isn't based on Sagan's made up evidence, and thus is just as faulty? Sagan wasn't the primary author on the paper, and he didn't coin the phrase. The primary author did, after the research had been done (using preexisting validated models) and the paper was near publication. There's no evidence whatsoever to back up the allegation that Sagan invented the concept to make people scared of nuclear war. The original article's paywalled, but anyone interested should read the 2007 followup paper. http://www.envsci.rutgers.edu/~gera/nwinter/nw6accepted.pdf
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Jul 1, 2013 21:12
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So I found some crazy guy's website while I was looking for tips on a game I was 6 years late to: http://defconwarningsystem.com/ But for relevance, he's hosting an interesting document: http://defconwarningsystem.com/documents/The%20Effects%20of%20Nuclear%20War.pdf
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Jul 2, 2013 15:24
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That's an oldie but a goodie, check out the W68 spread on Leningrad 
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Jul 2, 2013 19:50
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DEFCON is an amazing game, if that's the game you're talking about.
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Jul 2, 2013 23:41
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This channel has a lot of interesting SU-25 footage of combat from the conflict in Chechnya in the mid 90s. http://www.youtube.com/user/kuslin2
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Jul 3, 2013 13:49
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iyaayas01 posted:You can add a lot of the idiots in the five sided wind tunnel. The lack of planning within DoD for the sequester was simply staggering, especially since it's not like Congress passed the law on Monday and it took effect Wednesday...we had over a year and a half to plan for this and everyone basically shrugged their shoulders and said "it's not gonna happen" up until a few months before it actually went into effect. When they start writing it down it becomes subject to congressional scrutiny and thus manifest a political poo poo storm when such proposals would invariably include base closures, program cancellations, and benefit cuts. The Strategic Choices and Management Review from a month or so ago is the closest you'll get.
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Jul 3, 2013 18:09
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daskrolator posted:When they start writing it down it becomes subject to congressional scrutiny and thus manifest a political poo poo storm when such proposals would invariably include base closures, program cancellations, and benefit cuts.  I know, just like I know we'll never get a strategy driven budget process. Here's a cool video about the history of BMD, up through Safeguard. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARx2-wRn9-Y That channel has a lot of cool old Bell Labs videos. e: Hahaha, check out "Heavy Action" (i.e. the MNF theme) at around 16:45. iyaayas01 fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jul 3, 2013 |
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Jul 3, 2013 18:24
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Aluminum Overcast status: Very worth it.
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Jul 5, 2013 17:19
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I figured TFR would be interested in this at least a bit, but didn't really know if this would fit in the news thread. Anyways, this is the closest we've got to a generic "modern military industrial complex" thread so. . . Reuters Special Report about how the Pentagon (doesn't) handle payroll and other fiscal matters tl;dr - 
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Jul 10, 2013 00:08
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