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I don't know which speed run this is but I don't think it's working out for them somehow.
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Oct 21, 2022 01:12
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Volmarias posted:Putin: loses most of the territory in the Ukraine, only a token force of conscripts remain in a rearguard action I’m not saying that destroying the Russian army in Ukraine is the only thing that NATO should do in response to Putin using a nuke, I’m just saying that they ought to let the Russians know that the first, automatic thing that they would do would be to completely destroy all Russian forces in Ukraine, thus making it impossible for Putin to come out ahead by using nuclear weapons.
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Oct 21, 2022 01:54
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Maybe they are evacuating citizens alongside the troops so that Ukraine doesn't bomb the hell out of them as they have in all the past retreats.
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Oct 21, 2022 02:25
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D-Pad posted:Maybe they are evacuating citizens alongside the troops so that Ukraine doesn't bomb the hell out of them as they have in all the past retreats. This is definitely their main reason for doing it.
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Oct 21, 2022 02:31
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Volmarias posted:I don't know which speed run this is but I don't think it's working out for them somehow. My best run was the nuclear holocaust by 1956 but that was using a thorium Soviet spawn.
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Oct 21, 2022 03:15
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Sucrose posted:I’m not saying that destroying the Russian army in Ukraine is the only thing that NATO should do in response to Putin using a nuke, I’m just saying that they ought to let the Russians know that the first, automatic thing that they would do would be to completely destroy all Russian forces in Ukraine, thus making it impossible for Putin to come out ahead by using nuclear weapons. If Putin thinks he can come out ahead using nuclear weapons he's already so far off the rails that he can't be relied on to respond to communication rationally. It's like trying to use diplomacy to keep him from punching himself in the balls.
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Oct 21, 2022 18:43
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Yeah, I'm not seeing "Putin sees nuclear weapons as a path to success", I'm seeing them getting used out of spite, and also to demonstrate that their nuclear weapons still work thank you very much. Though if he launches a dud, lol, lmao.
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Oct 21, 2022 18:52
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How would a 'dud' even happen with a nuclear warhead? I mean, based on past events what's the most likely point of failure, in the very slim chance one gets launched and even slimmer chance it ends up not working properly? Will the entire detonation circuit not work and end up with an intact warhead slamming down into Kyiv town square to be disposed of? Or is it more likely the trigger only partially works and the bomb fizzles, scattering bits of radioactive minerals around a few km radius? How many nuke tests ended up as fizzles, anyway?
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Oct 21, 2022 19:39
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Mister Speaker posted:How would a 'dud' even happen with a nuclear warhead? I mean, based on past events what's the most likely point of failure, in the very slim chance one gets launched and even slimmer chance it ends up not working properly? If there is a dud the conventional explosives will still go off from either the trigger or impact, since the safeties will be off. Thus turning all the nuclear fuel into a fine radioactive mist that will be ejected over a large radius. Also the conventional explosives are enough to destroy a building on their own. Apparently a piece of Tritium is an essential component of the modern nuclear detonation process. Tritium has a half life of only 12.32 years, so every warhead since 2012 will have needed a refresh with this very rare and expensive isotope, or they won't go off. It's a very bad bet to make that Russia didn't keep their warheads in working order, but it's certainly possible.
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Oct 21, 2022 19:46
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Mister Speaker posted:How would a 'dud' even happen with a nuclear warhead? I mean, based on past events what's the most likely point of failure, in the very slim chance one gets launched and even slimmer chance it ends up not working properly? The missile guidance systems and MIRV deployment are also potential points of failure. For the former, the missile could go off course, explode (the rocket part) during the boost phase, or turn sideways immediately after launch and roar majestically off into the night. The latter involves eight to twelve warheads of adjustable yield (single digit kilotons to about 220) in the least aerodynamic configuration imaginable slamming into the atmosphere as a single unit and breaking up at high altitude. Edit: imagine a cluster of Mexican coca cola bottles super glued to a serving tray, flying caps first. Blue Footed Booby fucked around with this message at 19:55 on Oct 21, 2022 |
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Oct 21, 2022 19:51
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Mister Speaker posted:How would a 'dud' even happen with a nuclear warhead? I mean, based on past events what's the most likely point of failure, in the very slim chance one gets launched and even slimmer chance it ends up not working properly? As mentioned above, you would end up with a very expensive "dirty bomb" instead of a nuclear explosion, or in some rare cases a partial explosion with a lower yield than expected. Turning the fissile material into a nuclear explosion is actually very hard, and it's possible that a mistake happened in the finest of post 1990 quality control somewhere in the last 30 years. I absolutely wouldn't want to take the risk, but it's definitely possible that a launch doesn't go quite as expected.
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Oct 21, 2022 20:27
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I don’t know hardly anything about nuclear weapons, but isn’t a Hiroshima type bomb just two super enriched isotopes of Uranium-235 launched into each other with explosives to make it instantly super critical? Is there much that can actually go wrong there presuming it can actually be delivered to its target?
qhat fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Oct 22, 2022 |
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Oct 22, 2022 01:08
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A dud would make a really bad ~dirty bomb~; in general, the idea of using explosives to spread radioactive material is laughably ineffective as a weapon. The article that was linked earlier is a good example of why chemical weapons don't work, and a dirty bomb is a chemical weapon that is far less effective in every way. The amount of radioactive material in a bomb, combined with the fact that they detonate at altitude, makes it highly unlikely that there would be even a single fatality, and contamination would be relatively negligible. As always with nuclear incidents (barring the two bombs in 1945) the fear and anxiety generated by the incident kills more people than the incident itself.qhat posted:I don’t know hardly anything about nuclear weapons, but isn’t a Hiroshima type bomb just two super enriched isotopes of Uranium-235 launched into each other with explosives to make it instantly super critical? Is there much that can actually go wrong there presuming it can actually be delivered to its target? There was a US DoD study in the... 70s? (around then, anyway) that gave a few physics graduate students a small budget and asked them to develop a clean-sheet nuclear weapon design using only publicly available knowledge. They did it in about a year. It's not hard to design nuclear weapons it turns out, the hard part is refining uranium into concentrated U235. This is why anti-proliferation efforts focus on enrichment and not weapon design, and for example why stuxnet targeted the Iranian centrifuges.
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Oct 22, 2022 01:25
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qhat posted:I don’t know hardly anything about nuclear weapons, but isn’t a Hiroshima type bomb just two super enriched isotopes of Uranium-235 launched into each other with explosives to make it instantly super critical? Is there much that can actually go wrong there presuming it can actually be delivered to its target? You're correct that one of the Hiroshima bombs had a gun-like trigger, but the other and most (all?) nuclear weapons since then work via implosion. The sub-critical core of fissile material is surrounded by explosives, which are designed to detonate at exactly the same time, to a ridiculously precise degree, such that the explosion compresses the material into criticality which creates the explosion. And that's not even discussing the thermo part of thermonuclear, which uses tritium as mentioned above to turn the explosion from a fission one to fusion. Then, there's stuff like dial-a-yield which allows for the user to determine the size of the explosion at arming time, down from the maximum size for the weapon to an actually impressively small amount for what's happening. I don't know if Russian nuclear weapons are variable yield but I would actually be surprised if they weren't. E: even a gun style weapon that slams the two together requires precision; if it's not done correctly the incomplete fission reaction just sort of goes poof relative to the conventional explosives, since it moves the pieces away from each other too fast. Volmarias fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Oct 22, 2022 |
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Oct 22, 2022 01:28
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The gun type bombs are also significantly larger and heavier than implosion style devices, which is bad if you are putting it on a rocket. The mechanism for the implosion system is actually really interesting since it involves a soccerball type patchwork of explosives that burn at slightly different speeds so that there is a single wave of force moving toward the core. If there is any deviation in the shockwave it just scatters nuclear material in a random direction or only partially explodes. The upside is because the central core of material is compressed by the shockwave you can achieve critical mass with less material than would otherwise be possible, which is really good for bombs that need to be very small and light like tactical artillery shells or man portable devices.
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Oct 22, 2022 02:56
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Blue Footed Booby posted:If Putin thinks he can come out ahead using nuclear weapons he's already so far off the rails that he can't be relied on to respond to communication rationally. It's like trying to use diplomacy to keep him from punching himself in the balls. If it wasn’t for NATO retaliation I have no doubt at all that Putin would use his nukes to compel Ukraine to surrender, since nothing else’s he’s got is winning the war for him. But I agree that in reality Putin couldn’t possibly profit from using nukes; the only realistic scenario in which he’d use nuclear weapons would just be as a mad dog wanting to take a bunch of other people to the grave with him.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:04
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Kadath posted:The gun type bombs are also significantly larger and heavier than implosion style devices, which is bad if you are putting it on a rocket. The mechanism for the implosion system is actually really interesting since it involves a soccerball type patchwork of explosives that burn at slightly different speeds so that there is a single wave of force moving toward the core. If there is any deviation in the shockwave it just scatters nuclear material in a random direction or only partially explodes. The upside is because the central core of material is compressed by the shockwave you can achieve critical mass with less material than would otherwise be possible, which is really good for bombs that need to be very small and light like tactical artillery shells or man portable devices. Right OK this is a part I'm still wondering about - so it's density and not necessarily size that makes a mass of fissile material go supercritical correct? And the core of a bomb is one piece of the stuff that just gets compressed, literally squeezed smaller, by the blast wave? I was sort of under the impression it was slices of a sphere suspended apart by something like styrofoam getting slammed together into supercritical by the blast wave.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:14
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Critical mass decreases with density, and I’d imagine you get a better nuclear yield at higher compression levels as well, since the mass will be a higher density for a (slightly) longer time before the nuclear chain reaction blows it apart. IANANP Most of the work of weaponizing a nuclear device is making it smaller and lighter, so lots of explosive squeeze is desirable to minimize overall weight.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:24
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Yeah compressing fissile material lets you start critical mass with less total material. Considering that nuclear material is both expensive and literally the heaviest stuff on earth, this is desirable.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:34
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Volmarias posted:
Pretty sure the Tsar Bomba was a selective yield device. they only filled it half full and got 50MT. I am not sure if the yield scaled linearly with the tritium used but it could have been much bigger.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:43
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Isn't there also theoretically no upper limit to how many stages a device could have? Maybe I'm phrasing that wrong, but I seem to remember someone mentioning that in nukechat or some documentary somewhere.
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Oct 22, 2022 03:48
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For anyone interested on the history and development of nukes (like how the gun type bomb evolved to the implosion, etc), there's an interesting series by Scott Manley on the yubtubs
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Oct 22, 2022 07:34
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Mister Speaker posted:Right OK this is a part I'm still wondering about - so it's density and not necessarily size that makes a mass of fissile material go supercritical correct? And the core of a bomb is one piece of the stuff that just gets compressed, literally squeezed smaller, by the blast wave? I was sort of under the impression it was slices of a sphere suspended apart by something like styrofoam getting slammed together into supercritical by the blast wave. The requirement for the fission chain reaction to go critical is that the neutrons released by fission events are sufficiently likely to meet a friendly heavy atom (its nucleus) to make whopee with, blowing apart that nucleus and releasing some more neutrons looking to get friendly. The neutrons go about their business in a random walk, so what you can do is increase the density (number of nuclei per volume element) of the fissile material, use neutron reflector materials around the thing you're trying to make go boom, etc., and you have to do it fast. Rapidly imploding a sphere of plutonium is one of the easier ways (nb. not that easy, shaped explosions are hard) to get a decent amount of the fissile stuff fissioning before the chain reaction tears itself apart and makes that beautiful mushroom cloud we've all learned to not worry about. The gun type that was mentioned earlier "just" puts two sub-critical lumps of fissile material into one another, making a critical whole, but it turns out that this tends to blow itself apart faster than the squeezed up version, so it's less efficient. It also weighs more, since the squeeze method requires less nuclear fuel to, erm, squeeze, to get to a critical mass than having two regular-density-lumps being shoved together would. The fusion part is a different kettle of fish; the fission part is the (nuclear) detonator, whose purpose aside from a big boom is to heat up its immediate vicinity hot enough that fusion becomes energetically affordable. Then you have stuff like tritium in there to fusion, and you get an even bigger boom, straight out of the same stuff that makes our Sun grow all those pretty flowers and trees. Ain't nature beautiful?
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Oct 22, 2022 08:24
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Heck Yes! Loam! posted:Pretty sure the Tsar Bomba was a selective yield device. they only filled it half full and got 50MT. I am not sure if the yield scaled linearly with the tritium used but it could have been much bigger. It's more efficient to have multiple smaller nukes than one big one, due to the inverse square law. Which is simply the bigger the sphere of the blast is, the more atmosphere it has to push against. So a 5 megaton bomb has 1000 times more power than a 5 kiloton bomb, but it doesn't have anything close to 1000 times the blast radius. So a couple smaller warheads are better, and then you want to put a bunch of these on a very expensive rocket. So the most efficient nuke is a small fission device for a trigger, combined with a bunch of fusion fuel, which includes tritium, since fusion is a lot more energetic and thus efficient than fission. Both US and Russian ICBMs found the sweet spot for yield is roughly 300-ish kilotons per warhead, and about 5 to 10 warheads per missile. Larger warheads are still around, not sure what doctrine is for those but best guess is they are for either making a massive EMP, or getting through particularly tough targets like the NORAD bunker. Or with Russia, the purpose could be salting the earth with their ginormous nuclear propelled and nuclear tipped torpedo.
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Oct 22, 2022 08:49
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What kind of device do we need to eliminate our greatest enemy the moon?
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Oct 22, 2022 09:24
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Orthanc6 posted:It's more efficient to have multiple smaller nukes than one big one, due to the inverse square law. Which is simply the bigger the sphere of the blast is, the more atmosphere it has to push against. So a 5 megaton bomb has 1000 times more power than a 5 kiloton bomb, but it doesn't have anything close to 1000 times the blast radius. Advances in guidance & fuzing since the cold war have also made city killers less appealing. The doctrinal goal has never really been about massacring civilians; targets for nuclear strikes aren't aimed at populations, but rather the infrastructure & industry that support military operations. The thing is, these tend to be clustered in high population areas. If you want to be sure that you get a target, say an airfield or a factory, you might only get one shot at it, and the amount by which you miss, circular error probability, dictates that you send a large enough explosion to guarantee destruction even if your guidance systems don't hit their mark very precisely. For many applications in which nuclear weapons are attractive, for example bunker busting or targeting missile silos, a CEP of just 100 meters can be the difference between a guaranteed kill or leaving something operational. Mid 20th century missiles and bombs generally had to be fairly high yield as a result of their inaccuracy, relatively speaking. You'll notice if you check the wiki lists for Russian and particularly US arsenals that most weapons are relatively low-yield now because the CEPs are now low enough to guarantee destruction without the need to overkill a large area. Nuclear devices are expensive to build and maintain, especially large ones - and large nuclear devices require large delivery systems. Militaries prefer smaller yields, assuming that they can still meet their objectives with such a device. Outrail posted:What kind of device do we need to eliminate our greatest enemy the moon? What, do you think Carl Sagan is going to show up in this thread?
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Oct 22, 2022 10:36
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Outrail posted:What kind of device do we need to eliminate our greatest enemy the moon? ~300 billion tsar bombas https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/if-the-moon-were-destroyed-what-would-it-mean-for-earth
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Oct 22, 2022 17:53
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That article is a bit odd, starting out with the binding energy it seems like they're examining a gedankenexperiment of turning the Moon to a monatomic dust or something? Never mind that just having loads of Tsar Bombas around wouldn't do that in the first place.
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Oct 22, 2022 18:16
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Orthanc6 posted:Or with Russia, the purpose could be salting the earth with their ginormous nuclear propelled and nuclear tipped torpedo. Unclear if this is a Pluto reference or not
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Oct 22, 2022 18:46
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aniviron posted:Advances in guidance & fuzing since the cold war have also made city killers less appealing. The doctrinal goal has never really been about massacring civilians; targets for nuclear strikes aren't aimed at populations, but rather the infrastructure & industry that support military operations. A second strike of "We will destroy your infrastructure & industry that supports military operations" isn't a good deterrent. Plausibly having a first strike of "We might be able to destroy your military and prevent you launching a second strike" is destabilizing because someone might convince themselves to try. Aiming nukes at anything besides population centers is counterintuitively the realm of crazy people that want to actually use them to fight wars. In a Mexican standoff, the guy putting on a bulletproof vest and practicing kicking guns out of peoples' hands is increasing the chance that it pops off and everyone loses.
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Oct 22, 2022 22:16
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Foxfire_ posted:The strategic goal has always been to kill as many civilians as possible, and anything else is destabilizing and bad. Well there's a difference between counterforce meaning "we will destroy your military capability so a follow-on invasion is impossible" and counterforce meaning "we will your destroy your nuclear retaliatory capability so that we might be able to win a nuclear win with a first strike". A counterforce deterrent might still be credible if it's damaging enough to ensure the other party doesn't win, but of course counterforce against nuclear is extremely destabilizing.
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Oct 23, 2022 03:00
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A few days ago, there was some Russian talk show that claimed Ukraine wanted to detonate a nuke in Kherson. Which of course screams false flag. Seems like they're now getting louder about this. https://twitter.com/nukestrat/status/1584169560659218432?t=n2SPDsufvGkfhLf9KCNnhw&s=19
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Oct 23, 2022 15:07
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Is there any point for this propaganda now? Are there people who seriously believe that Kyiv has nukes and also that they would use those nukes to nuke their own country? Also lol at not knowing the difference between “low yield” and “dirty bomb”.
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Oct 23, 2022 15:48
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brockan posted:A few days ago, there was some Russian talk show that claimed Ukraine wanted to detonate a nuke in Kherson. Which of course screams false flag. More context https://twitter.com/russianforces/status/1584194327621750784
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Oct 23, 2022 15:57
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ＢＯＲＮ ＴＯ ＤＩＥ WORLD IS A gently caress 鬼神 Kill Em All 1989 I am trash manshame on an IGA posted:~300 billion tsar bombas
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Oct 23, 2022 16:58
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shame on an IGA posted:~300 billion tsar bombas I guess if that's an option we could convert the moon into a nuclear-suicide orion platform and turn our ire towards the sun. To combat the sun we made our own sun
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Oct 23, 2022 17:47
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qhat posted:Is there any point for this propaganda now? Are there people who seriously believe that Kyiv has nukes and also that they would use those nukes to nuke their own country? Also lol at not knowing the difference between “low yield” and “dirty bomb”. What's the difference between a dirty bomb and a low yield nuclear bomb?
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Oct 23, 2022 18:56
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Dirty bomb = conventional explosion laced with radioactive material. Low yield nuke = (relatively) small nuclear explosion.
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Oct 23, 2022 19:02
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To be more descriptive, a dirty bomb is designed to spread radioactive material over an area to render the area unlivable for a time. Such a device would use something like cobalt-60, which has a long enough half life to stick around for a while but short enough to make an area "goddamn radioactive", but blowing it's load to spread the raw material around, rather than using the radioactive material to create the blast itself. A low yield nuke is just a nuke that has a small (well, "small", for nuclear weapons) blast. The Davy Crockett was one such device; one person to carry the nuke itself, two more to carry the firing platform and operate it. Literally a man portable nuke.
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Oct 23, 2022 19:26
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I’m phone posting but there are posts on Reddit saying Shoigo is calling the west to give dark hints that Ukraine is going to use a dirty bomb. The pentagon told him to not try it but this seems like it’s raising the idea up the flag pole signal.
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Oct 24, 2022 02:53
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